"Seattle is the home of the U.S. Coast Guard's entire fleet of polar-class icebreakers.

Both of them.

Capt. George Pellissier commands both the Polar Sea and the Polar Star. He has spent much of his career on these ships, which were built in Seattle in the 1970s.

"A human fecal bacterium kills coral, new research shows, and U.S. scientists say this is a warning to Florida and the Caribbean to protect prized reefs from sewage or face a threat to a key pillar of their tourism."

"A third or more of all the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been smuggled in from China and may be tainted with illegal antibiotics and heavy metals.  A Food Safety News investigation has documented that millions of pounds of honey banned as unsafe in dozens of countries are being imported and sold here in record quantities."

"Plants and animals are responding up to three times faster to climate change than previously estimated, as wildlife shifts to cooler altitudes and latitudes, researchers said on Thursday."

"U.S. solar company Evergreen Solar Inc filed for bankruptcy on Monday, its once cutting-edge technology falling victim to competition from cheaper Chinese rivals and solar subsidy cuts in Europe."

"The famine in the Horn of Africa is manmade - the result of artificially high prices for food and civil conflict, the World Bank's lead economist for Kenya Wolfgang Fengler told Reuters Tuesday."

"Japan insists its nuclear crisis was caused by an unforeseeable combination of tsunami and earthquake. But new evidence suggests its reactors were doomed to fail."

David McNeill and Jake Adelstein report for the Independent August 17, 2011. [30]

SEE ALSO:

[31]

The planned oil-drilling in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's coast could bring spills harder to control than the Deepwater Horizon blowout. For centuries, native Inupiat have huted bowhead whales, bearded seals, walruses, and Caribou here. The Interior Department has approved exploration here by Shell, the company recently cited by the United Nations for decades of oil pollution in the Niger Delta.

[34]

"Royal Dutch Shell said an oil leak from a ruptured pipeline into the North Sea was slowing but refused to say how much oil has already leaked into the sea."

"China will double its solar capacity to around 2 gigawatts (GW) by the end of the year as the world's largest solar-panel maker ramps up domestic installation, a local paper said on Saturday citing a government-linked think tank."