Polar bears' threatened status upheld in court

 A U.S. federal judge upheld the status of polar bears as a species threatened by climate change, denying challenges by a safari club, two cattlemen's organizations and the state of Alaska.

The ruling on Thursday by District Judge Emmet Sullivan confirmed a 2008 decision that polar bears need protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act because their icy habitat is melting away.

The legal challenges -- some contending polar bears don't need this protection, others maintaining the big white bears need more -- were launched after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service included this Arctic mammal on its list of threatened species.

The state of Alaska, Safari Club International and two cattlemen's groups claimed the federal government's decision to list the polar bear was "arbitrary and capricious and an abuse of agency discretion," according to a memorandum opinion released with the ruling.

On the other side, environmental groups including the Center for Biological Diversity, urged that polar bears be listed as endangered, which offers greater protection than that provided for wildlife classified as threatened.

RATIONAL DECISION

The heart of the judge's decision was whether the Fish and Wildlife Service had made a rational decision in its 2008 listing.

The judge noted that the wildlife agency took three years to "evaluate a body of science that is both exceedingly complex and rapidly developing," considering 160,000 pages of documents and some 670,000 comments from a wide range of interested parties."

"The court finds that plaintiffs (who challenged the listing) have failed to demonstrate that the agency's listing determination rises to the level of irrationality," Sullivan wrote.

"... the Court finds the (wildlife) service's decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species ... represents a reasoned exercise of the agency's discretion based upon the facts and the best available science as of 2008 when the agency made its listing determination," the judge wrote.

Environmental activists gave the decision measured praise.

Greenpeace called it "bittersweet," the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity said stronger protections were warranted.

However, Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute said in a statement: "This decision is an important affirmation that the science demonstrating that global warming is pushing the polar bear toward extinction simply cannot be denied."

Evidence "increasingly against" phone cancer risk

Despite a recent move to classify mobile phones as possibly carcinogenic, the scientific evidence increasingly points away from a link between their use and brain tumors, according to a new study on Saturday.

A major review of previously published research by a committee of experts from Britain, the United States and Sweden concluded there was no convincing evidence of any cancer connection.

It also found a lack of established biological mechanisms by which radio signals from mobile phones might trigger tumors.

"Although there remains some uncertainty, the trend in the accumulating evidence is increasingly against the hypothesis that mobile phone use can cause brain tumors in adults," the experts wrote in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

The latest paper comes just two months after the World Health Organisation's (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) decided cellphone use should be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans."

Anthony Swerdlow of Britain's Institute of Cancer Research, who led the new review, told Reuters the two positions were not necessarily contradictory, since the IARC needed to put mobile phones into a pre-defined risk category.

"We are trying to say in plain English what we believe the relationship is. They (IARC) were trying to classify the risk according to a pre-set classification system," Swerdlow said.

Other things deemed by the IARC to be possibly carcinogenic include items as diverse as lead, pickled vegetables and coffee.

Mobile phone use has risen hugely since the early 1980s, with nearly 5 billion handsets in use today, and controversy about their potential link to the main types of brain tumor, glioma and meningioma, has never been far away.

The largest study to date, published last year, looked at almost 13,000 mobile phone users over 10 years.

Swerdlow and colleagues analyzed its results in detail but concluded it gave no clear answer and had several methodological problems, since it was based on interviews and asked subjects to recall phone use going back several years.

Significantly, other studies from several countries have shown no indication of increases in brain tumors up to 20 years after the introduction of mobile phones and 10 years after their use became widespread, they added.

Proving an absence of association is always far harder in science than finding one, and Swerdlow said it should become much clearer over the next few years whether or not there was any plausible link.

"This is a really difficult issue to research," said David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the study.

"But even given the limitations of the evidence, this report is clear that any risk appears to be so small that it is very hard to detect -- even in the masses of people now using mobile phones."

Swerdlow is chairman of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection's Standing Committee on Epidemiology. The commission is the international body, recognized by the WHO, that constructs guidelines for exposure limits for non-ionizing radiation.

Since mobile phones have become such a key part of daily life -- used by many for websurfing as well as talking -- industry experts say a health threat is unlikely to stop people using them.

Facebook set for $1 bln in social-gaming revenue

Facebook Inc is on course to generate $1 billion in revenue this year from social gaming, according to Kevin Ryan, a leading Internet entrepreneur and former chief executive of online advertising giant DoubleClick.

Most of that revenue will come from advertising, Ryan estimated in an interview with Reuters this week.

The $1 billion forecast also includes revenue from Facebook Credits, which allow users to buy items for games and other activities on the social network, he added.

Ryan is now chief executive of luxury flash-sales company Gilt Groupe, but he invests in other Internet businesses including news website The Business Insider and 10gen, which runs MongoDB, a database that's popular with start-ups.

Ryan's brother, Sean Ryan, became director of gaming partnerships at Facebook in early 2011.

Facebook's more than 500 million active users are attracting a lot more ad dollars as companies step up online marketing. Research firm eMarketer estimated in January that ad spending on Facebook would exceed $4 billion this year. That's more than double levels of 2010.

A big chunk of that ad revenue comes from social games that are played on Facebook's platform.

"Assuming Facebook is on track to produce $4 billion in ad revenue this year, $1 billion of that coming from social gaming is not outlandish," said Paul Verna, a senior analyst at eMarketer.

Facebook is a private company and doesn't disclose financial information. A Facebook spokesman declined to comment on Friday.

Zynga Inc, the dominant developer of social games played on Facebook, filed for a $1 billion initial public offering on Friday.

Zynga disclosed that it generated $235 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2011, more than double the same period a year earlier. That level of sales and the growth rate suggest Zynga is on course to generate more than $1 billion in revenue this year.

"We generate substantially all of our revenue and players through the Facebook platform and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future," Zynga said in its IPO filing on Friday.