Phoenix, U.S.A. — A strong majority of Arizona residents approve of the state’s recently-expanded education savings accounts program, and an even larger majority agree with the introduction of increased accountability measures for the program, according to the results of a recent survey of likely Arizona voters released this week.

The American Federation for Children—the nation’s voice for school choice—praised the results as a clear indication of the growing support for the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program, the first-of-its-kind school choice model that was enacted by the state legislature last year.

The poll found that 62 percent of respondents support the newly-improved ESA program, while nearly four in five likely voters—77 percent—favor increased accountability measures for the program in the form of required standardized tests to measure student performance.

A broad expansion of the program was signed into law earlier this year. The poll results are the latest indication of the growing, broad, and bipartisan support for school choice among Arizona residents.

“This is a great reminder that Arizonans support expanded, high quality, and accountable educational options for families,” said Betsy DeVos, chairman of the American Federation for Children. “We’re encouraged that such strong majorities support this groundbreaking form of parental choice.

Support for the ESA program and accountability was also strong across ideological lines. A near-majority (46 percent) of Democrats support the program, to go along with 67 percent of Independents and 70 percent of Republicans. Seventy-two percent of Democrats, 76 percent of Republicans, and 84 percent of Independents expressed support for greater accountability.

Nearly 150 special needs students participated in the ESA program—in which parents receive 90 percent of the per-pupil expenditure to use on a variety of educational tools—during the 2011-12 school year. That number is expected to grow next year, thanks to increased program eligibility.

More than 30,000 students participate in all four of Arizona’s private school choice programs.

The poll, conducted by Washington, D.C.-based Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research, surveyed 500 likely Arizona voters on a host of political and policy issues. The ESA questions were commissioned by the American Federation for Children, and the survey’s margin of error is +/- 4.4 percent.

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Instead of coming back on December 21, 2012 – the infamous apocalyptic date – the newly discovered asteroid 2012 DA14 is not expected to return around February 15, 2013. For now, humanity can breathe easy.

A group of amateur astronomers working at Observatorio Astronómico de La Sagra (La Sagra Sky Survey), located in the Andalusia Mountains of southeast Spain, discovered the asteroid a month ago, on February 22. The group accidently spotted it in an area of the sky where asteroids are not generally seen, and was only able to detect it when it flew by the Earth at a range of seven times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. 2012 DA14 was difficult to notice because of its small size; it has a diameter of around 50 meters (150 feet).

Come February 15, 2013, 2012 DA14 fly past 24,000 km (15,000 miles) away, much closer than most of our commercial satellites orbit the Earth. One would be able to view it with binoculars, but at that distance, the asteroid would not even skim the atmosphere, let alone hit the Earth.

Phil Plait, former Hubble Space Telescope member and astronomy teacher, assures in his blog Bad Astronomy, “In astronomical terms, [that distance] is pretty close, but in real human terms it’s a clean miss.”

The asteroid’s orbit is inclined in comparison to the Earth’s and lasts for 366.24 days, which is extremely close to that of the Earth, being only one day longer. Due to the nature of its orbit, 2012 DA14 will most likely not ever cause an impact – no matter what other sources assert.

Earlier this month, La Sagra joined the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space Situation Awareness (SSA) program, which searches for hazards in or that will enter Earth’s orbit and cause harm or pose a risk to life, such as (as stated on their website) “remnant man-made space objects, in-orbit explosions and release events, potential impacts of Near Earth Objects, the effects of space weather phenomena on space- and ground-based infrastructure.” Together, La Sagra and SSA will search for asteroids and miscellaneous space objects that may pose as a threat to the Earth.

In addition to keeping track of the smaller asteroid, when 2012 DA14 approaches again, astronomers will jump at the opportunity to study it and measure the gravitational effects of the Earth and Moon that affect it. After 2013, the asteroid is not expected to return until 2020

According to ESA, the SSA program is developing a system of telescopes that will be able to detect any asteroids around the size of 2012 DA14 – just in case.

“I can’t say this strongly enough: asteroid 2012 DA14 is not an impact threat for February 2013,” Plait continues to write. “However, we definitely need to keep our eyes on this guy to see if it poses a threat at some future date.”

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NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) may decide to withdraw from the ExoMars Program due to hefty budget cuts.

Recently, President Barack Obama filled out the 2013 Federal Budget Request, which will be released today. NASA received a massive blow to its budget, prompting its administrators to debate which programs should be cut. A decision weighed between exploring the planets in our solar system or adventuring out into the cosmos. In the end, several programs for planets were cut. Mars was hit the most. According to Associated Press, the current budget for Mars missions is $518.7 million, and more than $200 million has been slashed.

“To me, it’s totally irrational and unjustified,” Edward Weiler, who is formerly NASA’s associate administrator for science, says to MSNBS.com. Weiler quit because he, according to MSNBC, tried to prevent Mars from being in the pool for the cuts. “We are the only country on this planet that has the demonstrated ability to land on another planet, namely Mars. It is a national prestige issue.”

The ExoMars Program is a collaboration of NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency). Their goal, according to the website, is to “search for evidence of past and present life on Mars.” Two missions have been planned thus far. The first, led by the ESA, is to send a satellite launched by NASA to Mars in 2016 that will search for traces of methane in the atmosphere.

The second plans to send, in 2018, two rovers (one American and one European), which will drill into the red planet’s surface. This mission will be both led and launched by NASA, who will have provided the materials and technical attributes. NASA promised to provide $1.4 billion for both missions.

If NASA truly withdraws, ESA will look to involve Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency. They worry, however, that Roscosmos does not have the same technical skills and assets as NASA. Furthermore, ESA would have to deal with the fact that the program will have lost a large amount of money – the missions would be hindered and delayed.

NASA has been in a bind with costs, using much their budget, for example, to replace the $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope with their current successful Hubble Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope, which was originally estimated to cost $3 billion, would be more than a hundred times powerful than Hubble.

“Even in these times of fiscal restraint, President Obama has laid out an ambitious plan of exploration and discovery for NASA that includes robotic missions to Mars as well as the ultimate goal of a human mission,” NASA HQ in Washington tells BBC. “It would not be appropriate to comment on specifics of the president’s budget before it is released on 13 February.”

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Friends of Animals recently celebrated a victory for scimitar-horned oryx, addax, and dama gazelles who are routinely bred and killed on hunting ranches here in the United States. These animals, on the brink of extinction in their native homelands in northern Africa, have been the targets of paying trophy hunters seeking a thrill-kill.

On 5 Jan. 2012, a new rule in the U.S. Federal Register was published, reflecting two decades of work by Friends of Animals to protect these antelope. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) will now protect all members of these three species under the Endangered Species Act—including those bred on U.S. soil and sold for sport-hunting.

60 Minutes will recount the story of how these animals ended up on the verge of extinction, and how Friends of Animals, through its project in Senegal, is protecting these animals so they can recover their footing and freedom in their own habitat.

“We’re grateful that 60 Minutes is telling this landmark story,” says Friends of Animals’ president Priscilla Feral, who worked with 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan in the late spring of 2011—recounting Friends of Animals’ work on this project that began in 1999 with a trip to Senegal.

Friends of Animals, with the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, sued the federal government to list the these antelopes as “endangered” under U.S. law. In September 2005, the FWS did list the three species as “endangered,” noting that desertification, human encroachment, ranching, regional military activity, and hunting imperil these antelopes.

Yet on the same date, the FWS published an exception to the rule removing take and transport prohibitions from the very animals that the United States has the strongest power to protect—those kept by U.S. enterprises.  The blanket exemption authorized killing, commercial transport, and interstate or foreign commerce—hence, allowing continued exploitation of these animals on hunting ranches.

A court case brought by Friends of Animals and WildEarth Guardians in 2009 challenged the loophole and secured a court order finding that the exemption violated Section 10 of the Endangered Species Act. The judge call the blanket exemption “anathema” to the ESA, and in June 2009 remanded the rule to the FWS for the appropriate change.

Friends of Animals currently supports an increasing population of 175 oryxes (and dozens of dama gazelles) in northern Senegal within two, semi-desert reserves encompassing thousands of acres—and is committed to seeing these numbers grow.

“Even though this project is decades long, we’re just beginning,” says Feral. “We’re committed to ensuring these animals thrive in freedom once again.”

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The US Fish and Wildlife Service officially marked the end of the Eastern cougar on March 2 this year after 38 years on the Endangered Species List (ESA). The cougar was known to live around the Eastern US but its existence has not been officially confirmed since the 1930s. Although sightings have been consistently reported until present day, the US Fish and Wildlife Service have come to the conclusion that those incidents could not have been of the eastern cougar subspecies since no supporting information has been found in the time period. For that reason, they moved the cougars status from ‘endangered’ to ‘extinct’.

The eastern cougar was a subspecies of the North American cougar, which is currently considered critically endangered and can only be found in a few protected areas in Florida.  Overall, the American cougars have been in a critical decline and experts believe that the species is running out of time.

Who is the cougar? Well, it is known as the widest-ranging native land animal in the Americas, having migrated from Asia approximately 8 million years ago and evolved into the different cat lineages known in present day. Even though the cougar is the second largest felid in the Americas, it is closer related to smaller cat species than to lions and tigers. In the 1890s and early 1900s, German animal parks experimented with breading separate subfamilies of the cat species and found cougars and leopards capable of hybridizing. The resulting ‘pumapard’ had very distinct features from both subspecies but according to an article from Mongabay.com, most cubs died young. Those that reached adulthood developed genetic dwarfism.

Cougars are known to be able to live in virtually any environment but research has shown that the species needs at least 850 square miles of uninterrupted habitat to achieve low risk of extinction. The main reason behind their decline in population is said to be the expansion of human population into cougar territory which has resulted in a bad reputation for the cougars. Many states in the Western parts of the US and Canada have resident cougar populations and all, except California and the Yukon, allow hunting. However, Texas is the only state that allows the hunt to go unregulated because it groups the cougars as ‘nuisance wildlife’.

There is also a perceived threat of cougars attacking livestock but research shows that this threat is minuscule. What is also very rare are attacks on people. The slight increase in attacks in recent decades, though still very small numbers, is attributed to civilizations expansion into the cougars habitat. The problem for the cougar population is that attacks receive heavy media attention and have succeeded in blacklisting cougars as malignant, undermining its role in the local ecosystems.

Environmental groups like WWF, Panthera and Cougar Rewilding Foundation continuously work to ensure the conservations of the wild cats but some subspecies are down to just 50-100 individuals which makes the task extremely challenging. With the demise of the Eastern cougar, the megafauna has lost another of its unique subspecies, joining the list of els, bears and wolves which have all vanished within the last 100 years.

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