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News from all over this holiday weekend:
• Remember those formaldehyde-filled trailers that FEMA provided to people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Well, they’re back. “Some of the trailers, though, are getting a second life amid the latest disaster here — as living quarters for workers involved with the cleanup of the oil spill,” reports the New York Times.
• The fight in rural areas over transmission lines continues. Dan Byfield writes an op-ed in the San Angelo Standard-Times that “landowners across the Hill Country are learning that their pristine private property is now going to be condemned for a 260-foot right-of-way so the state can install 180-foot tall towers on their land. And when the electricity starts to flow, they can’t even tap into it because it will be a ‘pass-through’ that only benefits big-city users. Landowners are asked to accept the loss of their land, along with the value of their land with these eyesores, so people in Austin can flip a switch and not feel guilty because it comes from a ‘renewable resource.’”
•No wonder some parts of West Virginia don’t have broadband. The Charleston Gazette reports that the president of Mountain State College in Parkersburg misappropriated more than $2.4 million in state and federal grants aimed at expanding broadband.
• It turns out that Ohio won’t be having an election this year on animal welfare. The state and the Humane Society of the U.S. have signed a joint agreement urging everyone to update laws pertaining to farm animals, including banning some crates and cages and the use of strangulation as a form of euthenasia,” according to the Marietta Times.
• The House Appropriations Committee overseeing the U.S. Department of Agriculture has cut all funding for the voluntary National Animal Identification System (NAIS), the New York Times reports. The committee approved a $23 billion Ag appropriations bill that keeps intact the major conservation and energy programs passed two years ago. The committee rejected cuts proposed by the White House, the Times reports.