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The latest on the Key Bridge collapse, New York puts forth legislation to get clean energy projects on the grid and Wisconsin and other states join a federal summer food program to help feed kids across the country.

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Republicans float conspiracy theories on the collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge, South Carolina's congressional elections will use a map ruled unconstitutional, and the Senate schedules an impeachment trial for Homeland Secretary Mayorkas.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

New BiOp: Same Song, Next Verse, Fewer Salmon?

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Thursday, November 1, 2007   

Seattle, WA – A "platinum-plated roadmap to extinction." That's what one sport-fishing spokesperson calls the new ten-year federal plan for saving wild salmon in the Columbia and Snake Rivers. The document, known as a "Biological Opinion" (BiOp), was released yesterday, and critics say it suggests all the same approaches the government has used for years -- that haven't worked. Dan Ritzman, Northwest regional director of the Sierra Club, says time is running out for dwindling native salmon populations.

"While they've been tinkering with this plan for the last two years, these fish continue to disappear from the rivers. Fishermen have lost their jobs, communities are suffering, and billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted."

Ritzman explains one of the most persistent issues is whether to remove four dams along the Lower Snake River to make fish migration easier, a point on which the Bush Administration apparently won't budge.

"The operation of these dams works for certain key constituents of the Administration, but they don't work for the broad spectrum of people in the Pacific Northwest, and they don't work for the fish."

The federal government calls the new BiOp draft "aggressive and comprehensive," and says it contains more than 70 recommendations to save salmon. Conservation groups say the fine print reveals nothing new, and that an independent study is needed.

The public comment period for the plan begins today. The federal NOAA Fisheries Service releases Biological Opinions; access the new draft online, at www.nwr/noaa.gov




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