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The Australian Government reintroduced a package of bills on 23 June 2014 to repeal the carbon tax.

The Australian Government reintroduced a package of bills on 23 June 2014 to repeal the carbon tax.

One of Australia’s internationally important wetlands will receive a boost with environmental water being made available to improve the health of the Hattah Lakes Ramsar site.

Emails and meeting notes show group’s finance department has a long history of problems in its handling of the £58m budget

The handling of Greenpeace International’s £58m budget has been in disarray for years, with its financial team beset by personnel problems and a lack of rigorous processes, leading to errors, substandard work and a souring of relationships between its Amsterdam headquarters and offices around the world, documents leaked to the Guardian show.

Coming after it emerged that a staffer had lost £3m on the foreign exchange market by betting mistakenly on a weak euro, the documents show that the group’s financial department has faced a series of problems, and that its board is troubled by the lack of controls and lapses that allowed one person to lose so much money.

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The man who trained more than 66 countries in open source methods calls for re-invention of intelligence to re-engineer Earth

Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.
With 18 years experience working across the US intelligence community, followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training, Steele's exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine world.

Steele started off as a Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. After four years on active duty, he joined the CIA for about a decade before co-founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, where he was deputy director. Widely recognised as the leader of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) paradigm, Steele went on to write the handbooks on OSINT for NATO, the US Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Operations Forces. In passing, he personally trained 7,500 officers from over 66 countries.

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Mehdiganj plant at centre of protests accused of extracting too much groundwater and releasing pollutants above limits

Authorities in northern India have ordered the closure of a Coca-Cola bottling plant at the centre of protests that it is extracting too much groundwater, an official said Wednesday.

An anti-pollution official said the Mehdiganj plant in Varanasi in the state of Uttar Pradesh had breached the conditions of its operating licence, prompting the order closure earler this month.

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Tepco says it is behind schedule with scheme because temperature of pipes sunk into ground is not low enough

The operator of Japan's battered Fukushima nuclear power plant has said it is having trouble with the early stages of an ice wall being built under broken reactors to contain radioactive water.

Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) has begun digging the trenches for a huge network of pipes under the plant through which it intends to pass refrigerant.

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Agency application on ecological sustainability - comments close 17 July 2014.

A new study from REMI finds that a revenue neutral carbon tax could create 2.8 million jobs, increase GDP by $1.3 trillion

A revenue-neutral carbon tax or fee is a proposed policy to address global warming that's become increasingly popular, particularly in the US. It's a simple concept – put a much needed price on carbon pollution, but return all the revenue that's generated to taxpayers (for example with a monthly refund) to offset rising energy costs. This approach appeals to political conservatives, because it's a free market solution that doesn't increase the size of government.

British Columbia (BC) launched a revenue-neutral carbon fee in 2008, with the tax offset through a matching reduction income taxes. So far it's been very successful, decreasing carbon pollution while the BC economy performed just as well as the rest of Canada's. The carbon tax has 64% support among BC voters.

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Feral pigs will be targeted under a joint State and Federal Government initiative to aid marine turtle recovery and continue the war on pests.

Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."

Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."

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Australian Government commits $1 million for the Gladstone Healthy Harbour Partnership. The Gladstone Healthy Harbour Partnership is a forum to bring together parties to work towards the highest environmental standards for Gladstone Harbour.

This report provides information on the success of the Australian Government investments to reduce nutrient, pesticide and sediment discharge into the reef from broadscale landuse over the period 2008 to 2013.

An independent review into the leaking bund wall at the Port of Gladstone is announced by the Minister for Environment to ensure that the ecological health of our oceans and harbours are protected.

Balou was in competition with the alpha male of the southern European mountains, 26-year-old Pyros, who is believed to have fathered all other males in the region

One of France's celebrated and controversial brown bears, introduced from Slovenia, has been found dead in the Pyrenees.

Experts say the animal, aged just 11 – who boasted actors Gérard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant as "godparents" – appeared to have fallen.

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Between 1909 and 1965, the whaling station of Leith Harbour on South Georgia was one of the busiest whaling stations in the world, with more than 48,000 whales processed into oil for margarine, bone meal for fertiliser and other products. Last November, a film crew was granted access to the abandoned whaling stations, and a new BBC4 documentary shows the remains of whaling life, and the wildlife that is re-colonising Leith Harbour.

• Britain's Whale Hunters: The Untold Story is on BBC 4 on Monday 9th and 16th June, at 9pm.

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Advice on the online permits application system which enables exporters to apply for their permit using a smart form. Using the online system, exporters are able to apply for CITES export permits for specimens sourced from an approved fishery.

Officials in the Pyrenees are considering how to curb the sexual appetite of Pyros the bear to give his rivals a chance to mate

The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa-funded project that went wrong

An elderly brown bear in the Pyrenees is facing castration or segregation amid fears that his sexual dominance is threatening the species' survival in the region by limiting genetic diversity.

Pyros, one of the oldest of the 30 or so bears who roam the mountains between France and Spain, is the father, grandfather or great-grandfather of nearly all of the cubs born in the Pyrenees over the past two decades. There are four other males in the colony – only one of them is not related to Pyros – and none of them have fathered any offspring.

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In the 1960s, Margaret Lovatt was part of a Nasa-funded project to communicate with dolphins. Soon she was living with 'Peter' 24 hours a day in a converted house. Christopher Riley reports on an experiment that went tragically wrong

Like most children, Margaret Howe Lovatt grew up with stories of talking animals. "There was this book that my mother gave to me called Miss Kelly," she remembers with a twinkle in her eye. "It was a story about a cat who could talk and understand humans and it just stuck with me that maybe there is this possibility."

Unlike most children, Lovatt didn't leave these tales of talking animals behind her as she grew up. In her early 20s, living on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, they took on a new significance. During Christmas 1963, her brother-in-law mentioned a secret laboratory at the eastern end of the island where they were working with dolphins. She decided to pay the lab a visit early the following year. "I was curious," Lovatt recalls. "I drove out there, down a muddy hill, and at the bottom was a cliff with a big white building."

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After an ecological disaster in India, wildlife groups call for ban on vets using diclofenac in Italy and Spain

Wildlife groups have launched a Europe-wide campaign to outlaw a newly approved veterinary drug that has caused the deaths of tens of millions of vultures in Asia. They say that the decision to allow diclofenac to be used in Spain and Italy not only threatens to wipe out Europe's vultures but could harm other related species, including the golden eagle and the Spanish imperial eagle, one of the world's rarest raptors.

Diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory agent and painkiller, was introduced around the end of the 20th century in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh to treat sick cattle. But when the cattle's carcasses were eaten by vultures, the birds contracted a fatal kidney condition. Within a few years, vulture numbers had declined by a staggering 99.9% across south Asia. The worst-affected species included long-billed, slender-billed and oriental white-backed vultures. Dead cattle were left to rot without vultures to consume their flesh. Packs of feral dogs grew to fill the ecological gap. The risk of rabies also rose, said health experts. Now diclofenac has been approved for use in Italy and Spain.

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