In Calvert County, they’re celebrating the spoils of the General Assembly session. As part of $4.9 million in capital funding for the next fiscal year, Chesapeake Beach will receive $250,000 to reduce discharges of polluted water into the Bay. North Beach gets $100,000 for its waterfront park and other improvements, according to an announcement from Senate President Mike Miller — who lives just down the road from the Beaches …

In Anne Arundel County, the General Assembly’s allocation for parks also sounds encouraging: Bayhead Park $500,000; Davidsonville Park $200,000; and Kinder Farm Park $100,000 …

In Oregon and Washington, last week was a disaster for fishermen. Officials halted sport fishing for salmon and trout after scientists warned of a mysterious decline in fish populations this spring. Just 2,000 chinook salmon — not 200,000 as predicted — returned to Oregon’s Bonneville Dam preparing to spawn …

In the United States, registration of hybrid vehicles, like you’ve been reading about in Bay Weekly, jumped by 81 percent last year. But the 83,153 hybrids still represent less than one percent of the 17 million new vehicles sold in 2004, according to new data from R.L. Polk & Co. Toyota’s Prius dominated the market, followed by the Honda Civic hybrid, then the Ford Escape hybrid SUV, a new entry in the market …

Our Creature Feature is a peculiar tale of mothering from Myanmar (formerly Burma), where a woman is breastfeeding two Bengal tiger cubs along with her seven-month-old baby boy.

Three times a day, Hla Htay goes to the zoo in the city of Yangon and cradles the cubs, which were rejected by their natural mother. “It’s not scary at all. … I felt sorry for them,” she told Fuji TV, which filmed her with one of the cubs. The zookeeper said the breastfeeding would end by the end of this week — or when the cubs began teething.