Talk to someone who has recently moved to Milwaukee from a larger place like New York, Boston or San Francisco, and ask what they think of our town. Invariably you'll hear, "I didn't expect to be saying this.." or "I was totally surprised..." followed by, "This is a great city!" The Shepherd Express City Guide is an annual celebration of some of the factors that make Milwaukee special. With descriptions of hundreds of restaurants and festivals, the City Guide is a close look at the places that add flavor and color to Milwaukee.

“The DOT’s whole approach to how we move people and goods around for the next 30 to 50 years just reflects a total disconnect with everything that’s happening around us,” Grzezinski said.

Shepherd readers are well acquainted with the Bonobo and Congo Biodiversity Initiative, launched 10 years ago by the Milwaukee Zoological Society to study and help protect the elusive, endangered bonobo (human DNA is 98.4% identical to that of bonobos). The project’s leader, Dr. Gay Reinartz, is currently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to deliver supplies and collect more data on the great ape. Reinartz reports that they are seeing many bonobos at Etate, the project’s research park. But, as this dispatch shows, she and her crew are also finding disturbing evidence of elephant poaching.

On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush staged a photo-op on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to declare “the end of major combat operations in Iraq” while a giant banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” waved behind him. When Bush declared “mission accomplished,”...

Dear EarthTalk: How is wind power currently faring in the United States? Is more of it coming on-line and becoming a larger percentage of the grid? —Paul

Nobody with a functioning memory should be too quick to condemn Jimmy Carter for daring to speak with the leadership of Hamas, as nearly everyone along the American political spectrum suddenly has felt obliged to do.

Today we walk in the footsteps of elephants, their tracks deep, flat depressions in the leaf litter of the forest floor. With room to spare, I can place both my feet in their circular form. Bunda tells us that elephants passed here yesterday after the rain. The elephants are headed toward the Yenge River...

Even if you don’t have an alt-fuel car, you can try “EcoDriving,” a term coined by gasstrapped Europeans that means “to drive a vehicle in the most fuel-efficient manner possible, to save fuel and to lower emissions.” In some EU countries, EcoDriving proficiency...

It sounds like something that happens in Baghdad or 1980s El Salvador— individuals being taken from their homes, never to return again. But it isn’t happening a world away in a war zone or under a brutal regime.

The maverick who claims to cross party lines is anything but moderate on the subject of reproductive rights. Sen. John McCain, the likely Republican nominee for president, wants to overturn Roe v. Wade and add a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion, doesn’t want to require insurance companies...