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There are toxic secrets in Canada's Chemical Valley

|NATIONAL OBSERVER Ron Plain will most likely be dead in 24 months. In November 2016, his doctors diagnosed him with a rare form of cancer… Story here.

The Labouratory

The Guardian - George Monbiot We are still living in the long 20 th  Century. We are stuck with its redundant technologies: the internal combustion engine; thermal power plants; factory farms. We are stuck with its redundant politics: unfair electoral systems; their capture by funders and lobbyists; the failure to temper representation with real participation. Story here.

Worrying new research finds that the ocean is cutting through a key Antarctic ice shelf

The Washington Post A new scientific study has found that warm ocean water is carving an enormous channel into the underside of one of the key floating ice shelves of West Antarctica, the most vulnerable sector of the enormous ice continent. Story here.

"Bill 24 Stinks!" Manitoba Green Party Leader - James Beddome.

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Winnipeg Free Press WINNIPEG - Green Party leader James Beddome wasn't the least bit subtle Wednesday about what he thinks of the Pallister government's red tape reduction bill. "This bill stinks!"  Beddome declared to a rally on the steps of the Manitoba legislature. "It's part of a Conservative agenda that tells us all regulation is bad," Beddome said. "Government efficiency means don't do our homework; if there's no data, there's no problem." Environmental activists led by the Wilderness Committee and Hog Watch Manitoba protested Bill 24, an omnibus bill going to public hearings sometime later this month, warning that within its reductions to regulations were changes that would allow the expansion of industrial hog barns that would further jeopardize the health of Lake Winnipeg. Speakers could not agree on  how many sets of regulations are threatened by red tape reduction - 12, 14, and 15 were all cited - bu

Tainted honey spells more trouble for bees. Are we losing the battle to save them?

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 by Larry Powell Three out of every four samples of honey tested in a global survey released this week, were tainted with  neonicotinoids,  the world's most widely-used insecticide. A five-member Swiss research team  tested almost two hundred honey samples from every continent except Antarctica (including several remote islands), for the five main compounds in the "neonic family" of pesticides (acetamiprid, clothianidin, imidacloprid, thiacloprid, and thiamethoxam). At least one  of those compounds was found  in 75%  of all samples tested. (Fourty-five percent contained two or more, while ten percent showed traces of four or five.) The levels detected were considered too low to pose a risk to people who actually eat honey. But, for adult bees, honey is their  only  food in winter and when flowers aren't blooming. While "neonics" may not always kill the pollinators outright, they've been shown to have "sub-lethal

Lessons learned from Manitoba's Flood of the Century

The Red River Valley Echo MORRIS - They were at the forefront of one of Manitoba’s worst natural disasters, and 20 years later, municipal officials and provincial experts gathered in Morris to share their perspective of what became known as “The Flood of the Century”. Story here.

Crash in sea-turtle births stumps ecologists

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Nature|News Leading suspect — climate change — doesn’t fully explain what is happening to leatherback turtles in the US Virgin Islands. Story here. Little leatherbacks leave their nest in Aruba. Photo by  Elise Peterson