Environment

Anti-fracking campaigners set up a ten-metre-high mock drilling rig in Parliament Square today in protest at the Government’s support for the controversial process.  The rig, featuring a ‘flare’ that fires up every hour, was installed by Greenpeace and is located opposite the Houses of Parliament in London. RT reports: It was erected to coincide with the first day of a public inquiry into energy company Cuadrilla’s persistent applications to frack for shale gas in Lancashire.

While the world’s attention is focused on the Zika virus, a new UN report warns that a future global epidemic could result in millions of deaths and could be far worse than the recent Ebola outbreak in Africa. The hard hitting  report urges the World Health Organization to reform in order to be ready to combat future crises.

More than 58,000 children are at risk of dying from starvation in Somalia if they are not provided with urgent humanitarian assistance the United Nations has warned. The international community has failed to tackle the famine crisis due to the internal conflicts and an ongoing war in the African country. Press TV reports: UN aid chief for Somalia Peter de Clercq said on Monday that more than 300,000 children under the age of five are acutely malnourished. The UN official also said that they urgently need medical, food, and other humanitarian support.

North Korea have issued a defiant warning to the west, saying they intend to continue launching more long-range rockets in the future, despite international warnings to stop.  Pyongyang say the most recent rocket launch on Sunday was so that North Korea could send a satellite into space, strongly denying claims by the West that the launch was used as a means of testing ballistic missiles.

Russia have launched the Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket containing the navigation satellite Glonass-M into space from the Plesetsk space center on Sunday.  “On Sunday, at 03.21 a.m. Moscow time [24:21 GMT] a squad of Russian Space Forces of Russian Aerospace Forces successfully carried out a launch of a Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket with the navigation satellite Glonass-M,” the press service told Russian media outlets. Tass.ru reports: “It will take several hours for the Frigate upper stage to bring the Glonass-M spacecraft to the intended orbit,” the Defense Ministry added.