Daily News Channel
With a razor-thin margin of just seven votes, the House of Representatives on Friday evening passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act — the first bill to put a fixed and declining cap on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Republicans and Democrats in the House spent much of the day sparring in sharp language over the bill, which will reduce U.S
Climate Change: The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis The Global Humanitarian Forum; 117 pages Download the PDF The Gist: Quick: What does global warming look like A forlorn polar bear stuck on a splintering glacier makes for a gripping visual, but a new report says there are millions of climate-change victims we don’t see — and many look just like us.
A dam burst in the northeastern village of Cocal left a 12-year-old girl dead and three people missing, fire department officials said Thursday, according to Brazil’s state news agency. The break occurred late Wednesday afternoon and was blamed on heavy rains in the state of Ceara, the state-run Agencia Brasil reported. Concern over the dam’s integrity led officials to order residents to evacuate Cocal for 15 days
As he stood in the rose garden on May 19 with state governors and auto executives to announce a new deal that tightens automobile fuel-efficiency standards, Barack Obama took note of the glorious weather. “The sun is out because good things are happening,” he said. Many environmentalists — who spent the eight years of the Bush Administration in the cold — would agree.
Environmentalists savored a long-awaited victory on Thursday when the carbon cap-and-trade bill fashioned by Democratic Representatives Henry Waxman and Edward Markey passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, putting it on the road to becoming a law. Supporters had to withstand over 400 amendments filed by Republicans during the markup of the bill this week, but it’s now possible the U.S. could see climate legislation go into effect by the end of the year
Angered by what he perceived as the systemic discrimination of the minority Tamils by successive Sri Lankan governments, 18-year-old Velupillai Prabhakaran, armed with just a revolver, set out in 1972 to right the perceived wrongs by forming a militant group. That group eventually morphed into the Tamil Tigers, who have engaged in a brutal 25-year insurgency for an independent Tamil state that has left more than 70,000 dead.
Despite predictions of a close race forcing an unstable coalition government, India’s Congress Party on Saturday claimed a major victory in national elections, leaving it with enough parliamentary seats to form a government with only minimal support from other parties. Congress is expected to win 205 out of 543 seats, according to India’s Election Commission, garnering 124 million votes. So how does Prime Minister Manmohan Singh plan to use the electorate’s strong mandate for his second term in office?
Buried on page 795 of President Obama’s budget, released last Thursday, is a paragraph banning the federal funding of needle-exchange programs for drug addicts — an apparent about-face on his campaign promise to overturn that longstanding ban.
A judge in Saudi Arabia has said husbands are allowed to slap their wives if they spend lavishly, a Saudi newspaper reported this past weekend.
On a plane to the Maldives, tourists sigh about the luxury resorts and sun-dappled beaches to which they are bound. From above, the country’s coral-fringed lagoons in the Indian Ocean look computer-generated: arrayed in turquoise pods, they stretch over an azure expanse that would span from Rome to Budapest. Ibn Battuta, the 14th century Arab explorer, hailed the archipelago as “one of the wonders of the world.” Ever since, the Maldives has enchanted shipwrecked sailors, Hollywood celebrities and Russian oligarchs fortunate enough to wash up by its shores.