Corals bleached and dying in overheated South Asian waters

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, August 16, 2010 (ENS) – The rapidly rising temperature of south Asia’s Andaman Sea has triggered coral bleaching and die-off that scientists working in Indonesia are calling one of the most rapid and severe coral mortality events ever recorded. The coral die-off was indentified though monitoring by marine ecologists from the Wildlife […]

The Great Land Grab: A rush for food security and profits

Want to avoid the next food price crisis? Tired of unreliable rice and corn exporters? Why not buy up fertile land abroad and ship your own fresh, dependable supplies of foodstuffs and biofuels back home? That solution seems to make sense for more and more cash-rich, food-importing countries. Foreign land acquisitions and long-term lease-holdings, starting […]

I Don't Believe in Global Warming, by Banksy, 20 December 2009. Photo: TheMammal via flickr

How global climate change may affect violence

July 18, 2010 (NNPA) – If global warming is a scientific fact, then we’d better be prepared for the earth to become a more violent place. That according to a recent Iowa State University study that shows as the earth’s average temperature rises, so too does violent tendencies in humans. Using U.S. government data on […]

Big oil firms accused of human-rights abuses in Burma

By VIVIENNE WALTWed Jul 7, 2:15 am ET To the list of Big Oil companies with p.r. problems add two more: Chevron and French energy giant Total. In a report published on Monday, the NGO EarthRights International accuses the firms of being implicated in human-rights violations in Burma, claiming that soldiers guarding Chevron and Total’s […]

Millions face starvation as Niger prays in vain for rain

Urgent aid is needed to avert a catastrophe in West Africa  By Alastair Stewart To the north of Niger, the creeping Sahara; to the south, oil rich and agriculturally lush Nigeria – this nation straddles the Sahel – dry, hot and cruel. It has suffered catastrophic droughts – 1974, 1984 and 2005. And now, another. […]

Oil spill fund chief says ‘not enough money in the world’ to pay all claims

By ALLEN JOHNSON, NEW ORLEANS July 2, 2010 THE man appointed by US President Barack Obama to manage BP’s oil spill disaster fund has warned that “there’s not enough money in the world” to pay all claims, and suggested home owners with plunging property values could lose out. The warning from prominent US lawyer Kenneth […]

Gulf oil spill spews anxiety and despair

By Casandra Andrews, Press-Register Published: Sunday, June 27, 2010, 5:32 AM In March, officers with the Bayou La Batre Police Department responded to 470 calls, according to their records. Two months later — after a ruptured well began gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, imperiling the fishing industry in five states and idling thousands […]

Climate refugees in Syria driven to cities by severe drought

  Damascus (AFP) June 22, 2010 – A severe four-year drought is devastating Syria’s rural communities, forcing them to abandon the country’s traditional breadbasket in the northeast for cities in search of employment. Earlier this month, the World Food Programme started delivering food aid to nearly 200,000 people in the provinces of Al-Hasakeh, Al-Raqqa and […]

Amid historic drought, Red Cross buys starving cattle to feed Malians — ‘Dead animals litter the ground’

  Toya, Mali (AFP) June 22, 2010 – In single file, hundreds of residents of Toya wait patiently for meat distributed by the Red Cross who bought up thousands of starving animals to feed Mali’s drought-stricken population. With containers in hand they await the meat from four cows slaughtered in the village in the north-west […]

Drought adds to Syria woes of poverty and unemployment

By MICHAEL JANSEN in Damascus SYRIA IS sweltering in an unseasonable heatwave which Damascenes are blaming on climate change. “We have to fight global warming now, as well as so many other battles,” asserted Zuhair, an academic. Battle was joined in 2007 when the rains failed and 40,000 farm families in the country’s northeastern breadbasket […]

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