20 January 2018 (BBC News) – Thai police have arrested a man alleged to be the head of Asia’s biggest illegal wildlife trading networks. Boonchai Bach, a 40-year-old Thai of Vietnamese origin, was detained in a town on the border with Laos. He faces up to four years in jail for smuggling protected animal parts […]
By Michael J. Abramowitz 18 January 2018 (Freedom House) – Political rights and civil liberties around the world deteriorated to their lowest point in more than a decade in 2017, extending a period characterized by emboldened autocrats, beleaguered democracies, and the United States’ withdrawal from its leadership role in the global struggle for human freedom. […]
By Brietta Hague 8 January 2018 Lahou-Kpanda, Ivory Coast (Al Jazeera) – Diplo Anacle stands in the doorway of an old prison, once one of dozens of stately seafront buildings erected by French colonialists on this sliver of sand between the Atlantic ocean and a giant lagoon. Today, the structure in the centuries-old village of […]
The Eagle Creek wildfire burns as golfers play at the Beacon Rock Golf Course in North Bonneville, Washington, 4 September 2017. [more] Pictures of the year: Natural disasters Extreme heat in Indonesia: A freshly-scorched landscape in Pekanbaru, Indonesia in August 2017, after a fire caused by hot temperatures and lack of rain. [more] The impact […]
By George Dvorsky 22 November 2017 (Gizmodo) – To reduce energy consumption, many jurisdictions around the world are transitioning to outdoor LED lighting. But as new research shows, this solid-state solution hasn’t yielded the expected energy savings, and potentially worse, it’s resulted in more light pollution than ever before.Using satellite-based sensors, an international team of […]
By Christopher Ingraham 17 November 2017 (The Washington Post) – Supporters of trophy hunting say that permit fees from the practice, which can run into the tens of thousands of dollars in the case of large game like elephants, can be put toward conservation efforts that help bolster the populations of endangered animals.In part, that’s […]
17 October 2017 (UFZ) – Every year, millions of tonnes of plastic debris ends up in the sea – a global environmental problem with unforeseeable ecological consequences. The path taken by plastic to reach the sea must be elucidated before it will be possible to reduce the volume of plastic input. To date, there was […]
By Tim Wallace 12 October 2017 (Cosmos) – Just 10 rivers – eight of them in Asia – may be responsible for dumping almost four million tonnes of plastic into the seas every year.Calculating with precision the source and amount of plastic trash in the oceans is difficult; estimates tend to cover wide ranges. Previous […]
By Mark Buchanan 7 November 2017 (Bloomberg) – The latest U.S. government report on climate change illustrates how expensive the phenomenon can be: It estimates that more frequent flooding, more violent hurricanes and more intense wildfires, among other things, have cost the country $1.1 trillion since 1980.What’s particularly striking, though, is how much the report […]
By Kara Fox and Livia Borghese 7 November 2017 (CNN) – Italian authorities have launched an investigation into the cause of death of 26 teenage girls whose bodies were recovered in the Mediterranean Sea on Sunday. The girls, aged 14-18, are believed to have been migrants from Niger and Nigeria who had embarked on the […]