Their intervention is timely. Powerful commercial interests, including developers and big farming groups, have been pressuring Congress to keep things the way they are.

Water of the Buriganga and Shitalakhya rivers has become difficult to treat due to high level of pollution, said Dr MA Taher Khandker, director general of Bangladesh Haor and Wetland Development Board at a seminar yesterday.

Many people scour the Maine woods for lakes with big trout, but just a few seek places like this unnamed four-acre lake near the Machias River. Like thousands of other Maine lakes, it is scenic and remote, but it claims a rare distinction: it has no fish.

The Obama administration stepped up efforts to reverse a rule adopted late in the Bush administration that makes it easier for companies to deposit debris from mountaintop coal mining near streams. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, left, said that the rule was legally flawed and that he had asked government lawyers to press a federal court to vacate it and send it back for reworking.

It is important to preserve our freshwater ecosystems from over-fishing, from the dumping of hazardous waste upstream, and from the damming of rivers upstream, as a national priority that will ultimately protect the livelihoods of millions of fishing families and continue to provide an abundance of fish for consumption on the other, consequently also sustaining the diversity of fauna, including do

Rahul Mangaonkar | TNN