The evils of e-ivory: Next time you find yourself cruising for bargains on eBay, keep an eye out for "white gold" and "ox-bone" -- euphemisms for illegal elephant ivory. More than 32,000 elephants were killed last year to support a booming black market, much of which is conducted online. According to the Environmental Investigation Agency, Google’s Japanese site alone hosts more than 10,000 ads for ivory. The black-market trade is leading to the slaughter of elephants in what's described as "crisis proportions unheard of in two decades." Associated Press

Spare the bear: As if the country's quest to build polluting tar sands pipelines wasn't enough, Canada is fighting hard this week to preserve its trade in polar bear skins, rugs, and claws. Canadian hunters, unmoved by scientists who predict long-term doom for the species, kill 600 bears every year, and Stephen Harper’s minions aren’t about to surrender the lucrative industry anytime soon. On the bright side, the United States and Russia have put aside their ideological differences, at least on this issue, to censure our not-so-friendly neighbors to the north. Guardian

Nightmare bacteria: That's what the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called deadly bacterial infections that resist even the strongest antibiotics, and which are on the rise in U.S. hospitals. The bacteria, which are normally found in the gut, can't be killed by even our drugs of last resort, meaning that when they get into parts of the body like the bloodstream, lungs, or urinary tract, the illness may be untreatable and deadly. Right now the infections are largely confined to patients with other serious illnesses who have spent a long time in the hospital, and they haven't made it into the wider population, but that could change, the CDC warns. New York Times

Volcanoes vs. global warming: The next time you find yourself trapped in an airport while a volcanic eruption shuts down air travel (Ed. note: been there, done that), take comfort in this: the sulfur particles spewed into the atmosphere by that eruption are helping to shield the earth from solar radiation, partly (though not fully, of course) mitigating the heat-trapping effects of global warming pollution. So ... yay, volcanoes? Grist

Cat trap fever: Last year in California, hunters and trappers killed nearly 2,000 bobcats for their skins, which fetch up to $700 on foreign markets. Now a state legislator has introduced a law that would ban all commercial bobcat trapping in California. The trappers, unsurprisingly, hate the bill, and claim that their conservation efforts are responsible for bobcats’ abundance in the first place. Somehow we doubt the skinless bobcats are grateful. Los Angeles Times

Aussie agony: As if it weren't self-evident, the Australian government is blaming its summer from hell -- four months of brutal heat and fires followed by biblical downpours and flooding -- on climate change. Hmm ... heat waves, fires, floods ... sounds familiar to us here in the Northern Hemisphere, too. New York Times

Camel colossus: Scientists have found fossil evidence of a giant prehistoric camel that roamed the Canadian Arctic more than three million years ago, back when the Arctic was 70 degrees warmer than it is today. You know, if we could get a guarantee that global warming would somehow lead to the Arctic being repopulated by awesome enormous camelids, well ... we still wouldn’t sign up, but at least we could look forward to one pleasant side effect. National Geographic

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Image: Lenny Montana