By Clifford Krauss19 March 2013 NEW ORLEANS (The New York Times) – The chief executive of the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon oil rig acknowledged in court on Tuesday that his crew should have done more to avert the 2010 oil well blowout that left 11 dead and soiled hundreds of miles of beaches […]
By Leone Lakhani14 March 2013 Lake Zakher, United Arab Emirates (CNN) – In a remote corner of the United Arab Emirates, a blue lake shimmers amid the sand dunes. It’s not a mirage, but a man-made oasis — an unintended byproduct of the UAE’s water management practices, which has sprung from the desert in recent […]
(Kyodo) – Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Friday it detected a record 740,000 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium in a fish caught in waters near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, equivalent to 7,400 times the state-set limit deemed safe for human consumption. The greenling measuring 38 cm in length and weighing 564 […]
By Bernhard Warner15 March 2013 (Businessweek) – Big Pharma on Friday won the first round of its fight to defeat a European proposal to ban a trio of commonly used pesticides suspected of killing honeybees. The closely watched measure, which calls for a European Union-wide moratorium on three types of neonicotinoid pesticides, failed to secure […]
By DAVID JOLLY 14 March 2013 PARIS (The New York Times) – Will Brussels try to give bees a break? In a case closely watched on both sides of the Atlantic, European officials plan to vote Friday on a proposal to sharply restrict the use of pesticides that had been implicated in the decline of […]
By Mark Stevenson13 March 2013 MEXICO CITY (AP) – The amount of Monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico dropped 59 percent this year, falling to the lowest level since comparable record-keeping began 20 years ago, scientists reported Wednesday. It was the third straight year of declines for the orange-and-black butterflies that migrate from the United States […]
By GARDINER HARRIS12 March 2013 CHERRAPUNJI, India (The New York Times) – Almost no place on Earth gets more rain than this small hill town. Nearly 40 feet falls every year — more than 12 times what Seattle gets. Storms often drop more than a foot a day. The monsoon is epic. But during the […]
By AKIKO FUJITA10 March 2013 NAMIE, Japan (ABC News) – Michie Niikawa struggles to define her role as school principal. Two years since taking over at Ukedo Elementary School in the town of Namie, the 54-year-old has yet to welcome her first class of students, greet teachers, or visit classrooms. Most days, she works in […]
By James Topham and Mari Saito, with Aaron Sheldrick; Editing by Robert Birsel8 March 2013 TOKYO (Reuters) – Tokyo Electric Power Company is struggling to stop groundwater flooding into damaged reactors at its wrecked Fukushima plant and it may take four years to fix the problem, possibly delaying the removal of melted uranium fuel. The […]
28 February 2013 (BBC) – People living near the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan have an increased risk of developing some cancers, the World Health Organization says. The increased risk is limited to communities and some emergency workers exposed to radiation after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, analysis shows. For those living in the […]
