Lake Michigan

More than 20 years after the manufacture of PCBs was banned, the cancer-causing toxins are still entering Lake Michigan from sources on land, according to a federal study that challenges long-held beliefs about the chemical. Air tests indicate that the Chicago and Gary, Ind., areas are major sources of PCBs entering the lake, said Glenn Warren of the Environmental Protection Agency's Great Lakes National Program Office in Chicago.

A small but devoted group of cruise aficionados wouldn't book a trip on a big ship -- even if you offered them free shore excursions or an upgrade to a stateroom on the top deck. Not for them the swimming pools, floor shows and shopping arcades of glitzy mega-ships.

BATTLE CREEK, Mich. — A company operating a pipeline that dumped more than 800,000 gallons of oil into a southern Michigan river said Wednesday it is doubling its workforce on the containment and cleanup effort. Officials with Calgary, Alberta-based Enbridge Inc. made the announcement during an update on the spill, which coated birds and fish as it poured into a creek and flowed into the Kalamazoo River, one of the state's major waterways. "We've made significant progress," company Chief Executive Patrick D. Daniel said.

California's 4-year-old drought will not ease until a volcano erupts at latitudes near the Equator, according to University of Illinois physicist Paul Handler. Volcanic eruptions in that region produce stratospheric dust and sulfur dioxide gas that prevent a small portion of sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface, thereby altering climate in what Handler believes to be highly predictable ways.

In retrospect, I should have chosen the 5 p.m. seating. But the 6:30 seating offered the opportunity to catch both of Door County's premier light shows: the sun setting over Green Bay and the pyrotechnic climax of the region's celebrated fish boil.

It's mid-April, and the gray-haired fisherman and his gray-haired son are not headed out for just another day of hoisting nets from the depths of Lake Michigan. For decades their workday has always started before dawn. But today the men don't climb aboard their battered commercial fishing boat until noon, because they aren't hustling to get to their normal fishing grounds three hours out in the middle of the lake — a place that, from the view out the little round windows of the wheel house, is still as wild and lonely as any on the globe.

The "2002 Lake Michigan Circle Tour & Lighthouse Guide," published by the West Michigan Tourist Assn., maps out a 1,100-mile route around Lake Michigan. It lists about 100 lighthouses, current and historic, along the way. Much of the 45-page booklet is devoted to advertising and promotional essays about areas near the lake. More detailed descriptions of lighthouses can be found at www.wmta.org. (Click on "Light up your life!" at the bottom of the home page.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers today rejected proposals to divert more water from Lake Michigan into the drought-reduced Mississippi River. Robert Page, assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, said evaluations done by the corps did not support increasing the diversion because the additional water would do little to improve river conditions. Mississippi River levels today at St. Louis and Memphis were 13 feet and 20 feet below normal respectively, river officials said.