Environment

According to French electricity grid operator Enedis, winter storm Zeus which unleashed hurricane-force winds across much of southern France, has left more than 600,000 French households without power as of 4pm on Monday. The company's website advises that the power cuts have affected 175,000 customers in Brittany, 190,000 in Auvergne Rhone Alpes, 130,000 in Nouvelle Aquitaine, 80,000 in Pays de Loire, and the company advises that more than 3,500 technicians from Enedis are working in the field to deal with “very major” storm damage.

Millions of people in Northern Syria have been left without water following John McCain’s unexpected visit to the region last month.  Senator McCain made a secret visit to Northern Syria at the end of February, which was followed by a meeting with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to reports, McCain requested that Turkey shut down the supply of water going into Northern Syria as part of a plan to undermine Syrian President Assad. Mintpressnews.com reports: According to the Kurdish Hawar News Agency, Turkey cut water supplies to Syria around Feb.

Millions of Spanish residents in Andorra and Catalonia fear they may have been poisoned by the government after the Valira river turned luminous green overnight.  The massive river was the cause of last year’s gastroenteritis outbreak, and now residents are worried that they may have been subject to mass government poisoning this time round. The Express reports: Such was the unease caused by the green water, the Mayor of Seu d’Urgell was forced to issue a statement clarifying the cause.

Via Yvette Tan of Mashable.com,

The robots sent in to investigate the nuclear fallout at Fukushima just aren't good enough.

Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) head of decommissioning admitted on Thursday that more creativity was needed in developing its robots sent to the reactive zone.

The Fukushima nuclear power plant was massively damaged in 2011, when three of the six nuclear reactors suffered meltdown after being struck by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and associated tsunami waves.

Via Mac Slavo of SHTFPlan.com,

While Oklahoma has had a handful of notable earthquakes over the past century, it was essentially never an earthquake state.

And rightfully so, given that the USGS and other officials, up until quite recently, ranked Oklahoma’s earthquake hazard level at the second lowest level, with a patch of slightly elevated, but still moderately low areas: