Category: Environment

Lawyers-to-be Help Environmental Causes for Free!

Environmental Law students are beginning a very cool trend all over the United States. They are contributing free legal services to Environmental causes to gain hands on experience in their field!

At Pace University’s environmental law clinic in White Plains N.Y, for example, some second and third year students are acting as lead attorneys and have gone against such high powered lawyers as those at Exxon-Mobil! They often take cases which government agencies aren’t willing to back up and that means taking serious risks to fight for a good cause that needs help. Some students can even wind up with legal victories on their résumés before they take their bar exam!

Rather than focusing on a grade these students actually learn by making a difference! With their energy and conviction they are going head-to-head with corporations that have armies of lawyers and unlimited budgets.

Wow! If only all lawyers were so kind!

Toronto Transit Experiment

The Toronto Transit Commission is starting an interesting experiment on it’s St. Clair street car line: the Time Based Transfer. Transfers on the line are now valid for up to two hours after you disembark the vehicle, and will allow you to board any other TTC route, including the one you just departed. See a trendy cafe from the window? Need to do some shopping? Now you can do it all on one ride.

This seems like a good way to encourage people to use Transit for their non-commuter needs. If successful, the word is that these transfers will be expanded to the entire network.

Russia Destroys Chemical Weapons Themselves!

After several years of arguing with the U.S over financial aid, Moscow has come up with its own funding to speed up the deconstruction of it’s chemical weapons aresenal. Russian industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko has submitted a proposal which states that Russia should reprocess 40 thousand tons of combat poisonous materials and also calls for an accelerated reprocessing pace of the chemical weapons.

In the past the officials had planned to finance the project with foreign funds, but Moscow never recieved the money. Now the government has approved the proposals providing 171 billion rubles for the program. Several new plants for the destruction of mustard gas, sarin, soman, and VX gas will be built with funds from this new budget.

This is an extremely important move toward the Global fight against dangerous chemical weapons which will hopefully encourage other countries to seriously consider deconstructing toxic weapons as well.