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Planning approvals for battery, wind, and solar projects in Great Britain (GB) have almost doubled over the past year, with more than 45 GW of capacity approved in 2025, 96 percent higher than last year’s 23 GW and enough to power 12.9 million homes.

A research team led by Chalmers University of Technology , Sweden, have presented a new way to produce hydrogen gas without the scarce and expensive metal platinum, using sunlight, water and tiny particles of electrically conductive plastic.

A record of repeated retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet during the past warm climates has been identified by International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 379 Scientists.

An international team has provided the first direct evidence of the beneficial effects of scheduled daylight as compared to artificial light in people with type 2 diabetes.

A research team led by Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have presented a new way to produce hydrogen gas without the scarce and expensive metal platinum. 

Study reveals ticks are growing threat to health and livelihood of agricultural workers.

A natural, superabsorbent material developed at the University of Waterloo could dramatically reduce the environmental impact of personal hygiene products like diapers, menstrual pads and tampons.

Higher temperatures may make monarch butterflies more vulnerable to parasites, according to new research from the University of Georgia.

In the early hours of 3 January, the United States sent its military forces into Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro Moros and Cilia Flores, a deputy in the National Assembly, bombing civilian and military sites across Caracas. The United States indicted both Maduro and Flores, who are married, with ‘narco-terrorism’ and related charges and is holding them in New York, where they appeared for the first time in Manhattan federal court on 5 January 2026.

Clearly, the United States did not begin its assault on Venezuela on 3 January 2026. The hybrid war against Venezuela’s Bolivarian process began in 2001, after the Organic Law of Hydrocarbons was passed as part of a package of forty-nine laws decreed by Chávez and approved by the National Assembly.

The post How Many International Laws Can The United States Break Against Venezuela? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi stunned the world when she declared publicly in the Japanese legislature, that a Taiwan contingency could constitute a "survival threatening situation" that would allow Japanese military intervention in “collective defense”.

Words matter.  Especially when they are words with legal force, uttered in an official capacity. 

These words are legal terms of art that authorize the aggressive use of the military according to Clause 4 of Japan’s Peace and Security Act of 2015.                             

Applied to Taiwan, it allows expeditionary military force against China. 

The post Japan’s Remilitarization Is A Danger To The World appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

There was no regime change’ -Venezuela’s ex-FM Jorge Arreaza on US kidnapping raid In an exclusive interview with The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal, Venezuela’s former Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza discusses the January 3 US military raid on Caracas that resulted in the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores and the killing of as many as 100 people. Arreaza argues the operation violated international law, the US Constitution, and head-of-state immunity, calling it “barbaric.” He insists Maduro and Flores were in a secure location and were defended by guards who “gave their lives,” but that US technological superiority made resistance ineffective.

The post There Was No Regime Change appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

Following the Trump administration’s illegal attack on Venezuela, people’s movements and political figures throughout the world immediately mobilized in solidarity to reject the unilateral US military aggression. The mood of solidarity reached Southeast Asia and Australia, with public opposition and demonstrations in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and elsewhere.

Snap rallies in Australia were held on Sunday, January 4, in Melbourne and Sydney, with actions outside the US embassy in Canberra as well as in Brisbane and Hobart. The mobilizations were nationally coordinated by the new coalition Hands Off Venezuela, formed in October 2025 to organize emergency responses against the US military threats and airstrikes in the Caribbean.

The post Hands Off Venezuela! Solidarity In Australia And Southeast Asia appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

Click the icon at the bottom right to view the issue full screen. December 2025

The post Down to Earth: December 2025 appeared first on Montana Environmental Information Center - MEIC.

A University of Arizona–led, $3.6 million Arbor-funded research initiative is assessing whether Arizona’s historic copper mine tailings—amounting to billions of tonnes—can be economically reprocessed to recover both critical minerals and hazardous elements while reducing environmental risk.

The University Tailings Center initiative, led by Dr. Isabel Barton, Associate Professor of Mining Engineering, is focused on recovering critical minerals such as arsenic, zinc and possibly tungsten from copper mine tailings, using advanced geometallurgy and mineral characterization to turn mine waste into a domestic resource.

The project combines remote sensing, industry data-sharing, field sampling, mineralogical characterization, and techno-economic analysis, with early findings suggesting unexpected mineral occurrences at some sites, according to Barton.

While not a full resource definition, the work aims to de-risk future reprocessing and byproduct recovery, including potential changes to current mining flowsheets to prevent valuable elements from first entering tailings. Finding out how much actual usable metal can be extracted from the tailings is the end goal of the project.

“The Arizona state mine inspector for research’s office was interested in finding out whether Arizona’s billions of tons of copper mine tailings constitute a potential resource of critical elements, which many of them are also hazardous in various ways to the environment,” Barton told MINING.COM in an interview.

“The idea is that if any of them is recoverable, then recovering that would contribute to the US critical metals supply as well as reducing the environmental hazards.”

The project kicked off in Q1 2024 with 17.5 billion tons of mine waste, including copper tailings, and is accumulating at a rate of upwards of 100 million metric tons a year, Barton said.

Re-characterizing tailings

For many years public awareness about tailings was extremely limited, Barton pointed out.

“It was by definition a waste product, and so why waste money characterizing it?” And while many companies have very strong characterization programs now, and they know what they’re putting out in tailings facilities, that wasn’t always the case. I would say for most of the 20th century it was not, and so where we’ve been playing catch-up, on figuring out what’s actually in these, added to which they’ve been active geochemical systems.”

The research team is working on sampling and characterization to start, conducting remote sensing studies to characterize tailings, both at a statewide level and more focused UAV-based mapping of individual tailings facilities, working towards developing new methods.

“We are getting data from partner companies in industry, many of whom have characterized their own tailings and have been kind enough to share that information with us,” Barton said.

“The surface samples from drilling down into the tailings become the basis for extraction studies to look at how much of which critical elements we can get out relatively easily. It ends with a techno-economic analysis to look at under what, if any, market conditions extraction would make sense.”

Historical backlash

There has been significant historical backlash against projects and products that contained arsenic, mainly because of concerns about its toxicity, threats to public health and environmental hazards.

The irony is that the US needs arsenic — its classified as a critical mineral by the US Geological Survey (USGS) and other nations because it’s crucial for gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductors used in LED lights, lasers, integrated circuits, solar panels, and telecommunications. It also hardens lead and copper alloys, used in ammunition.

“We’re 100% import reliant on arsenic, as well as most of these other semi-metallic elements,” Barton said. Being able to produce even a small amount of those domestically would significantly help US critical metals supply.”

This year, the team is starting the techno-economic analysis using standard extraction methods, such as magnetic separation and basic leaching, and is beginning to feed data to that team.

“We have found a few exciting things,” Barton said. “Minerals that we didn’t expect in a few places have been turning up, and that actually makes me somewhat optimistic that we’ll continue to find results that we didn’t think we were going to that might lead to viable tailings reprocessing.”

“I promise you, if you put me in a fully equipped lab, I can extract anything out of any source material,” Barton said. “The difficulty is doing it cheaply enough that you don’t break the bank with the materials and labor cost of the extraction. That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out in this project…[so] we can point the way for future work.”

Career momentum

Barton noted there has been a growing recognition that the US has outsourced most of its mineral production, and that it is problematic in a geopolitical context.

“For a long time, I think people were either unaware of the drawbacks or ignored them, but recently they’ve become too obvious to ignore.”

What bodes well is that the shift could potentially attract a new generation of talent.

“The workforce is rapidly decaying, and capacity to meet the material demands of a technological future is seriously in doubt. What we’re seeing is a scramble to make up some of that ground,” she said.

“It’s an industry with a stable and bright future, and I realize that calling the mining industry stable is going to raise a few eyebrows, but the fact is we always need metals. We always need industrial minerals – the demand for them isn’t going away. It’s only increasing.”

“The other thing I would point to is a workforce retiring en masse. We’re going to need more mining engineers in 10 years than we have now, more economic geologists, more metallurgists, more of everybody related to mining.”

Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello has announced that the death toll from the US empire’s military attack against Venezuela on Saturday has risen to 100 people, including civilians and military personnel.

Cabello explained during a special broadcast of his program Con el Mazo Dando this Wednesday, January 7, that although it was not scheduled to start his program this week, “the current circumstances force it,” following the illegal attack perpetrated by the US targeting four states in the country that concluded with the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

The post Venezuela’s Interior Minister Cabello Updates Death Toll Of US Attacks appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

The organisers of a major international children’s book fair in Italy have barred an Israeli state-backed literary body from participating, in what is being seen as another indication of the growing cultural boycott of Israel, a state now almost universally accused by human rights experts and legal scholars of committing genocide against the Palestinian people.

Haaretz reported that the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, the world’s largest and longest-running event dedicated exclusively to children’s literature, barred the Israeli Institute for Hebrew Literature from participating in this year’s fair, which is expected to attract tens of thousands of visitors from across the global publishing industry.

The post Israeli State Literary Body Excluded From Bologna Fair appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

Kate and Aaron talk to Kelly Mitchell, executive director of oil industry watchdog FieldNotes, about about what Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro’s capture by the US means for oil and gas producers here in the West. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has also been making the rounds on Fox cheering on Trump’s actions in Venezuela and calling on US companies to start drilling there, which we also touch on.

News

• The Trump Administration Approved a Big Lithium Mine. A Top Official’s Husband Profited. – New York Times
• Takeaways from Congress’ latest spending package – E&E News

Resources

• Watch this episode on YouTube (link to come)

Credits

• Produced & hosted by Aaron Weiss and Kate Groetzinger
• Feedback: podcast@westernpriorities.org
• Music: Purple Planet
• Featured image: Natural gas drilling equipment on the Pinedale Anticline, WY. Source: Richard Waite, World Resources Institute

The post Will Maduro’s capture lead to an American oil rift? appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

British doctors warned on 6 January that Palestine Action-linked prisoners refusing food in UK jails were facing life-threatening risks, describing them as “well into the critical phase,” as the hunger strikers vowed to continue despite repeated hospitalizations.

The protest involves activists detained over alleged actions targeting UK sites connected to Israeli arms firm Elbit Systems – a company that has recorded record profits since the start of the Gaza genocide by supplying the Israeli military with weapons, munitions, and surveillance systems – as well as a Royal Air Force base. 

The post Palestine Action Activists On Hunger Strike Reach ‘Critical Phase’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

On January 7, an Immigration and Customs (ICE) Enforcement agent murdered Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Immediately, the Trump administration sprang into action to propagandize the incident. Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin claimed that Good ​“weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, meanwhile, claimed, ​“It was an act of domestic terrorism.”

President Donald Trump posted via Truth Social:

The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.

The post ICE Is The Domestic Terror Threat appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

Former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black once wrote in an opinion on the 1971 case New York Times Co. v. United States: 

“In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bear the secrets of government and inform the people.” 

The post Journalist Town Hall Sounds Alarm On Freedom Of The Press appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.