Word: rare
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Mexico's cactus diversity attracts the interest of international markets and collectors who employ illegal tactics to obtain wild-collected specimens of desirable species, some of which may be newly named to science, rare, or threatened with extinction," according to a World Wildlife Fund study authored by Rolando Barcenas Luna of the Autonomous University of Queretaro, Mexico. Barcenas and Terry are members of a team of biologists currently mapping several threatened cactus species through DNA sampling, but their project is often stymied by growing threats to the plants from illegal harvesting and destruction by drug traffickers. There are almost...
They look sturdy, even hostile, but cactus plants in the southwestern United States and Mexico are under attack. According to wildlife conservationists, cactuses are being dug up and smuggled away at an alarming rate by over-zealous collectors looking for rare species and "narco-tourists" mining the desert for the small, psychotropic peyote plant...
...purchasing from, say, the acres and acres of cacti nurseries in the Netherlands, avid collectors travel to Mexico instead, according to Dr. Martin Terry, a biologist at Sul Ross University in West Texas and co-founder of the Cactus Conservation Institute (CCI), where they "roam the boondocks, see a rare species, dig it up and FedEx it home, avoiding all the inspections along the way." For the travel-averse, there's no shortage of cactus dealers online: a 2005 Mexican study found nearly 4,000 websites selling cactuses, and 500 were run by illicit traders, who constantly switch Web servers...
...message: This is a rare automobile that few can afford, but the top-notch engineering and technology needed to design and build such a beautiful machine are evident in every model...
...Confederate flag to troll for votes in South Carolina. And before you judge, you should know that the critic in question is John McCain, who has explored and deplored his own flaws in remarkable detail in his books and speeches and has apologized for them with candor that is rare in a politician. In 2000, after sidestepping the flag issue during his first presidential campaign, he returned to South Carolina to flay himself for pandering. "I don't seek absolution," he said. "I can only try to resist future temptations to abandon principle for expediency...