North Korea has resumed construction work on an experimental light water reactor (ELWR) in a move that could extend its capacity to produce more material for nuclear weapons, website 38North reported on Thursday.

Based on April 30 satellite images, work halted in December at the reactor had now re-started, said the website (38north.org), run by the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University and former U.S. State Department official Joel Wit.

Corals, trees and marine sediments, among others, are direct evidence of the climate of the past, but they are not the only indicators. A team led by Spanish scientists has interpreted records written in Iraq by Arabic historians for the first time and has made a chronology of climatic events from the year 816 to 1009, when cold waves and snow were normal.

Gene banks represent an overdue push to preserve crop biodiversity. It also needs conserving on farms. WITH a heavy clunk, the steel outer doors of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault closed on February 28th, shutting out a howling Arctic gale and entombing a tonne of new arrivals: 25,000 seed samples from America, Colombia, Costa Rica, Tajikistan, Armenia and Syria. For Cary Fowler, the vault’s American architect, the Syrian chickpeas and fava beans were especially welcome.

Fresh water supplies are unlikely to keep up with global demand by 2040, increasing political instability, hobbling economic growth and endangering world food markets, according to a U.S. intelligence assessment released on Thursday.

The report by the office of the Director of National Intelligence said that areas including South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa will face major challenges in coping with water problems that could hinder the ability to produce food and generate energy.

Indian companies tried to export nuclear grade material to Syria and Iran in violation of international conventions and desisted only after the matter was raised by the US, WikiLeaks has revealed. The secret US diplomatic correspondence says that a public sector unit was also trying to export high grade conventional explosives to Syria in 2009 but was stopped by the Indian defence ministry as it would have been ‘contrary to export control policies’.

The European Union has agreed to ban oil imports from Syria, the most significant economic sanctions imposed on the regime of Bashar al-Assad for its use of military force to suppress pro-democracy protests.

European Union members escalated the pressure on Syria’s government on Friday by banning all imports of Syrian oil in response to its violent suppression of the nearly six-month-old uprising there. It was the most punitive action by the European Union to date over the crackdown in Syria, which sells nearly all its oil to Europe and relies heavily on that export income.

An invasive alien weed, silverleaf nightshade, is threatening cotton and wheat crops in Syria and Iraq and could spread to Lebanon and Jordan, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Tuesday.

More than 60 percent of the farmland in Syria, growing mainly cotton and wheat, has been infested with the weed, originally from the American tropics, which sucks nutrients from

ONGC Videsh Ltd, the overseas arm of state- owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC), has made two significant oil discover- ies of 185 million barrels of oil in a block in northeast- ern Syria.

OVL and its partner IPR Mediterranean Exploration Ltd discovered Rashid and Abu Khashab oilfields in Block-24, the company said in a statement here.