Free Republic

According to local reports, roadblocks surrounding the Obama vacation mansion in Martha’s Vineyard are frustrating locals, who can’t get to their businesses. “August is our make it or break it month,” Vineyard Artisans Festivals manager Andrea Rogers said to the Vineyard Gazette, “So this is the worst possible time of the year to block access. It impacts a lot of people.” Obama’s vacation week coincides with the heaviest time of the year in Martha’s Vineyard, known as Fair week. Patrick Jenkinson, who co-owns a gas station, says he “really rel[ies] on this third week in August, especially Fair week…We do...

BENNINGTON, Vt. — An infestation of bedbugs has forced the temporary closure of a homeless shelter in Bennington, Vt. ... In the meantime, the women and children who would normally stay there are being placed in temporary locations, including motels

CHINA -- A Chinese woman almost lost her life savings recently when termites invaded a wooden drawer in which she kept a plastic bag containing 400,000 yuan: the equivalent of $65,000 U.S. dollars. It was only after the woman decided to redecorate her house in Guandong Province that she noticed the termites had dined on her nest egg. According to the Guangzhou Daily, the money was given to the woman by her children. A local bank generously scanned the remaining cash and was able to identity 340,000 yuan which means the termite's meal ultimately cost the woman roughly $9,786.

The booming deer population in the northern United States is bad for the animal's beloved hemlocks, a new study finds. During Michigan winters, white-tailed deer converge on stands of young hemlocks for protection from winter chill and predators. The same deer return every year to their favorite clumps of the bushy evergreens, called deeryards. The high concentration of deer in a small space saturates the soils with nitrogen from pee, according to a study published online in the journal Ecology. While deer pee can be a valuable source of nitrogen, a rare and necessary nutrient for plants, some deeryards are...

The noise these critters make sounds like a cheap 50's space ship sound effect.

Invasive fire ants have been a thorn in the sides of Southerners for years. But another invasive species, the so-called "crazy" ant that many describe as being worse has arrived and is displacing fire ants in several places. "When you talk to folks who live in the invaded areas, they tell you they want their fire ants back," said Edward LeBrun, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, in a statement from the school. "Fire ants are in many ways very polite. They live in your yard. They form mounds and stay there, and they only interact with...

Keith Cressman of the locust-fighting unit of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said, Sunday, that the locusts crawling around Israel's southern border will start flying in two weeks and be most destructive as they prepare for the trip to the breeding grounds in northern Sudan. Following a tour out in the field, Cressman said he was impressed by the manner and pace of the Agriculture Ministry's determined war on the pests. The ministry is using ground spraying against every swarm that enters from Egypt, with air spraying as needed, around the clock. It noted that there were fewer...

All around the Northeast -- from Pennsylvania to Maryland to Connecticut -- billions of cicadas are starting to emerge from the ground after 17 years of underground adolescence mostly spent feeding on the fluid inside tree roots. While this emergence is the biggest in the Northeastern U.S. in a long while, the Southern states have had recent visits too. There are about 15 distinct broods of cicadas that emerge regularly in the U.S. In 2011, the Great Southern Brood popped up across the American Southeast.

Rats or Humans? Inside Saddam's Extermination Plant(August 29, 2002)This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/ He was introduced as director of research and development at Falluja, one of the remote factories where the United States claims Saddam Hussein could be making chemical and biological weapons. Asked if he had worked on any of Saddam's chemical weapons programs, Dr Mohammed Frah played a straight bat: "In the early 1980s I worked for five years on the chemical and biological programs at Al-Muthanna." This is the name of a critical centre in Saddam's weapons program - a huge pesticide complex that produced...

Why more patients share rooms with the blood-sucking pests. As if adapting to health-care reform and curbing the “nightmare bacteria” weren’t challenge enough, hospitals are increasingly plagued by another problem: Bedbugs. More than a third of pest management companies treated bedbug infestations in hospitals in 2012, 6% more than the year before and more than twice as many as in 2010, according to a survey released today by the National Pest Management Association. The percentage of exterminators dealing with bedbugs in nursing homes has also almost doubled since 2010, to 46%. Bedbug experts also report seeing them in ambulances. Hospitals...

.........Hotels contacted by The Washington Times about bedbug reports either referred calls to their corporate headquarters or didn’t return messages. Charlotte has a long way to go before its bedbug levels approach cities such as New York, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C., where recent infestations have made national news, but a study this year by pest control company Orkin shows activity there has been on the rise. The survey, released in March, rated Charlotte as having the 33rd-most bedbug reports of any city in 2011. The list was topped by Cincinnati, Chicago and Detroit. By contrast, the GOP’s choice for its...

If so what did you do to rid yourself of them?

Who would steal flags from Civil War graves? Authorities in Hudson, N.Y. believe they have found the culprit in a rash of cemetery flag thefts: woodchucks. Mayor Bill Hallenbeck tells the Register-Star that police used cameras and confirmed that the flags were in the woodchucks' burrows.

HOUSTON--At the Stop and Save in Richwood, you’ll find lottery tickets, beer and fishing bait, plus a gaze of raccoons--that’s what they’re called in groups. They've taken up residence in the woods behind the store. "They eat everything," said Stephanie Rutkowske, a local animal lover. "Doritos, Cheetos, chocolate. Or a big bag of cat food. They’ll eat that just as good too."

Learn how to utilize a technique called Integrated Pest Management to control pests in our garden...

The federal government is proposing to grant a first-of-its-kind permit that would allow the developer of a central Oregon wind-power project to legally kill golden eagles, a regulatory move being closely watched by conservationists. The Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday released a draft environmental assessment that would allow West Butte Wind Power LLC to kill as many as three protected golden eagles over five years if the company fulfills its conservation commitments. It’s the first eagle “take permit” application to be received and acted on by U.S. Fish and Wildlife under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection...

A Chicago Burger King has been shut down after inspectors say they were so many flies in the fast food restaurant that they were "afraid to open their mouths,"

MIAMI— Customs inspectors in Miami have intercepted five pests that had never been seen before in the U.S. during this year's first three months. The list includes a longhorn beetle found in railroad ties from Argentina, a leafhopper in a mint shipment from Colombia and a moth in a container of fresh okra from Honduras. The bugs were found by Customs and Border Protection agriculture specialists at Miami International Airport and Port Everglades in Broward County.

(snip) The tiny, reddish-brown parasites, which live on warm human blood, were once nearly extinct. But thanks to a growing resistance to pesticides, and an increasingly mobile human population, they’ve had a resurgence since the mid-1990s. For years, they’ve been enjoying city life, crawling out at night from all sorts of mattresses to feed. The difference now, exterminators said, is they’ve made sizable inroads into suburbia. (snip) In the past decade, most urban-dwelling bedbugs arrived on the backs of roaming college students or migrant workers from South and Central America.Once they settle and mate, their offspring will eventually set off...

Bedbugs can be found in mattresses, furniture and clothing, and they feed off animal and human blood. Insect scientists say bedbugs are appearing on a scale not seen since before World War II. High-traffic areas such as hotels, airplanes and cruise ships are especially prone to infestations. Ohio has three cities in the top 10 — Cincinnati is fourth, Columbus is seventh and Dayton is eighth.