EU/ERBD News
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Because of sulfur’s cooling effect, smoke from Asia’s rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming in the decade after 1998, even though greenhouse-gas emissions soared, Reuters reported a study by scientists in the United States and Finland as saying. The findings raised the prospect of more rapid, pent-up climate...
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French president Nicolas Sarkozy pledged one billion euros (nearly US$1.5 billion) of investment in atomic power, resisting the anti-nuclear trend following Japan’s Fukushima disaster, The Guardian reported. Seeing “no alternative to nuclear energy today”, Sarkozy said moratoriums on new reactors adopted since the Japanese crisis began in...
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Fish, sharks, whales and other marine species are in imminent danger of an “unprecedented” extinction event, The Guardian cited a study of the world’s oceans as finding. The International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) report said species are disappearing far faster than predicted because of overfishing, pollution, fertiliser runoff...
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Climate change could be slowed if governments cleaned up “black carbon” from industry and cooking fires, The Guardian reported, citing a UN report by 50 leading atmospheric scientists. Linked to melting of Himalayan glaciers, the pollutant affects climate by absorbing sunlight, darkening snow and ice when deposited, and helping to form clouds....
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As EU health officials met to discuss the world’s deadliest E. coli outbreak, Germany said new infections were dropping, the Associated Press reported. In the bacterial outbreak centred in the Hamburg area, 26 people have died and nearly 3,000 have become ill since May 2. Scientists are still looking for the cause -- possibly raw vegetables. Much...
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The development of regional airports is one of the earliest aspects of the Polish economic transformation. Although Poland has had a fairly well-developed network of civil airports, and particularly military airports, since the post-W=war years, their role has been very limited. They used to be auxiliary airports for the main airport in Warsaw, which means...
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Warning that world food demand will have jumped by 70% by 2050, the charity Oxfam said soaring food prices and weather and financial shocks had aggravated the hunger crisis -- and that the global food economy was broken, according to Reuters. In a new report, “Growing a Better Future”, Oxfam called for regulation of financial speculation and the...
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An Amazon environmental activist and his wife have been shot dead in Brazil, Al Jazeera reported. José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva, a rubber tapper, and his wife Maria do Espirito Santo were ambushed in the Amazon state of Pará. News of the killings came as the Brazilian congress wrangles over new laws that environmentalists say would reduce...
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The swollen Mississippi River, already spilling over into wide areas of the Mississippi Delta in the southern US, is dealing a heavy economic blow to commercial and agricultural life, The New York Times said. Tens of thousands of hectares of cropland were inundated in Louisiana when floodgates were opened to ease the flooding threat to New Orleans,...
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Nearly 1.3 million hectares of farmland in three southern US states have been submerged by flood waters from the Mississippi River and its tributaries – North America’s largest river system – Reuters reported. Caused by melting snow and heavy spring rains, the floods add to troubles in seeding this year’s crops in the world’s...
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