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Africa's protected biodiversity areas are under increasing threat from the species introduced - usually through human activities - to areas outside their natural range where they damage biodiversity, agriculture and human health.

"The government is now spending substantial amounts of money on trying to control this insidious weed," Howard said.

“This is much, much different. This is not a gradual change,” said Dr. Andrew Derocher, one of the world’s leading polar bear authorities and co-author of the study. “We’re looking at a decrease by 20 or 30 per cent or even much more in a year.”

All of that information can be subjected to “some fairly advanced math” to create data tables that chart the estimated time of death by starvation for adult male polar bears.

Typically 120 days in the 1980s, the time polar bears have to spend fasting has increased by about seven days per decade and is continuing to increase.

While 3 to 6 per cent of polar bears in the Western Hudson Bay die during a 120-day summer fast, 28 to 48 per cent would die if it reached 180 days, the study found. The fast occurs because polar bears depend on frozen sea surface to cover distances.

It compares the rise in gold today with the rise of the Nasdaq in the 1990s and the Dow Jones index of home-building stocks in the 10 years leading up to 2005-06.

Eurasian Natural Resources Corp., a London-based iron ore and alumina miner, delayed a debut dollar-denominated note sale this month because of market volatility, people familiar with the matter said. Towergate Partnership Ltd., Europe’s largest independent insurance broker, postponed a 665 million-pound ($961 million) sale of high-yield bonds on May 13 until markets improve, said people with knowledge of the deal.

A quarter of Venice's income comes from the City-owned casino near the famous Rialto bridge, where thousands of tourists gamble, unaware that they're funding the city's battle against rising lagoon levels, or paying for its world-renowned carnival. But a credit crunch-led drop in tourism has starved the municipal coffers, and forced the city into new fundraising ventures. Venice recently created an 18-property fund, valued at €82m (£71.3m), expected to be sold within three to five years.

"The market is shut, nobody's doing anything," the banker says. "Money can't be kept in a drawer but it was shut two weeks ago, and it will have to reopen."

Its shares fell 13pc – the stock’s biggest fall in nearly two years – when it announced in November that it will delay subordinated debt repayments of up to €45m after missing its financial targets.

Cullen argued the companies had made this request because drilling a relief well within the required time limit would be too expensive, given the difficult Arctic conditions.

As a result, for the past 70 years or so, the sinking of the delta coast has continued unabated. As salt water pushes inland from the gulf, it kills wetlands and marshes, habitat for wildlife and fish, and is increasingly threatening homes for many thousands of people.

The dead zone is caused by nutrient enrichment from the Mississippi River, particularly nitrogen and phosphorous. Watersheds within the Mississippi River Basin drain much of the United States, from Montana to Pennsylvania and extending southward along the Mississippi River.

"There are still a lot of uncertainties in the world economy. Therefore we believe it is too early for us to talk about an exit strategy from our stimulus package," Chen told reporters after a meeting with European Union (EU) Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht.

The average price for a car license was 42,262 yuan (US$6,187), up 625 yuan from April, the Shanghai International Commodity Auction Co said. The lowest price was up 900 yuan to 41,900 yuan. Both prices have been rising for eight months and are at their highest since January 2008.

A total of 8,500 car plates were up for auction this month, the same number as last month but more than February's 7,500.

The number of bidders dropped for a fifth month to 16,324, or 989 fewer than April.

The strike, which has forced Honda to suspend production at all four of its joint venture assembly plants in China, has shown that Chinese authorities are willing to tolerate work stoppages at least temporarily, even at high-tech operations on which many other factories depend.
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Even before the strike, manufacturers and buyers of low-cost products were already actively seeking alternatives to China, like Vietnam and Cambodia, said Richard Vuylsteke, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong.

“They’re looking very seriously, and we’re seeing that in apparel and footwear,” he said. “A lot of our members are seeing appreciating wages.”
[...]
Labor advocacy groups say that they hear of frequent strikes in China, with work stoppages occurring somewhere every day. But strikes are typically hushed up and are often resolved in a day or two by the authorities, either with the police or through pressure on employers and workers to resolve their differences.

Ab Wintersemester 2011/2012 sollen keine neuen Medizinstudenten in Lübeck mehr angenommen werden, das Studium werde an die Uni Kiel "verlagert", heißt es in den Empfehlungen zur Konsolidierung der Finanzen des Landes Schleswig-Holstein, wie die CDU-FDP-Haushaltskommission sie verabschiedete.

Und auch die Schulen müssen empfindliche Einschnitte hinnehmen. 300 Lehrestellen werden im Sommer 2011 und weitere 300 im Sommer 2012 gestrichen, berichtete das "Hamburger Abendblatt". Insgesamt sollen so bis 2020 3650 Lehrstellen wegfallen. Ausnehmen wird das schwarz-gelbe Bündnis in Kiel die Gymnasien: Sie erhalten schon im kommenden Schuljahr 180 Lehrerstellen mehr.

Hamburg/Berlin - In Frankfurt am Main wundert sich in diesen Tagen mancher: Der Kauf von Staatsanleihen hochverschuldeter Euro-Länder durch die Europäische Zentralbank (EZB) sorgt nach SPIEGEL-Informationen für erhebliche Irritationen in der Bundesbank.

The white-coloured bird was found by a local resident in India's Punjab state, which borders Pakistan, and taken to a police station 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the capital Amritsar.

The pigeon had a ring around its foot and a Pakistani phone number and address stamped on its body in red ink.

The mud lake is so huge -- seven square kilometres (almost three square miles) and 20 metres (66 feet) thick -- it is now visible from space, and geologists say "Lusi" could continue gushing sludge for centuries.

"With good layout and good concepts, we can turn this place into something useful for the community, whether as a geological tourist attraction, fishery or for other public activities," he said.

"If it's managed well, I have confidence this will be an attractive place and bring good to the local community."

"The consequences of this collective failure, if not corrected, will be severe for us all," she said.

Nandi-Ndaitwah said wetlands such as the oshanas of north-central Namibia have been invaded by invasive species which are the manifestation of degraded ecosystems.

Within days of the Ibeno spill, thousands of barrels of oil were spilled when the nearby Shell Trans Niger pipeline was attacked by rebels. A few days after that, a large oil slick was found floating on Lake Adibawa in Bayelsa state and another in Ogoniland. "We are faced with incessant oil spills from rusty pipes, some of which are 40 years old," said Bonny Otavie, a Bayelsa MP.

This point was backed by Williams Mkpa, a community leader in Ibeno: "Oil companies do not value our life; they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and fishermen can no longer sustain their families. It is not tolerable."

Consequently, Nigeria loses about 350,000 hectares of land every year to desert encroachment. This has led to demographic displacements in villages across 11 states in the North. It is estimated that Nigeria loses about $5.1billion every year owing to rapid encroachment of drought and desert in most parts of the north.

Even under the most optimistic assumptions about government spending cuts and bank losses, by 2012 Ireland will have a worse ratio of debt to national income than the one that is sinking Greece.

On the face of it, Ireland’s debt position does not appear catastrophic. At the start of the year, Ireland’s government debt was two- thirds of GDP: only half the Greek level.

There is more. The ability of a government to service its debts depends on its tax base. In Ireland the proper measure of tax base, at least when it comes to increasing taxes, is not GDP (including profits of multinational firms, who will walk if we raise their taxes) but GNP (which is limited to Irish people, who are mostly stuck here). While for most countries the two measures are the same, in Ireland GDP is a quarter larger than GNP. This means our optimistic debt to GDP forecast of 115 per cent translates into a debt to GNP ratio of 140 per cent, worse than where Greece is now.

And even this catastrophic number assumes that our economy does not contract further. For the last two years the Irish economy has not been shrinking, so much as vaporising. Real GNP and private sector employment have already fallen by one-sixth – the deepest and swiftest falls in a western economy since the Great Depression.

The estimated costs of environmental degradation in the lakes and rivers due to excessive loads of sediments and nutrients caused by soil erosion may be even higher.

While the survey by Conservation International, a non-profit organisation with its headquarters in Washington, DC, United States, has revealed that 2,300 square kilometres of forests is being destroyed yearly, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has put the annual deforestation rate at whopping 4,200 square kilometres.

Currently, Tanzania has 385,000 square kilometres of forest cover, but experts warn that this could disappear fast if measures are not taken to reverse the alarming situation. According to experts, the wanton felling of trees or burning of forests releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, leading to global warming that could result in increased drought, flooding, poor harvests, water shortages and a growing number of refugees driven from the worst hit areas.

As George Osborne, the chancellor, prepares to unveil the first £6 billion of cuts tomorrow, the full scale of the job losses that will follow has begun to emerge.

The initial savings to be announced will target such items as civil servants’ perks, which include taxis, flights and hotel accommodation.

Some estimates suggest that the number of job losses could reach 700,000. These will include tens of thousands of health service managers as well as many thousands of doctors and nurses, according to internal documents from the National Health Service.

The stock of money fell from $14.2 trillion to $13.9 trillion in the three months to April, amounting to an annual rate of contraction of 9.6pc. The assets of insitutional money market funds fell at a 37pc rate, the sharpest drop ever.

Almost all -- 90 percent -- said unemployment was a problem for their communities and that joblessness has mounted over the last year.

"City budget shortfalls will become more severe over the next two years as tax collections catch up with economic conditions," the report said. "These will inevitably result in new rounds of layoffs, service cuts, and canceled projects and contracts."

Already, 71 percent of cities have cut personnel and 68 percent have delayed or canceled infrastructure projects, it found.

And that's what this bill does. It eliminates separate funding for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and eliminates federal income taxes for everyone's first $35,000 of income ($70,000 for couples). Plus it pays down the national debt.

The costs of the war have been rendered invisible. There's no draft. Instead, we take the most vulnerable elements of our population, and give them a choice between unemployment and missile fodder. Government deficits conceal the need to pay in cash for the war.

We put the cost of both guns and butter on our Chinese credit card. In fact, we don't even put these wars on budget; they are still passed using 'emergency supplemental'. A nine-year 'emergency'.

On June 1, New York is due to send $3.8 billion in aid to local school districts, including $2.1 billion that was supposed to be paid in March but not sent for lack of funds. Yet New York is still $1 billion short. This could affect school operations, the solvency of any business that sells goods or services to the state, the paychecks of state workers, and ultimately home values.

“We applaud these lawmakers for taking the lead to address the housing production credit crisis that is jeopardizing the housing and economic recovery now under way,” said NAHB Chairman Bob Jones, a home builder from Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

The effort reflects a worrisome new problem in the nation's troubled retirement-savings system: the grim financial condition of such pension plans, known as multi-employer plans. They are common in the hotel, construction, trucking and other industries, and cover about 10 million workers, or almost one in four workers who have a private pension.
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A 2009 study from ratings firm Moody's Investors Service estimated that the country's largest multi-employer plans have long-term deficits of about $165 billion. Some employer groups that are supporting efforts to help the plans question whether that estimate accurately reflects the government's potential exposure, however.