Word: oakes
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Fellow workers called Thomas McIlvane a "time bomb" after he was fired last year from the Royal Oak, Mich., post office for insubordination. "Everybody said if he didn't get his job back, he was going to come in and shoot," postal worker Bob Cibulka said. "Everyone was talking about it." Last week the 31-year-old former Marine proved them right. Armed with a sawed-off .22- cal. Ruger Rimfire rifle, he entered the back sorting room of the 1940s- style office and killed his supervisor and the labor arbitrator who had turned down his appeal for reinstatement...
...Royal Oak was the fifth multiple post-office murder in as many years. Last month in Paterson, N.J., an ex-postal employee wielding a sword and gun killed his supervisor and three others. Labor analysts struggled last week to explain why postal workers seem more prone to violence than workers in other high- stress fields, like coal mining or air-traffic control. One possible explanation: budget cuts that have reduced the screening and supervision of workers. Another could be the boot-camp conditions that exist for many workers. Delivering the mail is not necessarily a more dangerous profession than most...
...small desert area nearly dry, clearing the way for the reappearance of palm trees, willows and migratory waterfowl. Off the coast of Scotland, Bernard Planterose, a warden with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and his wife Emma have planted 20,000 slender saplings -- downy birch, rowan, oak and Scotch pine -- to bring back the forest on tiny, windswept Isle Martin. And at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, ground crews and volunteers have returned some 280 hectares (700 acres) of former cornfields to a rustling expanse of big bluestem and Indian grass...
...helped Israeli restorationists re-create biblical landscapes at Neot Kedumim, a 220-hectare (545-acre) nature reserve in the Judean hills. In similar fashion, the diaries of a 19th century doctor have provided Illinois ecologists with a list of plants that once flourished under the light shade of bur oak trees...
...prairie in two hours," observes Robert Betz, a Northeastern Illinois University biology professor. "But to rebuild it might take half a century or more." Essential to the task is identifying the dynamic process that shaped each ecosystem and, if need be, putting it back into play. Prairies and bur oak woodlands, for instance, were both created by fire. Without fire, their bright flowers and luxuriant grasses are shaded out by invading brush. Where in centuries past roving bands of Plains Indians set fire to the prairies to flush out game, today preserve managers and teams of volunteers set restored grasslands...