Polar bears 'will not survive without urgent action'

Polar bears will not survive without action to tackle climate change and save their rapidly disappearing Arctic habitat, conservationists have warned.

WWF, the conservation charity, said that the five countries which are home to the polar bear must commit to action on global warming to save the animal, which is reliant on the sea ice.

Recent analysis by the US Geological Survey and World Conservation Union found that two-thirds of the 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears in the world could be lost in the next 50 years as warming temperatures melt the ice.

But WWF said an agreement signed in 1973 by the five Arctic states - Canada, Russia, the US, Greenland/Denmark and Norway - commits them to saving protecting the bear and its habitat.

While the original deal focused on threats from hunting that had decimated populations, WWF's polar bear co-ordinator Geoff York said polar bears could not now be protected without addressing climate change.

"The most important action we can take to help preserve polar bears is to slow the rate of climate change, and ultimately to stop it so that their habitat does not entirely disappear," he said.

"Without the sea ice habitat, the polar bear will not survive in the long term. There are other threats, such as oil and gas drilling, shipping and toxins, but they pale in comparison to climate change and the loss of the sea ice."

Next week the five nations which are party to the 1973 Agreement for the Conservation of Polar Bears and Their Habitats will meet in Norway for the first formal meeting in more than 25 years.

Mr York said delegates must agree to push their countries to commit to urgent and effective action to cut the greenhouse gas emissions which cause climate change.

"Anything less would be an abdication of the responsibilities of these nations under the polar bear agreement," he said.

WWF will be presenting a wide-ranging action plan on protecting polar bears at the meeting in Tromso, Norway.

Mosha the elephant gets prosthetic leg

Mosha the elephant has been fitted with an prosthetic leg in Lampang, Thailand, after losing a limb when she stepped on a landmine.


She was rescued when she was seven-months-old and brought to the Friends of the Asian Elephant hospital where she became the first elephant in the world to be fitted with an artificial leg in 2007.

Now aged three, Mosha is growing at such a rate she has now been fitted with a second prosthetic leg.

Her home in the tropical jungle of northern Thailand, near the Cambodian border, is an orphanage for elephants.

Stumbling around on three limbs at the world's first elephant hospital, she refused to mix with other elephants and shunned food.

Doctors had feared the worst until she had a chance meeting with Dr. Therdchai Jivacate, who runs a foundation for human amputees.

Jivacate knew that Mosha would not survive as she grew heavier with age.

"When she cannot walk, she is going to die," he said.

Jivacate's foundation has made prosthetic limbs for over 16,000 humans. But it had never fitted an elephant until Mosha caught Jivacate's eye.

Fashioned out of plastic, sawdust and metal, doctors at his Prostheses Foundation successfully fitted an artificial leg for Mosha sturdy enough to carry her weight.

One of many patients treated at the unique £1m animal hospital, with fellow elephants suffering infections, broken bones and knife wounds, Mosha soon became the most famous.

Almost a year after her operation, Mosha eats 200 pounds of food a day and is growing so fast that doctors recently fitted her with a second, larger prosthesis.

After her daily exercises, Mosha takes a nap. The prosthesis is only removed when she sleeps.
Source:telegraph.co.uk

Sofa surprise: Cat found inside $27 used couch

The mysterious mewing in Vickie Mendenhall's home started about the time she bought a used couch for $27.

After days of searching for the source of the noise, she found a very hungry calico cat living in her sofa.

The Spokesman-Review reported that her boyfriend, Chris Lund, was watching TV on Tuesday night and felt something move inside the couch. He pulled it away from the wall, lifted it up and found the cat, which apparently had crawled through a small hole on the underside.

Mendenhall contacted the store where she bought the couch, but it had no information on who donated it. So she took the cat to the animal shelter where she works, so it could recover, and contacted media outlets in hopes of finding the owner.

Sure enough, Bob Killion of Spokane showed up to claim the cat on Thursday after an acquaintance alerted him to a TV story about it.

Killion had donated a couch on Feb. 19, and his 9-year-old cat, Callie, disappeared at about the same time.

source:msnbc.com

Euro chiefs ban 'Miss' and 'Mrs'

The politically correct rules also mean a ban on Continental titles, such as Madame and Mademoiselle, Frau and Fraulein and Senora and Senorita.

Guidance issued in a new 'Gender-Neutral Language' pamphlet instead orders politicians to address female members by their full name only.

Officials have also ordered that 'sportsmen' be called 'athletes', 'statesmen' be referred to as 'political leaders' and even that 'synthetic' or 'artificial' be used instead of 'man-made'.

The guidance lists banned terms for describing professions, including fireman, air hostess, headmaster, policeman, salesman, manageress, cinema usherette and male nurse.

However MEPs are still allowed to refer to 'midwives' as there is no accepted male version of the job description.

The booklet also admits that "no gender-neutral term has been successfully proposed" to replace 'waiter' and 'waitress', allowing parliamentarians to use these words in a restaurant or café.

It has been circulated by Harold Romer, the parliament's secretary general, to the 785 MEPs working in Brussels and Strasbourg.

Struan Stevenson, a Scottish Conservative MEP described the guidelines as "political correctness gone mad."

He said: "We have seen the EU institutions try to ban the bagpipes and dictate the shape of bananas, but now they see determined to tell us which words we are entitled to use in our own language."

Philip Bradbourn, another Conservative MEP, vowed to ignore the booklet, which he described as a "waste of taxpayers' money" and called on Mr Romer to reveal its cost.

He added: "I will have no part of it. I will continue to use my own language and expressions, which I have used all my life, and will not be instructed by this institution or anyone else in these matters."

Seven years ago, an attempt to amend noise laws came close to effectively outlawing bagpipes.

However, a number of bizarre EU rules remain in place, including a directive stating that every pair of rubber boots must be supplied with a user's manual in 12 languages.
source: The Telegraph