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Lawyers for the Drakes Bay Oyster Co. and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will square off Friday before a federal judge in Oakland in the first round of a legal battle to continue the commercial oyster operation in the Point Reyes National Seashore. At stake is Salazar's decision in November not to renew a 40-year lease that gave oyster farm operator Kevin Lunny the right to commercial operations in 2,500-acre Drakes Estero, a five-fingered estuary that features extensive eelgrass beds and a harbor seal colony. The decision, hailed by wilderness advocates, gave Lunny's company 90 days to shut down a business...

The Sierra Club has announced its approval for a "one-time" use of civil disobedience. The civil disobedience is intended to step up their efforts to oppose the Keystone pipeline. Many of the other groups opposing Keystone have been engaging in civil disobedience as a tactic, including arson-based ecoterrorism. This will be the first time in the Sierra Club's history that they have approved violating the law.

With the imminent return of Ken Salazar to Colorado, and talk of his future political aspirations bubbling up in the papers, we thought it a good time to recount a brief history of Secretary Salazar’s failures at the Interior Department. ... First and foremost amongst Salazar’s fiascos is the BP oil spill. The Deepwater Horizons disaster is firmly etched in the American conscience as an example of bumbling incompetence and haphazard, if not non-existent, leadership. Salazar mucked up his role so badly that unnamed White House sources spanked him publicly in The Washington Post as an “erratic spokesman” who was...

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ... has proposed designating 1.7 million acres in southwest Colorado and southeast Utah as critical habitat for the bird ... The designation sometimes, but not always, means restrictions on human activities on that land. The public and the scientific community have until March 12 to comment before the agency makes a final decision on whether to list the Gunnison sage grouse as endangered.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The Interior Department's plan for managing a vast petroleum reserve on Alaska's North Slope calls for a roughly 50-50 split between conservation and oil development plus accommodation for a pipeline that could carry offshore Arctic Ocean oil to the trans-Alaska pipeline. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday announced that the plan will allow for development of nearly 12 million acres within the 23 million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an area roughly the size of Indiana. Salazar said in his announcement that the plan will guide the transition from leasing and exploration to responsible production and transport of the...

Shame on the Interior Department for trying to drum a family-owned enterprise out of business. After a seaside area has been designated as wilderness, when is it considered pristine enough by Washington's standards? Is it after airplanes have been banned from flying over it? After electricity pylons and telephone cables have been removed, cars and bikers prohibited, the roads torn up? When hikers are forbidden access to trails, and kayakers, sailors and snorkelers banished from the water? When eucalyptus trees and other foreign species are eradicated? Or only after Miwok Indians' arrowheads have been excavated and placed in a museum?...

New legislation that jumps the death tax to 55 percent of estates exceeding $1 million threatens 526,421 family farms, of about 25 percent of all farms in America. ... Farm values are largely tied up in non-liquid assets like land, buildings, and livestock. Many farm and ranch families would be forced to sell their assets to satisfy Washington Democrats' insatiable appetite for tax money. Up to 24 percent of America's farm and ranch families could be forced to hand over a large chunk of their heritage to the Internal Revenue Service when a family member dies. This would economically devastate...

Grand County companies whose owners signed a letter to President Obama supporting federal protection for 1.4 million acres surrounding Canyonlands National Park are facing an economic boycott that some say has been spurred by the locally-based Sagebrush Coalition. The coalition’s Facebook page includes a list of local and national companies that signed the Nov. 13 letter from the Outdoor Industry Association urging Obama to create the Greater Canyonlands National Monument. ... Sagebrush Coalition president James Tibbetts ... opposes monument status for land around Canyonlands National Park because it isn’t necessary. “We’ve used it all these years and we haven’t ruined...

A California family that has operated an oyster farm on the bucolic Northern California coast is fighting back after the federal government moved to kick it off of the National Park Service property where the shellfish have been legally harvested for nearly 80 years. The Drakes Bay Oyster Company faces closure and its 30 employees will be out of work if the National Park Service reclaims some 1,100 acres of an estuary as part of a plan to create a larger marine wilderness preserve at Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County. Owner Kevin Lunny said federal officials told him...

Today’s attack was a chilling reminder of the day earlier in November when the seven-year-old girl was snatched by a saltwater crocodile 210 miles east of Darwin. ... Saltwater crocodiles, which can grow up to 25ft and weigh more than a ton, are plentiful in the Northern Territory... Crocodiles are protected in the Northern Territory and their numbers have increased steadily, resulting in a number of attacks on people, One man writing to the Northern Territory News today said: ‘This has got to stop – there are too many crocs. ‘Of course we need to use common sense when in...

Because of the importance of the US market, chocolate manufacturers in Switzerland are submitting to Uncle Sam’s intrusion in their factories but they are not happy about it. “The fact that a foreign authority is involved in our Swiss businesses is unseemly,” Daniel Bloch, of Chocolats Camille Bloch, told Handelszeitung, the German-language business journal. The newspaper has discovered that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to inspect 21 chocolate factories and 18 dairies in Switzerland. The move is part of the implementation of America’s Food Safety Modernization Act, new legislation signed into law by President Barack Obama last...

Republican Heather Wilson, a candidate for U.S. Senate in New Mexico, has a new ad criticizing her opponent, Democratic congressman Martin Heinrich, for voting twice for a medical device tax that Heinrich had noted himself would be bad for job creation. ... Wilson, a former member of the House, is running to replace retiring Democrat Jeff Bingaman in the Senate.

A national group representing off-highway recreationists is suing the U.S. Forest Service to try to overturn a new travel management plan on national forest lands in the Sierra west of Reno they say is overly restrictive. The Pacific Legal Foundation said in a lawsuit filed recently the agency plan adopted in 2010 illegally closed more than 800 miles of roads and trails the public has used for years in the Tahoe National Forest. ... Similar disputes are under way in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, primarily in northeast Nevada's Elko County, and in the Eldorado National Forest in California mostly west...

Welcome to the Wild West, 2012 style. The Feds to Tombstone: “If you want to fix your water line, better lawyer up and talk to President Obama.”... Obama, is truly the out of touch candidate. The U.S. Forest Service — of which the president is ultimate boss — is preventing, on the flimsiest of excuses, Tombstone Arizona from rebuilding its water pipeline. Obama, conniving, is putting Tombstone, a fixture of American history, in mortal danger. ... A massive forest fire in 2011 wiped out the vegetation in Coronado National Park, wherein lies Tombstone’s waterworks — which were destroyed by the...

The U.S. Forest Service has re-examined the effects of a logging project on lynx habitat in an attempt to lift a judge's block of the Lolo National Forest project. U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy ruled in June that the Forest Service did not properly analyze the cumulative effects of the 2,038-acre Colt-Summit project on lynx habitat.

August 12, 2012SCRUBBED : PHOTO OF PRESIDENT OBAMA REMOVED JUST DAYS AFTER BOOK EXPOSES AGENDA TO ELIMINATE SUBURBS by Lee Stranahan A photo of President Obama was suddenly pulled from the website of the group Building One America, whose goals were documented extensively in Stanley Kurtz’s book Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. The book, which was released ten days ago, reveals what Kurtz refers to as Obama’s plan to undercut the political and economic independence of America's suburbs. Kurtz connects current Obama administration policy with his personal history, and with groups...

Fauquier County is only about an hour from the nation’s capital but it feels like a different world— rolling hills dotted with vineyards, idyllic horse farms, and stifling regulations and ridiculous penalties meted out by capricious bureaucrats. Wait, what? Well, I guess it’s not that easy to get away from it all. Martha Boneta, who owns a small local farm, found that out the hard way when she was threatened with $5,000 in fines for not getting the proper permit to sell produce and host 10-year-old’s birthday party on her property. "Boneta already had a business license the county issued...

There is a "growing radicalized environmentalist faction" in Canada that is opposed to the country's energy sector policies, warns a newly declassified intelligence report. The RCMP criminal intelligence assessment, focusing on Canadian waters, cites potential dangers from environmental activists to offshore oil platforms and hazardous marine shipments, representing perhaps the starkest assessment of such threats by the Canadian security community to date. The report drew a sharp dismissal from Greenpeace — a prominent environmental group singled out in the document

A spunky 17-year-old who had his right arm partially torn from his body during a vicious alligator attack, told FoxNews.com that he wants the alligator’s head. "I'm going to use it for a prosthetic armrest," Kaleb Langdale said in an exclusive interview. “I want his head." The Florida teen lost his right arm below the elbow Monday night during an alligator attack. He said he survived by offering the 11-foot alligator his arm, and used the skills he learned by watching TV shows like "Swamp People" to survive the brutal attack. "I'm glad the alligator attacked me, because if it...

Second Amendment: The United Nations is putting the finishing touches on an Arms Trade Treaty that transcends borders and may even trample our Constitutional right to bear arms. Every indication is that the president will sign it. Like the New Start and Law of the Sea treaties before it, as well as the Kyoto Protocol and Agenda 21, the Arms Trade Treaty being finalized at the U.N. this month is one of those feel-good, can't-we-all-get-along pieces of parchment whose net effect is to accomplish little except to eat away at American sovereignty and freedom. Just as the world's worst human...