Heapangi - we've got some nice note floating about, there are lots of them, but unfortunately there are a lot of plastics.\n\nThere is quite a lot of plastics, and in there once whole organisms have been caught."\n\nJust over a million skins had been found, and surveys suggested the number could be much higher, said litter management and marine life recovery manager Mike Sewell.\nNew Zealand has experienced similar spikes on hatching sea finches and some sea turtles.\nThe problem started in rivers on Picton and the Great Barrier Reef and then grew in the southern fork of the Kaimana River.\nThe drifting will be around for at least 50 years, Sewell said.\n"It's not easy for plastics to live in marine ecosystems, but it's not that difficult to spread around."\nDAVID WHITE/STUFF The Southern Eyre blue swallow lives under some of the heaviest ocean waters in the world.\nDAVID WHITE/STUFF A Penigan's seahorse in the Kaimana.\nDAVID WHITE/STUFF Part of a cephalopod in the Kaimana.\nPolluted skim chutes were found at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef on Picton, in the Tongariroa gorge on the Kernadec Peninsula and Matamata.\nThe contaminated debris had been added to a variety of local coastal feets.\nDAVID WHITE/STUFF A cephalopod in the Pennou.\nOne kilogram of contaminated rubbish was found in Kaimana's skink chicks.\nDr David Wilson, the NIWA's acting director of pollution science and surveying in Wellington, said plastics were by far the biggest threat to the Great Barrier Reef - which was polluted with more plastic than found in the whole of Europe.\n"This skim pollution highlights the danger of single-use plastics, which are killing corals and sensitive wildlife," he said.\nDANIEL BURNELL/STUFF A xanthopod remains stranded in the Kaimana.\nConservationists were keen to see more measures in place to protect the oceans.\n"With plastics we would really like to see a strong standard - something to really harden the rubbish problem."\nPolymers are often dumped in NZ to waste, and then plastics are imported here from overseas and recycled.\nDANIEL BURNELL/STUFF A harp's shell lives in the Kaimana.\nA group of commercial and freshwater anglers has called for a stronger global filter standard to protect fishermen from microplastics, but it has not yet been adopted.\n"For sure we need more flow packaging - there are alternatives."\nSewell said about 150,000 skims settle on humps each year, more than five times the number on sea finches last year.\nOn the blue plug mat we have also seen a lot of skim," he said.\n"They got stuck last year and a similar number have been seen this year, although they are not gathering on us as much on the blue plug bog in Kaimana."\nPlastic for human use is not allowed to sell in New Zealand, but manufacturers have produced cheaper plastics with higher concentrations of chemicals and these have been getting into the rivers, he said.\nSewell said skims were in good shape in comparison to the rest of marine life but action was needed to fix the problem."\nbrittany.fletcher@news.com.au<endtext>In the months prior to Donald Trump's election in November 2016, DNC employee Donna Brazile was outed in the media through legitimate documents released by the Guccifer 2.0 group, after her name appeared in a de facto document released by the group. This disclosure and others garnered public attention and raised major concerns with regards to election integrity. It is only now that the perpetrator of the breach has not been charged with crimes, and a lot of speculation and media attention was paid to the issue."\nGuccifer 2.0's actions raise interesting questions, and a need for closer scrutiny and analysis. In the following piece, I look at several ways in which Guccifer 2.0's choice to infiltrate and hack into the DNC may have been related to other operations, such as intelligence operations on US leaders and offensive cyber warfare operations.\nHISTORY AND ROOT\ntIt should be well known by now that Guccifer 2.0 breached the Democratic Party on June 15, 2016. While leaked documents have reportedly questioned the exact scope of the hack, it was reportedly more sophisticated and stole more data than the original content of the phishing tool. The original phishing method was more targeted to