Environment

Prime Minister Patrick Manning yesterday said Alcoa would not be allowed to construct its controversial aluminium smelter in Chatham if it does not commit to developing downstream aluminium industries in Trinidad and Tobago. Read More

After an appellate court in the United States rejected claims by Bhopal city residents, seeking compensation from Union Carbide for environmental contamination around the site of the world's worst industrial disaster, plans are afoot to have the case transferred to India. Read More

A CONFRONTATION involving Chatham residents protesting the construction of ALCOA's multi-million dollar smelter plant and Alcoa officials and police threatened to become violent yesterday, when a policeman held one of the protesters at gunpoint. Read More

Wal-Mart's plans to open its first New York City store at the southern tip of Staten Island have fallen through, company officials confirmed yesterday. Read More

GOVERNMENT officials and Greenpeace activists have discovered contamination of the waters on Rapu-Rapu Island as the test run for the resumption of the operations of Lafayette Philippines Inc. continues. Read More

An American gold-mining executive was preparing Friday to defend himself in court for the first time against charges his company dumped millions of tons of mercury and arsenic-laced waste into an Indonesian bay, sickening villagers. Read More

In the summer of 1997, Tyrone Hayes, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, accepted what seemed a harmless offer to join a panel of eight other scientists investigating the safety of the common weed-killer atrazine. The panel had been commissioned by atrazine's inventor and primary manufacturer, the Swiss-based chemical giant then called Novartis and since renamed Syngenta. The company wanted to know if its product threatened "non-target" organisms, including fish, reptiles, and amphibians-creatures whose fate had remained largely unexplored through the half century in which atrazine had become the most heavily used herbicide in the United States as well as one of its most widespread environmental contaminants. Read More

For years, most industry groups have fought any effort to limit carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming, warning of dire consequences for the U.S. economy. But with growing public anxiety about climate change, major corporations are increasingly preparing for -- and, in some cases, lobbying for -- Congress to regulate emissions of heat-trapping gases. Read More

A former ad exec only now realizes "Beyond Petroleum" is just an oily smokescreen. Read More

Techint, the Argentine company that built the Camisea pipeline which carries natural gas from Peru's Amazon jungle region to a port on the country's Pacific coast, used unqualified welders, in a clear violation of international norms, according to a new report by E-Tech, a California-based non-profit engineering and environmental consultancy firm. Read More