Air quality study judges UK capital to be ‘below average’ for its lack of action on tackling deadly soot particles • Read the air quality study here (PDF) London ranks as one of Europe’s unhealthiest major cities, having done little to tackle deadly particles from diesel vehicles, according to a major air quality study published on Wednesday. The home of the 2012 Olympics ranks “below average” in a soot pollution league table by German environment and consumer groups, coming behind Glasgow, Copenhagen and Stockholm. Berlin is judged to have Europe’s cleanest air and only Düsseldorf, Milan and Rome are judged to have worse air than London. The survey, which comes after Barack Obama last Friday put off legislation to force US cities to clean up air pollution , shows that bad air quality in Europe causes nearly 500,000 premature deaths a year across all countries, and costs up to €790bn a year to address. It supports two major official air quality studies published earlier this year in Europe and Britain . The 17 cities were judged on the action they had taken to reduce soot in the air between 2005 and 2010 when new European limits for particulate matter (PM10) came into force. London was ranked low because of the “backward steps” it has taken to address air pollution since 2005. It has tightened its low emission zone for heavy goods vehicles and promoted some cycling and walking, but it has halved the size of its congestion charging zone , scaled back plans for new hybrid buses and sharply increased public transport fares. Nine criteria including traffic management, the shift to sustainable public transport and public information were taken into account. “With less than a year to the Olympic Games, London is doing less to deal with its dangerous air pollution levels than other major European capitals. The government and the mayor of London can no longer ignore the biggest public health crisis since the great smog of 1952,” said James Grugeon, chief executive of Environmental Protection UK , an NGO that is part of a coalition of environment and health groups campaigning to raise awareness of air pollution and put pressure on government to meet minimum EU air quality laws. “It’s shameful that Londoners are still forced to breath dirty air. Urgent action is needed by both the mayor and UK government to help Londoners breathe more easily – and this will also help tackle climate change,” said Jenny Bates, London campaigner for Friends of the Earth . “The mayor seems to have crippled the potential of existing measures to improve London’s air quality,” said Simon Birkett, head of the Campaign for Clean Air . Pollution Travel and transport Climate change London Green politics Europe John Vidal guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is used to catching flak over all things monetary , so when he and wife Tonette decided to renovate the governor’s mansion to its former glory, they (probably wisely) decided to do it without making taxpayers foot the bill. Unfortunately, they’re not getting off scot-free. On Sept….
Continue reading …NASA today released a batch of high-resolution images of the moon that show close-ups of landing sites from three Apollo missions, reports Space.com . (NASA has labeled and unlabeled versions of the images, taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, here .) They show astronauts’ footprints, the tracks of their lunar…
Continue reading …Archeologists near Vienna, Austria, say underground radar has made a spectacular find: a Roman gladiator school that appears to be in better shape than any found so far, reports Der Spiegel . It even still has the wooden post used to represent an opponent in the arena. Don’t bank on seeing…
Continue reading …The CDC is out with new stats on smoking, and the big headline is that the number of adults who partake has fallen from 20.9% in 2005 to 19.3% in 2010, report MedPage Today and the Wall Street Journal . That means about 3 million fewer people are smoking…
Continue reading …New poll results from the Washington Post and ABC have a familiar ring—Rick Perry is the frontrunner. Among all Republicans and right-leaning independents, Perry gets 27%, followed by Mitt Romney (22%), Sarah Palin (14%), Ron Paul (8%), and Michele Bachmann. What’s more, 30% say Perry has the best chance…
Continue reading …More than 1,000 homes have been destroyed in at least 57 wildfires across rain-starved Texas, most of them in one devastating blaze near Austin that is still raging out of control, officials said today. Gov. Rick Perry, who cut short a presidential campaign trip to South Carolina to return…
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Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has told staff in an email she was fired over the phone by the chairman of the board Carol Bartz was fired on Tuesday as Yahoo Inc’s CEO nearly three years into a tenure in which the company fell short of the turnaround she was charged with leading. The company said Bartz will be replaced by chief financial officer Timothy Morse on an interim basis. “I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board,” Bartz said in a two-sentence email to employees. “It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.” Yahoo said in a statement that Bartz had been “removed” from her role and it would begin a search for a new, permanent CEO. Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock voiced his public support in June for the CEO, a lightning rod for criticism from Wall Street, and known for her tough attitude and salty language. Shares in the company jumped more than 6% in after-hours trade to $13.72, from a close of $12.91 on the Nasdaq. The stock was trading around $12 in January 2009, when Bartz joined Yahoo, hoping to engineer a turnaround for a company then slowly ceding market share. In January 2000, near the end of the dot-com bubble, the stock traded at more than $125 a share. Yahoo remains one of the most popular destinations on the web, but the company is facing increasing competition from social networking service Facebook and continuing pressure from search leader Google Inc. The Internet company reported a slight decline in net revenue in the second quarter, as efforts to restructure its sales force caused disruptions. Research firm eMarketer has projected that Facebook would overtake Yahoo this year to collect the biggest slice of online display advertising dollars in the United States. Management and the board also came under fire after the company’s handling of its relationship with China’s Alibaba Group, in which Yahoo owns a stake of roughly 40%. The rocky relationship between the companies came to a head in May when it was revealed that Alibaba had abruptly handed Alipay – one of Alibaba’s crown jewels – to a company controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, apparently without Yahoo’s knowledge. The news of Bartz’s ouster was first reported by tech blog AllThingsD. “Carol Bartz was brought in to try to organise and streamline the company and frankly she’s been able to do that. However, Yahoo is going to need a little bit more than organisation and streamlining,” said Michael Yoshikami, CEO at fund management company YCMNET Advisors. “They are going to need a vision of what they want to be in the future. And I don’t think investors really understood what that clear vision was.” Yahoo Internet Computing Carol Bartz United States Digital media guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The rumor mill proved true this time: Eddie Murphy will host the Oscars in February, reports the Huffington Post . One connection that likely helped, as noted by Deadline : This year’s show is being produced by Brett Ratner, who directed the soon-to-open movie Tower Heist , starring Murphy and Ben Stiller. Murphy…
Continue reading …Awesome reason to keep that newspaper subscription: A 75-year-old woman in Texas got trapped in an outdoor chair overnight and might not have survived had her paperboy not pulled up about 5am, reports the Austin American-Statesman . Evelyn Rogers sat in the lawn chair about 6pm when it collapsed upon her….
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