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A Sumatran tiger is seen here at the National Zoo in Washington, DC.

JAKARTA (AFP) – Indonesian villagers have trapped and killed a fourth endangered Sumatran tiger amid a spate of tiger attacks blamed on illegal logging, according to environmental group WWF.

Four tigers and six people have been killed on Sumatra island this month, it said.

“We learnt on February 24 that another Sumatran tiger had been trapped and killed by villagers after it attacked two farmers on Sunday,” WWF spokeswoman Syamsidar told AFP.  “This is the fourth tiger killed this month and we are concerned because it is a protected animal and an endangered species.”

The farmers from Simpang Gaung village in Riau province were seriously injured in the attack, Syamsidar said.

“The tiger in the latest killing had wandered into the village as its habitat had been destroyed by people,” she added.

Indonesian Forestry Minister Malam Sambat Kaban urged the provincial police to arrest the tiger killers, Detikcom news website reported.

“I urge the police to carry out a complete investigation… the killers must be arrested quickly,” he was quoted as saying.

“They can’t kill these tigers as they please. Whatever their excuse, the tigers must be protected.”

There are fewer than 400 Sumatran tigers left in the wild and their increasing contact with people is a result of habitat loss due to deforestation, according to the wildlife group.

It said about 12 million hectares (30 million acres) of forest on Sumatra had been cleared in the past 22 years, a loss of nearly 50 percent islandwide.

The incidents in Riau occurred in an area dotted with pulp and oil palm plantations and recently subjected to burning to clear forests.

Harpooned Fin Whale being butchered in the port of Hvalfj?rour, Iceland.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The United States on Friday denounced Iceland’s decision to go ahead with a sharply higher whaling quota, voicing concern there were not whales to sustain the hunt.

Iceland’s new left-wing government said last week it will maintain an earlier decision for a quota of 150 fin and 150 minke whales this year — a sixfold increase — despite international calls for it to reconsider.

The US State Department said it “strongly opposes” the decision.

“We are deeply concerned that stocks of fin and minke whales are not adequate to support this harvest,” it said in a statement.

“We call upon the government of Iceland to rescind this decision and to focus on the long-term conservation of whale stocks, rather than on the short-term interests of its whaling industry,” it said.

The United States also said the decision would undermine ongoing talks on the future of the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

The IWC reform talks are part of a US-led drive to reduce tensions around close ally Japan, which infuriates Australia and New Zealand by killing hundreds of whales each year in the Antarctic Ocean.

Japan says it abides by a 1986 IWC moratorium on commercial whaling as it uses a loophole that allows “lethal research” on the ocean giants, with the meat then heading to restaurants and supermarkets.

Norway and Iceland defy the moratorium altogether.

Iceland’s new government came to office after the global financial crisis ravaged the economy of the island, which became the first Western European nation in three decades to need a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

The new government includes parties opposed to whaling, but it said it was maintaining the new whaling quota because it concluded it was legally bound to it.

Green jobs include installing solar panels on homes like this one in Newburgh, N.Y. Solar power is still more expensive than fossil fuel, especially now that oil prices have crashed, but President Barack Obama wants to promote renewables as a way to provide domestic jobs, cleaner air and less reliance on imports.

WASHINGTON – Green jobs, where are they and how to get them, will be the focus when President Barack Obama’s task force on middle-class working families formally begins its work on Friday in Philadelphia.

The panel, chaired by Vice President Joe Biden, will hear from experts on the potential to create and fill these jobs.

The $787 billion economic stimulus bill Obama signed last week includes billions to help create such jobs as installing solar panels and building wind turbines, which also is part of his goal to nudge the country away from dependence on foreign oil and toward reliance on renewable forms of energy.  It is Obama’s belief that such jobs will help raise living standards for middle-class families, who didn’t fare well before the current economic downturn set in and are now feeling pinched along with millions of other people who have lost their jobs and homes, and watched retirement and college savings disappear.

Obama announced the panel last month at the White House. Its purpose is to recommend ways to boost the nation’s middle class. It also will evaluate new and existing policies to determine whether they are helping or hurting the middle class.

“Quite simply, a strong middle class equals a strong America. We can’t have one without the other,” Biden said at the time. “It is our charge to get the middle class, the backbone of this country, up and running again.”

$2,000 drop in middle-class incomes estimated
Jared Bernstein, the task force’s executive director, said middle-class incomes have fallen by about $2,000 in real terms since the start of the decade and that violates a basic American tenet: that you’ll get ahead if you work hard and your children will fare even better.

“Part of this election was about recognizing that a key part of any effective government’s economic agenda had to be reconnecting the living standards of the middle class to that of the expanding economy once it starts expanding again,” said Bernstein — Biden’s chief economist and economic policy adviser.

“We are fortunate enough to be here now and we have a responsibility to carry through on that,” he said in an interview Wednesday.

Green jobs, broadly defined as related to improving the environment, pay up to 20 percent more than other jobs, are more likely to be union jobs and likelier held by men, less so by minorities and city dwellers, according to a draft copy of a staff report to be released at Friday’s meeting at the University of Pennsylvania. Green jobs also are largely domestic jobs that cannot be shipped overseas.

Breaking down the billions
The stimulus bill provides $11 billion for investments in a new smart grid to create more than 3,000 miles of new or modernized high-tech transmission lines; $6 billion for a loan guarantee program to encourage banks to finance green investments; $5 billion to help people weatherize their homes, potentially saving them money on their utility bills; and $500 million for a “green job” training program to be run by the Department of Labor.

Labor unions welcomed the administration’s focus on the middle class.

Anna Burger, who leads the Change to Win group of seven unions, said the task force shows government understands that rebuilding the American Dream and fixing the economy means “creating good jobs with a wage that can support a family, benefits that can keep them healthy and a secure and dignified retirement.”

Bill Samuel, the AFL-CIO’s director of governmental affairs, said the makeup of the task force increases its visibility, even though the panel is only advisory.

“This is a high-profile task force with someone in charge who is really committed to this and has been throughout his entire career,” Samuel said. “So we don’t see this as a flash in the pan.”

Biden will be joined at the meeting by several Cabinet members and others on the task force, including the secretaries of energy, transportation, education, agriculture, and housing and urban development, labor secretary-designate Hilda Solis and Melody Barnes, Obama’s domestic policy chief.

The barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) has extremely light-sensitive eyes that can rotate within a transparent, fluid-filled shield on its head. The fish's tubular eyes are capped by bright green lenses. The eyes point upward (as shown here) when the fish is looking for food overhead.

A bizarre deep-water fish called the barreleye has a transparent head and tubular eyes. Since the fish’s discovery in 1939, biologists have known the eyes were very good at collecting light. But their shape seemed to leave the fish with tunnel vision.

Now scientists say the eyes rotate, allowing the barreleye to see directly forward or look upward through its transparent head .

The barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) is adapted for life in a pitch-black environment of the deep sea , where sunlight does not reach. They use their ultra-sensitive tubular eyes to search for the faint silhouettes of prey overhead.  Scientists had thought the eyes were fixed in an upward gaze, however. This would make it impossible for the fish to see what was directly in front of them, and very difficult for them to capture prey with their small, pointed mouths.

Bruce Robison and Kim Reisenbichler of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute use videos from the institute’s remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to study barreleyes off Central California. At depths of 2,000 to 2,600 feet (600 to 800 meters), the ROV cameras typically showed these fish hanging motionless in the water, their eyes glowing a vivid green in the ROV’s bright lights. The video also revealed a previously undescribed feature of these fish — its eyes are surrounded by a transparent, fluid-filled shield that covers the top of the fish’s head.

In this image, although the barreleye is facing downward, its eyes are still looking straight up. This barreleye is about 6 inches

Most existing descriptions and illustrations of this fish do not show its fluid-filled shield, probably because this fragile structure was destroyed when the fish were brought up from the deep in nets.

Robison and Reisenbichler were fortunate to bring a net-caught barreleye to the surface alive. Over several hours in an aquarium on the ship, they were able to confirm that the fish rotated its tubular eyes as it turned its body from a horizontal to a vertical position.

Barreleyes are thought to eat small fishes and jellyfish. The green pigments in their eyes may filter out sunlight coming directly from the sea surface, helping the barreleye spot the bioluminescent glow of jellies or other animals directly overhead. When it spots prey (such as a drifting jelly), a barreleye rotates its eyes forward and swims upward, in feeding mode.

The findings were detailed recently in the journal Copeia.