A California sea lion last week became the first salmon predator to be euthanized this year under a program that has been denounced by those who say there are far greater dangers to salmon, like the series of hydroelectric dams on the Columbia.

The program has been administered for two years by wildlife officials in Oregon and Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Last year, 11 sea lions were euthanized. Another four were transferred to zoos or aquariums.

The sea lions represent a massive headache each year as chinook salmon begin arriving at the Bonneville Dam east of Portland, congregating in large numbers on their return from the ocean. Sea lions have become aware that the dam is a great spot to feast on salmon, easy pickings for them as they wait to go up the dam’s fish ladders.

Officials are tracking 63 additional sea lions listed as repeat offenders. They are identified by scars or by numbers which were branded on them by researchers.

Sea lions have eaten salmon forever. But the numbers have soared recently, as has the number of sea lions cruising upriver to dine on the salmon at Bonneville Dam. Frustrations are peaking as well, especially among fishermen who have watched sea lions snatch salmon right out of their gill nets.

The sea lions are protected by a 1972 federal law, however an amendment leaves open the possibility that some can be captured or killed if the states request it. Oregon and Washington did in 2006 with the support of Indian tribes and sport and commercial fishing groups.

Two years ago, the National Marine Fisheries Service authorized Oregon and Washington officials to first attempt to catch the sea lions that arrive at the base of Bonneville Dam and hold them for 48 hours to see whether an aquarium, zoo or similar facility will take them in.

Supporters say the program is successful. The numbers of sea lions at the dam have dropped, although the 4,489 salmon they ate last year was the highest since tracking began in 2002.

The Humane Society says that fishermen catch three times as many salmon as sea lions eat.

The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission this year has begun tracking the sea lions’ movements with acoustic transmitters and cameras placed along the river. Instead of just reacting to the sea lions, the data might help authorities plan a more successful campaign.

The aggravation comes as experts predict the largest spring chinook run since 1938. Thanks to good ocean conditions for young salmon, a projected 470,000 fish will head up the Columbia River, compared to 169,300 in 2009.

Martin Mittelstaedt reports in the Globe and Mail about a new study of Frenchman’s Bay, a lagoon off Lake Ontario by University of Toronto Geologists. The conclusion drawn:

“Our findings are pretty dramatic, and the effects are felt year-round,” said Nick Eyles, a geology professor at the university and the lead researcher on the project.

“We now know that 3,600 tonnes of road salt end up in that small lagoon every winter from direct runoff in creeks and effectively poison it for the rest of the year.”

In the community of Pickering, to the east of Toronto, they apply 7,600 tons of salt. Half of that goes into the groundwater, and the other half goes right into Frenchman’s Bay.

The salt water “knocks out fish,” said Dr. Eyles, adding that in the most contaminated areas, only older fish can survive, while younger ones move to areas of the lagoon closer to Lake Ontario and its fresher water.

A University of Minnesota study recently studied 39 lakes and three major rivers, and they found that 70% of the road salt ended up in the watershed. According to Science Daily:

“Nobody has asked the question of where the salt ultimately goes after the winter season is over…Our study has been concerned with that question in particular.”

The effects of salt include decreases in biodiversity, reduction in fish numbers and types, and higher mortality rates among organisms that rely on marine life for food.

Well, don’t you know, the sad part of this story is that salt is completely unnecessary. It only works within a few degrees of the freezing point so where it is really really cold, people must learn to drive properly in the winter with properly equipped cars.

Road salt destroys roads, shortens the lives of cars, kills vegetation and now, we KNOW that it harms watersheds. Some alternatives are reducing speed limits in winter, making snow tires mandatory as they do in Quebec, and provide better public transit and other alternatives to driving, instead of destroying the environment to satisfy the need for speed.

The end of the book is set in summer 2009, and McEwan introduced a new scene, in the last few pages, in which Michael Beard, the chief protagonist and a Nobel-prize winning physicist, receives an email that invites him to address a meeting of foreign ministers at the coming summit. McEwan said:

“I just slipped something in to reflect the spirit of sadness…Everything has collapsed around him [Beard] and he knows that Copenhagen will be just the place for him. It is where he would be heading to add his confusion to everybody else’s.”

Had the summit produced a successful deal, as McEwen was so rooting for, Beard and his failures would not have fitted in:

“I would not have wanted my man anywhere near it,” said the author. “I didn’t want him there, believe me.”

McEwan said that he had spent four years gathering material for the book, though he had wanted to write about climate change since the mid 1990s:

“I couldn’t see a way in. A subject so weighted with moral and political value is not helpful to a novel. I couldn’t see a way of making it come alive.”

That all changed during a visit of artists and scientists to the Arctic in 2005, when he said he was struck by the contrast between the idealistic evening discussions of global warming and the chaos of the equipment room.

“Clothes and equipment there to save our lives, which we should have been able to look after very easily would go missing, and I thought, for all the fine words and good intentions, maybe there was a comic inadequacy in human nature in dealing with this problem.”

McEwan said he was “baffled” by the media storm over the emails released from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the mistake made in the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

“I think those involved, in the UEA press office and the IPCC, need to get a little more nimble. These things just surge across the blogosphere.”

He said that he was happy to class himself as “warmer” — a term increasingly used by climate skeptics to describe those who agree with the scientific consensus that human activity drives warming:

“Though I am quite tempted sometimes to be a calamatist. There is something intellectually delicious about all that super-pessimism.”

McEwan added that his research on the climate had forced him to reconsider opposition to nuclear power:

“We just don’t have anything else that can run our cities on a windless night in February…It is rare that virtue and necessity collide. Sooner or later we’re going to have to find a new energy source for mankind.”

The class action suit brought by residents from southern Mississippi, which was ravaged by hurricane-force winds and driving rains during the storm, was first filed just weeks after Katrina hit in August of 2005.

The documents say:

“The plaintiffs allege that defendants’ operation of energy, fossil fuels, and chemical industries in the United States caused the emission of greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming…[The increase in global surface air and water temperatures] in turn caused a rise in sea levels and added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina, which combined to destroy the plaintiffs’ private property, as well as public property useful to them…”

More than 1,200 people died in Hurricane Katrina, which swamped New Orleans in Louisiana when levees gave way under the weight of the waves.

The suit, which is claiming compensation and punitive damages from multinational companies including Shell, ExxonMobile, BP and Chevron, has already passed several key legal hurdles, after first being knocked back by the lowest court.

Three federal appeals court judges decided in October 2009 that the case should be heard. But in February the same court decided to re-examine whether or not it could be heard this time with nine judges.

Other companies named in the suit include Honeywell and American Electric Power, with the residents saying that:

“the defendants’ greenhouse gas emissions caused saltwater, debris, sediment, hazardous substances, and other materials to enter, remain on, and damage plaintiffs’ property.”

They allege that companies had a duty to:

“avoid unreasonably endangering the environment, public health, public and private property.”

The district court, which originally rejected the case, ruled that it was:

“a debate which simply has no place in the court.”

The court argued to Congress that what needs to be done is to enact legislation:

“which sets appropriate standards by which this court can measure conduct.”

Mississippi residents must now wait for the appeals court to fix a new hearing date.

A decision will be due by the end of 2010, and both sides could also then take the case to the Supreme Court.

Many lotions include ingredients which are derived from non-renewable petroleum or natural gas which have a wide assortment of health effects. 12 types to avoid are:
Antibacterials
coal-tars
diethanolamine (DEA)
1,4-dioxane
Formaldehyde
Fragrance
lead and mercury
nanoparticles
parabens
petroleum distillates
p-phenylenediamine
hydroquinone

Third-party certification of personal care products is rare and actually does not necessarily ensure a completely chemical-free product, or potentially hazard chemical-free product, however the following certifications below provide additional guarantees for animal welfare and ingredient purity. Among the most common are:
The Biological Farmers of Australia (BFA)
Ecocert
BDIH
USDA Certified Organic
Leaping Bunny label

Be sure to keep an eye out for misleading terms, such as fragrance-free, hypoallergenic, non-comedogenic, and cruelty-free. These labels may sound reassuring, but these labels are not defined by the government or by independent third-parties.

Try to avoid hot water. You can always wash with warm water instead.

Try to keep your bathing and showering brief.

Be sure to use a mild soap.

Apply moisturizer to your skin immediately after bathing, that is while your skin is still moist.

And drink the recommended six to eight glasses of water a day to prevent dehydration.

Not yet, anyhow.

With the state of technology, and given how relatively young the solar sector is – such an endeavor would be considered impracticable by today’s standards – forget 2003, when Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, the co-founders of technology firm Solar Impulse, announced that they would be designing a solar-powered aircraft to fly around the world.

It would be a statement about global dependence on fossil fuels and the untapped promise of blossoming green technologies. The Swiss pilot-entrepreneurs were on a dream of “perpetual flight”: a plane that could climb to 9,000 feet and fly on the sun’s energy by day, while descending below cloud cover to lower altitudes, where it would cruise on its stored battery power by night.

A long shot to say the least. Well, seven years of interesting innovation later, the 70-person team at Solar Impulse is nearing its goal:

Borschberg said:

“We were intrigued by this notion of perpetual flight…we wanted to be totally independent of any fuel…forget hybrid planes, or the biofuels fixating most of the sustainable aviation sector today; Piccard and Borschberg are purists. No fuel, no CO2, no pollution. It could fly almost forever, assuming good weather…”

By November of last year, test pilot Markus Scherdel, formerly of DLR German Aerospace, the NASA of Germany, if yo will, was climbing into the cockpit of the completed prototype to taxi down the Dübendorf runway for the very first time. And soon after that, Scherde was back in the cockpit, this time guiding the plane as it shot up into the air for a series of successful “flea-hop” mini-flights over the tarmac.

“No matter how well intentioned governments are, they always can be led astray…Europe has laws that are comprehensive and ambitious, but they are often difficult to enforce or not enforced at all, and Europe actually lags the United States rather badly in this regard.”

Mr. Thornton honed his know-how as an environmental lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a group founded in 1970 by a group of law students and attorneys at the forefront of the U.S. environmental movement.
During the 1980s, Mr. Thornton brought scores of cases in U.S. courts and caused the administration of President Ronald Reagan to take action to stop companies in sectors like agriculture and steel from discharging pollutants into bodies of water such as the Chesapeake Bay and to make them clean up the mess which they had created.

Some of the same philanthropic organizations which supported Mr. Thornton and his organization 30 years ago, including a foundation run by Michael and Winsome McIntosh, the heirs to wealth from the A.&P. supermarket chain, also are financing his newest efforts in Europe.
Other backers include the European Climate Foundation and the Marisla Foundation, a charity that emphasizes marine conservation.
One of the aims of ClientEarth is to create

“an equality of arms”

in Brussels, where as many as 20,000 often well-funded lobbyists seek to influence legislation on behalf of major utilities, car manufacturers and food companies.
Another is to bring lawsuits, although ClientEarth has not won any cases in court so far.
When ClientEarth sued the French government in 2008 for failing to enforce a ban on the use of drift nets that entangle and often kill endangered species like dolphins, by fishermen, the French court in Paris rejected the claim.
ClientEarth sued again later that same year, asking for an emergency order that would have forced the government to intervene, however the court declined to grant the request.
Mr. Thornton said the result in France was a symptom of the larger problems faced by litigants in many parts of Europe, where it was difficult to put environmental laws into practice.
In places like England and Wales, bringing cases to court is too financially risky, because losers have to pay the legal costs of their adversaries. The barriers to justice created by such costs show that

“Her Majesty’s courts are open to everyone, just like the Ritz.”

In Luxembourg, at the European Court of Justice, the highest E.U. tribunal, judges accept only cases filed by governments and companies, thereby effectively blocking environmental campaign groups from lodging complaints to hold enforcement bodies like the European Commission to account.
Seeking to remedy such situations, ClientEarth brought a pair of cases to a committee of international lawyers in Geneva against the British government and the E.U. at the end of 2008.
The committee, which arbitrates complaints under the Aarhus Convention, an international agreement on environmental matters, may not issue binding decisions. But Mr. Thornton said that rulings in its favor would put pressure on the European court and the British government to put changes in place.
Another public interest lawyer in Europe, Peter Roderick, said that cultural factors also had helped to bamboozle the environmental litigation like mass tort cases which have become commonplace in the United States.
Mr. Roderick formerly was with the environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth International and is also a co-director in Britain of the Climate Justice Program.
That being said, Mr. Roderick said there had been increasing litigation amid growing concern over climate change, including cases brought in the British High Court by environmental activists against the British Treasury concerning the restructuring of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
The activists insisted that the Treasury should have taken measures to ensure that public money was spent in ways which did not undermine human rights or contribute to climate change when bailing out the bank in Scotland in the aftermath of the subprime lending crisis.
The court refused to review the case, but the activists have appealed, and they filed another complaint after the bank received a new cash injection by the government.
Mr. Roderick also highlighted a case in which Micronesia, the Pacific island nation, challenged plans by the Czech Republic to refit a coal-fired power station called, Prunerov.
Micronesia’s case was based on the disputation that doing so would result in continued emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, which it says threatens its existence.
Jiri Nezhyba, a lawyer in Brno with Environmental Law Service, a group tracking the case, said the Czech government was expected to decide whether plans for the plant needed to be modified before the summer.

But is it a mistake?

Some feel that circumcision is an unnecessary procedure that is painful and can lead to complications. The vast majority of the world’s men, including most Europeans and Scandinavians, are uncircumcised. And before 1900, circumcision was virtually nonexistent in the United States except for Jewish and Muslim people, who’ve been performing circumcisions for thousands of years for religious reasons.

Circumcision was introduced in English-speaking countries in the late 1800s to control or prevent masturbation, kind of like the way in which female circumcision–the removal of the clitoris and labia–was promoted and continues to be advocated in some Muslim and African countries to control women’s sexuality.

Routine female circumcision, which has been practiced in some cultures, is completely unacceptable. In fact, the United Nations has issued a decree against it.

Some feel that we justify male infant circumcision by pretending that the babies don’t feel it because they’re too young and it will have no consequences when they are older. Women who are abused in childhood know how deeply and painfully early experiences leave their marks in the body. So, those opposed to circumcision say, why wouldn’t the same thing apply to boys?

One of the main reasons people choose to have their child circumcised is because they believe that it is nearly impossible to keep an uncircumcised penis clean.

Now this conviction goes challenged by doctors.

Emotions run high around the subject of circumcision, a perfect example of the strength and influence of first chakra cultural programming on our beliefs and emotions. This kind of psychological programming is so ingrained that many people cannot even discuss the subject of circumcision without guilt, denial, or other strong emotions.

Horrified visitors who had stuck around after a noontime show watched the animal charge through the pool with the trainer in its jaws. Workers used nets and an alarm sounded, but it was too late. Dawn Brancheau had drowned. She was 40 years old.

It was the third time that the animal had been involved in a human death.

I guess that’s why they call it the killer whale.

Because of his size and the previous deaths, trainers were not supposed to get into the water with Tilikum, and just a dozen of the park’s 29 trainers worked with him.

Brancheau had more experience with the 30-year-old whale than most. She was actually one of the park’s most experienced trainers overall.

A SeaWorld spokesman said that Tilikum was one of three orcas blamed for killing a trainer in 1991 after the woman lost her balance and fell in the pool at Sealand of the Pacific near Victoria, British Columbia.

Tilikum was also involved in a 1999 incident, when the lifeless body of a man who had sneaked by SeaWorld security was found draped over him. The man either jumped, fell or was pulled into the frigid water and died of hypothermia, though he was also severely bruised and scratched by Tilikum.

So what to do with the murderous mammal? Sea Jail? Capital Punishment? Therapy?

Brancheau’s older sister, Diane Gross, said that the trainer would not want anything done to the whale because she loved the animals like children. The trainer was married but didn’t have children.

Billy Hurley, chief animal officer at the Georgia Aquarium, the world’s largest — said there are inherent dangers to working with orcas, just like driving race cars or piloting jets.

“In the case of a killer whale, if they want your attention or if they’re frustrated by something or if they’re confused by something, there’s only a few ways of handling that…If you’re right near pool’s edge and they decide they want a closer interaction during this, certainly they can grab you…At 12,000 pounds there’s not a lot of resisting you’re going to do.”

Wednesday’s attack was the second time in two months that an orca trainer was killed at a marine park. On Dec. 24, 29-year-old Alexis Martinez Hernandez fell from a whale and crushed his ribcage at Loro Parque on the Spanish island of Tenerife. Park officials said the whale, a 14-year-old named Keto, made an unusual move while the two were practicing a trick in which the whale was supposed to lift the trainer and leap up into the air.

Americans bought more than 44 million packages of low-dose aspirin marketed for heart protection in the year ending in September. The sales were up about 12% from 2005.

Well now, public-health officials are scaling back official recommendations for the painkiller to target patients at risk of a heart attack or stroke. The concern is that aspirin’s side effects, which may include bleeding ulcers, could outweigh the potential benefits when taken by healthy or old people.

Doctors generally agree that most patients who have already suffered a heart attack or stroke, the type caused by a clot or obstruction blocking an artery to the brain, should take regular low-dose aspirin. But for people without heart disease, the latest guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force spell out much more clearly than before when exactly aspirin should be administered.

The guidelines, announced last year, suggest aspirin for certain men 45 to 79 years old with elevated heart-disease risk because of things like cholesterol levels and smoking. For women, the guidelines don’t focus on heart risk. The task force recommends certain women should take aspirin regularly if they are 55 to 79 and in danger of having an ischemic stroke, for reasons that could include high blood pressure and diabetes.

The panel wants doctors to factor in conditions that could increase a patient’s risk of bleeding from aspirin, which tends to rise with age. The group did not designate a dose, but suggested that an appropriate amount might be 75 milligrams a day, which is close to the 81mg contained in low-dose, or “baby,” aspirin. The task force however did not take a position on aspirin for people who are 80 and older because of a lack of data in this age group.

Aspirin acts as a blood thinner, believed to account for much of its benefit of protecting against heart attacks and strokes. But this action, along with a tendency to deplete the stomach’s protective lining, can lead to a danger of gastrointestinal bleeding and possibly bleeding in the brain.

Not all patients used to taking aspirin though, will want to stop. Maxine Fischer, 55 years old, recently figured out that under the new U.S. guidelines, she would not be encouraged to continue on with the drug. Using an online calculator, which factored such data as her age, blood pressure and medical history, she learned she had a 1% likelihood of a stroke in the coming 10 years. Under these guidelines, only women in her age group with at least a 3% or higher stroke risk should be taking aspirin.

Ms. Fischer, a manager for seniors’ lobby AARP in San Diego, has taken aspirin daily for two years after reading it could reduce the risk of stroke. For the moment, she says she’ll continue, partly because she’s more worried about strokes than ulcers. Strokes are

“the big scary thing.”