Planet in Crisis The Washington Post reports that walrus calves are suddenly showing up alone in Arctic waters, separated from their mothers because warming waters are fracturing the ice floes on which they live. Without their mothers, on whose milk they depend, the calves invariably die.

"We were on a station for 24 hours, and the calves would be swimming around us crying," said Carin Ashjian, a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and a member of the research team. "We couldn't rescue them."



Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that recently retired ExxonMobile chairman Lee R. Raymond was paid an average of $144, 573 a day in his 13-year tenure, for a total of $686 million. Under Mr. Raymond, ExxonMobile was an outspoken critic of the idea that global warming exists, and the company refused to take any proactive measures against it.

Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. But how do you sleep knowing that your massive fortune has come at the expense of the entire planet? And why do the rest of us tolerate one man's self-aggrandizement at the expense of future generations of children—whether human or animal?  ¶ 8:30 AM