By Sarah Lazare, staff writer18 October 2013 (Common Dreams) – Protests are sweeping Canada following Thursday’s assault by paramilitary-style police on members of indigenous Elsipogtog Mi’kmaq First Nation and local residents as they blockaded a New Brunswick fracking exploration site. The group had barricaded a road near the town of Rexton in rural New Brunswick […]
Gainford, Alberta, 19 October 2013 (AP) – Emergency crews battled a massive fire on Saturday after a Canadian National tanker train carrying oil and gas derailed west of Edmonton, Alberta, overnight. No injuries have been reported so far. A Canadian National spokesman, Louis-Antoine Paquin, said 13 cars four carrying petroleum crude oil and nine loaded […]
By Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent 17 October 2013 (theguardian.com) – The number of wild birds in the UK is still falling, despite efforts to protect them by changing farming practices. Conservationists have urged the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, to use the money newly available from the EU’s common agricultural policy to step up protection measures. […]
By Greg Ray 18 October 2013 (Newcastle Herald) – It was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it. Not the absence of sound, exactly. The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves still sloshed against the fibreglass hull. And there were plenty of other […]
By Betsy Cohen17 October 2013 (Missoulian) – In the dark theater, on a dimly lit stage, a 32-foot-long gray whale made of plastic bags looked so lifelike, it seemed to be gliding through the depths of the ocean. As visitors came to see the one-day exhibit of “The Plastic Whale Project,” the iconic shape and […]
FUKUSHIMA (AFP-JIJI) – Radiation levels in groundwater under Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant are soaring, Tepco said Friday after taking samples from an observation well. Tepco said 400,000 becquerels per liter of beta ray-emitting substances such as strontium were detected in water sampled Thursday from the well located some 15 meters […]
By Sarah Boseley, health editor 14 October 2013 (The Guardian) – Babies born to mothers who live in areas with air pollution and dense traffic are more likely to have a low birthweight and smaller head circumference, according to a large European study. The researchers, who included a team from the UK, found that babies […]
By Darryl Fears13 October 2013 (Washington Post) – Under the watchful eyes of scientists, a little forage fish that lives off the southern coast of Maine developed a strangely large appetite. Killifish are not usually big eaters. But in warmer waters, at temperatures projected for the future by climate scientists, their metabolism — and their […]
By Steve Horn10 October 2013 (desmogblog.com) – Over 20,600 barrels of oil fracked from the Bakken Shale has spilled from a Tesoro Logistics pipeline in Tioga, North Dakota in one of the biggest onshore oil spills in recent U.S. history. Though the spill occurred on September 29, the U.S. National Response Center – tasked with […]
By Yuka Obayashi and Mari Saito; Editing by Michael Perry10 October 2013 TOKYO (Reuters) – Radiation levels in seawater just outside one of the damaged Fukushima reactors spiked this week to the highest level in two years, the operator of the crippled Japanese nuclear plant said on Thursday. Radiation levels on Wednesday, the day six […]
