Mussels are considered a threat in Utah as well as in most parts of the United States as they pose a certain danger to marine wildlife on account of their voracious appetite for plankton. That aside, Mussels are pretty hard to get rid off, lets say that you come across a mussel, try removing it with your hand and you will know exactly why it is hard to remove them. In addition to being hard to remove, Mussels tend to build colonies very rapidly thus making it near impossible to remove them altogether from small-sized water bodies.

Taking into account the threat that they pose to the local marine life, the Utah state officials were unpleasantly surprised last week when they came across a boat contaminated with Zeba mussels. What made this incident shocking is the fact that despite random checks on all the local boats plying on the flaming gorge reservoir, this had happened. The biologists from the Division of Wildlife resources were happy to note that the mussels hiding in the drive train area of the boat were all dead. The mussels continue to pose a threat to the marine flora and fauna, in addition to causing damage to any local aqua project.

The Utah officials surmised correctly that the mussels were dead as the boat had sat out of the water for a long duration and had it not, the news would not be good. This was a near miss but one cannot count on being so lucky all the time. When it comes to mussels prevention is the best policy to adopt, so when it comes to Utah, say no to mussels!

With drug and narcotic smuggling on the rise, it should definitely not come as a surprise to any of us that a Utah man was recently convicted of trying to smuggle African ‘Khat’ to the United States of America. He was held guilty of conspiring to import hundreds of pounds of this African drug to the mainland and got sentenced to 18 months behind bars for his effort.

Of course, we all think that he is pretty dumb, but that aside, how on earth did he think that we was going to get away with it? He was not even taking the time to smuggle it into the country but had imported it in the guise of ’spices’. Being an import item, it would have been subjected to a myriad number of tests including a visual inspection by the customs officials themselves.

khat is an African plant, whose green leaves, when chewed tend to give one a high and are categorized as a drug. Most of the people in east Africa chew Khat in one form or the other. The Utah man must have thought that there would be a great demand for this amongst the African immigrants in Utah and so decided to import it. The Khat was all chopped up and flown to the United States and from there to Utah by way of a container truck. The customs officials in Utah decided to take a closer look at this huge consignment of Spices and were shocked to discover that it was actually a drug shipment marked to the Holladay residence. It must have been really insulting to the customs officials in Salt lake city to have their intelligence underestimated by a person who thought that he could legally import drugs into this country.