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Iran has said the US should apologise after the crews of two US Navy boats were detained by Revolutionary Guards for “violating” Iran’s waters in the Gulf.

Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, said in an interview broadcast live on state television that foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had taken a “firm stance” on the issue when contacting US secretary of state John Kerry.

Earlier, US officials said they had received assurances from Tehran that the crew of two small US navy ships in Iranian custody would soon be allowed to continue their journey. Fadavi was quoted by the Tasnim news agency as saying “The final order will be issued soon and they will probably be released.”

Twelve people died and more than 80 were sickened during the Flint water crisis, and now authorities are holding Michigan officials responsible.

In a news conference Thursday, prosecutors announced charges against nine officials for their roles in the crisis, including former Gov. Rick Snyder, who faces two counts of willful neglect of duty. Snyder has pleaded not guilty to the charges. The eight others include members of Snyder's staff, officials from the city of Flint and state public health officials. They face a variety of charges ranging from willful neglect of duty to involuntary manslaughter."The Flint water crisis is not some relic of the past," Michigan Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud, one of the prosecutors leading the investigation, said.

Flint has been exposed to extremely high levels of lead since 2014 when city and state officials switched the city's water supply from the Detroit Water System to the contaminated Flint River in an effort to cut costs.

Sitting on the Arizona-Nevada border near Las Vegas, Lake Mead - formed by the creation of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River - is the largest reservoir in the United States and provides water to 25 million people across three states and Mexico. Here, the stunning scale of a drought in the American west has been laid plain for all to see.

Californians have been told to conserve water at home or risk mandated water restrictions as a severe drought on the West Coast is expected to get worse during the summer months.

People have been told to limit outdoor watering and take shorter showers. In Los Angeles, many are being asked to cut their water use by 35%. The restrictions come after California recorded the driest start to the year on record.

she has not had running water for more than five months — nor is there any tap water in her near future — because of a punishing and relentless drought in California

In the Gallegos household and more than 500 others in Tulare County, residents cannot flush a toilet, fill a drinking glass, wash dishes or clothes, or even rinse their hands without reaching for a bottle or bucket.

For months, families called county and state officials asking what they should do when their water ran out, only to be told that there was no public agency that could help them.

Revolutionary Guards release 10 US sailors who entered Iranian waters

The US military confirmed the sailors’ release after the Guards issued a statement claiming they were freed into international waters after an apology from Washington.

The sailors’ two small navy craft brieflywent missing on Tuesday while crossing the Gulf from Kuwait to Bahrain. Pentagon sources later said the vessels entered Iranian waters because of technical difficulties.

As Covid-19 swept across the world, protecting those on the front lines became front of mind. Governments, the World Health Organization, UNICEF and other partners mobilized masks and gowns from every corner of the world even as the cost of those items skyrocketed.

Many doctors and nurses don't have the means to wash their hands when treating patients, and disease and death are the result.

New figures show that an estimated 1.8 billion people use or work in clinics or hospitals without basic water services, meaning no access to running water, as detailed in a recent WHO report. Worldwide, nearly 1 in 4 health facilities lacks basic water services, 1 in 3 lacks adequate means to wash hands where patients are treated, 1 in 10 has no sanitation services, and 1 in 3 do not segregate waste safely. In the world's 46 least developed countries, half of all health facilities have no clean water on site.

Some of the world’s most ancient buildings are being destroyed by climate change, as rising concentrations of salt in Iraq eat away at mud brick and more frequent sandstorms erode ancient wonders.

Iraq is known as the cradle of civilisation. It was here that agriculture was born, some of the world’s oldest cities were built, such as the Sumerian capital Ur, and one of the first writing systems was developed – cuneiform. The country has “tens of thousands of sites from the Palaeolithic through Islamic eras”, explained Augusta McMahon, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Cambridge.

Damage to sites such as the legendary Babylon “will leave gaps in our knowledge of human evolution, of the development of early cities, of the management of empires, and of the dynamic changes in the political landscape of the Islamic era”,

When the rice shoots began to wither on Lam Thi Loi’s farm in the heart of the Mekong Delta, a usually verdant region of Vietnam, she faced a hard choice: Let them die in the parched earth, or pump salty water from the river to give them a chance.

The Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s premier rice growing region, is suffering its worst drought since French colonial administrators began recording statistics in 1926.

The increasingly dramatic effect of El Niño, the weather phenomenon that causes excessive heat and reduced rainfall in Southeast Asia, is the prime reason for the crop failures in the delta, scientists say. But it is not the only one.

In the United States, we experienced more than 80 “billion-dollar” climate and weather disasters in the last decade, and several have cost much more. The regularity of these episodes and the resulting damage shows that we are not prepared for the current climate, let alone a changing one that portends more weather extremes.

We are not arguing that the drought has been caused by climate change alone, or that all weather disasters have a link to climate change. However, the evidence is clear that many areas of the globe are experiencing increasing risks from weather and climate hazards. As with the California drought, climate change is an important thumb on the scale, increasing the odds of particular extremes in specific places.

In California, we can expect warmer winters and hotter summers, drier dry years and wetter wet years, and less water storage from snowpack in the mountains, which also controls flooding. This means more years with extreme fire danger, critically overdrawn groundwater, legal water rights that exceed the amount of water available and challenges to balancing trade-offs among water storage, flood control and environmental protection.

Massachusetts health officials announced findings Wednesday linking contaminated water in the northeastern area of the state to a cluster of child cancers in the 1990s, though officials say the water no longer poses a health risk.

The study conducted by the state’s environmental health bureau specifically looked at Wilmington, Mass., and found expectant mothers’ exposure to contaminants like n-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) and trichloroethylene (TCE) from the public water supply was associated with an increase of cancers like leukemia and lymphoma in children born in the 1990s. The association, said to be "statistically significant," was upheld even after accounting for factors like family history and possible household exposures. 

"There was no evidence of increased odds of cancer for children who were exposed to NDMA or TCE during childhood," a press release states.

Along with amazing technological advances, the Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th century introduced new sources of air and water pollution.

Out of this movement came events like Earth Day, and legislative victories like the Clean Air Act (1970) and the Clean Water Act (1972).

The resulting smog and soot had serious health impacts on the residents of growing urban centers.

For years, opium has been the monster too big to slay. One Afghan government after another has pledged to stamp out opium production and trafficking, only to prove unable to resist billions of dollars in illicit profits.

But after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, opium taxes and smuggling helped fuel the Taliban’s own 20-year insurgency.

The Taliban announced on April 3 that poppy cultivation had been outlawed, with violators to be punished under Shariah law.

A scientist who worked for the chemical industry nowshapes policy on hazardous chemicals.

Within theE.P.A., there is fear that public health is at risk.

For years, the Environmental Protection Agency has struggled to prevent an ingredient once used in stain-resistant carpets and nonstick pans from contaminating drinking water.

Japan said on Tuesday that it had decided to gradually release tons of treated wastewater from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the ocean, describing it as the best option for disposal despite fierce opposition from fishing crews at home and concern from governments abroad.

Disposal of the wastewater has been long delayed by public opposition and by safety concerns. But the space used to store the water is expected to run out next year, and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said during the cabinet meeting on Tuesday that disposing of the wastewater from the plant was “a problem that cannot be avoided.”

The Fukushima crisis was set off in March 2011 by a huge earthquake and tsunami that ripped through northeastern Japan and killed more than 19,000 people. The subsequent meltdown of three of the plant’s six reactors was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

In the weeks since the arrival of the first Covid-19 vaccines, the Rev. Dr. Sarah Bailey has been fielding calls from friends and neighbors in Flint.

The vaccine won't give them the virus and it won't affect their DNA, she tells them, just as all major medical authorities have said based on extensive testing. She walks them through the science behind the vaccines.

The people reaching out to Bailey aren't folks who will take a vaccine just because the federal government tells them it's safe and effective. They live in Flint, a city still reeling from the 18 months starting in 2014 when public officials insisted that tap water, eventually found to contain dangerously high lead levels, was safe to drink.

Tons of dead fish have washed ashore as the once-crystalline waters became choked with algae.

But they agree that nitrate-filled runoffs from fertilizers from nearby farms have heavily damaged the waters where oysters and sea-horses used to thrive

He also put some of the blame on local politicians, accusing them of long downplaying the contamination

On November 29th diplomats gathered for yet more negotiations meant to salvage the nuclear deal that Iran signed with six world powers in 2015, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The JCPOA set limits on Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of many international economic sanctions.

1. Floods and disease

As life becomes less tolerable for humans, animals and plants, things will get easier for disease-causing organisms. More than half of all known diseases have been made worse by the climate crisis

A warming world makes outbreaks of water-borne diseases such as cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio more likely.

A state government in India promised to introduce a bill to grant coveted “backward” status to a relatively prosperous caste group, officials said Monday, in an effort to quell protests that have raged for the past four days.

The protesters, members of the Jat caste group, had blocked roads around the capital, set fire to railway stations and cars, and temporarily shut down a crucial canal that is a major source of the city’s water. Nineteen people were killed in the violence in surrounding Haryana State, and fears of water shortages led New Delhi to close its schools to conserve its supply.

The main thoroughfare in the area, Grand Trunk Road, which had been reopened on Sunday, was blocked again by fighting on Monday morning, the police said. Still, a state official said, 80 percent of the roads that had been closed were open again on Monday morning.

A new category of the dispossessed now exists—“climate refugees.” Which countries are particularly at risk—and should the rest of the world be held financially accountable for them?

The countries that are most vulnerable are places like Bangladesh, India or West Africa. Globally, 145 million people live 3 feet or less above high tide. Small island states, like the Marshall Islands, may not only have to move to escape the rising seas, they’re going to lose their entire cultures as their nations are literally going to be under water. The central paradox is that the people who are going to suffer most, like the Marshall Islanders or people in Bangladesh, are those who have done the least to contribute to this problem. These are not the people who are driving around in SUVs and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere!

The last time the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as they are today, sea levels were 20-30 feet higher. But even if we all turn in our cars and ride skateboards to work, because of the heat that’s already in the ocean, sea levels are going to continue to rise.