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Not many people have heard of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, nor the Athabaskan Tar Sands. Not these days, anyway, with the Deepwater Horizon disaster spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. But in Fort Chipewyan, the ongoing effects of bitumen oil extraction continue as the top news of the day.
The so-called “Catfish Wars,” pitting U.S. catfish farmers against Asian producers since 2002, is heating up.
A vast experiment in urban planning is underway in Brazil’s urban jungle metropolis of Manaus. At the center of the urban expansion is the construction of a 2.2-mile bridge that is to connect the city to industrial cities and towns across the Rio Negro—the largest left tributary of the Amazon.
South Africa’s state-owned and fickle electrical grid is likely to come under intense pressure during the June 11-July 11 World Cup soccer tournament, as hundreds of thousands of fans pour into the country during the dead of the Southern Hemisphere winter.
Yosemite National Park, the gemstone of John Muir’s “Range of Light” in California’s Sierra Nevada, has agreed to a $4.4 million solar panel installation at its El Portal entrance.
A Turkish court this week sentenced the former editor of the only Kurdish-language daily to 166 years in prison, convicting him of spreading propaganda for the terrorist organization PKK (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party).
It’s hard to imagine that a dam that is twice the length of Hoover Dam and is visible by satellite imagery would go unnoticed for 35 years. But then again, there aren’t that many visitors to Canada’s remote “Beaver Belt.”
It is an astonishing instrument by any measure—by far the largest such telescope on earth and capable of spotting rocky, earth-like planets up to 100 million million miles away.
In the last 10 years, 62 journalists have been killed in Mexico, making it the most dangerous country in the world for journos.
The multimedia series Bay Area Toxic Tour: West Oakland was published by the nonprofit online news packager/distributor Newsdesk.org—and crowdfunded by through Spot.us.