(IN) The Indianapolis Star – Indiana’s cattle producers — their billion-dollar-a-year industry threatened by an obscure bacterium — turn their eyes anxiously to Franklin County.

(MN) Minneapolis Star Tribune – Carver County is skirting the same issue — a lack of adequate separation between drain field and groundwater — at a $2.5 million ballroom it bought at a park near Lake Waconia.

(OH) Cleveland Plain Dealer – Since 2006, state wildlife officers have been shooting thousands of double-crested cormorants to prevent them from inundating several of the Lake Erie islands and denuding the landscape, threatening nesting egrets and herons and killing endangered plants.

(IL) Chicago Tribune – Jim Camasto, a Naperville homeowner who installed two kinds of solar energy systems in his home over the last few years, is generating so much power from those sources on some days that he sells the excess back to the city and gets credit toward his electric bill.

(MI) Detroit Free Press – Macomb County commissioners last week took the lead on transit — and regional cooperation — by approving a road map for a Regional Transit Authority. Unfortunately, Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson and Detroit Mayor Dave Bing are still largely MIA.

(MI) The Detroit News – A global team of researchers has mapped the genetic code of the world’s most popular vegetable – the potato.

(NY) The New York Times – Call it eco-angst, the moment a new bit of unpleasant ecological information about some product or other plunges us into a moment (or more) of despair at the planet’s condition and the fragility of our place on it.

(WI) Duluth News Tribune – An eight-island archipelago on Lake Superior will be protected from development and mining and preserved for wildlife and rare plants under a $7 million international conservation deal to be unveiled today.

(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – The final stretch of Greenfield Ave., east of S. Barclay St., hosts UWM’s Great Lakes WATER Institute, where the university might build its School of Freshwater Sciences now that the former Pieces of Eight site on the lakefront downtown is no longer an option. But the street includes huge, unsightly coal piles, a railroad crossing so rough it rattles teeth, and a crumbling former factory that’s nearly 100 years old.

(NY) The New York Times – Over the last decade, the drinking water at thousands of schools across the country has been found to contain unsafe levels of lead, pesticides and dozens of other toxins.