SAN FRANCISCO-Lawyers for gay couples, California Gov. Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown filed legal motions Friday telling a federal judge that allowing same-sex marriages to resume immediately in the state was the right thing to do.

The motions came two days after U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker struck down California’s voter-approved gay marriage ban as unconstitutional.

In his 136-page decision, Walker said gay marriages should begin immediately. But later Wednesday, he agreed to suspend weddings until he could consider the legal arguments he ordered to be filed by Friday.

Opponents of same-sex marriage said they want Proposition 8 to stay in effect until their appeal of Walker’s ruling is decided by higher courts.

They argued in court papers filed earlier this week that resuming gay marriage now would cause legal chaos if the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals or U.S. Supreme Court eventually reverse Walker’s ruling.

The 9th Circuit received their appeal of Walker’s decision on Wednesday, hours after the judge ruled that Proposition 8 violates the civil rights of gay Californians.

On Friday, Schwarzenegger and Brown were the first to urge an immediate resumption of gay marriage, which was legal in the state for more than four months before voters amended the […]

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Researchers in the US have found new evidence that genetically modified crop plants can survive and thrive in the wild, possibly for decades.

A University of Arkansas team surveyed countryside in North Dakota for canola. Transgenes were present in 80% of the wild canola plants they found.

They suggest GM traits may help the plants survive weedkillers in the wild.

The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Pittsburgh.

‘We just drew 11 lines that crossed the state [of North Dakota] – highways and other roads,’ related research team leader Cindy Sagers.

‘We drove along them, we made 604 stops in a total distance of over 3,000 miles (5,000km). We found canola in 46% of the locations; and 80% of them contained at least one transgene.’

In some places, the plants were packed as closely together as they are in farmers’ fields.

‘We found herbicide resistant canola in roadsides, waste places, ball parks, grocery stores, gas stations and cemeteries,’ they related in their Ecological Society presentation.

The majority of canola grown in North Dakota has been genetically modified to make it resistant to proprietary herbicides, with Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready and Bayer’s LibertyLink the favoured varieties. These accounted for most of the […]

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It cannot be proved that the wildfires now devastating western Russia are evidence of global warming. Once-in-a-century extreme weather events happen, on average, once a century. But the Russian response is precisely what you would expect when global warming really starts to bite: Moscow has just banned all grain exports for the rest of this year.

At least 20 percent of Russia’s wheat crop has already been destroyed by the drought, the extreme heat-circa 40 º C for several weeks now-and the wildfires. The export ban is needed, explained Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, because ‘we shouldn’t allow domestic prices in Russia to rise, we need to preserve our cattle and build up supplies for next year

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THE Earth is a recycling scheme that has been running for a third of the age of the universe. Microbes and plants endlessly pull carbon, nitrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere and pump them back out in different forms. Water evaporates from the oceans, rains down on the land, pours back to the seas. As it does so it washes away whole mountain ranges-which then rise again from sea-floor sediments when oceans squeeze themselves shut. As oceans reopen new crust is pulled forth from volcanoes; old crust is destroyed as tectonic plates return to the depths from which those volcanoes ultimately draw their fire.

The Earth has finite resources of matter. But thanks to its own internal heat and the light of the sun it has almost unlimited supplies of energy with which to remake itself over a vast range of timescales. Water lasts in the atmosphere for a fortnight or so; carbon dioxide stays in the oceans for thousands of years. Mountains rise and fall over tens of millions of years; oceans open and close at rates even slower than that.

And for some things, in some places, there is a sort of stillness. The argon in the atmosphere just sits […]

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While Pakistan has been hit by catastrophic flooding, Russia has endured a lethal heatwave.

Some 1,200 people have been killed in the deluges sweeping Pakistan, but in Moscow more than 30 are reported to have died in wildfires as temperatures have soared to a new record for the region of 38C (100F).

It marks out 2010 as the year of extreme weather – and experts predict the pronounced conditions will continue across the globe.

Last month alone the UK was hit by a hosepipe ban, saw tarmac melting on roads and the population was issued health warnings about the dangers of too much sun.

Yet despite the heatwave, it was also the wettest July ever recorded.

According to provisional statistics from the Met Office, the country was 46 per cent wetter than average and some areas faced devastating floods.
An Envisat satellite image gives an aerial view of the wildfires raging east of Moscow

Britain was not alone. The mercury climbed to its highest point in decades in other parts of Europe, the U.S. and Japan as record temperatures were recorded.

In Russia the army was drafted in to battle the wildfires which threatening dozens of towns and villages.

Thick smoke and ash slowed firefighting efforts and […]

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