Karachi Municipal Corporation has entered into an agreement with a Turkish firm on bringing about an improvement in the solid waste management system of the city, a statement said on Wednesday.

It recalled that a memorandum of understanding in this regard was signed by the two sides recently in Islamabad.

A wildlife official says that about 5,000 elephants have been killed by poachers over the past five years around the Nouabale Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo.

Thomas Breuer, a senior technical official of the Wildlife Conservation Society project in the park, says that authorities must take action and double guards around the park.

Breuer says that while poaching around the park is intensifying, poaching inside is not as prevalent.

The Asian Development Bank has announced participation in its first Shariah-compliant project financing by providing assistance to two projects to build wind farms near Karachi, using two partial credit guarantees worth up to $66 million to the Islamic Development Bank.

IDB will use the assistance to finance two projects that will each produce 50MW of much-needed additional power for Pakistan and lower reliance on fossil fuels.

The wind farms will avoid greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 136,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

The Capital Development Authority’s (CDA) plan to install 65,000 light-emitting diodes (LED) at an estimated cost of Rs6.8 billion was challenged in the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on Tuesday.

Advocates Mohammad Naseem Khan and Syed Shajjar Abbas in their petition contended before the court that the multi-billion project had been awarded to a favourite firm by the prime minister and his task force constituted to oversee the CDA’s affairs.

Certain amendments have been proposed to the new Punjab Environmental Protection (Amendment) Act, 2012, the other day.

Secretary (Environment) Iqbal Saeed Wahla chaired a meeting at EPD office and presented the proposals to the media and experts on environment.

Mr Saeed said the proposals would be forwarded to the law department after holding a few brainstorming sessions with all the stakeholders.

The Sindh High Court on Tuesday issued notices to the chief secretary, provincial irrigation and health secretaries and chief of the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board in a petition against the supply of contaminated and unhygienic water in the city.

Japan was hit by two shallow earthquakes in the space of just eight minutes on Sunday, one of them measuring a strong 6.2-magnitude, but there were no reports of damage and no tsunami alert.

The 6.2-magnitude quake struck at 4:20pm (0720 GMT) off Japan’s northeast Pacific coast, the national meteorological agency said, followed by a tremor with a reading of 5.7 at 4:28pm.

The US Geological Survey estimated the magnitude of the first quake at 6.0. The depth of both quakes was about 10 kms, the agency said.

Massive extraction of groundwater can resolve a puzzle over a rise in sea levels in past decades, scientists in Japan said on Sunday.

Global sea levels rose by an average of 1.8 millimetres per year from 1961-2003, according to data from tide gauges.

But the big question is how much of this can be pinned to global warming.

National environmental programmes have been seeing no progress since the devolution of the Ministry of Environment two years ago.

All environmental conservation plans were approved by the Pakistan Environment Protection Council (PEPC) – the apex organisation at the national level for formulation and implementation of the national environmental policy and programmes – headed by the prime minister.

Japan’s government on Friday called on the nation’s homes and businesses to cut their energy use by as much as 15 per cent amid fears that nuclear plant shutdowns will spark power shortages and blackouts.

With the coming of summer, when the draw on the grid increases as air conditioning gets cranked up, Japan’s utilities are warning of a shortfall.