By Erik De Castro, with additional reporting by Rosemarie Francisco and Manny Mogato in MANILA; Editing by Robert Birsel18 December 2011 CAGAYAN DE ORO, Philippines (Reuters) – Rescuers searched for more than 800 people missing in the southern Philippines on Sunday after flash floods and landslides swept houses into rivers and out to sea, killing […]
By Rachel Cernansky16 December 2011 Over the last decade, more than 200 million hectares of land in developing countries have been sold off in large-scale land transactions that tend to benefit “national elites” while harming the world’s poor and rural populations, according to a new report from the International Land Coalition (ILC). The group calls […]
Contact: Sofia Holmgren, Department of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences, Lund UniversityTel. +46 709 289778, Sofia.Holmgren@geol.lu.se 16 December 2011 Nitrogen from human activity has been polluting lakes in the northern hemisphere since the late 19th century. The clear signs of industrialisation can be found even in very remote lakes, thousands of kilometres from the nearest city. […]
By Rhett A. Butler, www.mongabay.com 16 December 2011 Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) continues to mislead the public about its role in destroying rainforests and critical tiger habitat across the Indonesian island of Sumatra, alleges a new report from Eyes on the Forest, a coalition of Indonesian environmental groups including WWF-Indonesia. But APP is sharply […]
By Erik De Castro and by Manny Mogato17 December 2011 CAGAYAN DE ORO, Philippines (Reuters) – More than 400 people were killed and an unknown number were missing after a typhoon struck the southern Philippines, causing flash floods and landslides and driving tens of thousands from their homes. In a text message to Reuters, Gwendolyn […]
(The Economist) – The clock is ticking. Every second, it seems, someone in the world takes on more debt. The idea of a debt clock for an individual nation is familiar to anyone who has been to Times Square in New York, where the American public shortfall is revealed. Our clock shows the global figure […]
[Longtime readers will recognize this as another artifact of China’s development bubble, which has produced ghost cities and dead malls.] By David Gray, Reuters 14 December 2011 Along the road to one of China’s most famous tourist landmarks – the Great Wall of China – sits what could potentially have been another such tourist destination, […]
By arevamirpal::laprimavera16 December 2011 Declaring a cold shutdown, even with “state”, is a joke, but Noda went further and declared the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident to be over. Why did he do that? Asahi Shinbun (12/16/2011) reports that: 「事故の収束」という、より強い表現に置き換えることで、風評被害など国内外に根強い原発事故への不安を払拭（ふっしょく）したいという狙いがある。政権は今後、放射性物質の除染を進めていく方針。避難区域の縮小も行い、住民の帰還へとつなげたい考えだ。 By using the word “the accident is over”, the government wants to dispel […]
By JUSTIN GILLIS12 December 2011 Scientists trying to understand the future of forests on a warming planet have a strange problem: They do not know how to kill trees. I don’t mean the trees in their backyards. I would bet that the average climate scientist, especially one who studies forests, is better with a chain […]
WASHINGTON, December 15 (Reuters) – A growing number of families in the United States are struggling to put food on the table as poverty rises in major cities, a new survey showed on Thursday. The U.S. Conference of Mayors’ 2011 hunger and homelessness survey [pdf] found all but four of the 29 cities surveyed reported […]
