Right-wing websites are jumping on a 2005 UN report predicting that climate change would create 50 million refugees by 2010—and gloating that it hasn’t come to pass. But maybe we are closer to the 50 million than they think.
Pakistan’s Supreme Court upheld the acquittal of five of the six men accused in the gang rape of Mukhtar Mai—the woman whose refusal to remain silent about the 2002 crime won international acclaim for her courage.
The US is sending $25 million in nonlethal aid to Libyan rebels to cover “vehicles, fuel trucks and fuel bladders, ambulances, medical equipment, protective vests, binoculars, and non-secure radios.”
The US Department of Defense announced that Guantánamo Bay detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri will be subject to capital charges and tried in a military court for his allegedly involvement in the USS Cole bombing.
As “progressives” like George Monbiot pose nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, the big corporations that control both oil and uranium laugh all the way to the bank.
Tokyo Electric Power Company issued a plan for cooling down the reactors and reducing radiation leaks within six to nine months at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant on Japan’s Pacific coast.
The Center for Biological Diversity charges that the impacts on wildlife of last year’s BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe have been dramatically underestimated.
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut regarding whether electric utilities contributed to global warming. The Obama administration has sided with the power companies.
Syria’s government passed a draft decree to lift the emergency law and a bill to dismantle the Supreme State Security Court. But protesters took to the streets in large numbers again the next day in the central city of Homs,
A Tunisian court dropped charges against a police officer who incited protests in several Arab countries when she allegedly slapped a local fruit vendor who later set himself on fire in front of a governor’s office.
Italy’s government announced it is indefinitely suspending plans to build the country’s first nuclear power plants—ahead of a June referendum on the atomic development plans, which the administration says is no longer necessary.
Radioactivity levels skyrocketed in the sea surrounding the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan late last week, raising fears that a new leak in the facility needs to be sealed.
