Earlier I explained her $300 + million arbitration order benefitted tycoon Bernard Tapie, not the French government she was sworn to serve as finance minister, violating her fiduciary duty. French Court of Cassation (its highest court of appeal) Attorney General Jean-Louis Nadal ordered the Tapie dossier made public, including allegations that “Lagarde had indeed acted in a way to defeat the law…to help Tapie gain a favourable decision, against an earlier” appeals court judgment for the state.

Stunning Photos Show Huge Crack in Antarctic Ice Shelf

By Dan Zukowski, December 20 2016

NASA has just released new aerial photographs that show, close-up, an immense, 70-mile long rift in the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. The breach is 300 feet wide and one-third of a mile deep. As it grows, an iceberg the size of Delaware will break off.

Paris in Transit and Urban Pollution: A Few Snapshots

By Stefan Kipfer, December 20 2016

In early December 2016, the Paris region suffered from the most intense bout of small particle pollution in a decade. Anticyclonic weather (cold air under a cover of hotter air undisturbed by wind) trapped pollutants. These came for the most part from car traffic (including diesel-powered beasts), ammonia-emitting intensive agriculture, some industrial emissions and a spike in pollutants from residential heating (90% of which emanating from the relatively few wood-fired ovens).

Radioactive Plume From Fukushima Makes Landfall on America’s West Coast

By Emerson Urry, December 20 2016

Tillamook County, Oregon — Seaborne cesium 134, the so-called “fingerprint of Fukushima,” has been detected on US shores for the first time researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) said this month.