By Scott Moore 4 February 2018 (The National Interest) – When it comes to Pakistan, President Trump’s Twitter feud with one of America’s most important partners in the fight against terrorism has dominated the news. But beneath the headlines, a massive water crisis is unfolding that has profound implications for the country’s stability and security. […]
By Lindsay Murdoch 13 February 2018 (The Sydney Morning Herald) – Women’s groups and human rights advocates have condemned Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte for encouraging soldiers to shoot female rebels in their genitals, the latest in a series of violent, misogynist remarks. Duterte, a former provincial mayor, told a group of former communist rebels to […]
By Jonathan Watts 2 February 2018 (The Guardian) – The slaughter of people defending their land or environment continued unabated in 2017, with new research showing almost four people a week were killed worldwide in struggles against mines, plantations, poachers and infrastructure projects.The toll of 197 in 2017 – which has risen fourfold since it […]
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, 31 January 2018 (AP) – Soldiers in northeastern Cambodia, an area where illicit logging and smuggling are rife, killed a forest protection ranger, a military police officer and a conservation worker in apparent retaliation for their seizure of equipment from illegal loggers, officials said Wednesday. Keo Sopheak, a senior environmental official in […]
5 February 2018 (BBC News) – One of the world’s leading investigators into the illegal trade in ivory and rhino horn has been killed in Kenya. Esmond Bradley Martin, 75, was found with a stab wound to his neck at home in the capital Nairobi on Sunday. The former UN special envoy for rhino conservation […]
25 January 2017 (The Economist) – America, which has long defined itself as a standard-bearer of democracy for the world, has become a “flawed democracy” according to the taxonomy used in the annual Democracy Index from the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company. Although its score did not fall by much—from 8.05 in 2015 to […]
By Jason Samenow 31 January 2018 (The Washington Post) – As an antidote to the report of minus-88 degree weather in the Siberian outpost of Oymyakon earlier this month, we give you this: The temperature in a settlement just to its east was an astonishing 126 degrees warmer two weeks later.The mercury in Omolon, Russia, […]
WASHINGTON D.C., 25 January 2018 (AGU) – Man-made phosphorus pollution is reaching dangerously high levels in freshwater basins around the world, according to new research. A new study published in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, estimated the global amount of phosphorus from human activities that entered Earth’s freshwater bodies from […]
By Nathan Vanderklippe 26 January 2018 (The Globe and Mail) – The sight of sharp horizons and cerulean skies in the Chinese capital was, not so long ago, rare enough that it merited special designation. There was “APEC Blue,” around the time Beijing hosted world leaders in 2014. There was “Parade Blue” for a 2015 […]
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 […]
