Dirty water and air kill 500,000 a year, says report

Environment chief points finger at corrupt officials

The head of China’s environmental agency has blamed the rising number of riots, demonstrations and petitions across the country on public anger at pollution.

Echoing the language of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Shengxian called for a “struggle” against polluters, and said the public refused to accept the increasing degradation of the environment.

New U.S. data show how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of the war-torn nation.

The number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, newly released figures show, raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war effort and the government’s capacity to carry out military and rebuilding campaigns.

The attempted terror attacks in Britain prove the U.S. needs its domestic spying program and more surveillance cameras in American cities, two powerful lawmakers said yesterday.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman called for an end to the “petty, partisan fighting” over the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping and e-mail spying efforts.

“I hope this week, based on what happened in the United Kingdom, President Bush [and] the bipartisan leadership of Congress will sit down and say, ‘Hey, let’s cut out the nonsense,’” Lieberman (I-Conn.) said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Tax-exempt groups such as the American Center and the Lawyers Association were deployed in battleground states to press for restrictive ID laws and oversee balloting.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division turned traditional voting rights enforcement upside down with legal policies that narrowed rather than protected the rights of minorities.

The White House and the Justice Department encouraged selected U.S. attorneys to bring voter fraud prosecutions, despite studies showing that election fraud isn’t a widespread problem.

Humans have domesticated the planet to such a degree that few untouched spots remain, researchers report in a review article published in the journal Science.

Earth is so tamed that conservationism should shift focus from protecting nature from humans to better understanding and managing a domesticated world, the authors said.

“There is no such thing as nature untainted by people,” writes Peter Kareiva, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, a US-based non-profit group. “Facing this reality should change the scientific focus of environmental science.”