Month: February 2014

China said on Wednesday it would set up a 10 billion yuan ($1.65 billion) fund to fight air pollution, offering rewards for companies that clean up operations. Pollution increasingly worries China's stability-obsessed leaders, anxious to douse potential unrest as more affluent city dwellers turn against a growth-at-all-costs economic model that has poisoned much of the country's air, water and soil. Authorities have issued innumerable orders and policies to try and clean up China, investing in projects to fight pollution and empowering courts to hand down the death penalty in serious cases. Premier Li Keqiang told a cabinet meeting the central government would set up the 10 billion yuan fund to "use rewards to replace subsidies to fight air pollution in key areas", the government said in a statement.

(Reuters) – A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that U.S. government attempts to gather information from an Oregon state database of prescription drug records violates constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure. The American Civil Liberties Union hailed the decision, in a case originally brought by the state of Oregon, as the first time a federal judge has ruled that patients have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their prescription records. The ACLU had joined the lawsuit on behalf of four patients and a physician challenging U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration efforts to gain access, without prior court approval, to the state’s prescription database. The Oregon Prescription Drug Monitoring Program database was created by the state legislature in 2009 as a tool for pharmacists and physicians to track prescriptions of certain classes of drugs under the federal Controlled Substances Act.

Becoming a food cop typically won’t help your partner lose weight, and it may even trigger them to eat more.        

By Mari Saito TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan's nuclear regulator has criticized the operator of the stricken Fukushima plant for incorrectly measuring radiation levels in contaminated groundwater at the site. Almost three years since the reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi station, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) still lacks basic understanding of measuring and handling radiation, Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) Chairman Shunichi Tanaka said on Wednesday. Tepco said last week that groundwater drawn from a monitoring well last July contained a record 5 million becquerels per liter of dangerous radioactive strontium-90 – more than five times the total beta radiation reading of 900,000 becquerels per liter recorded in the well, which is around 25 meters from the ocean.

Police in central China have detained a man who spread “panic” with a graphic rumor about the arrival of bird flu in his home province, state media reported on Wednesday. Wild rumours abound on Chinese social media sites, driven in part by a broad belief that the government always seeks to cover up bad news and that state media are untrustworthy. The man detained by authorities, who was identified only by his surname, Zhou, and hails from the central province of Hubei, posted the rumor over the weekend via the popular mobile messaging platform Wechat, the official Xinhua news agency said. “The post was spread widely among netizens and aroused panic among the public,” it said, adding that Hubei’s health officials had dismissed the rumor as untrue, since the province had yet to report human cases of the H7N9 bird flu virus.