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LOS ANGELES, Jun 8, 2006 (AP Online delivered by Newstex) -- The fur really could fly on TV's latest reality entry: It stars cats. Ten felines, picked from animal shelters nationwide, will live in a New York house to vie _ a la "Big Brother" or "Survivor" _ for a grand prize, in this instance an executive-level job with Meow Mix cat food. "This thing is very tongue-in-cheek," Ira Cohen, the company's director of advertising and marketing, said Thursday. The project will be shown in three-minute segments in the 9 p.m. EDT hour Friday on the Animal Planet channel for...

Delighted conservationists said on Friday that they had found conclusive proof of the existence of a rare giraffe-like creature in Congo's Virunga National Park that has defied the odds of survival in a region battered by savage conflict. First discovered in what is now Virunga in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in 1901, the shy forest-dwelling okapi had not been found in the park since 1959. It was known to be present elsewhere in the Congo, but there were concerns it had gone extinct in the place of its discovery because of violence and lawlessness. But a recent survey...

Crashes involving vehicles and moose have increased steadily across New Brunswick since 2002 despite a safety campaign launched by the provincial government warning drivers to slow down. Four years ago, the New Brunswick Transportation Department printed posters and brochures urging drivers to avoid hitting moose on the highways. Moose-vehicle accidents are terrifyingly common in New Brunswick, where the huge animals often lumber onto roads that wind through remote wooded areas of the province. Most of the crashes happen between dusk and dawn, with 85 per cent occurring between the months of May and October. Highway 7 between Fredericton and Saint...

Hot clouds again billowed down the slope of Mount Merapi Thursday morning over a distance of five kilometers in the direction of the upper reach of Gendol River, thus burning down northern part of Kaliadem forest area in the district of Sleman, Yogyakarta. The volcano erupted more than 10 times from 06:00 to 09:00 Thursday morning. Eruption of hot air had lasted for 25 minutes since 07:20 (0020 GMT). Such a long distance of hot clouds moving down from the mount's crater burning some forest areas in Kaliadem, but no casualty was reported in the disaster, official news agency Antara...

US scientists claimed today to have bred the world's first hypoallergenic kitten, opening the doors and arms of millions of pet lovers for whom cuddling a cat has, until now, been a curse. At $US4000 ($5400) a head, the allergy-free felines will not be cheap. But the biotechnology firm behind the project believes sensitive owners will happily fork out extra for the chance to have a cat that doesn't leave them wheezing and sneezing. In a statement, the San Diego-based company, Allerca, said it had produced the cats using a technique known as genetic divergence. After identifying the genes of...

Two frog species feared extinct have been rediscovered in Colombia, a boost for scientists battling to save rare amphibians threatened by a deadly disease. "These finds show there is still hope...a lot of these species were pretty much written off," Claude Gascon, a senior vice-president at Conservation International in Washington, told Reuters on Tuesday. Scientists have found the Santa Marta Harlequin frog and the San Lorenzo Harlequin frog, rated critically endangered after no sightings in 14 years, in a reserve in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta massif on Colombia's Caribbean coast. A fungal disease that smothers amphibians' skin is...

Jeremy Maitland took a cookie from the cookie jar. And for it, he was suspended from school for a day and tossed off the baseball team. Today, the Hungary Creek Middle School student and his mother expect to question the disciplinary action in a school system hearing. Jeremy Maitland was in the school kitchen at the end of the day May 17 to fill a water cooler for a baseball game. There, he and other students spotted a container of cookies and decided to eat a sweet, according to his mother, Caryl Maitland. Henrico school officials approached the eight-grader the...

As the fight over immigration reform drags on, an ominous undercurrent to the debate — racism — is becoming more pronounced. From muttered ethnic slurs to violent attacks, activists say an anti-immigrant backlash seems to be growing in America's neighborhoods and workplaces. A few political leaders have called proposed immigration measures before Congress "racist." "The climate has gotten demonstrably worse and it is racially charged," said Devin Burghart of the Center for New Community, which tracks anti-immigrant activity. "It's not simply a debate about immigration policy. ... It's about race and national identity and who and what we are as...

The world's deserts are being threatened "as never before", particularly by climate change, but can still be used as a key resource if action is taken to protect them, according to a report released on Monday. The study by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) highlights the problems facing desert areas but also their potential uses in vital sectors such as energy, food and medicine. Shafqat Kakakhel, from UNEP, said: "Far from being barren wastelands, (deserts) emerge as biologically, economically and culturally dynamic while being increasingly subject to the impacts and pressures of the modern world. "They also emerge as...

Supported by real-life romantic splits and hookups, Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn's "The Break-Up" pulled an upset over the mutant world of the "X-Men." "The Break-Up" debuted more strongly than expected with $38.1 million to take over as the No. 1 weekend movie from "X-Men: The Last Stand," which slipped to second place with $34.35 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. Aniston's split from Brad Pitt last year and her reported romance that began with Vaughn while filming "The Break-Up" helped keep the movie in the public eye. "They're always in the press," said Nikki Rocco, head of distribution for...

Plunging oil prices pushed stocks sharply higher Wednesday as the United States' latest move to settle the dispute over Iran's nuclear arms program eased worries about a supply cutoff from the petroleum-rich nation. The pullback in crude oil helped calm inflation jitters as investors grew hopeful that the minutes from the last Federal Reserve meeting would shed light on the outlook for interest rates. Traders have been on edge after the Fed said in early May that more rates hikes could be needed to battle soaring energy prices. Meanwhile, a recovering bond market was also helping stocks to their gains,...

SHOCKED Paul Neal was chased through a train by a gay ticket inspector who dropped his trousers and begged him for a kiss. Passengers watched stunned as the terrified teacher desperately tried to get away from the randy railman. Paul, 27, leapt off at the next stop only for the pervert to do the same — running after him and pleading for a sordid romp in a platform toilet. Furious Paul said yesterday after the inspector was SACKED: “It was like something from a Carry On film. I only asked for a single to Hastings — and I ended up...

OTTAWA (CP) - The Liberals' $12-billion plan to implement the Kyoto Protocol over seven years would have been largely ineffective, says an as-yet unpublished report by the C.D. Howe Institute. The report, marked "do not cite or circulate," was written before the current government axed Project Green, as the plan was dubbed, and may have been a factor in the Conservatives' decision to scrap it. Project Green largely relied on voluntary measures and incentives which have been shown not to work, says the study, which sarcastically calls the package "Project Dream." "This policy approach will fail dramatically to meet national...

RESOLUTE, Nunavut — Bob Hudson says he has played in the Rose Bowl, jumped out of airplanes, scuba dived off Fiji and stalked bighorn sheep in the Rockies. But for all the excitement of his 67 years, there was one thrill he still craved: hunting polar bear in the high Canadian Arctic. He sold his beloved Jaguar XKE on eBay for $26,000 to do it. After heavy wind and snow ruined his hunt in April, he took another $14,000 out of his retirement account for a return trip. "Life is short," Mr. Hudson joked. "The last check you write should...

UGANDA is set to start spraying homes countrywide with DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) against malaria in July, the Government has announced. In preparation for the DDT anti-malarial strategy, the US has given Uganda US$10m to fight malaria. The US President George Bush anti-malarial initiative has chosen three African countries; uganda, Tanzania and Angola, former health minister Jim Muhwezi said. Uganda loses over US$700m per year to malaria (more money than Uganda gets from donors to balance its budget), while between 100,000 and 120,000 people are killed by malaria annually, the Government says. Muhwezi said the spraying was being coordinated at continental level...

Gun registry successfully kept guns out of the United States The people for and against the long-gun registry have been tossing allegations back and forth about how effective the registry has been in fighting crime. Often this takes the form of statistics. For: An average of 5,000 queries a day are made by law enforcement agencies. Against: Virtually all the queries are automatically generated by local police computers whenever any kind of information is accessed, including outstanding parking fines. The problem is that it is hard to really understand how useful the registry is when you look at broad collections...

Canadian snowbirds aren't the only northern tourists you might meet at the beach this summer. An increasing number of young harp seals are straying from their northern breeding grounds and showing up on U.S. beaches, biologists say. Federal researchers say 297 harp seals were reported on beaches from Virginia to Maine last year, almost double the 152 reported in 1995. The booming arctic harp seal population in Canada, spurred by a hunting ban, and dwindling food sources such as cod are among the reasons being cited. "This is interesting and weird," said John Hocevar, a marine biologist with Greenpeace. "There...

Polar bears are cute. Just ask the marketing executives at Coca-Cola which used animated polar bears to hawk their wares in recent years. Bears, pandas, lions and elephants are "charismatic megafauna" -- meaning basically cute animals that people care about. If you want to sell a product, or a cause, just tie it to one of these animals and you've got the attention of millions of people; kids and adults alike. Thus, environmental alarmists have made much of research claiming the Arctic's great white bear faces extinction from human-caused global warming. Snails, snakes and spiders withering in the sun just...

So far, it's been a heartwarming story about binational cooperation, cuddly kittens and the rebirth of a species extinct in the southwestern United States. About 200 lynx from B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec and Yukon -- trapped and transported to Colorado since 1999 in one of the most successful wildlife reintroduction programs in U.S. history -- have thrived so well that U.S. biologists, environmentalists and politicians have seized upon the project as a symbolic triumph for nature. But the Canadian cats are proving to have poor knowledge of U.S. geography. And their wanderings into Utah, Wyoming, Kansas and, most unfortunately, New...

The matter of Rumsfeld v. the Generals bears close scrutiny. The controversy represents the worst breach in civil-military relations since Harry Truman dismissed Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 for his conduct and his criticism of the president during the Korean War. It has proven an unwelcome distraction for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs, and has added to the already considerable woes of President Bush in his role as a wartime commander-in-chief. Notably, the calls from a group of recently retired generals that Rumsfeld should resign has also thrust senior military leaders and, by proxy, the uniformed services...