Six men are being brought to trial for the murder of two Guarani Indians who were killed in Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state in 2009. The case has been described as ‘an important milestone’ by a public prosecutor.

Genivaldo Verá and Rolindo Verá were victims of an armed attack, after their Y’poi community attempted to reclaim its ancestral land from ranchers.

Brazil’s Public Ministry has announced that ranchers and politicians are among those facing prosecution. The charges they face include: homicide; hiding a body; shooting a firearm; and bodily harm against an elderly person.

One of the men under investigation, cattle rancher Firmino Escobar, also held the Guarani of Y’poi hostage in 2010, imprisoning them on their land and cutting off food and medical supplies. Survival has a recording of him refusing an undercover Survival campaigner entry to the site. He also falsely denied any Indians were on the land.

The Public Ministry is considering opening another police investigation into other people who may have been involved in the fatal attack in 2009.

Hey, Iraq, don’t say we never gave you anything. In addition to hundreds of thousands dead and untold injured, the United States is leaving behind enough toxic waste sites to kill your rats. - “Open-air burn pits have operated widely at military sites in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the Department of Veterans Affairs notes on its website. On hundreds of camps and bases across the two countries, the U.S. military and its contractors incinerated toxic waste, including unexploded ordnance, plastics and Styrofoam, asbestos, formaldehyde, arsenic, pesticides and neurotoxins, medical waste (even amputated limbs), heavy metals and what the military refers to as “radioactive commodities.” The burns have released mutagens and carcinogens, including uranium and other isotopes, volatile organic compounds, hexachlorobenzene, and, that old favorite, dioxin (aka Agent Orange).

Scientists, environmentalists and even World War II historians have reacted with a mixture of excitement and concern to news that Russian geologists have drilled through to a huge subterranean lake in Antarctica, some 20 million years old.

It has taken more than 30 years to work through 3,700 meters of thick ice – drilling in temperatures as low as minus 80 centigrade. But it will have been worth it, if even half the claims being made about the lake are true. Sealed off below the ice for millions of years, the lake is a unique environment. “According to our research, the quantity of oxygen there exceeds that on other parts of our planet by 10 to 20 times. Any life forms that we find are likely to be unique on Earth,” says Sergey Bulat, the Chief Scientist of Russia’s Antarctic Expedition to Russian Reporter magazine. But there is one place not on Earth that has similar conditions – Europa, the mysterious satellite of Jupiter.

USA Today: Russian drillers reach huge lake below Antarctica

After 30 years spent drilling through a four-kilometer-thick ice crust, researchers have finally broken through to a unique subglacial lake. Scientists are set to reveal its 20-million-year-old secrets, and imitate a quest to discover ET life.

The Vostok project breathes an air of mystery and operates at the frontiers of human knowledge. The lake is one of the major discoveries in modern geography; drilling operations at such depths are unprecedented; never before has a geological project required such subtle technologies.

The main inspiration for the project – the Russian scientist who posited the lake’s existence – died just six months before the moment of contact with the lake’s surface. Now, the whole world is looking to Lake Vostok for crucial data which might help to predict climate change.

“Yesterday [on Sunday] our scientists at the Vostok polar station in the Antarctic completed drilling at depths of 3,768 meters and reached the surface of the subglacial lake,” RIA Novosti reported, quoting an unnamed Russian scientist. Meanwhile, Itar-Tass news agency says the scientists still have a few meters to go.

Lake Vostok is a unique closed ecosystem hidden under some four kilometers of ice. Its water has been isolated from the atmosphere – and therefore from any contact with the outside world – since before man existed. The key question for scientists is, could the lake harbour life?

Eastern and central Europe continue to shiver under a blanket of heavy snow Friday, with more deaths reported after bitter cold overnight temperatures.

Ukraine is probably the worst affected, with Poland, Romania, Serbia and Belarus also suffering much more severe winter conditions than usual. Thirty-eight people have died of hypothermia in Ukraine over the past 24 hours, according to the state-run news agency Ukrinform, citing government ministries. The latest deaths take the total number killed in Ukraine in the cold spell that started January 27 to 101, the news agency reported. Twenty-nine people had died in Poland as of Thursday, according to the publicly funded Polish Radio's news website. Other cold-related deaths have been reported in Serbia, Romania and elsewhere.

Joe Lowry, spokesman for the International Red Cross Europe Zone, said many people across the region are in urgent need of help. "If 163 people have frozen to death on the European streets, it is a disaster," he told CNN. The homeless and elderly are among the most vulnerable, Lowry said, as well as those who often find themselves on the margins of society, such as alcoholics or people with mental health issues. He said the Red Cross is helping people by providing warm clothing, boots, hot drinks and food, as well as shelter in heated tents and moral support. Local authorities must also react effectively to the crisis to save lives, he said. The sudden start to the bitter cold weather after what had been a mild winter for some parts of Eastern Europe caught many people unaware, Lowry said.

EuroNews: Europe’s homeless dying in arctic conditions
The Telegraph: Europe's cold spell: Death toll rises to 220 and no end in sight

The United States has perpetually contaminated the world, particularly the Middle East, by using massive amounts of depleted uranium (DU) in its wars, an analyst tells Press TV. - Vietnamese-American writer and journalist Linh Dinh described the US use of depleted uranium as a “tremendous crime against humanity,” reiterating that it will affect innocent people and new-born infants “for generations to come and literally, for billions of years to come.” "Once depleted uranium gets into the environment, into the water, into the soil, into the air, it remains there for billions of years and it doesn't just stay in these (Middle Eastern) countries, although these populations are the ones who are most affected immediately, because once airborne it will spread all over across the globe," he said. The Philadelphia-based writer noted that the use of DU, the destructiveness of which the US denies, is 'frankly genocidal.'

PressTV: 'DU destroying Afghans' gene pool'
Abel Bult-Ito: Nothing depleted about 'depleted uranium'

Across southern Florida, rabbits, raccoons, bobcats and foxes have been disappearing at dramatic rates over the past decade, and invasive Burmese pythons are to blame, a US study said Monday.

The United States formally banned the import of Burmese pythons earlier this month, but the study suggests they have already caused enormous damage to the ecosystem in the Florida Everglades with unknown implications for the future.

The research was based on data from surveys in which dead and live animals are counted along roadways. From 1993-1999, before the invasive snakes had established a population in south Florida, raccoons, opossums and rabbits were the most frequent roadkill. But from 2003-2011, surveys spotted a 99.3 percent decrease in racoons, 98.9 percent fewer opossums and no rabbits or foxes, said the article authored by Michael Dorcasa at Davidson College in North Carolina and colleagues at the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation and the National Park Service. Surveys also saw 94.1 percent fewer white-tailed deer and 87.5 percent fewer bobcats. These “severe apparent declines in mammal populations… coincide temporally and spatially with the proliferation of pythons in Everglades National Park,” said the study. During that period, annual removals of Burmese pythons have risen from less than 50 per year to 300-400 annually.

This is fascinating, a nuclear explosion from the Tumbler-Snapper tests performed in Nevada during 1952. It looks different from all nuclear explosions you've seen because it's what it looks like one millisecond after detonation. It looks like a skull by Tim Burton.

The face of atomic death just one second away from unleashing its absolute destruction. Only one millisecond after the bomb explodes, this 65.6-foot (20 meters) ball of fire appears in midair, with spikes that look like rotten teeth or stalactites of fire (called the rope trick effect). The explosion was captured by a Rapid Action Electronic camera—a high speed device designed to photograph nuclear explosions just milliseconds after ignition.

What's a Rapid Action Electronic camera? - The rapatronic camera, as it is called, was created by Harold Edgerton in the 1940s using two polarizing filters and Kerr cell instead of a shutter, which is too slow for this job. A Kerr cell is a panel that changes its polarization depending on the voltage applied. This acts as a very high speed shutter, which allows the perfect exposition to capture this moment.

Too Much Radiation to Cover Up - As I’ve pointed out since day one, the Japanese government and Tepco have covered up the extent of the radiation released by Fukushima and its health effects on the Japanese and others. See this and this. The New York Times notes:

The government inspectors declared Onami’s rice safe for consumption after testing just two of its 154 rice farms. Then … more than a dozen [farmers] found unsafe levels of cesium. An ensuing panic forced the Japanese government to intervene, with promises to test more than 25,000 rice farms in eastern Fukushima Prefecture, where the plant is located. [...]

Montreal Gazette: Radioactive iodine in rainwater: Public was in the dark

“Betraying” Their Own People … “Akin to Murder”. The New York Times reported last August:

The day after a giant tsunami set off the continuing disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, thousands of residents at the nearby town of Namie gathered to evacuate. Given no guidance from Tokyo, town officials led the residents north [to] a district called Tsushima …. The winds, in fact, had been blowing directly toward Tsushima — and town officials would learn two months later that a government computer system designed to predict the spread of radioactive releases had been showing just that. But the forecasts were left unpublicized by bureaucrats in Tokyo, operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism. Japan’s political leaders at first did not know about the system and later played down the data, apparently fearful of having to significantly enlarge the evacuation zone — and acknowledge the accident’s severity. “From the 12th to the 15th we were in a location with one of the highest levels of radiation,” said Tamotsu Baba, the mayor of Namie, which is about five miles from the nuclear plant ….The withholding of information, he said, was akin to “murder.”

A newly discovered form of chemical intermediary in the atmosphere has the ability to remove pollutants in a way that leads to cloud-formation and could potentially help offset global warming.

The existence of these so-called Criegee biradicals, which are formed when ozone reacts with a certain class of organic compounds, was theorized over fifty years ago, but they have now been created and studied in the laboratory for the first time.

According to Science Daily, the discovery was made possible through the use of a third-generation synchrotron at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which produces an intense, tunable light that enables scientists to differentiate between molecules which contain the same atoms but arranged in different combinations. The Criegee biradicals — named after Rudolph Criegee, who postulated their existence in the 1950′s — turn out to react with pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, much more rapidly than expected to form sulphates and nitrates. “These compounds,” Science Daily explains, “will lead to aerosol formation and ultimately to cloud formation with the potential to cool the planet.”

Watch more Capital Account @ www.youtube.com twitter.com twitter.com The Iowa caucuses are tonight. Iowans will head to the polls to cast their first votes in the US primary season. The horse race is really underway here, but what real options do the American people have? What choice can they make that will have a positive effect on their financial future, not to mention their constitutional rights and civil liberties? It doesn't look to us like there is any leader who can unify the country. Obama had the political currency and the skill to do that 3 years ago, but he squandered it. So where does that put the rest of us now exactly? Feels kind of like the Twilight Zone, and we will bring in former assistant treasury secretary Paul Craig Roberts to tell us what he thinks. And speaking of the twilight zone, let's talk a bit about Iran. After all, it is center stage once again as the candidates look to out gun each other. Iran has threatened to act if the US navy moves an aircraft carrier into the gulf. This as New US and EU sanctions target the Islamic Republic. What doe this mean for Oil prices for you and I and is the US sabre rattling worth the cost? Well, again, we will speak to Paul Craig Roberts, an assistant treasury secretary under the Reagan Administration for answers to that questions.

Photo: Molly the dog walks around dead herring on a beach at Kvennes in Nordreisa, northern Norway. Photograph: Scanpix Norway/Reuters

Norwegians have been left puzzled at the sight of thousands of dead herring carpeting a beach in the northerly district of Nordreisa with some wondering if a predator had driven them to their death or a storm had washed them ashore.

Scientists were hoping to test the fish to see if they could ascertain the cause of death. Locals had more pressing concerns: how to clean up the 20 tonnes of dead creatures before they decay.

For doom-mongers, the fish were the second a sign in as many days that 2012 would live up to the apocalyptic prediction of the ancient Mayans, after hundreds of blackbirds reportedly dropped dead in Arkansas.

Someone went into a large roost of blackbirds in Beebe, Arkansas, as the clock struck midnight Saturday and set off fireworks, contributing to the deaths of scores of blackbirds, a state wildlife spokeswoman said. - Last New Year's Eve, roughly 5,000 birds were found dead in a square-mile area in Beebe, a central Arkansas town about 35 miles northeast of Little Rock through which birds migrate and that is home to a large roost for the birds. Fireworks last year caused otherwise healthy birds to become disoriented and "fly all over the place" into stationary objects, such as trees and buildings, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission spokeswoman Ginny Porter said.

Figure jumps to nearly 1,500, and likely to rise further, as many bodies remain buried in the debris in country's south. - The death toll from killer floods in the Philippines has risen by more than 200, more than a week after the disaster struck, with officials expecting more corpses to be found. The confirmed toll reached 1,453 on Tuesday, up sharply from 1,236 the previous day as navy and coastguard ships fished more bodies out of the waters off the southern island of Mindanao, the civil defence office said. The stench of death pervaded the region, a sign that many corpses still remained unrecovered on land, Ana Caneda, the regional civil defence chief, said. Tropical storm Washi brought heavy rains, overflowing rivers and flash floods to the southern Philippines from December 16 to 18, sweeping away whole villages built on sandbars and riverbanks.

Steve Irwin Responding to Distress Call from the Brigitte Bardot. - While fighting heavy seas in pursuit of the Japanese whaling fleet, the Sea Shepherd scout vessel Brigitte Bardot was struck by a rogue wave that has cracked the hull and severely damaged one of the pontoons on the vessel. Captain Paul Watson, onboard the Sea Shepherd flagship Steve Irwin, reports that they are fighting heavy seas to reach the position of the Brigitte Bardot some 240 miles to the southeast. It is expected to take twenty hours to reach the damaged vessel. The Brigitte Bardot is at 51 degrees 42 minutes South and 99 Degrees 21 minutes East, or 1500 miles southwest of Fremantle, Western Australia.

A key chemical of one of the most horrifying elements of the Vietnam War -- Agent Orange -- may soon be unleashed on America's farmlands. Considered by world nations to be a "Weapon of Mass Destruction" (WMD), Agent Orange was dropped in the millions of gallons on civilian populations during the Vietnam War in order to destroy foliage and poison North Vietnamese soldiers. The former president of the Vietnamese Red Cross, Professor Nhan, described it as, "...a massive violation of human rights of the civilian population, and a weapon of mass destruction."

A key chemical in that weapon -- 2,4-D -- is just months away from being dropped on agricultural land across the United States. Dow AgroSciences, which along with DuPont and Monsanto is heavily invested in genetically engineered crops, has petitioned the U.S. government to deregulate a variety of GE corn that's resistant to 2,4-D, which comprises 50% of the recipe of Agent Orange.

Google Image Search for 'Agent Orange'

There is a legacy for the Iraqi people, a legacy left to them by the “Coalition of the Willing”, a legacy that will be handed down from generation to generation. It is a legacy that has stolen their future and shattered the dreams of generations yet to come. Depleted Uranium (DU) type weaponry, was widely used in Iraq with devastating effects. There are over 350 sites in Iraq contaminated with DU, though the explosions have long since gone silent, the after effects of the contamination will linger for generations. Birth deformities have increased more than ten fold in some areas, cancers are in epidemic proportions. The figure for 2007 was 140,000 cases of cancer and 7,000 to 8,000 new cases reported each year. On viewing photographs of some of the deformities in these children it is hard to believe that the perpetrators are still walking free. What was the cause that was worth this sort of hell on earth for so many. Mid-wives in Iraq are purported to have said they no longer look forward to births as.... "We don't know what's going to come out." Is this “liberation” Western style?

India's homeless are waiting out the biting cold winter, which has already killed over 100 people, mostly in Uttar Pradesh. - Kalyani, 15, refuses to come out her comforter as she snuggles even deeper when her mother, Saraswati Bai, crouching over a cooking fire, calls out loudly that it is time to eat. It is early morning; the diminutive girl has a flyover over head but no protection against the chilly wind. She is asleep on one of the many cold and hard walkways of the capital.

The oil company says up to 40,000 barrels of crude oil was spilled 75 miles off the coast of the Niger delta. - Nigerian coastal and fishing communities were on Thursday put on alert after Shell admitted to an oil spill that is likely to be the worst in the area for a decade, according to government officials. The company said up to 40,000 barrels of crude oil was spilled on Wednesday while it was transferred from a floating oil platform to a tanker 75 miles off the coast of the Niger delta. All production from the Bonga field, which produces around 200,000 barrels a day, was last night suspended. "Early indications show that less than 40,000 barrels of oil have leaked in total. Spill response procedures have been initiated and emergency control and spill risk procedures are up and running," said Tony Okonedo, a Shell Nigeria spokesman.

In a wildlife video that’s making the rounds today, an explorer treking through Uganda’s Bwindi National Park has a hair-raising encounter with a pack of wild baby gorillas as a big male Silverback watches silently.

The official death toll from last week's massive flash flooding in two southern Philippine cities topped 1,000 on Wednesday, while authorities said they lost count of how many more were missing in one of the worst calamities to hit the coastal region. - The latest tally showed a total of 1,002 people have been confirmed dead, including 650 in Cagayan de Oro and an additional 283 in nearby Iligan city, said Benito Ramos, head of the Civil Defense Office. The rest came from several other southern and central provinces. A tropical storm swept through the area Friday night and unleashed flash floods in the middle of the night that caught most of the victims in their sleep.

AWIP: Philippines mulls mass graves after typhoon kills hundreds

Disaster agencies Monday rushed to deliver body bags, food, water, and medicine to crowded evacuation centers in the southern Philippines as officials considered digging mass graves for hundreds killed in weekend flash floods.

The national disaster agency said 533 died and 309 remain missing, while the local Red Cross put the toll at 652 killed and more than 800 missing. Casualties from the flashfloods exceeded the more than 450 people killed in 2009 when a tropical storm dumped heavy rains on the main Luzon island, inundating nearly the entire capital Manila. Typhoon Washi slammed ashore in the Mindanao region of the Philippines while residents slept at the weekend, sending torrents of water and mud through riverside villages and sweeping houses out to sea. In the aftermath, radio stations and local governments have been deluged by calls and appeals from survivors asking for help to bury the dead or find missing relatives.

AWIP: Philippines flood toll rises past 200 400 450 900

MANILA, Philippines - Pounding rain from a tropical storm swelled rivers and sent walls of water rushing through the southern Philippines while people were asleep, killing more than 200 with scores missing, officials said Saturday. Some of the dead were swept out to sea from the worst-hit coastal cities of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan in the Mindanao region, which is unaccustomed to the typhoons that are common elsewhere in the archipelago nation.

Cagayan de Oro city councilor Alvin Bacal said 107 people had died in the flooding in his city alone, citing military figures. In Iligan, 79 bodies were recovered in the city after more than 12 hours of continuous rain from Tropical Storm Washi overflowed a river and sent muddy floodwaters cascading from nearby mountains, Mayor Lawrence Cruz said. About 250 people are unaccounted for in Iligan, said military spokesman Lt. Col. Randolph Cabangbang.

A man in Cagayan de Oro said he heard a cry for help around 10 p.m. while the floodwaters were still low. "Suddenly, there was a very strong rush of water," the man, who was not identified, told a local TV station. Ayi Hernandez, a former congressman, said he and his family were resting in their home late Friday when they heard a loud "swooshing sound" and water quickly rose ankle deep inside his home. He decided to evacuate to a neighbor's two-story house. "It was a good thing because in less than an hour the water rose to about 11 feet," the height of the ceiling of his house, he said.

LA Times: Flash floods kill more than 450 in Philippines
New York Times: Flooding Kills Scores in Southern Philippines
The Telegraph: Hundreds die as tropical storm Washi sweeps across Philippines

The ill-fated Phobos-Grunt probe that got stuck in the orbit after an unsuccessful launch will fall to Earth on January 11, probably affecting four continents, the US Strategic Command shared its latest forecast. - The current orbit of the vehicle suggests that it could collide with the surface on a vast part of the globe, from latitude 51.4°N to latitude 51.4°S. anywhere in Africa, Australia, Japan, North America or southern part of Western Europe, but definitely not on the larger part of the Russian territory. A more-or-less exact prognosis on the coordinates of the crash can only be made several hours before the collision. According to the previous forecast, the probe was due to enter atmosphere on January 9.

A very informative documentary about the real cause of global warming. It clearly discuss about the fact that CO2 is not cause of global warming. Take a look also at the Great Global Warming Swindle and Green House Conspiracy in google video. This documentary discusses many topics that are not covered in the Swindle such as the hockey stick graph, from the viewpoint of Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas.

Hundreds of metres under one of Iceland's largest glaciers there are signs of an imminent volcanic eruption that could be one of the most powerful the country has seen in almost a century. - Mighty Katla, with its 10km (6.2 mile) crater, has the potential to cause catastrophic flooding as it melts the frozen surface of its caldera and sends billions of gallons of water surging through Iceland's east coast and into the Atlantic Ocean. "There has been a great deal of seismic activity," says Ford Cochran, the National Geographic's expert on Iceland. "There have been more than 500 tremors in and around the caldera of Katla just in the last month, which suggests the motion of magma. And that certainly suggests an eruption may be imminent." Scientists in Iceland have been closely monitoring the area since 9 July, when there appears to have been some sort of disturbance that may have been a small eruption.

Wikipedia: Eyjafjallajökull

Gunmen in Brazil are brazenly intimidating indigenous communities with a hit list of prominent leaders, following the high profile murder of Nísio Gomes last month. - Reportedly employed by powerful landowners in Mato Grosso do Sul state, the gunmen are creating a climate of fear to prevent Guarani Indians from returning to their ancestral land. The tactics employed in recent incidents have been almost identical. Gunmen encircle vehicles transporting Guarani, force them to stop, and then verbally abuse and interrogate passengers about the names on the hit list. One Guarani leader told Survival, ’They’ve pinpointed us and they’re set to kill us. We’re at great risk. Here in Brazil, we have no justice. We have nowhere left to run.’

[Hat tip: The Healing Project] This episode of If You Love This Planet features a lecture host Dr. Helen Caldicott delivered October 16, 2011 at the International Integrative Medical Conference in Sydney, Australia. Dr. Caldicott explains the medical dangers of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium mining, and talks about the current situation at the devastated Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, as well as the poliltical situation in the U.S., the threat of nuclear war and global warming. Listen HERE.

Wind power to make up half of Danish energy use by 2020 & the country aims to be 100% free of fossil fuels by 2050. - The country aims to be 100 percent free of fossil fuels in 2050, relying instead on wind power, biomass and biogas, the government said on its website where it presented its new "Our Energy" programme. The left-wing social democratic government, which came to power in September, has largely overtaken the previous centre-right administration's energy programme "but setting the goals higher", the ministry said. The previous government's plan called for an increase in the use of wind power from 20 percent today to 42 percent in 2020. The new government plans to invest 5.6 billion kronor (750 millio n euros, $996 million) in its energy programme, compared to 3.6 billion earmarked by its predecessor. The investments will be financed by the public and companies through higher energy prices, encouraging Danes to better isolate their homes and buildings to save energy. The government expects households to reduce their average energy consumption by eight to 10 percent by 2020.

After crunching ice-age climate numbers, Oregon researchers and colleagues from Harvard, Princeton, Cornell and Barcelona came up with two encouraging conclusions about future global warming.

The planet appears less sensitive to carbon dioxide changes than expected, their study says, so extreme temperature increases in the near future appear highly unlikely. And future warming may also be less than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, particularly at the upper end of the "likely" range.

The study, funded by the National Science Foundation's paleoclimate program, drew on the known extent of ice sheets in the past and levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide taken from air trapped in Antarctic ice cores. Researchers also mapped ice-age temperatures based on pollen levels on land and concentrations of temperature-sensitive microorganisms in the ocean. Schmittner and colleagues then ran a climate computer model at different "climate sensitivities" -- the climate's reaction to greenhouse gas levels -- to see which sensitivities best pinpointed actual ice-age temperatures.

Their conclusion: The climate appears less sensitive to greenhouse gases than prior estimates. Based on the computer runs, doubling carbon concentrations would likely increase the world's average temperature from 3.1 to 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit over preindustrial levels, the study predicts. That's lower than the IPCC's likely temperature range for a doubling of carbon dioxide: 3.6 to 8.1 degrees. And it's a far cry from increases of up to 18 degrees held out as low probability possibilities. The study also concludes that increases greater than 11 degrees from a doubling of C02 "should be assigned near-zero probability." Computer runs using such severe climate sensitivity modeled the globe as entirely covered in ice during the ice age, the study said. Schmittner said the actual number was closer to 10 percent.

The Brazilian government on Wednesday suspended Chevron Corp's drilling rights in Brazil until it clarifies the causes of an offshore oil spill, the latest twist in a political firestorm threatening the U.S. company's role in Brazil's oil bonanza. - The decision was announced as the chief executive of Chevron's Brazilian unit was testifying before the Brazilian Congress, where he publicly apologized for the November 8 spill that leaked about 2,400 barrels of oil into the ocean off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's National Petroleum Agency said it decided to halt Chevron's drilling rights after determining that there was evidence that the company had been "negligent" in its study of data needed to drill and in contingency planning for abandoning the well in the event of accident. The agency, known as ANP, also rejected a request from Chevron to drill deeper wells into subsalt areas in the Frade field where the spill took place. The Frade field, which is located in the oil-rich Campos Basin, is the only block in Brazil where Chevron is producing oil and is the operator. The Campos Basin is currently the source of more than 80 percent of Brazil's oil output.

The hunt is on for the source of low level radiation detected in the atmosphere "across Europe" over the past weeks, nuclear officials said today. Trace amounts of iodine-131, a type of radiation created during the operation of nuclear reactors or in the detonation of a nuclear weapon, were detected as early as three weeks ago by Austrian authorities and then two weeks ago by the Czech Republic's State Office for Nuclear Safety. Today the International Atomic Energy Agency released a statement revealing similar detections had been made "in other locations across Europe." The IAEA said the current levels of iodine-131 are far too low to warrant a public health risk, but the agency still does not know the origin of the apparent leak and an official with the agency would not say where else it has been detected. Considering iodine-131 has a radioactive decay half-life of about eight days, continued detection means the leak occurred over a period of several days at least and is possibly ongoing.

More awareness needs to be generated about the floods in Thailand. 4 million acres are under water, 400 people have died, and $17 billion of economic output has been lost. Levels are increasing and now threatening Bangkok.

THE capital is now under siege from the waters slithering down from the north towards the Gulf of Thailand. Shops, businesses and government offices in Bangkok cower behind makeshift concrete parapets and piles of sandbags. Bridges and elevated expressways are filling up with fleets of parked cars, to spare them from the deluge below. And all the time people speculate about just how bad it might get in a city the Europeans once called the Venice of Asia.

Despite the defences, there is likely to be some flooding. The government desperately wants to divert water around the capital, to east and west, but the volume is too great. The desire to save densely populated Bangkok is understandable. But the strategy is angering those in the northern suburbs, where neighbourhoods are filling up with water as the sluice gates remain closed. An admirable steadfastness among Thai people is wearing thin.

Oil contamination has devastated the lives of the people in the Niger Delta -- destroyed their livelihoods, undermined their access to clean water and food, and put their health at serious risk. Hundreds of thousands of people are affected, particularly the poorest. The failure by the oil industry to properly address pollution exacerbates human suffering and environmental damage. For example, the two major oil spills which occurred in 2008 in Bodo, Ogoniland continued for weeks before they were stopped, and three years on Shell has still not cleaned up the pollution.

The Guardian: Shell must pay $1bn to deal with Niger Delta oil spills, Amnesty urges - Rights group says oil giant's 2008 spills have wrecked livelihoods of 69,000 people and will take 30 years to clean up. The report by the human rights group to mark the 16th anniversary of the execution of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa by Nigerian authorities said the two spills in 2008 in Bodo, Ogoniland, had wrecked the livelihoods of 69,000 people.

Imágenes tomadas desde el helicóptero del Grupo de Emergencias y Salvamento del Gobierno de Canarias, sobre el estado del fenómeno eruptivo en El Hierro.

Der Spiegel: Undersea Volcano Now Just 70 Meters from Surface - PHOTOS - In the Atlantic Ocean, off the Canary Island of El Hierro, 20-meter high jets of water are being spat into the air as the sea boils amid the stench of sulfur. The undersea volcano, which is set to create new land, is growing ever-nearer to the surface -- but is the existing island at risk from the explosive eruptions?

Up to 4 million birds trapped illegally this year face a slow, sticky end before being sold to restaurants for tapas, say campaigners. - Thrushes flying south for a warm Mediterranean winter this week will, as usual, run a gauntlet of illegal hunters who kill some two million birds in their peak hunting season: the six late autumn weeks in which Spanish skies fill with migrating birds. Hundreds, if not thousands, of hunters in Castellón, eastern Spain, and neighbouring areas will have already set their so-called parany traps – copses filled with glue-covered twigs and spikes. Most of the illegally trapped birds will end up as tapas in Spanish bars, fried tidbits that locals claim are part of a cultural heritage stretching back to Roman times. "There are pictures of parany traps in the mosaics of Pompeii," said Miguel Angel Bayarri of the trappers' Apaval association. "This is a tradition that has existed for centuries and that we will continue to fight for." Hunting of song and mistle thrushes and their cousin the redwing is not illegal, but the methods used are, despite attempts by legislators to introduce exceptions.

[Image 1 of 13] Air traffic routes are shown between North America and Europe. Felix Pharand-Deschenes has created global snapshots depicting how power lines, roads and even air traffic corridors have come to dominate the surface of Earth. His visualisations based on real data show air traffic routes, the underwater cables that carry the internet, road and rail networks and electricity transmission lines all superimposed over cities at night.

These mosquitoes are genetically engineered to kill — their own children. - Researchers on Sunday reported initial signs of success from the first release into the environment of mosquitoes engineered to pass a lethal gene to their offspring, killing them before they reach adulthood. The results, and other work elsewhere, could herald an age in which genetically modified insects will be used to help control agricultural pests and insect-borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria. But the research is arousing concern about possible unintended effects on public health and the environment, because once genetically modified insects are released, they cannot be recalled.

More than 3.2m homes and businesses across the north-east US have been left without power after a freak snowstorm killed at least eight people and disrupted transport across the region. - From Maryland to Maine, officials said it would take days to restore electricity, even though the snowfall ended on Sunday. The storm smashed record snowfall totals for October and worsened as it moved north. Communities in western Massachusetts were among the hardest hit. Snowfall topped 68.6cm (27in) in Plainfield, and 66cm in nearby Windsor. The storm was blamed for at least six deaths, and states of emergency were declared in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and parts of New York.

Hartford Courant: Conn. Governor Declares State of Emergency; More Than 820,000 Without Power In Historic Storm

Heavy monsoon rains have been drenching Southeast Asia since mid-July, causing mudslides and widespread flooding. The deluge has now reached Bangkok, with rising water and associated problems affecting most of the city's 10 million residents. Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said that parts of the capital could be inundated by up to 1.5 meters of water and remain flooded for up to a month. Around Bangkok, the second-largest airport has closed, food prices are soaring, clean water is becoming scarce, and the country is declaring a holiday from Thursday until Monday to allow people to evacuate. The Chao Phraya river is predicted to overflow its banks in the city sometime today, and authorities say that if the protective dikes fail to hold the water, all parts of Bangkok will be vulnerable to the floodwater. [42 photos]

Turkey has announced that the death toll of Sunday's 7.2 magnitude earthquake in eastern part of the country has reached 523. - Turkish prime minister's center for crisis and emergency management declared on Thursday that nearly 1,650 people have been injured and 185 have been rescued from under the rubble so far, the Associated Press reported. Assessments conducted by Turkish Red Cross indicate that about 2,256 buildings were destroyed during the quake that shook the eastern province of Van. Rain and snow have added to the difficulties for thousands of people that were rendered homeless in the powerful earthquake. Turkey's weather agency has predicted intermittent snowfall in the general area for the next three days.

Daily Mail: Miracle baby Azra, who survived for two days in quake rubble, is reunited with her mother in Turkish hospital

The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has compared the alleged negligence of some officials and builders to murder, saying shoddy construction had contributed to the high death toll in Sunday's earthquake. Three days on, a teacher and a university student were rescued from ruined buildings in Ercis, but searchers said hopes of finding anyone else alive were diminishing. Excavators began clearing debris from some collapsed buildings in Ercis after searchers removed bodies and determined there were no other survivors. Erdogan said Turkey had not learned enough from past earthquakes that toppled poorly constructed buildings, trapping people inside. The 7.2-magnitude quake on Sunday killed at least 460 people.

"When we look at the wreckage, we see how the material used is of bad quality," Erdogan said. "We see that people pay the price for concrete that virtually turned to sand, or for weakened concrete blocks on the ground floors. Municipalities, constructors and supervisors should now see that their negligence amounts to murder.

Ercis, Turkey (CNN) -- A small baby was rescued alive from the rubble Tuesday in eastern Turkey, two days after a devastating earthquake toppled buildings in the region. - Dramatic video showed tiny Azra Karaduman being carried by rescuers to a vehicle that would take her to the hospital. They were holding a mask over her mouth to help give her oxygen. Later, rescuers pulled the girl's mother alive from the rubble as well. They then pulled the girl's paternal grandmother. It was not immediately clear whether she was alive. She was carried to a vehicle on a stretcher. The 2-week-old girl's father remains trapped somewhere under the rubble of the multi-story building, officials said. Azra's maternal grandmother said the baby was born three weeks premature. A rescuer told CNN the baby's mother managed to make contact with rescuers and get the baby to them through a narrow passage. Officials had to find a rescuer thin enough to fit into the crevice to get the baby. The rescuer told CNN it was the first time he had ever pulled someone alive from earthquake rubble in 12 years of doing such work.

Xinhua.net: Death toll in Turkey quake hits 432
BBC: Turkey earthquake: Death toll rises to 432
Times of India: Turkey battles to find quake survivors
PressTV: 'Thousands still under rubble in Turkey'

Reporting from Ankara, Turkey— As rescuers in eastern Turkey combed through rubble in search of earthquake survivors early Monday, officials said the number of deaths from the 7.2 temblor had reached 239 and could go much higher.

Many buildings were destroyed or damaged. Emergency workers and residents pressed to find hundreds of people believed to be buried under debris in the cities of Van and Ercis, where a student dormitory collapsed.

In Van, some residents using their hands and shovels worked frantically under floodlights or only flashlights after reportedly hearing the voices of people calling from under mounds of broken concrete in pitch darkness and cold. Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin said at least 100 people were killed in Van and 117 others died in Ercis, an eastern city close to the Iranian border.

The quake struck at 1:41 p.m. Sunday and was centered in the village of Tabanli in Van province, said Turkey's Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute. U.S. scientists recorded more than 100 aftershocks in eastern Turkey within 10 hours of the quake, including one with a magnitude of 6. The earthquake also shook buildings in neighboring Armenia and Iran, but no injuries were reported.

CTV.ca: Death toll climbs amid frantic search after Turkey quake
CNN: More than 230 dead in Turkey quake; 1,300 more hurt
Al Jazeera: Turkey steps up quake rescue efforts
EarthQuake Report: Very strong damaging earthquake in eastern Turkey - Video

More districts of Thailand's capital were on high alert on Monday with floods bearing down from northern Bangkok as authorities raced to pump water toward the sea and defend the business district. - Hundreds of people were evacuated over the weekend as water in residential areas of the northern Lak Si and Don Muang suburbs reached levels as high as two meters (six feet), testing flood defenses and spilling out of swollen canals and rivers. Thailand's worst flooding in five decades has killed at least 356 people and affected nearly 2.5 million, with more than 113,000 living in temporary shelters and 720,000 people seeking medical attention. Central areas and the industrialized provinces of Pathum Thani, Nonthaburi and Ayutthaya on the northern fringes of the Bangkok are the worst hit, but with rivers and canals at a constant risk of bursting, the city of 12 million is on edge.

euronews: Thailand floods displace more than 100,000 - Video
John Roberts: Millions impacted as floods engulf Bangkok
BBC: Waters advance on north Bangkok areas

Tremors in the ground beneath an Icelandic volcano could be the first warning signs of a long-awaited eruption that would have the potential to dwarf the chaos caused by Eyjafjallajokul last year, experts say. - Katla, which has a much larger magma chamber and is more powerful than its neighbour, averages two large eruptions every century but the last was 93 years ago, making another long overdue. In recent weeks an increasing number of small earthquakes have been detected beneath the volcano – a sign that an eruption could be imminent – and last week one tremor reached magnitude four on the Richter scale, a level which would cause the ground to shake noticeably. Volcanologists said that although activity beneath the volcano had picked up significantly in recent weeks, it may not indicate an eruption and could soon settle back to normal. But if it were to erupt the consequences could be even worse than those of Eyjafjallajokul in 2010, which cost airlines more than £1 billion despite being described as a "small" volcanic event. Katla is named after an evil troll and its last major eruption, in 1918, lasted for more than a month, blocking out sunlight, killing livestock and melting an ice-sheet that flooded nearby farmlands.

The Guardian: Icelandic ash cloud part two? Scientists monitor rumblings of larger volcano

Australia's lower house of parliament has narrowly passed a bill for a controversial carbon tax. - The legislation would force about 500 of the biggest polluters to pay for each tonne of carbon dioxide they emit. The tax is central to the government's strategy to combat climate change, but the opposition says it will cause job losses and raise the cost of living. Australia is the world's largest coal exporter and one of the biggest per capita greenhouse gas emitters. After her Clean Energy Bill 2011 was passed with 74 votes for and 72 against, she hugged colleagues and waved to supporters in the public galleries. Along with a companion bill for A$300m ($298m; £191m) in assistance for the Australian steel industry, it is expected to pass the Senate with the help of the Greens next month.

Tarballs appear on Bay of Plenty beaches as stricken freighter Rena has made the water "highly toxic". Fears high that the containment ship is going to break apart. - Oil has begun washing up on a popular beach on New Zealand's east coast, five days after the container ship Rena struck a reef in the Bay of Plenty. Officials urged people to avoid the area, warning that the water off Tauranga city had become "highly toxic". Efforts to remove oil from the ship, which ran aground on Astrolabe Reef in the early hours of Wednesday, have been suspended in the face of deteriorating weather conditions. On Sunday about 10 tonnes of fuel oil had been pumped into safe storage from the 236-metre-long ship but that represented a fraction of the 1,700 tonnes on board.

Scientists have discovered a hole five times the size of Germany in the ozone layer above the Arctic, allowing harmful ultraviolet radiation to hit northern Canada, Europe and Russia this spring. - The 2 million square kilometre Arctic hole is similar to the hole over the Antarctic, researchers write in the journal Nature, released yesterday. They say 80 per cent of the ozone was lost about 20km (13 miles) above the Arctic and that a prolonged spell of cold weather – when chlorine chemicals which destroy ozone are at their most active – was to blame.