China faces worst drought in 50 years – ‘All the rice fields have dried up’

By Leslie Hook in Beijing, with additional reporting by Gwen Chen in Beijing 24 May 2011 Chinese authorities will step up the release of water from the Three Gorges Dam in a bid to tackle a drought in southern China which has put pressure on drinking water, crops, shipping lanes and electricity production in what […]

Surviving alone: Colombia relief efforts failing after a year of unprecedented rain

Over the past year, persistent and unprecedented rains have resulted in massive flooding in Colombia that has affected close to 3 million people. In March 2011, Refugees International sent a team to assess the situation. This report describes significant shortcomings in the Colombian government’s and international agencies’ response to the disaster. While Colombia has spent […]

Fukushima radioactive water discharges to ocean may resume in three days

May 25 (Asahi Shimbun) – Tokyo Electric Power Co. is fast running out of places to stash highly radioactive water from the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant and may soon be unable to prevent leaks into the ocean. About 744 tons of water a day was being pumped into the No. 1, No. […]

Multiple 10-centimeter holes in Reactor 2 pressure vessel at Fukushima nuclear plant

By arevamirpal::laprimavera24 May 2011 So says the Mainichi Shinbun reporters who must be reading the report submitted by TEPCO on May 23 and released on May 24. Multiple 10-centimeter holes in the Reactor 2 Containment Vessel, and one 7-centimeter hole in the Reactor 1 Containment Vessel. Hiroaki Koide of Kyoto University was so right. The […]

Amazon activist and wife murdered as Brazil debates land bill

By Raymond Colitt; Editing by Stuart Grudgings24 May 2011 BRASILIA (Reuters) – An Amazon rainforest activist and his wife were shot dead in northern Brazil on Tuesday as the country’s Congress debated a divisive land bill that threatens to fuel deforestation. Joao Claudio Ribeiro da Silva, a rubber tapper and leading forest conservationist, and his […]

Video: Eyewitness account of historic Colombia floods in Manatí

[En Español. RI says that if you enable captions in the player, you’ll see subtitles, but this hasn’t worked for Desdemona.] By Alice Thomas19 May 2011 Unprecedented rain that has hammered Colombia over the past year has affected three million people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. In March, I spent three weeks traveling across […]

Indonesia deforestation moratorium gutted by plantation industry

Writing by Neil Chatterjee; Editing by Ramthan Hussain; Additional reporting by Niluksi Koswanage in KUALA LUMPUR, David Fogarty in SINGAPORE and Alister Doyle in OSLO20 May 2011 JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesia revealed a long list of exemptions on Friday to a two-year moratorium on new permits to clear forest, a concession to the hard-lobbying plantation […]

Graph of the Day: Simulated Distribution of Iodine-131 Fallout from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, 24 March 2011

By arevamirpal::laprimavera 22 May 2011 I mentioned the system called the WSPEEDI simulation system in passing when I wrote about SPEEDI data for the early period of the Fukushima I Nuke Plant accident (March 11 onward). The Ministry of Education very quietly put the WSPEEDI simulation data on their webpage for SPEEDI data list on […]

The oceans are emptying fast

By Geoffrey Lean 20 May 2011 It was a shameful par for a very long course when European, Middle Eastern and North African governments met in Rome this month to decide how to save the fast-vanishing fisheries in their common sea. You’d think there would have been a sense of the need for urgent action […]

Radioactive sewage sludge and slag in Tokyo

By arevamirpal::laprimavera 22 May 2011 It was big news when the radioactive sewage sludge and slag were found in Fukushima Prefecture earlier this month (see my posts here, here and here). And it is almost no news when the highly radioactive (170,000 becquerels per kilogram) sewage slag was found in TOKYO, and the slag’s been […]

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