Environment

Via Oriental Review,

With the onset of winter and the increasing strain on Ukraine’s energy system, the threat of a new nuclear disaster in Central Europe is becoming more than just a theoretical danger.

An oil rig in Lake Pontchartrain, La. exploded Sunday night, leaving seven people injured – five of them critically – with one person still missing, NBC News reported.

Hurricane force winds returned to Northern California on Saturday, revitalizing the massive Tubbs fire that’s destroyed much of Santa Rosa. With the fire headed toward the few neighborhoods in the city of 140,000 that haven’t already been destroyed, state authorities ordered thousands more residents to evacuate as residents in some of the hardest hit neighborhoods began venturing back into the city to see what, if anything remains of their homes.

Six years after a tsunami crashed into the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing three of the plant’s seven reactors to melt down in the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, a Japanese district court in Fukushima prefecture ruled this week that Tokyo Electric Power and the Japanese government were liable for damages totaling about 500 million yen ($4.44 million) in the largest class action lawsuit brought over the 2011 nuclear disaster, Reuters reported citing local media sources.

A month after San Diego began street-bleaching in an effort to control its spread, Governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency as California's Hepatitis A outbreak has "gone statewide," with dozens dead and hundreds hospitalized.

In order to combat the disease, the southern California city of San Diego has literally begun spraying the streets with bleach.