By Fred Pals30 January 2013 (Bloomberg) – Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA), Europe’s biggest oil company, isn’t liable in four out of five claims bought by Nigerian farmers for pollution, a Dutch court ruled. The company’s local venture must pay compensation in one case. “Shell Nigeria has been sentenced to pay damages in one of […]
By Suzanne Goldenberg 24 January 2013 (The Guardian) – Villagers in the Solomon Islands have slaughtered up to 900 dolphins in the course of a dispute with a conservation group, Earth Island Institute. Accounts of the dispute vary. The islanders say the Berkeley-based conservation group failed to pay them, as agreed, for stopping the traditional […]
By Damian Carrington 16 January 2013 (The Guardian) – The world’s most widely used insecticide has for the first time been officially labelled an “unacceptable” danger to bees feeding on flowering crops. Environmental campaigners say the conclusion, by Europe’s leading food safety authority, sounds the “death knell” for the insect nerve agent. The chemical’s manufacturer, […]
By Rhett A. Butler24 January 2013 (mongabay.com) – By some estimates, more than 30,000 elephants were slaughtered across the savannas and forests of Africa and Asia for the ivory trade during 2012. The carnage represents as much as 4 percent of the world’s elephant population. Accordingly, some conservationists are warning that elephants face imminent extinction […]
By Steve Connor24 January 2013 A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate “counter movement” to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt. The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in […]
By Jean-Louis Santini20 January 2013 But despite President Barack Obama renewing his early promises to act, experts said political opposition would make it at least as difficult as during Obama’s first, failed push to get new legislation through Congress, and said decisive measures will remain unlikely. “All the public opinion polls show a better understanding […]
4 January 2013 (The Asahi Shimbun) – Cleanup crews in Fukushima Prefecture have dumped soil and leaves contaminated with radioactive fallout into rivers. Water sprayed on contaminated buildings has been allowed to drain back into the environment. And supervisors have instructed workers to ignore rules on proper collection and disposal of the radioactive waste. Decontamination […]
Hong Kong, 3 January 2013 (AFP) – Hong Kong conservationists expressed outrage Thursday after images emerged of a factory rooftop covered in thousands of freshly sliced shark fins, as they called for curbs on the “barbaric” trade. The southern Chinese city is one of the world’s biggest markets for shark fins, which are used to […]
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN31 December 2012 KRUGER NATIONAL PARK, South Africa (The New York Times) — They definitely did not look like ordinary big-game hunters, the stream of slender young Thai women who showed up on the veld wearing tight bluejeans and sneakers. But the rhinoceros carcasses kept piling up around them, and it was only […]
By JACK HEALY10 December 2012 SEVERANCE, Colorado (The New York Times) – Since he was a boy in western Colorado, John Bartmann seemed destined to become a sheep man. He raised lambs with the local 4-H club and sheared them for elderly German farmers. His office is lined with paintings of sheep and a plaque […]
