Alliance unites to kill company's plans for shipping tarsands oil across B.C.

By Suzanne Fournier, The Province--March 24, 2010   sfournier@theprovince.com

An "unprecedented" alliance of more than 150 First Nations, environmentalists, unions, businesses and even Olympic athletes have united to oppose Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway pipeline across B.C.

First Nations leaders vowed on Tuesday to use "every possible means" to stop Enbridge from sending Alberta tarsands oil by pipeline to Kitimat and then by tanker down the B.C. coast.

"We'll start with every legal means we can, and we have many, including our constitutionally-protected rights and title to these lands and waters," Coastal First Nations director Art Sterritt said in Vancouver.

"There are many court decisions backing us, but failing all of that, our people have said they will blockade tankers in their little vessels. This is not an uphill battle, this is the wall. Enbridge has just hit the wall. As far as we're concerned, this project is dead."

 

An hour is what you make of it - you can't get it back and you can't lend it to someone who has used theirs up; it's yours and yours alone.

This day we, especially those of us in the so-called developed world, should be all taking at least this coming 8:30PM to 9:30PM (local time - Earth Hour) hour to think about what our use of power to light our lives after dark and away from windows means. 

ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2010) — Mother birds communicate with their developing chicks before they even hatch by leaving them messages in the egg, new research by a team from the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, has found.

By changing conditions within the egg, canary mothers leave a message for their developing chicks about the life they will face after birth. In response, nestlings adjust the development of their begging behaviour.

If chicks get a message that they will be reared by generous parents then they beg more vigorously for food after hatching. But chicks that are destined to be raised by meaner parents end up being much less demanding.

By attending to messages in the egg, nestlings gain weight more rapidly because they match their demands to the parents' supply of food, and can avoid either begging too little or wasting effort on unrewarded begging.

The Cambridge team made the discovery using fostering experiments, exchanging eggs between canaries' nests so that the chicks grew up in an environment that they were not expecting.

Bird strikes cause an estimated £800m damage a year to commercial aircraft worldwide, and are responsible for several accidents Photo: PA

Red Kites, which have seen their numbers soar as a result of a 20-year campaign to protect them - gather round RAF Benson base in Oxfordshire because locals are putting out scraps for them to eat.

The RAF is worried the huge birds will collide with helicopters which regularly fly in and out of the base.

(CNN) -- Gorillas may go extinct in much of central Africa by the mid-2020s -- victims of a meat trade, of logging and mining, and even the Ebola virus, a new report says.

Unless action is taken to guard the gorillas' habitat and counter poaching, the dire prediction will come to pass, said the joint report from the United Nations and Interpol released Wednesday.

Until now, the Congo Basin in Central Africa had been a rainforest refuge for gorillas and other apes.

But the threats to the gorillas' survival are so acute that a similar study that predicted only 10 percent of the gorilla population will remain by 2030 is now considered too optimistic.

That study -- conducted in 2002 -- did not take into account the rise in the demand for timber and metals destined for Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

The male orphaned cougar is believed to be 14-months-old.

Updated: Wed Mar. 24 2010 11:15:23

ctvcalgary.ca

Two orphaned cougars are now calling the Calgary Zoo home.

The male and female siblings arrived from the Northern Lights Wildlife Shelter in Smithers, B.C.

The 14-month-old cubs had been living there for the past nine months.

22 March 2010