Activism

"MEXICO CITY -- Fed up with oil spills from facilities belonging to Mexico’s state oil company Pemex, residents of two communities in the southeastern state of Tabasco are taking the country’s largest company to court in a bid for compensation for damage to the environment and agriculture."

"Hundreds of people took to the streets of the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming on Thursday to protest against the planned production of a chemical at a refinery, the second demonstration this month against the project."

"Prince Charles has attacked corporate lobbyists and climate change sceptics for turning the Earth into a 'dying patient', making his most outspoken criticism yet of the world's failure to tackle global warming just when the heir to the throne is assuming a growing number of the duties of what is supposed to be an apolitical monarchy."

"At about 300 colleges across the country, young activists worried about climate change are borrowing a strategy that students successfully used in decades past. In the 1980s, students enraged about South Africa's racist Apartheid regime got their schools to drop stocks in companies that did business with that government. In the 1990s students pressured their schools to divest in Big Tobacco."

"An elderly nun and two other peace activists will be sentenced in September on their convictions for damaging a Tennessee defense facility where enriched uranium for nuclear bombs is stored, a federal judge said on Thursday."

"A coalition of progressive groups is pulling its ads from Facebook in protest over political positions taken by the organization started by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg."

"Dan Rather called it 'the most watched load of garbage in the memory of man.' It was 1987. A small town businessman had what seemed like a promising idea, to transport New York trash by barge to a landfill in North Carolina, where it would be converted into methane to heat homes. And then the news media latched on to the story."

"The campaign group formed to support Barack Obama's political agenda has launched an initiative to shame members of Congress who deny the science behind climate change."

"Rob Gillies and his team gather data on Nepal’s changing climate for a research project. They log temperatures, raindrops and snow. They pump the numbers into powerful computers and read the trend lines the computers spit out. Gillies sees the numbers in human terms, too. Global warming is likely to mean less water, putting crops and livestock in peril, along with nourishment for children who already don’t get enough to eat. That leaves the climate scientist with questions instruments can’t answer. About fairness. Justice. And life and death."

"WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that Nigerian plaintiffs who said foreign oil companies had been complicit in violating their human rights may not sue in American courts. The decision limited the sweep of a 1789 law that had been used to address human rights abuses abroad."