TOP STORY: The pile of televisions waiting for recycling at the Eastern
Sanitation Yard in Baltimore - many of them wrapped in wood paneling
popular in decades past - is likely to get larger today when the nation completes its switch to digital TV. [Baltimore Sun]
Of all the things that have changed in China over the past 30 years, transportation has undergone one of the most obvious of transformations. Where city streets once swarmed with bicycles, they are now full of automobiles. Cars clog intersection and expressways. But zipping through the congestion is the vanguard of another transportation revolution: vehicles that use no gas, emit no exhaust and are so quiet they can surprise the unwary pedestrian. [TIME]
Making good on U.S. President Barack Obama's promise to accelerate the greening of the federal fleet, the U.S. General Services Administration has ordered 14,105 fuel efficient vehicles this month and will use $210 million in Recovery Act money to pay for them. [GreenBiz.com]
Dozens of communities nationwide are at risk from a coal ash spill like the one that blanketed a Tennessee neighborhood last year, but the Obama administration has decided not to tell the public about it because of the danger of a terrorist attack. [Associated Press]
Parasites, viruses and bacteria in the Oklahoma River were to blame for sickening dozens of participants in an international triathlon held last month, Oklahoma health officials said Wednesday. [CBS News]
If the Obama administration wants to protect the people and mountains of Appalachia, it needs to end the destructive practice of mountaintop mining, not settle for promises of stricter scrutiny of the mining permits, advocates say. [Solve Climate]
Satellite images released by NASA show nearly complete destruction of Rwanda's Gishwati Forest between 1986 and 2001. Deforestation of the forest reserve is largely the result of subsistence harvesting and cultivation by refugees in the aftermath of the country's 1994 genocide. Overall only 600 hectares of Gishwati's original 100,000 hectares of forest remain, a loss of 99.4 percent. [Mongabay.com]
Leslie C.
said on June 13, 2009