The highlight of Earth Hour 2011 will see the world’s most iconic landmarks go dark for one designated hour, as hundreds of millions of people transcend race, religion, culture, society, generation and geography, switching off their lights in a global celebration of their commitment to protect the one thing that unites us all – the planet.

Earth Hour 2011 will be held on Saturday March 26 between 8.30PM and 9.30PM in your local time zone.

4616 cities, towns and municipalities took part in Earth Hour 2010 across 128 countries/territories, including 89 national capitals and 9 of the world’s 10 most populated cities.

They included:

New York – Beijing – Los Angeles – Nairobi – Hong Kong – London – Moscow – Sydney – Rio de Janeiro – Toronto – Paris – Rome – Singapore – Mexico City – Dubai

And many many more of the world’s biggest cities in a truly global action that took place in major metropolises on every continent.

1551 landmarks also went dark for Earth Hour 2010, including some of the world’s most iconic:

- Sphinx and Pyramids of Giza – Bird’s Nest (Olympic Stadium) in Beijing – Eiffel Tower in Paris – The Las Vegas Strip – Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro – Buckingham Palace and Big Ben – The Acropolis in Athens – The Coliseum in Rome – Rio de Janeiro – Empire State Building – Table Mountain in Cape Town

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Around noon, Hoboken police were dispatched to the 300 block of Marshall Dr., and a 20-year-old Jersey City woman was crying and told police that her boyfriend punched her a few times and hit her with a “feline cat,” reports said. She said she had pain to her lower back and the back of her head, reports said.

Police then arrested her boyfriend Lasalle Davis with a simple assault charge for domestic violence, reports said.

The woman told police that they had been dating for two years and he became mad when she did not call him the night before, reports said. When she came to Hoboken to visit her sister, he showed up, yelled at her and grabbed her right arm, reports said. She told him she no longer wanted to date him, and that’s when he picked up the cat and hit her, reports said.

She declined to speak to a member of the Domestic Violence Team but did want to file a restraining order against Davis in Hudson County Superior Court, reports said.

Police did not know the whereabouts or the condition of the cat. The victim did not immediately respond to inquiries about the cat.

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Officials at Vassar Brothers Hospital in Poughkeepsie say backup generators kicked on Tuesday afternoon when a common-variety snake got into the switch box and disrupted the hospital’s main power supply. Workers found the dead snake inside the box.

Hospital officials say there were no patient care disruptions caused by the outage, which lasted from 3 p.m. Tuesday to 1 a.m. Wednesday. Some emergency room cases had to be diverted to other hospitals.

While squirrels and other small animals have been known to get into electrical equipment and cause outages, a utility spokesman says it’s the first time he’s heard of a snake doing it.

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The video was recorded in an undercover investigation at one of New York’s largest dairy farms, according to Chicago-based Mercy For Animals, a not-for-profit group that publicizes what it calls cruel practices in the dairy, meat and egg industries and promotes a vegan diet.

The video, posted on YouTube, shows workers punching and kicking cows to get them to move and dragging newborn calves from their mothers by one leg. After seeing it, Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, a Manhattan Democrat, proposed a tail-docking ban similar to one enacted last year in California.

The video also shows cows with various injuries, including swollen and festering sores and a prolapsed uterus, and several animals too sick or injured to stand.

Dairy officials say the practice of cutting off cow tails to prevent them from slinging manure is practiced on a small percentage of dairy farms. It is usually done without numbing, either with sharp shears or with a tight rubber band that stops the blood flow and causes the tail to die and fall off. Dehorning is done to prevent the animals from goring each other or their handlers.

The only person authorized to comment for Willet Dairy was out of the country and unreachable, said Laura Wells, the farm’s accounting manager. Attorney David Cook, who successfully defended the farm against a pollution lawsuit filed by neighbors several years ago, was also out of the country, his assistant said.

Assistant District Attorney Diane Adsit said in an e-mail that many of the actions shown in the videotapes “are commonly accepted practices used to protect both animals and farmers on large dairy farms.”

“While shocking to look at, these practices are not necessarily illegal,” Adsit said. If an investigation by the local SPCA leads the organization to file animal-cruelty charges, “we will prosecute anyone so charged,” she said.

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On the basis that celebrity animals are far more important than civilian ones, this column has been wont to focus on the Hilton menagerie, seeing it as a looming Malthusian catastrophe, whose chihuahua population would eventually increase too quickly for its resources, leaving weaker, less well-represented species – such as Paris’s ferrets, monkeys and goats – at risk of poverty and starvation.

Yet it seems the non-famous canines are really doing the numbers too, with one San Francisco shelter telling the LA Times that, at current growth, its population will be 50% chihuahua within months.

By now, you will be desperate for good news. So take heart, because it turns out that Knocked Up star Katherine Heigl has a foundation that runs a programme called Heigl’s Hounds of Hope – honestly – and that she recently arranged for nearly 70 chihuahuas to be fitted with miniature coats and airlifted to New Hampshire on a pets-only airline – honestly – where they will live free or die. Metaphorically, of course. Thanks to other donors, Colorado and New York will soon take their first shipments of California’s displaced chihuahuas, and animal welfare professionals confirm they are now actively seeking assistance from the entertainment industry that did so much to precipitate the problem.

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