In Washington, Missouri’s two Democratic senators, Paul Sarbanes and Barbara Mikulski, enlisted the support of Virginia Sen. John Warner, a Republican, in an appeal to the White House to help rescue the ailing Chesapeake Bay. The letter requests a White House task force in light of a new General Accounting Office report pinpointing how the Chesapeake Bay Program mislead people about progress in Bay restoration

In Glen Burnie, Del. Don Dwyer continues to worry that marriage is under attack. The Anne Arundel County Republican — who spent much of his first year in the House of Delegates promoting his unsuccessful Valid Marriages bill — has prefiled his Maryland’s Marriage Protection Act for the 2006 legislative session. His goal is a constitutional amendment limiting legal marriages to “one man and one woman.”

On the Eastern Shore, you can meet a Bay author as well as do some shopping when Friends of the Blackwater National Wildlife Reserve hold its holiday open house on Dec. 3 from 10 to 4. William Cronin will be on hand to sign copies of his new book, Disappearing Islands, chronicling how the Chesapeake used to look

In Pennsylvania, we got another clue last week about how Wal-Mart keeps its prices down when federal immigration agents hauled away more than 100 undocumented workers from a construction site for a Wal-Mart distribution center near Allentown. The retail giant said that a contractor had hired them.

Our Creature Feature is a twisted tale from India where it’s the vultures, not their prey, that people want to save. In Hindu mythology, vultures are sacred for trying to save the wife of the God-King Ram.

So after reports recently that 95 percent of Indian vultures have disappeared in a decade because of avian flu and mysterious viruses, state officials in the Indian state of Assam appealed last week for donations of dead animals to feed the remaining population.