By Sunita Patel-Carstairs, News Reporter7 March 2017 (Sky News) – A rhino has been shot dead by poachers who broke into a zoo and sliced its horn off with a chainsaw. Four-year-old Vince was found dead by one of his keepers at Thoiry zoo, near Paris, on Tuesday morning. One or more attackers are believed […]
By Vince Beiser27 February 2017 (The Guardian) – Times are good for Fey Wei Dong. A genial, middle-aged businessman based near Shanghai, China, Fey says he is raking in the equivalent of £180,000 a year from trading in the humblest of commodities: sand. Fey often works in a fishing village on Poyang Lake, China’s biggest […]
25 January 2017 (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) –Editor’s note: Founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear […]
Washington, DC, 12 January 2017 (Human Rights Watch) – The rise of populist leaders in the United States and Europe poses a dangerous threat to basic rights protections while encouraging abuse by autocrats around the world, Human Rights Watch said today in launching its World Report 2017 [pdf]. Donald Trump’s election as US president after […]
By Joe McCarthy5 January 2017 (Global Citizen) – Climate change rarely transforms an environment overnight. By the time ice shelves disappear, ocean waves creep onto main streets, and forests shrivel, the forces of climate change have been at work for decades. Fortunately, NASA is tracking these environmental changes with satellites so that the public knows […]
By Matthew Carney7 January 2017 (ABC News) – For weeks northern China has been covered in a thick toxic smog. It is one of the worst episodes of air pollution the country has seen, affecting 460 million people. Coal is the major cause, and will continue to be the country’s biggest source of energy and […]
By Pam Wright4 January 2017 (weather.com) – China issued its first-ever national red alert for severe fog Tuesday after two dozen cities reported persistent air pollution issues. The red alert was issued by China’s national observatory for parts of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, as well as in the provinces of Henan, Shandong, Anhui and Jiangsu, according […]
28 December 2016 (AFP) – Chinese customs seized over three tonnes of pangolin scales, state media said, in the country’s biggest-ever smuggling case involving the animal parts. Shanghai Customs found around 3.1 tonnes of pangolin scales mixed in with a container of wood products imported from Nigeria, state broadcaster CCTV reported Tuesday. It estimated up […]
GENEVA, 15 December 2016 (ILO News) – Wage growth around the world has decelerated since 2012, falling from 2.5 per cent to 1.7 per cent in 2015, its lowest level in four years. If China, where wage growth was faster than elsewhere, is not included, growth in global wages dropped from 1.6 per cent to […]
By Janne Hansen23 November 2016 (PhysOrg) – Three independent methods of modelling climate change impact on yield display the same bleak tendency: When global temperature increases, wheat yield will decline. This is demonstrated in a study carried out by an international group scientists, including Professor Joergen E. Olesen and Postdoc Mohamed Jabloun from the Department […]
