Environment

An official University of California report has concluded that there is a link between oil drilling and earthquakes.  The 2005 spate of earthquakes in California’s Central Valley was triggered by oilfield injection underground, researchers say Yahoo News reports: The research links a local surge in oil company injection of wastewater underground, peaking in 2005, with an unusual jump in seismic activity in and around the Tejon Oilfield in southern Kern County. In Oklahoma and some other Midwestern states, the U.S.

Last August, in a hilarious example of bad timing, Japan restarted its first nuclear reactor since the Chernobyl redux at Fukushima just as a nearby volcano was set to erupt.

Sakurajima, one of the country’s most active volcanos, erupts almost constantly, but experts warned the next eruption could be “the big one”, so to speak.

At the time, The Japan Meteorological Agency raised the warning level from 3 to 4.

4 means "prepare to evacuate."

Just like the global panic that gripped the world in October 2014 when the Ebola virus had spread from western Africa to many nations around the globe, including several isolated cases in the US, so a year and a half later, the world is urgently scrambling to unleash a sense of panic surrounding the Zika virus which, just like Ebola, came out of nowhere and is fast becoming the latest scapegoat for collapsing global commerce this year's invisible bogeyman.

Here are some of the latest developments.

At Least 54 People Infected in the U.S.

A strong magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck southern Taiwan early on Saturday, according to the US Geological Survey . The quake struck at 11:57 a.m. PT about 14 miles northeast of the city of Pingtung, 19 miles (31 km) east-southeast of Tainan at a depth of 6.2 miles, the agency said. The USGS  have also warned that a magnitude 6.4 quake is capable of causing a “severe damage”, though there have been no reports casualties but one official said that a building had partially collapsed No tsunami warnings have yet been issued.

Japan’s Meteorological Agency has issued an orange warning as the Sakurajima volcano erupted sending lava down its slope and spewing ash and stones into the night sky. Lightning flashed above the flowing lava as the Sakurajima erupted on the southern island of Kyushu at around 7 p.m on Friday evening The Sendai nuclear plant which is located 50 kms (30 miles) from the volcano, was the first to be restarted after 2011’s Fukushima disaster, despite local opposition and meteorologists’ warnings, following tremors in the nearby volcano.