Court rejects Sequoia logging

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that a Bush administration plan to allow commercial logging inside the Giant Sequoia National Monument violates environmental laws.

U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer sided with the state attorney general and environmental groups that sued the U.S. Forest Service over its plans for managing the 328,000-acre preserve, home to two-thirds of the world’s largest trees.

In the lawsuit filed last year, the Sierra Club and other conservation groups said the management plan for the reserve in the southern Sierra Nevada range was a scientifically suspect strategy that was intended to satisfy timber interests under the guise of wildfire prevention. The plan would have allowed up to 7.5 million board feet of timber – enough to fill 1,500 logging trucks – to be removed each year from the preserve, the plaintiffs said.

The Forest Service was disappointed with Breyer’s ruling and may appeal, said spokesman Matt Mathes.

Chicago

Study finds drop in genital herpes

Nearly 25 years after a news magazine declared that an epidemic of genital herpes threatened to undo the sexual revolution, a new study finds an encouraging decline in the percentage of people infected with the herpes virus.

The new study shows a 19 percent drop since 1994 in the percentage of Americans ages 14 to 49 testing positive for herpes type 2, the most common cause of the recurring painful sores of genital herpes. The declines were especially pronounced among young people.

The findings, appearing in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association, represent biological evidence of a decrease in risky sexual behavior among adolescents, said lead author Dr. Fujie Xu of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But herpes is still uncomfortably common. Despite the decline, blood tests of more than 11,000 people found 11 percent of men and 23 percent of women carry the genital herpes, or type 2, virus.