The Stream, March 21: Water and Security

The United Nations should promote cooperation in the regions most at risk of water conflicts such as the Middle East and North Africa, where scarce supplies and rising populations might spark future tensions, according to experts at a water and security meeting in Toronto, Canada.

Japan
The Guardian‘s datablog lists and ranks the world’s nuclear power plant accidents since 1952. Surprisingly, the International Atomic Energy Authority does not keep a complete historical database.

As Japan managed to restore power and start dousing the overheated reactors at the crippled Fukushima power plant, sources for The Wall Street Journal revealed that the initial efforts to cool Fukushima were delayed by concerns over damaging long-term investments and by passivity on the part of the government. But what do we actually know about Japan’s nuclear crisis?

Opinion
In this commentary for the Guardian, physician and molecular biologist Henry Miller argues that bad regulation of genetic engineering and poorly planned biofuels policy are largely to blame for the world’s food crisis. Read the arguments and the long discussion that they unleashed.

According to this analysis for Reuters, the history of the biggest oil spill cases in the last 30 years shows that lengthy and expensive litigation tends to work in favor of oil companies. What does this mean for the Amazon oil spill, the hundreds of lawsuits filed against BP in the Deepwater Horizon spill, for the future of hydrofracking and the proposed tar sands oil pipeline to Texas, among others?

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