"It's a mess, a bloody mess," was farmer Carol Wainwright's blunt assessment. "The government's messed the whole thing up. It's disgusting. They've put us through all this, promised they're going to sort out the problem and then at the last minute they give up."
For once, people on both sides of the debate agreed. Whether they were for the badger cull or opposed to it, they tended to agree the policy had been badly botched. "I can't believe that at the very last moment they've said it's not going ahead," said Wainwright, who farms in the planned cull area in Gloucestershire. "It's a disgrace."
Steve Jones, a farm manager in the Forest of Dean and a vocal critic of culling, said he had thought the shooting would at least begin. "I thought it would be derailed. But I thought the train would at least get out of the station," he said. "This just goes to show how flawed the cull was. Public opinion is against it, science is against it, common sense is against it."
Many Americans are bracing for high heating bills this year, but the frosty New England winter won't put a chill on Erik Fey and Kathleen Rutty-Fey's energy budget. The Feys are one of many families reducing their costly household oil or gas dependence by turning to a traditional fuel with newfound popularity: wood.
Extinctions during the early Triassic period left Earth a virtual wasteland, largely because life literally couldn't take the heat, a new study suggests.
Oil will flow from the Falkland Islands seabed for the first time by 2017 according to Rockhopper, the exploration company drilling in the South Atlantic Ocean.
Emissions analysers have to be checked annually by certified testers and during recent functionality tests for a Gasmet FTIR continuous emissions monitor (CEM) at a UK Energy from Waste plant, the Nitrogen Dioxide span check results were found to be incorrect. A subsequent investigation revealed surprising results that would not have been apparent had the plant been using traditional CEMs.