Read about polar bear cub Knut in Berlin zoo: here.
Video of polar bear dancing in zoo: here.
Also from the Arctic, a walrus video.
Electronic tagging of walruses: here; and here.
Global warming and arctic tree line: here.
Sloth bears in India: here.
This video is called T-Rex – attack of the dinosaur – BBC.
Tyrannosaurus rex lived over 65 million years ago,
Tyrannosaurid research: here.
This video is called Green Iguana Documentary Part 1.
An Internet site in Belgium on nature has a Top 10 of its subjects in which most visitors are interested.
After its page on nature in general at #1, the rest of the top 10 is:
2. Green iguana
3. London planetree
4. Walnut tree
5. Horse-chestnut
6. Red squirrel
7. African grey parrot
8. Swallowtail butterfly
9. Barn owl
10. Maple tree
This video is called Japanese whaling of Humpback whales.
From British daily The Independent:
Protesters celebrate as blaze forces Japan’s whaling fleet to abandon hunt
By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent
Published: 01 March 2007
Activists ready to risk their lives could not prevent Japan from harpooning whales in the Antarctic.
But a fire that crippled the fleet’s factory ship has forced the country to cut short its annual whaling operation for the first time in 20 years.
The fire aboard the 8,000-tonne Nisshin Maru two weeks ago killed a crew member and left the ship stranded in the frigid waters of the Southern Ocean.
It restarted its engines last weekend and can now sail under its own power, but Japan’s Fisheries Agency said yesterday that damage to equipment would make it difficult to continue the hunt.
The announcement was greeted with glee by anti-whaling groups, including Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd, which had been stalking the fleet before the fire and trying to disrupt its activities.
Japan suffered the indignity of a Greenpeace ship, the Esperanza, offering to tow the Nisshin Maru out of the area. It declined the offer.
From British daily The Guardian:
Sarkozy’s ‘Mr Clean’ image hit by property scandal
Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Thursday March 1, 2007
Nicolas Sarkozy is today struggling to reassert his self-styled image as a humble political outsider of modest means, after newspaper allegations that he benefited from a substantial discount on a luxury, six-bedroom apartment in Paris’s richest suburb.
French weblog on Sarkozy: here.
By Laura Hastings:
The number of loggerhead sea turtles that nested along protected areas of South Africa’s KwaZulu coastline is on the rise.
There were more than 2000 loggerhead nestings tallied by WWF scientists that monitored the beaches during the 2005-2006 season.
This represents the highest number of nestings for the species recorded during the past 43 years.
Green turtles: here.
Green turtle in Virginia, USA: here.
From an article on the visit of US Vice President Dick Cheney to Afghanistan:
Cheney did not fly on his usual jet, Air Force Two, which was left behind at a US base in Oman, instead boarding a C-17 cargo plane maintained by the South Carolina Air National Guard, named the Spirit of Strom Thurmond, which carried him to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Cheney was accompanied on his visit to both countries by Stephen Kappes, deputy director of the CIA and a veteran of the agency since the days when it first mobilized Osama bin Laden, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and other Islamic fundamentalists to wage war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Republican Senator Strom Thurmond is one of the most racist bigots in US history.
By Françoise Thull:
A third Renault worker commits suicide in France
1 March 2007
On February 20, the Versailles public prosecutor’s office opened an investigation “to check on the working conditions” of a Renault employee who, aged only 38, killed himself at his home four days earlier, leaving a suicide note referring to the pressures on the job.
The death came almost a year to the day after Carlos Ghosn, Renault’s new boss, launched the “Renault Contract 2009” revival plan.
It was the third suicide in four months of an employee working at the Technocentre Renault research centre at Guyancourt in the Yvelines department near Paris.
It occurred barely three weeks after a silent march by workers at the company in honour of the two employees who had previously taken their own lives (in October and January, respectively).
Since the announcement of the third death, spouses of workers at the Technocentre have contacted the unions fearing that their husbands might do the same.
The CGT (General Confederation of Labour) union representative Vincent Neveu reports: “Their husbands have similar characteristics to those of our colleagues who committed suicide: coming home from work after 10 p.m., the feeling of being overwhelmed by their work load.
One of the wives ended up bursting into tears. She had not dared tell her husband that she was contacting a union.”
Dear Kitty. Some blog 