Good morning,
Today’s forecast calls for a sunny day with a high of seventy-nine degrees.
Walworth County Today has a story about the departure of Fred Burkhardt from the Walworth County Economic Development Alliance, entitled, “Walworth County Economic Development Alliance head takes job in Ohio.”
In January, Walworth County Board Supervisor Dan Kilkenny urged the county board to seek an audit or financial review of the economic development alliance, partly due to what he referred to as Burkhardt’s “serious financial problems.”
“I am not suggesting that something is necessarily amiss with WCEDA’s finances because of the executive vice president’s personal financial problems, nor am I making any accusations,” the supervisor wrote.
“But I think that if you asked a professional auditor, they would advise that an audit would probably be in order under the circumstances.”
Kilkenny wrote that the county board’s lack of oversight and its unwillingness to judge the economic development alliance and its officials objectively would cause embarrassment to the county board.
County board supervisors, however, decided against considering the subject.
Wired has a story today on how technology helps diners detect adulterations in their food: DNA Testing Finds Endangered Whale Meat in Restaurants:
Genetic tests of whale meat from Japanese restaurants in Los Angeles and Seoul, South Korea, have confirmed the meat is from endangered animals.
The Los Angeles bust was publicized in March, prompting a restaurant there to close, but finding the meat in South Korea was even more troubling.
“This problem may be more widespread than we originally thought,” said Scott Baker, a whale researcher at Oregon State University. The identifications are described in a paper published April 13 in Biology Letters.
Killing sei, fin and minke whales was outlawed by the International Whaling Commission in 1986, and trade in their products is forbidden by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
Possessing or selling whale meat is illegal in the United States. Japan and South Korea allow endangered whales caught as “bycatch” by fishermen to be sold. Japan also operates a research program that’s been criticized as scientific cover for continued whale hunts.
No one thinks that DNA testing was initially designed to analyze restaurant dishes, but the wider application of the technology is a consequence of its increasingly lower cost. There’s no certain or natural use for the technology — its more frequent use is a market development, as more efficient and lower-cost tests meet market demand.