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"Syria has disappeared from the internet. That's not an exaggeration either, nearly the entire Middle Eastern country has been cut off from the web. A post from research company Renesys reveals that what effectively amounts to all of Syria's internet connectivity shut down earlier today: Starting at 10:26 UTC (12:26pm in Damascus), Syria's international Internet connectivity shut down. In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet. We are investigating the dynamics of the outage and will post updates as they become available. A more detailed post reveals that 77 networks, representing 92% of the routed networks in the country experienced an outage. The outage comes among increasing violence in the country. According to the Daily Star, the government cut off internet as well as cell phone activity amid increasingly fierce clashes between government troops and rebels."

"Police in Paris set up checkpoints around the city on Monday to enforce a vehicle ban in an effort to cut dangerous pollution levels. All vehicles bearing even-numbered license plates are banned from driving in French capital for the day. The restrictions were introduced after pollutions levels reached dangerous levels for five days in a row"

"In only a few years, logging and agribusiness have cut Indonesia's vast rainforest by half. The government has renewed a moratorium on deforestation but it may already be too late for the endangered animals -and for the people whose lives lie in ruin"

"Have you heard of carbon trading?  Where a country or region sets a cap for its emissions, and then uses permit trading to seek out the cheapest cuts.  I'm guessing you have. But what about the carbon in trade?  The carbon that moves around the world in the form of fossil fuels and finished products. Heard of it? When we talk about carbon emissions we invariably talk about where emissions occur due to fossil fuel combustion.  But carbon moves around a lot.  Oil moves from the Middle East to Europe before being used and products purchased in the US are often made in China.  These movements have important implications for climate policy."

The number of older people using day care centres in England has fallen by nearly a quarter in three years, charity Age UK has said. Age UK found the number using services such as lunch clubs had fallen from 88,498 in 2009-10 to 68,160 in 2011-12, and blamed councils' funding pressures.