Man picked up for questioning in Ohio deaths

MOUNT EATON, Ohio (AP) — An Ohio sheriff said a person of interest in an apparent double killing has been picked up by authorities in West Virginia.
Sheriff Thomas Maurer in northeastern Ohio’s Wayne County said at a news conference Thursday that officers found two bodies in the basement of a farmhouse, in what he described as a “gruesome scene.”

Maurer identified the man wanted for questioning as the 32-year-old son of the couple who lived in the home. A news release later announced the man was taken into custody in the Beckley, W.Va., area.

Maurer said deputies had gone to the home near Mount Eaton after another son in Indiana reported he had not heard from his parents for days.

The Wayne County coroner did not immediately return a message Friday on whether the bodies have been identified.

EPA gives break to biomass over climate

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — Under pressure from some members of Congress, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is easing up on regulating global warming pollution from facilities that burn biomass for energy.

The agency said last week it needs more time to figure out whether biomass – including farm waste, sawmill scraps and forest thinnings – is really a “green” fuel. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson notified members of Congress who had complained that new rules regulating industrial carbon dioxide emissions would make it hard to develop new biomass energy plants they see as job creators, and part of a national green energy strategy.

The EPA said it would issue a new rule July 1 to exclude biomass from regulations requiring large polluters to reduce their heat-trapping pollution for three years. That regulation went into effect earlier this month.

Nationwide, biomass plants generate less than 1 percent of the grid, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Agriculture Sec. Tom Vilsack said in a statement that markets for the trees and branches left after thinning would help the national forests reduce the threat of wildfire.

Meg Sheehan of the Stop Spewing Carbon Campaign in Cambridge, Mass., said the EPA was ignoring evidence that biomass is dirtier than coal and carbon from any source contributes to greenhouse gasses.

SE Indiana farmer killed under hay bale
GREENSBURG, Ind. (AP) — A farmer died recently in southeastern Indiana after being pinned beneath a round bale of hay he and another person were moving.
The Decatur County Sheriff’s Department said deputies arrived at the farm of 63-year-old John Bennett near Greensburg to find him beneath the large bale and without a pulse. The Republic of Columbus reported a deputy performed CPR at the scene Jan. 8, but Bennett was pronounced dead a short time later at a hospital.

Decatur County Coroner Charity Banks ruled that Bennett died of traumatic cardiac and respiratory arrest caused by blunt force trauma.

Some 800 hogs die in Illinois farm fire
ARENZVILLE, Ill. (AP) — Firefighters say some 800 hogs died in a blaze at a confinement building at a large farm in Morgan County.

The fire Jan. 10 was at a farm owned by Randy and Craig Schone about six miles southwest of the Cass County town of Arenzville, but the Jacksonville Journal-Courier reported the hogs were owned by a company called High Ridge Pork.

Fire crews from Arenzville and Meredosia were on the scene for about four hours. They said about 1,000 hogs were in the confinement building at the time of the fire, but only about 200 of them survived.

Germany kills 140 dioxin-contaminated pigs
BERLIN (AP) — German authorities ordered 140 pigs slaughtered Jan. 11 after tests showed high levels of a cancer-causing chemical for the first time in swine, as the nation’s dioxin scandal widened beyond poultry and eggs.
The top agriculture official in northern Germany’s Lower Saxony state demanded the cull after tests found illegal levels of dioxin in swine at a farm near Verden that purchased tainted feed from the company believed to be responsible for the scandal.

German firm Harles & Jentzsch GmbH, which produced fat used in the tainted feed pellets, is being investigated over allegations it did not alert authorities to the tainted product for months. Tests have shown that fat samples contained more than 70 times the permitted amount of dioxin.

“We were specifically investigating this farm, because they had bought their livestock feed from Harles & Jentzsch,” Lower Saxony’s Agriculture Minister Gert Hahne said.

Some 140 of the 536 pigs at the affected farm had to be slaughtered because the dioxin levels in their flesh were 50 percent above the maximum allowed, Ulf Neumann, a spokesman for the Verden government, said. The other pigs apparently did not eat the contaminated feed.

The scandal broke two weeks ago when German investigators found excessive levels of dioxin in eggs and some chicken. Authorities then froze sales of poultry, eggs and, as a precaution, pork, from thousands of farms as some countries banned German farm products.

Some 558 farms remained closed last Tuesday, said Holger Eichele, a spokesman for the federal agricultural ministry.