China says more than half of its groundwater is polluted
Nearly 60% of China’s underground water is polluted, state media has reported, underscoring the severity of the country’s environmental woes. The country’s land and resources ministry found that among 4,778 testing spots in 203 cities, 44% had “relatively poor” underground water quality; the groundwater in another 15.7% tested as “very poor”. Water quality improved year-on-year at 647 spots, and worsened in 754 spots, the ministry said.
Groups Descended from Right-Wing Death Squads Slaughtering Residents of Colombian City
In news from Colombia, Human Rights Watch has released a report on killings by right-wing paramilitary successor groups in the largely Afro-Colombian port city of Buenaventura. The groups reportedly use so-called “chop-up houses” to slaughter victims, sometimes dismembering them while they are still alive, then dumping them in the ocean. Scores and potentially hundreds of residents have been abducted and disappeared. Last year, more than 19,000 people fled Buenaventura, more than in any other municipality in Colombia, a country with the second largest population of internally displaced people in the world.
Du Pont Heir Avoids Jail Time on Child Molestation Conviction
A wealthy heir to the du Pont family chemical fortune has avoided prison, despite being convicted of raping his three-year-old daughter. Delaware Superior Court Judge Jan Jurden said Robert Richards IV should be spared jail time because he would “not fare well” behind bars. Jurden ruled that Richards’ “treatment need exceeds [the] need for punishment,” a reasoning almost never used in the case of child rapists. Richards is the great-grandson of billionaire du Pont family patriarch Irenee du Pont. The case has drawn comparisons to last year’s sentencing of a wealthy Texas teenager who avoided jail time for killing four people while driving drunk after claiming he suffered from “affluenza.”