The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said the workers were treated in a “discriminatory manner” by managers at the Cargill Meat Solutions facility in Fort Morgan, about 120 km northeast of Denver.

Jaylani Hussein, a spokesman for CAIR, said in a YouTube video posted by the group that the workers objected to new restrictions on their ability to worship on the job, “which they had been granted for a long period of time.”

“All of these employees are good employees (and) don’t have any other issues,” Hussein said, adding that the dispute stemmed from a “misunderstanding on policy changes” by Cargill regarding workplace prayer.

Mike Martin, a spokesman for Minneapolis-based Cargill, disputed assertions the company had changed its policy, noting that since 2009 the Fort Morgan plant has set aside an on-site “reflection area” for people of all faiths.

“Cargill makes every reasonable attempt to provide religious accommodations to all employees based on our ability to do so without disruption to our beef-processing business,” he said. He said the degree of flexibility the company can extend for prayers depends on a variety of factors, including daily workflow considerations.

Martin said about 200 workers walked off the job last week and were warned that failing to show up for work on three consecutive days without calling in could jeopardize their employment.

Plant managers met with the workers, members of the Somali community and Teamsters union leaders who represent nearly 2,000 hourly workers at the plant but were unable to resolve the issue, he said.

After 190 workers failed to show up without notice for three days straight, “termination procedures were initiated” and those workers were dismissed, Martin said.

Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Human Rights Commission, said Cargill managers may not have understood that depending on the time of year Muslims are required to pray at different times during the day.

Jamal said his organization has contacted Cargill to see if the workers can get their jobs back.

“Hopefully, there can be a clear policy in place that everyone understands that would solve the problem,” he said.

Cargill employs 155,000 people in 68 countries, according to the company’s website.

–– Keith Coffman reports for Reuters from Denver.

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U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell touted the decision as a success enabled by a sweeping multi-state conservation strategy devised over the past five years for the grouse and its shrinking habitat, spanning tens of millions of acres.

“This is the largest, most complex land conservation effort in the history of the United States,” Jewell told a news conference, joined by four western governors and a host of top federal land managers, at a wildlife refuge in Colorado.

The plight of the grouse, a key indicator species for the vanishing sagebrush ecosystem of the American prairie, has pitted conservation groups against oil and gas drilling, wind farms and cattle grazing in one of the biggest industry-versus-nature controversies in decades.

Tuesday’s announcement marked a turnabout from a 2010 finding by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an Interior Department agency, that endangered species protection for the grouse was warranted but that other species were a higher priority.

Conservation plans since implemented by federal and state wildlife officials and commercial interests now offer an alternative for saving the grouse while allowing activities such as energy development, mining and ranching to co-exist with the chicken-sized prairie fowl, Jewell said.

The greater sage grouse, known for the elaborate courtship dances performed by males in spring, once ranged by the millions across a broad expanse of the western U.S. and Canada.

They are now believed to number between 200,000 and 500,000 birds in 11 western states and southern Alberta. Wyoming accounts for about 40 per cent of them.

Despite long-term declines, sage grouse populations “remain relatively abundant and well-distributed” across the bird’s 173 million-acre range, Fish and Wildlife officials said, adding that conservation efforts already in place had staved off any immediate risk of extinction.

In addition to conservation programs for state and private lands representing 45 per cent of sage grouse habitat, a patchwork of 98 U.S. land use plans also were revised to protect the bird on federal property that accounts for most of the rest.

The effort includes designation of 12 million acres of “high-priority” protection zones where energy development, seen as posing the greatest habitat threat, is restricted, Jewell said.

Officials also pointed to newly adopted plans for curtailing two key environmental threats — rangeland wildfires and the spread of an invasive weed known as cheatgrass.

The announcement was immediately hailed by the Denver-based industry group Western Energy Alliance but received mixed reviews from environmental groups.

The head of the National Audubon Society’s Rocky Mountain chapter, Brian Rutledge, joined Jewell to endorse the decision.

But Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist for WildEarth Guardians, said the plans offered too little protection with too many loopholes, though he said his group would review the details before deciding whether to bring a court challenge.

Unlike many such battles of the past, commercial interests this time have embraced conservation efforts aimed at avoiding potentially tougher restrictions under the Endangered Species Act.

Many ranchers, in particular, found common cause with efforts to protect Western rangelands on which their livestock depend, often citing the rallying phrase, “What’s good for the bird is good for the herd.”

— Keith Coffman is a Reuters reporter based in Denver. Additional reporting for Reuters by Laura Zuckerman in Salmon, Idaho; writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles.

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The Mesa County Health Department said in a statement that a peach grower contacted authorities last month to report abnormally aggressive behaviour at a beehive on his orchard in Palisade, Colorado, about 70 km east of the Utah border.

Specimens were shipped to a U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory in California, and the hive was destroyed, the department said.

“This is the farthest north that Africanized honey bees have been reported,” the health department said.

Bob Hammon, an entomologist with Colorado State University’s Tri-River Extension office in western Colorado, said the fact that the bees were found in the spring suggests they survived through the winter.

Sometimes dubbed “killer bees” because of the aggressive way they defend colonies and hives, the Africanized bees first arrived in the Western Hemisphere in the 1950s when they were brought to a facility in Brazil.

The plan was to breed them with more docile European bees to boost honey production, but some of the Africanized bees escaped into the wild and the first colonies reached the U.S. in 1990, Hammon said.

While the venom from an Africanized honey bee is no more potent than that of a European honey bee, the risk of multiple stings makes the Africanized bees especially dangerous.

— Keith Coffman reports for Reuters from Denver.

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