By DEBORAH SONTAG and ROBERT GEBELOFF 22 November 2014 Williston, North Dakota (The New York Times) — In early August 2013, Arlene Skurupey of Blacksburg, Va., got an animated call from the normally taciturn farmer who rents her family land in Billings County, N.D. There had been an accident at the Skurupey 1-9H oil well. […]
By Ben Guarino 26 November 2014 (The Dodo) – The bodies of more than 1,000 rare sea turtles, collectively weighing nearly 3,000 pounds, were recently seized by Vietnamese officials in a warehouse raid. Conservationists have fingered Vietnam as a hotbed of illegal wildlife trade — a 2006 National Geographic article labeled the country Asia’s illegal […]
By Brad Wieners 25 November 2014 (Bloomberg Businessweek) – […] As they say, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to delay, rewrite, or kill off a meaningful effort to reduce the build-up of carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere. A Powerpoint (MSFT) deck now being circulated by climate activists—a copy of which was sent […]
By John Vidal15 November 2014 (The Observer) – When Botswana’s president, Ian Khama, opened a giant $4.9bn diamond mine in the heart of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in September, there were some notable absentees among the invited guests: the 700 bushmen whose hunter-gatherer families had been the traditional inhabitants of the desert, but who […]
By Lindsay Abrams19 November 2014 (Salon) – Congressional climate wars were dominated Tuesday by the U.S. Senate, which spent the day debating, and ultimately failing to pass, a bill approving the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. While all that was happening, and largely unnoticed, the House was busy doing what it does best: attacking […]
By Dom Phillips 18 November 2014 ATIBAIA, Brazil (Washington Post) – Seen from a micro-light aircraft, flying low near this small town in Brazil’s interior, the scale of the water crisis blighting São Paulo, a megalopolis 40 miles away, was frighteningly clear. Four of the five reservoirs in an interlinked system that supplies 6.5 million […]
18 November 2014 (AFP) – Japan said on Tuesday it has cut its Antarctic whale-catch quota by two-thirds in a move it hopes will convince international opponents it is conducting genuine scientific research on expeditions in the region. The International Court of Justice — the highest court of the United Nations — ruled in March […]
(UNODC) – Trend in main indicators of drug supply and drug supply reduction, 2003-2013. Seizure data: annual report questionnaire supplemented by other official sources. Cultivation data: UNODC estimates based on national illicit crop monitoring systems supported by UNODC supplemented by other official data. a Including amphetamine, ecstasy-type substances, methamphetamine, non-specified ATS, other stimulants and prescription […]
By Jeff Jenkins 13 November 2014 CHARLESTON, West Virginia (Metro News) – The 43-page, four-count federal indictment of former Massey Energy president and CEO Don Blankenship portrays an operator obsessive about upping production at the cheapest cost. Federal prosecutors allege it was an attitude that led to the deadly explosion at the Upper Big Branch […]
By Terrie M. Williams6 November 2014 (Los Angeles Times) — As I rubbed the frostbite out of my hands on returning from a seal survey on Antarctic ice recently, I was informed that I had the dubious distinction of making the Top 5 in the 2014 list of wasteful scientists compiled by Sen. Tom Coburn […]
