The Government has agreed to set up a panel to help victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak, which has till now killed more than 15,000 people. On Thursday morning, Minister of State in the PMO Prithviraj Chavan visited Jantar Mantar where the Bhopal survivors have been protesting for the last two months and read out a two-page statement authorised by the Prime Minister. The statement said India would press the US company which now owns Union Carbide to clean up the site.

Two Tata Motors officials, water treatment plant in-charge BK Sarkar and DGM (safety) Samir K Ghatak, were arrested on Wednesday night from their residences. They were arrested on the charges of negligence in the chlorine gas leakage case at the company's water treatment plant earlier this week.

THE GOVERNMENT has finally lent an ear to the victims of Bhopal gas tragedy. But coming after 25 years it's certainly a case of too little too late. The government has accepted "in principle' their demand to set up a commission to carry out medical, economic, social and environmental rehabilitation of the victims. However, dissatisfaction persists as demands of legal action against Union Carbide and Dow Chemicals are yet to be met.

Owing to the increasing mobile towers atop residential buildings, schools, hostels and hospitals, the West Bengal Pollution Control Board (WBPCB) has decided that they will not allow indiscriminate installation of mobile towers atop newly planned buildings as the electromagnetic radiation emitted by them are harmful for human body.

The Disaster Management Institute of Bhopal and Chief Inspector of factories of Assam had organising a two-day training programme from May 29 at Khanapara Staff Training College and Noonmati Refinery on risk associated with handling and transportation of hazardous chemicals during manufacture and processing, loading, unloading and bulk storage, including awareness about safety culture in community residing nearby the transport corridor, stated a press release.

In order to check proliferating hazardous e-waste recycling units in the national capital, Delhi Government is roping in private sector to regulate the process. "We have asked the private sector to come forward to develop an electronics waste management project on the basis of public-private partnership,' Delhi Environment Secretary JK Dadoo told PTI here. Delhi is emerging as the world's capital for e-waste recycling, a hazardous activity taking place without any regulations with the major dismantling taking place in unorganisedinformal sector.

A US appeals court on Wednesday threw out a Washington state law barring the federal government from adding radioactive waste to the Hanford nuclear disposal site until existing contamination is cleaned up. The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal law pre-empts the state from halting waste disposal at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a 586-square-mile (1,520-square-km) site along the Columbia River in south-eastern Washington. It provided plutonium for World War Two atomic bombs and for the US Cold War arsenal.

Greenpeace says the world's most popular electronic game consoles contain high levels of toxic chemicals, though they do not pose an immediate danger to gamers. A report by the environmental watchdog group says Nintendo's Wii, the Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 use varying degrees of bromine, PVCs and other potentially harmful chemicals, including phthalates, which can affect human hormones.

The relocation site of the world-famous Tsukiji Fish Market has been contaminated with far more toxic chemical materials than previously thought and around 2 meters of surface soil will probably have to be replaced, an advisory panel to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government said Monday. The metropolitan government is planning to relocate the market by 2013 to the Toyosu area of Koto Ward because the Tsukiji site has become too crowded and facilities there have aged. Gov. Shintaro Ishihara indicated the relocation plan could be delayed due to the contamination problem.

European Union lawmakers backed a watered-down law on "green crime" on Monday that would make dumping toxic waste or illegally transporting hazardous materials a criminal offence throughout the bloc. The draft law obliges the EU's 27 member states to treat and punish as criminal acts a list of nine offences ranging from harming protected plants or species to unlawful trade in ozone-depleting substances. But it does not set EU-wide sanctions to the dismay of environmentalists who doubt it will have much impact.