Monsanto alfalfa can't be limited as plant pest: US court
19 May 2013 - Alfalfa genetically modified to withstand Monsanto Company Roundup weed killer was correctly deemed by US agriculture officials not to be a plant pest that needs to be regulated, a federal appeals court ruled. The US Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a lower-court ruling that unconditionally deregulated the product and agreed the Agriculture Department's Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service lacks jurisdiction to regulate the plant. The Centre for Food Safety, one of the groups that sued, is disappointed in the ruling and will pursue other legal options to 'halt the sale and planting of this harmful crop,' the organization said in an e-mailed statement. 'This is an irresponsible decision,' Andrew Kimbrell, the group's executive director, said in the statement. 'The court acknowledged the many stark environmental and economic impacts of these crops, and yet bends over backwards in allowing USDA to avoid addressing those concerns in its regulatory process.' (more)

Challenges to improving health care in Pakistan
19 May 2013 - Hamza Mazhar, a 35-year-old teacher from Pakistan's eastern city of Lahore, says he never wants to see the inside of a government hospital again. 'My mother was taken to the hospital with an upper respiratory tract infection in February this year and doctors said she needed care in the hospital's Intensive Care Unit (ICU),' he told IRIN. But the doctors in charge wanted the family to pay a bribe to get into the ICU, which had plenty of spare beds. They could not afford to pay. His mother was unable to get the treatment she needed and in March she died. Health care in Pakistan is identified as one of the country's most corrupt sectors, according to surveys by Transparency International; general surveys suggest the majority of Pakistanis are unhappy with the health services they are offered. Pakistan has no national health insurance system and 78 percent of the population pay health care expenses themselves. It is the only country in the world without a National Health Ministry. (more)

North Korea fires projectile into eastern waters
19 May 2013 - North Korea fired a projectile into waters off its eastern coast Sunday, a day after launching three short-range missiles in the same area, officials said. North Korea routinely test-launches short-range missiles. But the latest launches came during a period of tentative diplomacy aimed at easing recent tension, including near-daily threats by North Korea to attack South Korea and the US earlier this year. North Korea protested annual joint military drills by Seoul and Washington and UN sanctions imposed over its February nuclear test. The Korean Peninsula officially remains in a state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. South Korea's Defence Ministry said Sunday it has deployed dozens of Israeli-made precision guided missiles on front-line islands near the disputed western sea boundary as part of an arms buildup begun after a North Korean artillery strike on one of the islands in 2010 killed four South Koreans. (more)

Scotland: Pollution threat from Glasgow subway
19 May 2013 - A snapshot survey by the Sunday Herald's New Era magazine discovered passengers on the Glasgow subway were breathing in tens of millions of tiny metallic particles that might damage their health. The investigation found levels of pollution by microscopic particles on the subway -- known in the city as the Clockwork Orange -- up to 10 times higher than on the streets outside and up to eight times above the World Health Organization's recommended daily limit. Experts estimate passengers on the subway for 45 minutes could each inhale 60 million particles. Anyone spending the same amount of time at one of Scotland's busiest railway stations could breath in 10 million particles, or 2.5 million on a Glasgow-to-Edinburgh train journey. (more)

Politics, bribery charges swirl around Ugandan oil
18 May 2013 - Uganda (AP) - Even before the first drops flow, Uganda's oil sector is beset by bribery allegations against officials, tax-related cases abroad that cost the government millions in legal fees, and the alleged interference of a president whose firm control of the sector worries transparency campaigners. Uganda, which has confirmed oil deposits of about 3.5 billion barrels, wants to extract at least 1.2 billion barrels over the next three decades. That figure could rise when more oil blocks are put up for exploration later this year, potentially making Uganda one of Africa's top oil producers. But some experts and analysts worry that the country got off to a false start and remains too politically unstable to avoid some of the mistakes made by other oil-rich but otherwise poor countries. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has reserved for himself the right to have the final say before any deals are signed with oil companies, saying that policy is to ensure the country's interests are always protected. But some critics say the president's close involvement is unhelpful to a country that needs to focus on building credible, transparent institutions to manage its oil wealth whether or not Museveni is around. (more)

US: Victims say Marines failed to safeguard water supply at camp Lejeune
18 May 2013 - A simple test could have alerted officials that the drinking water at Camp Lejeune was contaminated, long before authorities determined that as many as a million Marines and their families were exposed to a witch's brew of cancer-causing chemicals. But no one responsible for the lab at the base can recall that the procedure -- mandated by the Navy -- was ever conducted. The US Marine Corps maintains that the carbon chloroform extract (CCE) test would not have uncovered the carcinogens that fouled the southeastern North Carolina base's water system from at least the mid-1950s until wells were capped in the mid-1980s. But experts say even this 'relatively primitive' test -- required by Navy health directives as early as 1963 -- would have told officials that something was terribly wrong beneath Lejeune's sandy soil. A just-released study from the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry cited a February 1985 level for trichloroethylene of 18,900 parts per billion in one Lejeune drinking water well -- nearly 4,000 times today's maximum allowed limit of 5 ppb. Given those kinds of numbers, environmental engineer Marco Kaltofen said even a testing method as inadequate as CCE should have raised some red flags with a 'careful analyst.' 'That's knock-your-socks-off level -- even back then,' said Kaltofen, who worked on the infamous Love Canal case in upstate New York, where drums of buried chemical waste leaked toxins into a local water system. 'You could have smelled it.' (more)

Australia: Anger as green projects slashed, funds diverted to help cattle exports
18 May 2013 - Australia has all but dumped $75 million worth of projects regrowing forests in the developing world and shelved a $100 million forest carbon partnership with Indonesia, while millions of dollars in foreign aid will be channelled into the live cattle export trade, sparking claims that aid money is being misused to help the embattled industry. (more)

Fighting in Pakistan's Tirah Valley displaces 40,000 people
18 May 2013 - Around 40,000 residents of Pakistan's Tirah Valley, close to the border with Afghanistan, have fled their homes after renewed fighting in the last few weeks, according to the Disaster Management Authority in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FDMA). Most of the refugees from the Khyber Agency are heading towards Kohat, Hangu, and Peshawar districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Province or to the Kurram Agency in the tribal belt. According to the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, some 750,000 persons are already internally displaced in Pakistan due to conflict and natural disasters. Fighting between government soldiers and militants in Tirah Valley, which has strategically important routes into Afghanistan, has been underway for several months, but intensified recently with militants seizing control of key areas. The conflict is a complicated one, involving at least three militant groups that also have internal divisions. (more)