Oil is everywhere in Oklahoma, says local student Luke Kerr.

But that has not deterred him from planning a protest calling for its phasing out in the state’s capital city on Friday – mirroring similar events due to be staged around the world by students skipping school.

“It is very important that strikes and marches take place in fossil-fuel producing areas of the country, like Oklahoma,” the high school senior said on Thursday.

“We are showing the rest of the country that we can fight for climate.”

With strikes planned in at least 168 U.S. cities and towns, mostly progressive communities, a handful of them like that set up by Kerr stand out for taking place deep in oil country.

The students are taking their cue from Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg whose weekly “school strike for climate” has sparked a global movement.

The school strike movement – which hopes to raise awareness on climate change and force policymakers to take action – has taken the world by storm in recent months, prompting school walkouts mostly in Europe and Australia.

Kerr and his fellow student protesters will rally just feet away from monumental, mock oil derricks next to the State Capitol in Oklahoma City.

Oklahoma ranks fourth among all 50 states for oil production, whose burning is blamed for climate change. The southern state recently left its mark on the country when its former attorney general, Scott Pruitt, angered environmentalists due to his skepticism of mainstream climate science when he headed the Environmental Protection Agency.

About 38 percent of Oklahomans do not believe in global warming, an eight percentage point difference from the national average, according to a 2018 survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

In the adjacent state of Colorado, 7-year-old Forest Olson has been the driving force behind another climate rally in an area that is also among the country’s top fossil fuel producers.

The mountainous state ranks fifth nationally for its crude oil production, and tenth for coal, federal data shows.

But Olson, a first grader who lives outside the remote town of Telluride, is rallying high school and elementary school students there who have agreed to follow his lead to demonstrate on the county court house’s steps.

The young boy is witnessing the effects of climate change first hand, said his mother Josselin Lifton-Zoline, including reduced snowpacks on nearby ski slopes.

Snowpacks are expected to continue decreasing in size and affect water resources in the western United States, according to the National Climate Assessment, a U.S. government report.

So Olson recently wrote to the town newspaper and spoke to his fellow pupils about taking to the streets.

“I love Earth and I don’t want it to be a disaster,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

In Alaska’s capital city, Anchorage, German exchange student Maxim Unruh, said he had been inspired to bring the movement to this oil-rich state after a friend back home helped with Berlin’s first youth climate strike in December.

The 17-year-old high school senior said he expected some push back for exporting ideas perceived by some as foreign but had prepared a response.

“The climate crisis is a problem in the whole world, and it doesn’t matter from where – I’ll fight for climate justice,” he said.
…

On the day of a critical vote by British lawmakers to delay departure from the European Union, U.S. President Donald Trump again waded into the contentious debate on Brexit. He promised a “very large trade deal” with the UK- and threatened the European Union on trade. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
…

The U.S. Congress has formally rejected President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration to fund wall construction along the U.S.-Mexico border, triggering a near-certain presidential veto. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports from Capitol Hill, where the Senate joined the House of Representatives in disapproving a contentious executive action.
…

A man said by federal prosecutors to have been a top leader of New York’s notorious Gambino crime family was shot and killed Wednesday on Staten Island.

Francesco “Franky Boy” Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his body at his home in the borough’s Todt Hill section just after 9 p.m.

Cali was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. There have been no arrests.

No other information was provided by police.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn had referred to Cali in court filings in recent years as the underboss of the Gambino organization, related through marriage to the Inzerillo clan in the Sicilian Mafia.

Multiple press accounts since 2015 said Cali had ascended to the top spot in the gang, although he never faced a criminal charge saying so.

His only mob-related criminal conviction came a decade ago, when Cali pleaded guilty in an extortion conspiracy involving a failed attempt to build a NASCAR track on Staten Island. He was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison and was released in 2009.

 The last crime family boss to be shot in New York City was Paul Castellano. The Gambino crime boss was assassinated outside Sparks Steakhouse in Manhattan in 1985.

The Gambino Family was once among the most powerful criminal organizations in the U.S., but federal prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s sent its top leaders to prison and diminished its reach.
…

When you hear two middle-aged men in Green Bay, Wisconsin, talking about statistical records, it’s easy to assume they are discussing sports.

After all, Green Bay is home to the legendary Packers of the National Football League, who so dominate the local culture that the city’s public buses have green and gold stripes to honor the team’s colors.

But two guys chatting in amazement over the record figure of 2,555 weren’t talking about passing or rushing yards, or anything at all to do with the beloved Packers.

They were talking about cheese.

​Growing interest

In the United States these days, cheese is emerging as a product and point of pride that in some circles is beginning to rival that of local sports teams.

That was clear at the United States Championship Cheese Contest held here last week, where a crowd of about 500 people packed a ballroom to see a champion named. Two days earlier, a steady stream of people watched judges sniff, taste, spit and rate nearly 3,000 different cheeses from across the nation.

“It’s become a phenomenon,” said John Umhoefer, executive director of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association, which organizes and hosts the contest every other year. “People fly in from across the country to go to this.”

A Baby Swiss cheese made by Guggisberg Cheese in Ohio was named the overall champion. Two aged Goudas made by Marieke Gouda, a Wisconsin company, finished second and third in the competition that also chose winners in 116 categories.

The contest has come a long way from its humble beginnings in a butter factory’s garage in 1981.

“There was a boat in there, and six people judging a couple hundred cheeses,” said Umhoefer, whose organization also hosts a biennial world championship contest in Madison, Wisconsin. “Now, we’ve got 2,555 cheeses, butters and yogurt, and we’re in Lambeau Field” — home of the Packers.

The contest bills itself as the nation’s largest technical cheese, butter and yogurt competition.

In a state called America’s Dairyland, where locals are called “cheeseheads,” the changes in the industry and products that have swept across the nation have played out here on a larger scale.

“There are so many more good producers of cheese in the United States than there used to be,” said Gordon Edgar, who has been a cheese buyer for San Francisco’s Rainbow Grocery cooperative since 1994 and has written two books, “Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge” and “Cheddar: A Journey to the Heart of America’s Most Iconic Cheese.”

“There are all sorts of cheeses that weren’t made in the U.S. for a long time, if ever,” he said.

​Cheesemaking history

Cheesemaking is by no means a new industry in the U.S. English colonists and Irish immigrants brought it to New England, while Swiss and German immigrants brought it to Wisconsin.

Farmstead operations, with cheese made from a farm’s cows, gave way to cooperatives and commodity cheese — mozzarella is the top-produced cheese in the U.S.

Two forces brought change among U.S. cheese producers. The counterculture and back-to-the land movements of the 1960s and 1970s sparked people to make cheese on their own farms. From there sprang small artisanal cheese companies.

In Wisconsin, agricultural leaders in the 1990s were faced with the prospect of California becoming the country’s top dairy producer. Unwilling to lose its leadership position, local governments got to work.

Tax breaks helped dairy producers and cheese plants modernize. Other government funding led to the founding of the Dairy Business Innovation Center and the spread of smaller, specialty cheese operations throughout the state.

In 1997, Wisconsin made 50 million pounds of specialty cheese. By 2007, that figure grew to 174 million. In 2017, the most recent available statistic, the total was 799 million — 47 percent of specialty cheese made in the U.S.

Throughout the U.S., consumers wanted more locally produced and unique foods, and the cheese industry was well-positioned to meet the demands.

​Low prices, tariff anxiety

Despite an enthusiastic market for specialty cheese, these are tough times for the dairy industry. More than 1,000 Wisconsin dairy farms have closed in the past two years. Milk prices have been low, and cheese exports to Mexico and China have dried up because of tariffs.

“With an event like this, you see the innovation and you see how people are trying to market their way out of the doldrums,” Umhoefer said of the contest. “The commodity price is low, but that just means you need to make something better than a commodity.”

Many U.S. cheesemakers are succeeding at doing that.

Besides the contest in Green Bay, cheese fans have filled tents and convention centers throughout the U.S.

In 2016, a U.S.-made cheese, Grand Cru Surchoix by Roth Cheese of Monroe, Wisconsin, won the world cheese championship for the first time since 1988.

In 2017, Andy Hatch of Uplands Cheese Company in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, was the first U.S. cheesemaker honored by the prestigious international Slow Food Award.

“In the past, people would come into the store and say they had visitors coming from France, so they would want to buy French cheese to impress them,” Edgar said of the customers he’s seen in 25 years. “Now if they have visitors, they want to buy American cheese to impress them, to show them how good American cheese is. That’s just a complete switch.”
…

A man reported to have been a top leader of New York’s notorious Gambino crime family was shot and killed Wednesday on Staten Island.

Francesco “Franky Boy” Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his body at his home in the borough’s Todt Hill section just after 9 p.m.

Cali was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. There have been no arrests.

No other information was provided by police.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn had referred to Cali in court filings in recent years as the underboss of the Gambino organization, related through marriage to the Inzerillo clan in the Sicilian Mafia.

Multiple press accounts since 2015 said Cali had ascended to the top spot in the gang, although he never faced a criminal charge saying so.

His only mob-related criminal conviction came a decade ago, when Cali pleaded guilty in an extortion conspiracy involving a failed attempt to build a NASCAR track on Staten Island. He was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison and was released in 2009.

The last crime family boss to be shot in New York City was Paul Castellano. The Gambino crime boss was assassinated outside Sparks Steakhouse in Manhattan in 1985.

The Gambino Family was once among the most powerful criminal organizations in the U.S., but federal prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s sent its top leaders to prison and diminished its reach.
…