In Taiji's so-called drive fishery, fishermen in a menacing flotilla of boats herd wild dolphins, who are sensitive to noise, by banging pipes underwater. Fleeing this cacophonous wall of sound, the dolphins are corralled into a hidden cove and speared, clubbed and stabbed to death. By morning the entire cove is red with blood.

Salon film critic Andrew O'Hehir says the beautifully filmed and highly entertaining "The Cove" is "one of the most wrenching movies you'll ever see. It raises troubling questions about how badly we have befouled the 70 percent of our planet that's covered with water, and about why we have treated the species closest to us in intelligence with such cruelty and contempt."

While the mass slaughter is horrific enough, "The Cove" raises another troubling question that hits closer to home. The documentary stresses that "dolphinariums" -- performing dolphin shows, aquariums and swim-with-the-dolphin programs -- have bought live dolphins from the Japanese fishermen, making them complicit in the marine mammal carnage.

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Since April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believe that the virus formerly known as swine flu, now called influenza A H1N1, has infected one million Americans. Of 302 deaths in the United States to date that have been attributed to this flu, the CDC has detailed information on 266 of them, according to the Associated Press. The CDC has found that 15 of the 266 were pregnant women -- or about 6 percent. That doesn't sound like that many, but pregnant women only make up about one percent of the United States population.

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Pound-for-pound, bluefin is the most valuable fish in the world, prized as a delicacy at the finest sushi bars. But after decades of overfishing, this magnificent fish, which can grow to weigh three-quarters of a ton, has been so severely depleted that it swims on the brink of oblivion. Yet its prized buttery flesh is still on the menu at Nobu, the celebrated high-end sushi chain, which is co-owned by Robert De Niro, and has 24 restaurants in 13 countries.

With demand for the rare tuna showing no signs of abating, the market for it has grown more feverish. At the highest level of bluefin mania, a single fish that weighed 444 pounds was sold at auction for $174,000 in 2001. Since the tuna jackpot can be so huge, it's no surprise that the weak regulations that exist to curb overfishing have been flouted by greedy constituents of the fishing industry, which put short-term profits over long-term sustainability.

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Evan and Ellie were only 23 weeks gestation when Forman went into labor. They were so premature Forman thought she was having a miscarriage. At birth, each baby weighed only about a pound.

"One of life's great illusions is the notion that we can want -- and get -- things on our own terms, no matter what. It's human nature to seek pleasure and avoid suffering, but what happens when suffering finds you?" Forman writes in her harrowing new book "This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood." "My husband and I had tried for two long years to conceive these twins, had lived through miscarriages and fertility treatments to bear them. When I learned they were coming so early and so fragile, I had only one wish: to let them go."

While Forman thought the twins should be allowed to die, their doctors struggled to save them. While Ellie lived for only four days, Evan, who endured severe disabilities including the inability to speak or see, died just shy of his eighth birthday.

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Let's just say the Puppy Diaries is a departure for Abramson. "She arrived almost housebroken, a wonderful surprise," the Times editor writes. "Somehow I had forgotten how much having a new puppy is like having a new baby. It's not only the made-up games, the hide-and-seek and stuffed animals. There is the special puppy smell, much like the distinctive scent, better than perfume, of a new baby's head." Yes, there is a super cute Flickr photostream of the pooch and Abramson, too.

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In the '20s, a parenting guide cautioned Mom that a sitter might trundle her tender charge out on the town, so she could flirt on street corners. In the '40s, Newsweek reported that one veteran and his wife had hired a girl who turned out to be a dance-crazed "bobby-soxer" inviting friends over to party, while the toddler in her care teethed on marbles.

Since then, the bad baby sitter's renown has only grown, as she's come to play a prominent role in urban legends, horror movies, pornography and even pop music, according to Miriam Forman-Brunell's new book "Babysitter: An American History."

The bad baby sitter's a teenage girl, often dressed inappropriately, who is an unreliable scatterbrain, more interested in doing her nails or texting than the kids. When she's not glued to the TV, she's gabbing on the phone all night while eating Mom and Dad out of house and home. Or maybe she's sneaking her boyfriend in after the kids are asleep, or batting her eyelashes suggestively at Dad on the drive home. The bad baby sitter can be a threat not only to the children left in her care, but also to the very marriage of the parents she's working for.

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While the legislation has yet to be passed by the Senate, much less signed into law by President Obama, it represents the first significant climate bill to advance politically in the United States, which has been a notorious laggard on the international stage when it comes to climate change. Even so, environmentalists and political analysts of all stripes have taken issue with the bill, often for diametrically opposed reasons.

Some charge it doesn't go far enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough. Others contend it amounts to a vast giveaway to corporate polluters. Others claim it will unduly pinch consumers in the pocketbook, or curb American competitiveness. We turned to economist Robert Stavins, who is a professor of business and government at Harvard's Kennedy School, for his perspective.

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The police came to Anvarinia's home on April 13 responding to a domestic dispute. She told officers that her boyfriend had assaulted her, according to the Associated Press. The cops reported that she had swelling on her nose and a scratch on her left cheek.

The boyfriend wasn't there, and has not been charged, but Anvarinia was brought up on felony child-neglect charges, after she breast-fed her 6-week-old in front of the officers. While the cops insist that she was intoxicated, they did not do a blood alcohol test on her, much less the baby. But child neglect in North Dakota charges do not require such a test.

The cops say that they know three sheets to the wind when they see it. "The majority of our problems are caused by alcohol," Grand Forks Police Capt. Kerwin Kjelstrom told the AP. "Our officers handle it so much that it is pretty much a general knowledge thing to know when someone is intoxicated. It's pretty obvious."

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It's well documented that many of the world's major fisheries are in shocking decline. Some 90 percent of the world's big fish, such as bluefin tuna, blue marlin and Antarctic cod, have almost disappeared from the oceans since the advent of industrial fishing in the 1950s, according to a groundbreaking paper published in Nature in 2003 by Myers and Worm. And by 2048 the world's supply of seafood will likely simply run out, Worm and other marine biologists warned in the pages of Science in 2006. As of 2008, 80 percent of the world's fish stocks were considered either vulnerable to collapse or already collapsed.

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Only those who have changed the toddler's diapers know if "Pop," which is not the child's real name, is male or female. "We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mold from the outset," the tot's 24-year-old mother told the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. "It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead."

Pop's wardrobe includes both pants and dresses, and the child usually gets to decide what to wear. "Although Pop knows that there are physical differences between a boy and a girl, Pop's parents never use personal pronouns when referring to the child -- they just say Pop," according to the English-language Swedish site the Local.

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The strip-search occurred when Savana Redding, who is now a college student, was an 8th grader at Safford Middle School in the rural Arizona town of Safford. After a search of her backpack produced no banned substances, she was ordered to strip to her underwear.

Acting on a tip from another student, two women searched her for prescription-strength ibuprofen, one pill of which is about the equivalent of two Advil, according to the Associated Press.

Redding was ordered to move her bra to the side, and stretch out her underwear waistband, exposing her breasts and pelvis. The search revealed no pills.

Writing in the majority opinion, Justice David Souter observed that the search did not take into account the relatively mild nature of the contraband at stake: "In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear," he wrote. "We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable."

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In his new book, "The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family," Smith argues that fatherhood in America is changing as it comes to encompass taking care of kids, as well as providing for them. And as the recession throws so many men out of work, he contends that fluid family arrangements like his own are becoming more common.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are just 159,000 stay-at-home dads in the country, but Smith suggests that those numbers undercount many fathers, including him, who have served as their children's primary caregivers by day and continued working part-time at night or in the early morning.

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In his new best-selling book, "The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite," Kessler, a San Francisco Bay Area pediatrician, explains why certain foods loaded with fat, sugar and salt exert such a pull, despite our best intentions to avoid them. As he discusses the biology that leads to scarfing down a plate of fries, he delves into such puzzles as why the French fry binger is more likely to remember the pleasant stimulation of the fries' salt, fat, texture and flavor than the stomachache and self-recrimination that follow it.

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Twenty-nine-year-old Haley Wesley's 10-month-old daughter Maddison died in her car seat in May 2007 in Napa County after her mother forgot to drop her off at daycare. Wesley pleaded guilty to child endangerment charges. As part of her three years of probation and 120 hours of community service, she's given cautionary talks about the tragedy.

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"Proposed mileage standards would kill more Americans than the Iraq War," thundered libertarian Steve Milloy. Michelle Malkin lamented the laws' "potentially lethal impact." At National Review, Iain Murray argued the new policy amounts to "blood for less oil." At the core of conservatives' objection is the assumption that the automakers will attempt to meet the new regulation by selling smaller cars -- and smaller cars kill.

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The outlines of this particular tragedy will be familiar to Broadsheet readers, who read Kate Harding's post this March titled "You are potentially capable of forgetting your child." Although this case has not yet been fully investigated by the local police, what apparently happened is a parent's worst nightmare.

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"Today we show that this Congress doesn't just talk about family values -- it values families," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the bill's lead sponsor, according to the Washington Post. "As more families are relying on just one paycheck in these times, we can't afford not to help them in this way."

Some Republicans didn't see it that way. "Maybe we just ought to let federal employees take 16 years off," said Republican Pete Sessions of Texas, according to National Public Radio. "Hello! Hello! Wake up, Washington! We're in a recession, and somebody is going to have to pay for this," citing the bill's cost of about $100 million over five years. Critics further charged that the bill sends a bad message since it increases federal employees' benefits at a time when many American employees are having their benefits cut.

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Over the last five years, Massachusetts has gained $111 million in spending from gay and lesbian weddings, according to a new study published by the UCLA Law School's Williams Institute. Bring on the marriage industrial complex: All those bouquets, wedding singers and towering cakes add up. The researchers found that the average same-sex couple studied spent $7,000 on their wedding, with one in 10 spending over $20,000.

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"Climate change is a silent human crisis. Yet it is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time," said Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations, who is now the president of the Global Humanitarian Forum, in a statement. "Already today it causes suffering to hundreds of millions of people, most of whom are not even aware that they are victims of climate change. We need an international agreement to contain climate change and reduce its widespread suffering."

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