Environment

This past Christmas, while children around the world wrote letters to Santa Claus whom they believed would deliver presents to them in a sleigh drawn by the mythical Rudolph, the actual human companions of the Arctic reindeer spent their holidays worrying about Beowulf, a British mining company. Read More

AquaBounty, a U.S. biotechnology company based in Maryland, has secured approval from the Canadian government to export 100,000 AquAdvantage salmon eggs from Prince Edward Island in eastern Canada to Chiriquí province in western Panama. Read More

A clash between Belaruskali and Uralkali - the global potash exporters from Belarus and Russia respectively - almost destroyed a global cartel that has artificially kept prices of fertilizer as high as $400 a ton in international markets. Read More

YPF, the Argentinian state-owned oil company, has signed an agreement with Chevron in the U.S. to extract shale gas and oil using fracking technology in the southern Andes mountains. Local environmental and indigenous activists are gearing up for a fight to stop the controversial technology. Read More

BSGR, an Israeli mining conglomerate, is under investigation for the acquisition of mining rights to the Simandou iron ore deposit in Guinea, said to be the biggest in the world. Read More

ArcelorMittal, the global steel giant, has been ordered to hand over documents about the environmental impact of two South African facilities to community activists. The Luxembourg-based company, the largest steel producer in Africa, has been accused of polluting the air and water as well as dumping hazardous waste. Read More

Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) is facing calls to be shut down for failing to properly manage the environmental catastrophe caused by the meltdown of three of the company's nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan. The disaster was the result of a tsunami triggered by a March 2011 earthquake. Read More

Honduran owned Generadora del Istmo S.A. (GENISA) is almost done with building Barro Blanco- a 28.84 megawatt hydroelectric project - on the Tabasará river in Chiriqui province in western Panama. The indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé community says that the impact of this project on their livelihoods will be devastating. Read More

The idyllic village of Balcombe, just south of London, is a stronghold of the Conservative party. Just the sort of place that one might imagine cheering on industry plans to drill for natural gas and applaud the tax breaks that the government has offered to industry. Read More

Halliburton has admitted that it destroyed evidence after the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. The company has agreed to pay a $200,000 fine, make a donation of $55 million to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and accept three years of probation. Read More