kimblr.com

OTTAWA -When environmental activists want cuddly creatures for poster purposes, nothing beats Canadian.
Forget our most endangered species, like the black-footed ferret, northern swift fox and Vancouver Island marmot. They don’t stand a chance of becoming fundraiser-worthy victims when there are fuzzy seals and majestic polar bears to protect through international publicity.
The baby seal was the star last month when the Farley Mowat protest ship was seized by Canadian authorities for illegally interrupting the annual hunt. Partly due to that publicity, the European Commission is threatening to ban all Canadian seal product imports for no apparent reason other than the wide-eyed seal pups are so dang cute and graphically gush blood all over ice floes during a slaughter captured annually on television.
Now it’s the polar bear, granted mostly symbolic protection by the United States this week as the highest-profile potential casualty of global warming as its mostly Canadian domain disappears with the Arctic Ocean ice melt.
Ironically, the polar bear’s primary diet is the seal, and it has a particular affinity for the young pups it grabs by the head and chews, a death surely more prolonged than the fatal whack of a sealers’ hakapik.
The "threatened" status afforded the Canadian great white is intriguing. One might not associate that alarmist term with an animal whose Arctic population has doubled to 25,000 bears in the last 40 years, with only two of the 13 pockets of population experiencing any decline and the rest enjoying a boom.
Yet somehow, despite that population surge, its long history of surviving even warmer climates and having lived off much reduced sea ice, the polar bear is now the world’s photogenic canary in the global-warming coal mine.
When the U.S. Fish and Wild-life Service put up its suggestion for a "threatened" designation for the species, the service was swamped with a record-shattering 670,000 responses, or more than 25 for every polar bear on the planet.

nationalpost.com

By Daisy Whitney
While a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, would an Apple, a Moses or a Shiloh?
And is there some gene or DNA mutation once your face lives on celluloid that says your child can't be a Jennifer or a Michael?
But perhaps if your kid's name will pepper the pages of People for as long as there is a Brangelina or a TomKat or the next such celeb couple combo, then it better be a catchy appellation.
Celebrities have been bestowing unusual names on their offspring as far back as the 1967 birth of Frank Zappa's daughter Moon Unit Zappa.
But what should you do when considering a name? Do you opt for a Glimmer or Davidina or Papaya?
Let's look at what the celebrity babies' names mean first.
Gwyneth Paltrow's name choices - Apple and Moses - have biblical connotations with Apple hearkening back to the Garden of Eden and perhaps the flight from it, as Paltrow herself has fled life in Hollywood, says Stacy DeBroff, a national parenting author and founder of Momcentral.com
Then there's Geri Halliwell of former Spice Girls fame who chose Bluebell Madonna for her daughter, homage to flowers and the pop icon. Donald Trump opted for Barron and there's no secret as to what his expectations are for his new son. Penn Jilllette of Penn & Teller chose Zolten, a Hungarian name, for his new son, who may follow in his father's footsteps with a name like that.
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes selected Suri for their girl and the duo claims it means “princess” in Hebrew, though scholars disagree, DeBroff says. “Courteney Cox and David Arquette evoked their traditional-meets-quirky dynamic with baby CoCo, a derivative of Courteney's name. And by naming her twins Phinnaeus and Hazel, Julia Roberts proclaimed that she is old-world and classic… maybe a little too classic,” DeBroff says.

kfre.com

NEW ORLEANS — Kierstyn Cyrus cracked open the front door of her ruined home, a single goal in mind, just one precious thing she wanted to rescue. It was October 2005, the first time since Hurricane Katrina that she had stepped inside the brick ranch at 2455 Deslonde Street in the Lower Ninth Ward. The morning before a levee burst four blocks away, Kierstyn, her mother and grandmother had fled 250 miles inland.
On this mockingly sunlit afternoon, as Kierstyn entered the house, she spotted a kitchen chair perched atop the roof. Inside, the refrigerator lay sideways across the living room. In Kierstyn’s bedroom, her Tweety Bird doll was wedged amid the rafters, where the flood waters had pressed it, and all her church dresses were gone from the closet, swept away.
“Mom, where’s my book?” Kierstyn called out to her mother, Melanie. “Where’s my portfolio?”
Ms. Cyrus was standing outside, doctor’s orders. She was in the middle of chemotherapy for breast cancer, and she had been warned not to expose herself to the filth, germs and mold in the house. But she knew which book Kierstyn meant, and she shouted back to look under the radio on the bedroom dresser.
Kierstyn was searching for a loose-leaf binder, filled with every award and honor from her academic career. Her mother, a teacher, had begun keeping the book when Kierstyn was in Rock-a-Bye nursery school and continued all the way to the eighth-grade year interrupted by the hurricane.
The pages held all of Kierstyn’s report cards, the honor-roll ribbons, the snapshots of classmates, the certificate good for a free meal at Shoney’s in recognition of high marks. Ms. Cyrus and Kierstyn had put every page in a plastic sleeve, as if smudged fingers or spilled coffee were all the book had to be guarded against.

nytimes.com