By Christopher Ingraham 19 June 2018 (The Washington Post) – The Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies are predicated, in part, upon the notion that immigrants who are in the country illegally represent a threat to public safety.The White House, for instance, has sent out regular email blasts to reporters with alarmist accounts of crime committed […]
By Vaishnavi Vaidyanathan 23 June 2018 (IBT) – Officials at the Center for Biological Diversity said one of the last two jaguars known to be living in the United States was shown dead in a photo released Thursday.The photo provided to the Arizona Daily Star showed a jaguar pelt looked like that of the the […]
By Sarah Wu 22 June 2018 (The Seattle Times) – With his paws perched against towering stacks of furniture, Benny forced his snout between two Saudi Arabian sofas and found a piece of elephant ivory that his handler had hidden as part of a drill. Smugglers trafficking in elephant ivory — one of the most […]
By Tamino 21 June 2018 (Open Mind) – Thirty years ago James Hansen testified in congress that man-made climate change (a.k.a. global warming) was underway. He forecast that the world would get hotter.What happened since? The world got hotter. He also forecast that the Arctic would warm even faster. What happened since? The Arctic warmed […]
By Hans Nicholas Jong 21 June 2018 JAKARTA (Mongabay) – Indonesia’s national commission on human rights has vowed to investigate the death of a journalist who was being held on charges of defaming a palm oil company owned by a powerful tycoon.From November 2017 to March of this year, Muhammad Yusuf wrote at least 23 […]
By Taran Volckhausen 21 June 2018 (Mongabay) – The large-scale expansion of oil palm has been a major driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss in many areas of the tropics. In Malaysia and Indonesia, where 85 percent of the world’s oil palm is cultivated, rampant industry growth over the past several decades has replaced rainforest […]
8 June 2018 (UN News) – After four consecutive poor rainy seasons that brought Somalia to the brink of famine, the country is now seeing near-record rainfall, and with it, flooding that has already displaced hundreds of thousands of people, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday.According to the agency, about 230,000 people, over […]
By Shannon Van Sant 21 June 2018 (NPR) – A Canadian mining firm says it will move forward with plans to mine minerals from land that was previously part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.Last December, President Trump removed nearly half of the Grand Staircase-Escalante from protection, as well as part of the […]
By Kasha Patel 19 June 2018 (NASA) – In a matter of hours on 17 June 2018, torrential rains transformed parts of Michigan into a “state of disaster.” Early morning storms swept through the Upper Midwest, creating flash floods, a few fatalities, and historic property damage.The potent storms developed when moisture in the mid and […]
21 June 2018 (Mongabay) – In July last year, Abdon Nababan, one of Indonesia’s most prominent activists, announced his intention to run for governor in his home province of North Sumatra. During his decade-long tenure as head of AMAN, the country’s main advocacy group for indigenous rights, Abdon led the organization to a series of […]
