(IL) Chicago Tribune – North Shore and northwest suburban residents can resume giving some old pharmaceuticals to the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County as long as those medications do not include controlled substances.

(ON) The Toronto Star- One arm of the Leslie Street Spit, home to Tommy Thompson Park and the Great Lakes’ largest colony of cormorants, looks like a wintry apocalypse. There are no trees now, just a few guano-spattered snags. This is where cormorants first settled in the park in 1990. They now number about 30,000.

(MI) The Detroit News – On the same day President Barack Obama marched the Big Three auto executives smiling to the guillotine, China announced it will not set mandatory emissions standards and instead will attack greenhouse gases with a strategy that doesn’t threaten its ferocious economic growth.

(MI) Detroit Free Press – The Detroit-based Self-Help Addiction Rehabilitation Inc. (SHAR), a nonprofit drug rehab center funded by the state and others, is proposing that it be given up to 2,000 acres of vacant city-owned land to farm.

(IL) Chicago Tribune – Crouched in fields of prairie grass under moonlit skies, Matt Hokanson leads workshops three times in the spring to teach new monitors how to count the population of frogs by the number of calls they hear.

(NY) The New York Times – In seven years of overseeing every root and blade of grass on the grounds at the Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, Pa., Matt Shaffer has built a reputation on innovation and conservation. An early advocate of course playability over aesthetics, he long lived by the maxim “the drier, the better.”

By Thomas J. Morissey
Capital News Service
LANSING – Although hybrids may be the most talked-about vehicle technology, good old-fashioned diesel is quietly making its own resurgence, according to a new study by a multinational marketing research firm based in Michigan.
“The hybrid electric vehicles continue to get the most attention. They’re the ones consumers are most familiar with, and they’re already on the road,” said Bryan Krulikowski, vice president of Farmington Hills-based Morpace Inc.

(NY) The New York Times – A coalition of bottled water companies filed suit on Tuesday to block an expanded bottle deposit law scheduled to take effect next month, arguing that the law, which imposes a deposit fee on bottled water sold in New York State, is unconstitutional.

(MI) Kalamazoo Gazette – Georgia-Pacific Corp. has agreed to a new $13 million cleanup for the Kalamazoo River Superfund site in Allegan and Kalamazoo counties.

(NY) The New York Times – The nationwide automobile mileage and emissions standards announced by President Obama on Tuesday represent a huge step forward in the effort to limit greenhouse gases and reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. They also represent a departure from the Bush administration’s indifference on these issues and an important down payment on Mr. Obama’s pledge to fashion an aggressive and imaginative energy policy.