AUSTIN, Minnesota: If you have to come down with a strange disease, this town of 23,000 on the wide-open prairie in southeastern Minnesota is a pretty good place to be. The Mayo Clinic, famous for diagnosing exotic ailments, owns the local medical center and shares some staff with it. Mayo itself is just 40 miles east in Rochester. And when it comes to investigating mysterious outbreaks, Minnesota has one of the strongest health departments and best-equipped laboratories in the country. And the...

The St. Clair River is not eroding, a binational panel announced yesterday, dismissing a popular theory the river is sucking extra water from Lake Huron, and is partly responsible for the near-record low water levels in Georgian Bay.

Video images taken of the bottom of the river connecting lakes Huron and Erie show a blanket of boulders and large rocks “which flows would not be able to move,” said Ted Yuzyk, co-chair of the International Joint Commission study group investigating the reasons for the drop in water levels in the upper Great Lakes.

“We feel the (river) bed is fairly stable,” Yuzyk announced at a press conference yesterday. “It doesn’t look like the bed is actively being lowered.”

The new “critical piece of information” negates the theory that the St. Clair River is creating a larger and larger drain on Lake Huron, which has dropped about a metre in water level since 1997.

The theory was presented by the Georgian Bay Association, which, faced with drying wetlands and abandoned docks, commissioned engineering firm W. F. Baird to study the hydrology of the St. Clair River, which has been historically mined for gravel and dredged a number of times to make way for cargo ships.

That dredging has caused Lake Huron to drop by 45 centimetres. But it’s been traditionally believed that since the last dredging in 1962, the river had remained stable.

The Baird report, released in 2005, showed differently – that parts of the river had deepened significantly, allowing as much as 845 million gallons of extra water to flow down it daily. Then, last summer, the Georgian Bay Association declared the erosion was getting worse and that three times that much water was leaking out daily.

But, both reports were based on the assumption that the river bottom was composed of erodible sandy material and not large rocks.

“This does bring some new information to us,” said Bill Bialkowski, vice-president of the Georgian Bay Association, who did the calculations for the group’s latest report.

But he added that the videos confirmed that one stretch of the river has deepened by six metres since 1971.

“The barn door is open and the horse is already gone,” he said yesterday. “All the material that could erode has eroded, but it possibly happened fairly recently.”

Yesterday’s report was the first of many by the International Joint Commission. Its final report is not due until 2009.

This past September, Lake Superior reached its lowest level since the first records were taken in 1860.

LOS ANGELES—Nicole Richie and Christina Aguilera popped out a baby bella and beau (respectively) at Britney Spears ‘ former base Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Saturday. And even though there is no guarantee that the little babes will become buddies, at least they can bond over the fact that they both have yummy mommies who don?t mind the pregnancy pounds. Video: Pop Tarts Talk “At first I guess it was weird for Nicole to be gaining weight so fast after having been so...