A quick update on the shark front: In one of the first acts coming back from his Hawaiian vacay, President Obama signed the Shark Conservation Act of 2010 into law on Tuesday.
The bill, which I wrote about here a couple weeks back after it passed the Senate, will tighten the ban on shark finning — the practice of catching sharks, …
Scientists call it the Beepocalyspe. (OK, not scientists, but I like to call it that.) In late 2006, whole hives of honey bees began dying overnight for reasons that are still unclear. Scientists called it colony-collapse disorder (CCD), and it’s as scary as it is mysterious. Adult bees simply leave the hive, ostensibly in search of …
Some time late in 2011—at least according to the people-crunchers at the U.N. Population Reference Bureau—humanity will reach a new demographic milestone with the birth of the 7th billion living person. (As a measure of just how fast global population is growing, the 6th billionth living person—Bosnian Adnan Nevic—is only 11.) …
The AP is reporting that Zhao Lianhai, the father arrested for protesting China’s tainted milk scandal after his son fell ill with kidney stones, may have been released on medical parole.
If it’s true, however, it’s unclear what the conditions of his release are; his lawyer told the news wire that he had been unable to reach Zhao since …
Of all the projected impacts of climate change, the scariest one in a world is the effect warming could have on our ability to feed ourselves. Scientists have looked at the impact of major heat waves in the past, and have found that such abnormally hot weather tends to hurt agriculture, with maize productivity levels falling by more …
Among the various natural disasters and man-made catastrophes that unfolded during 2010, it’s nice to take a moment to consider the happier crumbs of environmental news that came out of the year. The UN’s International Year of Biodiversity yielded the discovery and naming of hundreds of new species, many of which can be credited to the …
I’m finishing up the Energy Innovations 2010 conference in Washington, of which more later today, but I wanted to note the news that the U.S. Justice Department has decided to sue BP and a number of other companies over this summer’s oil spill in the Gulf. From Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement today:
We intend to prove that
…
I’m traveling today to the Energy Innovation 2010 conference in Washington, where I’ll be moderating a panel tomorrow on innovation policy, so I apologize for the light posting today. I’ll have more on the conference tomorrow, which brings together thinkers and journalists who are looking for a new way to crack the energy and climate …
I’m back from Cancún, and I miss the weather there, if not the all-night hours of the assignment. You can read a longer version of my analysis of the conference over here, which includes some details on the last-minute drama as Bolivia tried to block adoption of the Cancún Agreements, only to be deftly overruled by Mexico. Juliet …
The Hong Kong Journalists Association is on the defensive this week after several reporters from the SAR were assaulted in a Beijing suburb on Friday, the same day the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in Oslo to jailed human rights activist Liu Xiaobao. The Hong Kong reporters were waiting outside the housing complex of another detained …
