Dal mondo

Four federal agencies dropped their protests to a plan to pipe water to booming Las Vegas from a valley near the Nevada-Utah line, the state water engineer said Monday.

A sewage leak from a chemical plant has spilled the cancer-causing chemical arsenide into a river in central China's Hunan province, poisoning drinking water for nearly 100,000 locals, Chinese media said.

Small sections of the Jordan's upper portion, near the Sea of Galilee, have been kept pristine for baptisms. But Israel, Jordan and Syria have siphoned off huge amounts of river water to meet their needs in this arid region, and pumped waste water back in.

Booming oil and gas development in Western and Northern Canada has prompted native groups to build a united front to better protect the vast region's water resources, aboriginal leaders said Thursday.

Acid rain caused by sulphur dioxide spewed from factories and power plants affected a third of China's vast land mass last year, posing a threat to food safety, Xinhua news agency said citing a parliamentary report.

The worst red tide in perhaps a decade has shut down shellfish beds all along Puget Sound and prompted serious public health worries, state officials said Wednesday.

An Indian-born Canadian man received the US$150,000 (euro124,000) Stockholm Water Prize on Thursday.

China has contained a chemical spill that threatened water supplies for millions and triggered panic buying of bottled drinking water, state media said on Thursday.

As the United States bakes in one of the hottest summers since the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, drought from the Dakotas to Arizona through Alabama has sharpened the focus of farmers on their lifeline: water.

China will spend 1 trillion yuan (US$125 billion; euro100 billion) to improve water treatment and recycling facilities over the next five years as part of efforts to fight the mounting threat of urban water pollution, officials said Tuesday.