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

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rockymountainnews.com

“I don’t think there’s much to worry about - that if there are 1,500 beds available, I guarantee you they will be used,” said Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., an outspoken critic of illegal immigration. “Until we have actually secured the border, of course we’re going to need more detention space.”
Pablo Paez, a spokesman for Boca Raton, Fla.-based GEO, didn’t return repeated telephone messages for comment.
On a recent day at Aurora, a group of orange-clad men played volleyball in a chain-link cage about the size of a basketball court. Motorists passed close by the site, in an industrial park behind a car wash.
Those housed at the Aurora center are awaiting deportation or hearings on their status and generally are not facing criminal charges. ICE doesn’t use security classifications for its facilities as prisons do because they’re not “correctional in nature,” said agency spokesman Carl Rusnok.
Several enforcement initiatives have increased the need for detention space.
In March, ICE announced a $2 billion to $3 billion initiative to identify and remove all deportable immigrants in custody - not only in federal and state prisons but at all levels, including the nation’s 3,100 county jails.
Under the “Secure Communities” initiative, a criminal suspect’s immigration status would be checked against a Department of Homeland Security immigration database as part of the regular booking process at jails, and ICE would automatically learn about potential violators.
In 2007, ICE deported 95,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records. ICE estimates that there are between 300,000 to 450,000 illegal immigrants in custody or detained for criminal violations across the country each year. About 67 percent of them are in county, state or privately operated facilities.
In addition, 17 states have formed immigration enforcement units. A Colorado State Patrol unit arrested nearly 800 undocumented immigrants, including 146 with criminal records, since it started in July.

examiner.com

Like ice cream? Like your local firefighters? Then go to the Baskin-Robbins store at 6940 Forest Hill Ave. in South Richmond today from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Those are the hours of a promotion called 31-cent Scoop Night.
During those hours, Baskin-Robbins will sell you scoops of ice cream for 31 cents apiece.
In turn, you have a chance to make a donation — say, with the money you just saved — to the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation.
Baskin-Robbins corporate officials in turn plan to make a $100,000 donation to the foundation, which helps firefighters and their families and offers the public information about fire prevention.

inrich.com

Antarctica's Wilkins Ice Shelf Risks Collapse, U.K. Group Says
By Alex Morales
March 25 (Bloomberg) — An Antarctic ice shelf bigger than Connecticut risks collapse because of global warming after a retreat that began on Feb. 28, the British Antarctic Survey said.
The Wilkins ice shelf, which lost 1,000 square kilometers (390 square miles) of ice, or about 6 percent of its surface, in 1998, calved another 570 square kilometers since February, the survey group said in an e-mailed statement. Now, there's little to stop the loss of another several thousand square kilometers.
“The rest seems to be held a bit by a thread,'' David Vaughan, a scientist at the group who in 1993 predicted Wilkins would break apart within 30 years, said today in a telephone interview from Cambridge, England. “We predicted it would happen, but it's happened twice as fast as we predicted.''
The collapse of Wilkins would have few implications for sea levels because it's already floating and doesn't hold back large land-based glaciers, Vaughan said. Still, it may foreshadow future melting in the southern continent, which combined with Greenland holds enough ice to raise sea levels by 64 meters.
“The importance of it is it's further south than any ice shelf we've seen retreating before, it's bigger than any ice shelf we've seen retreating before and in the long term it could be a taste of other things to come if climate change continues in the Antarctic,'' Vaughan said.
Wilkins, which is in the Antarctic Peninsula, a finger of the continent that points up toward South America, isn't the first ice shelf to retreat. In 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed, with 500 billion tons of ice breaking up into icebergs in less than a month. Other shelves that have collapsed in the past 30 years include Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Wordie, Muller and Jones, according to the survey group.

bloomberg.com

” is on display through March 8. The East Hartford-based artist has created drawings that approximate Nazi propaganda of the 1930s and comments on how Hitler’s government dealt with homosexuals before and during World War II. Gallery hours are 5 to 8 p.m. on Monday and Wednesday and 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Saturday.
“An Installation by Johanna Bresnick,” a New Haven-based artist who works with filament tape on Plexiglas. Bresnick, owner of the Elm City’s Grand Projects gallery, creates “site-specific art,” meaning this installation was created specially for The Niche. Bresnick might use the same materials in another setting, but the results will be quite different. Gallery hours are 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. This exhibition runs through March 28. For more information, call 860-343-5806.
“American Splendor,” the 2003 movie about graphic artist and music aficionado Harvey Pekar, starring Paul Giamatti, at 7 p.m. Film critic and reporter Rob Glidden will introduce the movie and lead the discussion following the film. For more information, call 860-663-5593.
“The Homecoming Project,” a collection of monologues, short plays and music created by the students of the Yale School of Drama that attempts to convey what it’s like for a soldier to come back from war. The show begins at 8 p.m. and there is no admission fee, but money will collected and donated to a nonprofit New Haven organization that helps to support veterans and their families. For more information, call 203-432-1566.
Woolsey Hall in New Haven. They will perform “Carmina Burana” by Carl Orff and Mikhail Glinka’s overture to “Ruslan and Ludmilla.” For ticket information, call 203-562-5666 or go to www.shubert.com.
Wendy Black-Nasta, the Middletown-based artist who created the International Peace Belt, has a new project. Artists for World Peace, an organization she founded, and Cold Stone Creamery are sponsoring the “Hats for a Cause” fundraiser, with a hat parade, from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Cold Stone Creamery store in Riverview Plaza in Middletown. Hand-made hats from more than 30 Connecticut artists will be on display. The parade (weather permitting) begins at 2 p.m. ,followed by a silent auction from 3 to 4 p.m. and a live auction at 4 p.m. There will be music and, of course, plenty of ice cream. Artists for World Peace is building a “safe house” in Cambodia, and the money raised from this event will go to buy beds for the house. For more information, go to www.artistsforworldpeace.org.

courant.com

They’re the passwords. Now everyone can sit and laugh at the mess.
This is just rediculous!!! I want to see Shtiney not some damn animation. Screw this shit!
She is so fat and ugly now she is not even allowed to star in her own videos.
The female in the animation looks nothing like Britney. Even when Britney was supposed to be “hot” she was never that thin or tall. She was short with stubby legs.
While a lot of people spend their life time ragging on pop stars????? HELLO fake bi-babe/Herbie YOU spend all your life on here ragging on people ragging on Shitney.
And you go on other threads all day ragging on Lindsay, Paris, Selma, EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!! The only person you don’t rag on is SHITNEY because you think she would ever even look at your ugly ass.
So she’s feeling well enough to make a TV show but not a music video?
I don’t get it!!!
Thanks 12:42. The pedophile Herbie is probably on another thread harrassing people. Fucking dirty old man!
Oh crap! Now she will probably believe that one of her ‘Spearsonalities’ is a superhero too! I think the pink wig is just another one of her identities and now this will be added into the fold! Like they say, if you hate yourself, become something else! But I do not think this will help. I bet it only confuses her addled mind even more! I bet when she looks in a mirror, it is not anywhere near what anyone else see! A whole mental dysmorphia!

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