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“LIMA, Peru — A $4.8 billion gold and copper mining project, Peru’s biggest such investment, was declared suspended Tuesday after increasingly violent protests by highlands peasants who fear for their water supply.

At least 20 people, including eight with gunshot wounds, were injured Tuesday in clashes between opponents of the Conga project and police who used firearms, Cajamarca state regional health director Reynaldo Nunez told Canal N television. He said one person was in critical condition and the injured included police.

“After discussions with the government, it was agreed that to help restore public order, the project would be suspended,” Newmont Mining Corp. spokesman Omar Jabara told The Associated Press via email. Denver-based Newmont is the majority owner of Conga, which was to begin production in 2015 and is an outgrowth of Yanacocha, Latin America’s biggest gold mine.”

Read More: The Huffington Post

“When you’re driving through a war zone, your instinct may be to roll up the car windows. Wrong move. A bullet is less likely to hit you than to strike the glass, which will shatter and probably cause injuries. It takes firsthand experience to learn these tricks of the trade, and for years, Mark Zeitoun has sought out such experience.

Yet he did not scout out war zones as a combatant or journalist; he was delivering water.

A leading thinker in the field of water issues, Dr. Zeitoun helped pioneer a way of analyzing international water tensions, departing from the idea that water struggles are characterized either by peaceful cooperation or armed conflict. He suggests that countries’ approaches can vary by many gradations in between.

Dr. Zeitoun’s philosophy on water politics, known as hydro-hegemony, “significantly influenced the way we look at hydropolitics across the world,” said Tony Allan, a water resource analyst at King’s College, London.

Today Dr. Zeitoun, 44, grapples with global water issues from his office at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. But his voyage to understanding has been a long one, taking him from his native Canada, Congo, Chad, the Palestinian territories and Iraq.”

Read More: Green Blogs New York Times

Retrieved from: cloudfiles

“Many people in Bangladesh and other parts of Asia have been poisoned by drinking groundwater laced with arsenic—not introduced by humans, but leached naturally from sediments, and now being tapped by shallow drinking wells. In recent years, to avoid the problem, deeper wells have been sunk 500 feet or more to purer waters—but fears have remained that when deep water is pumped out, contaminated water might filter down to replace it. Now, a study has shown that deep sediments can grab the arsenic and take it out of circulation—a finding that may help to keep wells safe elsewhere, including in the United States. The study, led by researchers at Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, appears in the current online edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.

“Lead author Kathleen Radloff and her colleagues injected arsenic-rich water into a deep aquifer in Bangladesh, then monitored arsenic levels over nine days. They found that arsenic fell by 70 percent after 24 hours, and continued to decline over the monitoring period. They attributed this to the arsenic sticking to the surfaces of deep sediment particles, in a process called adsorption.

“However, the process may have limits. The results were applied to a hydrological model of the Bengal Basin, the aquifer that serves most of Bangladesh and the neighboring Indian state of West Bengal. Using the model, the team found that the risk of arsenic contamination is limited when wells are restricted to household use, but increases significantly if they are also used for irrigation, even if much arsenic adsorbs to the sediment.”

Read more: EPonline