25 year anniversary of the worlds worst industrial accident (Bhopal, India)

People in the Indian city of Bhopal have been marking 25 years since a leak at a gas plant killed thousands and left many more seriously ill. Activists and survivors marched through the city, chanting slogans against the government and Union Carbide - the US firm that owned the plant at the time.

The incident was the worst industrial disaster in history. Forty tonnes of a toxin called methyl isocyanate leaked from the factory and settled over slums on 3 December 1984.

Campaigners say at least 15,000 were killed within days and that the effects of the gas continue to this day.

The site of the former pesticide plant is now abandoned. The state government of Madhya Pradesh took it over in 1998, but environmentalists say poison is still found there.

Campaigners say Bhopal has an unusually high incidence of children with birth defects and growth deficiency, as well as cancers, diabetes and other chronic illnesses.

No-one has ever stood trial over what happened at Bhopal.

Twenty years ago, the American company, Union Carbide paid $470m (£282m) in compensation to the Indian government.

Click on the headline to see a short video of the effects of the disaster

Dark roads will lead to brighter future says pollution commission

Street and motorway lights should be dimmed or switched off to save energy and let people see the stars, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution says.

It says there is little evidence that such lighting significantly cuts accidents or crime. It recommends the removal of thousands of motorway lights, possibly even at junctions. The report says that since 1993 most of the UK has become brighter, obscuring the stars, and it backs a recent paper in the scientific journal Nature that said: “Without a direct view of the stars, mankind is cut off from most of the Universe, deprived of any direct sense of its huge scale and our tiny place in it.”

The commission proposes “dark- sky parks” all over Britain, with planning restrictions on outdoor lighting. The Galloway Forest Park in southern Scotland this month became Britain’s first official dark-sky park, with 7,000 stars visible there, compared with 500 in Glasgow.

It says that the planned replacement of 2.3 million of Britain’s 7.4 million road lights in the next two years is “a real opportunity for local authorities to think about minimising the negative impacts of stray light”.

It says motorway lighting reduces crashes by about 10 per cent and that this may be too low to justify the costs. It welcomes the Highways Agency’s trials of switching off lighting on six stretches of motorway between midnight and 5am. The trials began in March and have so far reduced carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 230 tonnes, equal to 100 cars’ annual emissions

Environmental issues in China - Year 13 homework

Use this website on China to help you with your Superpower Geographies homework (due Tuesday 10th November). Have a look at the interactive map, videos and article (it's a bit long at 6 pages, but useful) and make a list of all the environmental problems that China have as a result of their rapid growth and emergence as a superpower.

ps - go down to the "Slideshare" widget on the left hand panel for past exam papers if you need some for the re-takes. Mark schemes are there as well.