A huge swath of the waters off Antarctica must be protected from fishing and other industries, environmental groups said on Monday.

More than 40% of the region needs to be given protection before one of the world's last true frontier areas is damaged irreparably by human activity, the Antarctic Ocean Alliance (AOA) said.

Microsoft on Tuesday vowed it would be carbon neutral in the fiscal year starting July.

The plan to zero-out the overall amount of climate-changing gas spewed while running data centers, software labs, and offices and even during work-related travel included charging departments a fee for carbon produced.

"The goal is to make our business divisions responsible for the cost of offsetting their own carbon emissions," Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner said in a release.

The IT and electronics industry insists that the entire collection mechanism of e-waste will need to be strengthened in order to make the new e-waste management rules effective.

The e-waste (Management & Handling) Rules, 2011, which were notified in May 2011, have come into effect from May 1, 2012 and people will now be required to dispose of their discarded electronic at designated centres.

‘Spread of the Bt gene could make brinjal a problematic weed'

An independent enquiry has revealed that the cultivation of genetically engineered (GE, also called genetically modified, or GM) Bt brinjal poses risks to the environment and possibly to human health. The occurrence of wild, weedy and also cultivated relatives presents a likelihood that the GE Bt gene will spread to these relatives but, so far, this has largely been overlooked in the risk assessments for GE Bt brinjal, it says.

For a change, farmers in Bihar may well look up to the Sun now than cloud. Awadhesh Kumar, a resident of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s native village Kalyan Bigaha under Nalanda, had a different kind of irrigation experience this month, with his fields experiencing the functioning of a solar photo voltaic pumpset.

The experiment was meant to give a message to the state government that has been grappling with acute power shortage and hence cannot offer adequate electricity for irrigation. The state generates only 200 MW power and needs 2500 MW during peak hours.

Environmental advocacy group Greenpeace said on Tuesday that an investigation it had conducted found tea bags sold in China by Unilever's Lipton brand contained unsafe levels of pesticide residue, though Unilever said the product was safe and to standard.

Greenpeace said in a statement that in March it randomly purchased several boxes of Lipton tea bags sold in two Beijing stores and sent them to an independent laboratory for pesticide residue testing.

As Greenpeace completes 10 years in India, it chalks up its successes and faces some flak. Kunal Majumder looks at both sides of the story

Nuclear power is safer than it was a year ago when a series of disasters at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant left 19,000 people dead or missing, the U.N. atomic energy chief said on Friday, but Greenpeace said no lessons had been learnt.

In a statement issued ahead of Sunday's first anniversary of the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986, Director General Yukiya Amano of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said meaningful steps had been taken to strengthen global nuclear safety since Fukushima.

The Indian government has cancelled a visa granted to Maya Kobayashi, a Fukushimat survivor due to visit India and share her experiences with communities who would be affected by the proposed nuclear power plants, including the Koodankulam Nuclear Project.

She was visiting India on the invitation of Greenpeace. The Indian embassy had granted Kobayashi a business visa on February 15th and the information conveyed to them was that she had been invited to “attend events and meet people.”

China said Friday that two-thirds of its cities currently fail to meet new air-quality standards introduced this week that are based on the pollutants most harmful to health.
Under pressure from a worried Chinese public, the government this week issued revised air-quality targets based on the smallest particulates, which make up much of the country’s air pollution.
Cities will have four years to get their pollution levels down to the new limits, which cover levels of ozone and particulates measuring 2.5 micrometres or less, known as PM 2.5.