Oil-trading company Trafigura has agreed to pay 30 million pounds to victims of toxic waste dumped in Ivory Coast in an out-of-court settlement, a spokesman for the firm said Sunday.
The agreement with British lawyers Leigh Day and Company, who represent 31,000 claimants in Abidjan, accepts however that there is no link between exposure to the waste and any deaths or miscarriages, as was alleged.
“The agreement was signed late on Saturday night,” a spokesman for Trafigura told AFP on Sunday, confirming the deal was worth 30 million pounds (33 million euros, 49 million dollars). Read More / Watch Video »
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Five years ago, James Lovelock’s “The Revenge of Gaia” issued a terrifying warning: if humankind didn’t radically curtail greenhouse-gas emissions, there would, quite literally, be hell to pay.
Italian authorities have discovered a ship that was sunk by the mafia off the coast of southern Italy with 120 barrels of radioactive waste on board, a local prosecutor said Monday. 
Argentina accused neighbouring Uruguay in the UN’s highest court Monday of reneging on a bilateral treaty when it authorised a paper mill that Buenos Aires says is now polluting a shared river.
French investigators are examining whether a lorry driver has become the first victim of a toxic seaweed that is clogging parts of the Brittany coast.
Climate change is killing valuable coral reef systems, a United Nations-backed report published on Wednesday warned.
Up to 10,000 Chinese villagers have clashed with police in eastern China in the latest incident in a wave of social unrest caused by fears over industrial pollution. 
U.S. government scientists have for the first time found chemical contaminants in drinking water wells near natural gas drilling operations, fueling concern that a gas-extraction technique is endangering the health of people who live close to drilling rigs. 
WASHINGTON — The world’s oceans this summer are the warmest on record. 
Industrialized nations excluding the United States are planning cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of between 15 and 21 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 under a new U.N. climate pact, official data showed on Tuesday. 
More beaches could be shut in northwestern France due to health fears over toxic algae, conservationists warned on Monday, after it emerged that algae have spread to almost 100 sites in Brittany. 
CLIMATE change will inflict more than $37 billion worth of damage to the Great Barrier Reef over the next century, a report has found. 
MANILA (AFP) – The World Health Organization on Wednesday warned Asia Pacific countries that they could be vulnerable to health risks and food shortages as a result of climate change. 
FORT MCMURRAY, Alberta – Canada’s government was investigating an oil sands company after hundreds of ducks that landed on a partially frozen pond filled with toxic waste died. 
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – A heavy metal believed to be benign in the state’s coastal waters does in fact pose a threat to the health and survival of oysters, a University of North Carolina at Charlotte scientist says. The heavy metal cadmium, combined with warming coastal waters, can kill the shellfish or weaken their resistance to disease, according to research led by assistant biology professor Inna Sokolova and published this month in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
