"Oil prices rose sharply on Thursday amid concerns that fighting in the Arabian Peninsula between a Saudi-led coalition and Houthi rebels in Yemen could disrupt supplies."
There used to be a searchable, online database of oil and chemical spill reports that reporters could turn to in an emergency to get insight into important breaking news. But ham-handed security efforts have sabotaged the public's right to know. Right now, emergency responders are working on a spill of a cancer-causing fuel additive known as MTBE. But news reporters probably couldn't get much if any helpful information from the database today (we checked).
"The conflict that has torn Syria apart can be traced, in part, to a record drought worsened by global warming, a new study says."
"Wendy Lee, an anti-fracking activist and philosophy professor at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, has always protested peacefully. So she was stunned last winter when a state trooper came to her home to ask her about eco-terrorism and pipe bombs."
"Secret documents leaked to Al Jazeera reveal a routine practice among intelligence agencies to seek the cooperation of their peers in other countries to curb political dissent."
"NEW YORK – Cleaning up widespread corruption in the water supply industry is crucial to avert looming water conflicts born of desperation, warns a new United Nations report based on case studies in 10 countries.
“In many places … corruption is resulting in the hemorrhaging of precious financial resources,” siphoning an estimated 30 percent of funds earmarked for water and sanitation-related improvements, the report states.
"The RCMP has labelled the 'anti-petroleum' movement as a growing and violent threat to Canada’s security, raising fears among environmentalists that they face increased surveillance, and possibly worse, under the Harper government’s new terrorism legislation."
Industrial-scale palm oil plantations and processing plants in Colombia are at the center of conflict between leftist rebels, government forces, right-wing paramilitary groups and criminal gangs.
Journalists hurrying to get up to speed on environmental or energy issues can get objective background from reports by the Congressional Research Service (an arm of the Library of Congress), which does not release them to the taxpaying public that funded them. We thank the Federation of American Scientists' Government Secrecy Project for publishing them.
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