Several types of vessels, from small whale-watching boats to large cruise ships, also traverse the coastal waters off Washington State and neighboring British Columbia, Canada.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A BBC expedition exploring inside the crater of an extinct volcano in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has discovered a lost world of dozens of weird new species and rare animals, including new frogs, a giant rat, many new insects and spiders, giant caterpillars, and a new bat species.Steve Greenwood, producer of "Lost Land of the Volcano" said the expedition to Mount Bosavi for the series follows on from expeditions to remote rainforests in Borneo for "Expedition Borneo" and Guyana for "Lost Land of the Jaguar".
The Mount Bosavi crater is 2.5 miles wide and over 3,300 feet high, and is located in the remote and mountainous southern highlands of Papua New Guinea. The mountain and its pristine, extinct crater are so inaccessible that even the few people in the Kasua tribe who live in nearby villages rarely enter the area.
Washington, D.C., residents mourning the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks this morning heard an eerie echo just an hour later -- reports that a Coast Guard vessel had fired shots at a boat in the Potomac River near the Pentagon.
But after half-an-hour of anxiety, the Coast Guard and local police said the whole thing was a training exercise, and no shots were fired at all.
Before the Coast Guard announcement, departures from Washington's Reagan National Airport were halted from 10:08 a.m. to 10:29 a.m., delaying 17 departures, and FBI agents scrambled to the scene near the river. A law enforcement official, asking not to be identified, told the Associated Press the local FBI office had not been told ahead of time about the exercise.
Network news programs broke into regular morning shows to report the incident, and cable networks went to blanket coverage.
By IBRAHIM USTA, Associated Press Writer Ibrahim Usta, Associated Press Writer – Wed Sep 9, 2:52 pm ET ISTANBUL – The heaviest rainfall in at least eight decades sent flash floods barreling across a major highway and into busy business districts in Turkey's largest city on Wednesday, trapping factory workers and truck drivers in their vehicles and drowning at least 20 people.
Waters six feet (2 meters) high in some places flooded hundreds of homes and offices and cut off the TEM highway, which connects central Istanbul to the sprawling city's main airport and goes on to Greece and Bulgaria.
SYDNEY (AFP) – Australian business confidence has surged to its highest level in almost six years as expectations rise that an economic recovery is underway, a monthly survey showed Tuesday. Confidence rose from +10 in July to +18 in August, the highest reading since October 2003, the National Australia Bank (NAB) study found. A positive reading indicates optimists outnumber pessimists among the 405 firms surveyed.
"The further significant improvement in business confidence is quite remarkable," NAB chief economist Alan Oster said.
Emotional Bunny Says: "Does anyone else feel a sudden desire to go to university in economically golden Australia....?"
ScienceDaily (Sep. 5, 2009) — What do abrupt changes in ocean circulation and Earth's climate, shifts in wildlife populations and ecosystems, the global finance market and its system-wide crashes, and asthma attacks and epileptic seizures have in common?According to a paper published this week in the journal Nature, all share generic early-warning signals that indicate a critical threshold of change dead ahead.
It's practically a rite of the season: as dependably as long sleeves come out of the closet and candy corn appears on store shelves, parts of the west go up in flames this time of year. Thousands of firefighters are battling a major blaze in southern California that has charred more than 130,000 acres, filling TV news reports with footage of hulking airplanes showering a bright red powder onto smoking forests below.
The World Heritage-listed reef was already showing the impacts of climate change, with two episodes of mass coral bleaching in the past 10 years, the Marine Park Authority's inaugural reef outlook report said.
"While populations of almost all marine species are intact and there are no records of extinctions, some ecologically important species, such as dugongs, marine turtles, seabirds, black teatfish and some sharks, have declined significantly," the authority wrote.
SAN FRANCISCO – Two American television reporters imprisoned in North Korea for months say communist soldiers "violently dragged" them back when they returned to Chinese soil after briefly crossing into the reclusive country.
In an article posted Tuesday on Current TV's Web site, Laura Ling and Euna Lee said they hesitantly followed their guide when he beckoned them across a frozen river into the North and were "firmly back" on the Chinese side when North Korean border guards grabbed them on March 17.
The 54-year reign of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is expected to come to an end on Sunday in the country's first general election in four years. The main opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), has little experience leading on a national level, but there are strong indications that voters will overwhelmingly support the party and its ambitious platform of reforming Japan's broken system. 
The research team from the three-week Seaplex expedition said more work remains to be done to determine the full extent of the trash vortex, how it affects marine life and how it might safely be removed from the ocean.
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UTRECHT, Netherlands — Dutch judges Friday called a 13-year-old girl's plan to sail solo around the world "undeniably daring and risky," but refused to scupper it completely, in a high profile clash between child care authorities and liberal Dutch parenting.
A panel of three judges at Utrecht District court ordered authorities to take temporary guardianship of Laura Dekker, delaying her plan to set sail next week on her 26-foot (8-meter) yacht Guppy and become the youngest person to sail solo around the world.
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"It's a populated day at sea today, sir......"
LONDON – Freeze-dried food. Autopilot failures. Brutal storms. Accidental dunkings.
A 17-year-old British sailor endured all those trials and more to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world.
Mike Perham grabbed the record Thursday after sailing 28,000 miles (45,000 kilometers) to cross the finish line off the coast of Cornwall, in southern England, after a mere nine months.
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AMSTERDAM – It's not green cheese, but it might as well be.
The Dutch national museum said Thursday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by U.S. astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood.
Rijksmuseum spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation that proved the piece was a fake, said the museum will keep it anyway as a curiosity.
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By GLEN JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer Glen Johnson, Associated Press Writer – Wed Aug 26, 2:40 am ETBOSTON – Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the Senate and haunted bearer of the Camelot torch after two of his brothers fell to assassins' bullets, has died at his home in Hyannis Port after battling a brain tumor. He was 77.
For nearly a half-century in the Senate, Kennedy was a steadfast champion of the working class and the poor, a powerful voice on health care, civil rights, and war and peace. To the American public, though, he was best known as the last surviving son of America's most glamorous political family, the eulogist of a clan shattered again and again by tragedy.
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UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The head of the joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping mission in Sudan's conflict-torn Darfur region, who some diplomats say has been ineffective, is stepping down, the U.N. said on Tuesday.
The world body is working closely with the AU to find a replacement for Rodolphe Adada, a former foreign minister of the Republic of Congo, U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.
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MELBOURNE (AFP) – An Australian town with deep historical ties to Japan has severed its sister city relationship with a Japanese village to protest an annual dolphin slaughter, civic leaders said Monday.
Councillors in the remote West Australian town of Broome voted unanimously to end sister city ties with Taiji at a meeting on Saturday because they felt the dolphin cull was unacceptable, said Broome's mayor, Graeme Campbell.
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Though ocean-borne plastic trash has a reputation as an indestructible, immortal environmental villain, scientists announced yesterday that some plastics actually decompose rapidly in the ocean. And, the researchers say, that's not a good thing.
The team's new study is the first to show that degrading plastics are leaching potentially toxic chemicals such as bisphenol A into the seas, possibly threatening ocean animals, and us.
Your house won’t explode from the difference in air pressure inside and outside if you don’t open your windows—that’s just a myth. Enough air leaks around window edges to stabilize the inside air pressure. All that opening your window will do is let in a hurricane’s ferocious winds, rain and debris to ruin all of your belongings.
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Animated Breakup of Pangea:
Croc Cam
Gaza Aid Work
