32 of those included on UN Secretary-General’s 2011 list are “persistent perpetrators” who have been cited for the past five years, twice as many as in 2010. Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. special representative for children and armed conflict, said that new crises that had occurred in 2011 have taken a “heavy toll” on boys and girls in countries including in Syria and Libya. The UN Secretary-General noted that he has received reports of “grave violations” against children in Syria since the start of the uprising there in March of 2011 — indeed, the arrest of teenagers who had written anti-government graffiti on a building in the southern city of Dera’a led to protests that fueled the start of the uprising.

According to the report, in March 9, 2012, children between 8 and 13 from the village of Ayn l’Arouz in Idlib province had been “used by soldiers and militia members as human shields, placing them in front of the windows of buses carrying military personnel into the raid on the village.” Dozens of eyewitness reports from the UN describe the torture that children have been subjected to, as detailed in the New York Times:

Most child victims of torture described being beaten, blindfolded, subjected to stress positions, whipped with heavy electrical cables, scarred by cigarette burns and in one case subjected to electrical shock to the genitals, the report said. One witness reported seeing a boy about 15 years old die as a result of repeated beatings. Another 15-year-old repeatedly beaten with heavy electrical cables during interrogation reported at least 20 other children his age or younger being held in detention, it said.

Ohter countries cited for serious violations against children include Somalia, where there were a documented 7,799 child casualties of conflict last year, 948 children recruited by the Islamic militant group Al-Shabab and 242 cases of rape and sexual violence. In Afghanistan, 1,325 children were killed or injured in 2011, with 30 percent by improvised explosive devices placed by armed groups.

The bloodshed continues in Syria. Just today, Tuesday, 11 people have been killed when government troops shelled a protest in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour. More than 100 people have been reported killed on Monday, in clashes between military forces and rebel fighters in Homs, Idlib and Latakia provinces.

US state department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that there are fears that the Syrian army is organizing another massacre like that in Houla, in the town of Haffa in Latakia province, where UN monitors have been barred from entering.

Activists say that over 13,000 people have been killed — hundreds of them children — in the uprising.

Previous Care2 Coverage

Even Animals Not Spared in Grisly Massacre in Syrian Town

Syria Blocks UN Monitors From “Massacre” Investigation

Syria Expels Diplomats; Assad Denies Houla Massacre

Instead of following the law and doing what is necessary to protect our natural resources, the EPA has chosen to sit on the sidelines when even its own scientists have identified the problem and provided a formula for action. Meanwhile, acid rain continues to poison our waters and threaten our forests.

“Acid rain isn’t a thing of the past, but an ongoing and very real threat to forest ecosystems and wild fisheries across the country,” said Kevin Bundy, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “The EPA is ignoring the hard work of its own scientific experts and instead relying on outdated air-quality standards that it knows are not protective enough.”

Power plants and other industrial operations pump pollution, including sulfur and nitrogen compounds, into the air. When this pollution later falls onto forests, rivers and lakes, it has an acidifying effect — hence the term “acid rain.” Acidic waters harm fish and other aquatic organisms. In the Adirondack Mountains, for example, lakes with more acidic water support only half the species of fish that might otherwise live there. Reduced growth rates in trout and salmon have also been attributed to acid stress.

Acid rain threatens entire forest ecosystems, national parks and wilderness areas. Although places across the country are at risk from this pollution, the eastern United States — including the Adirondacks, the Green and White mountains, and the Appalachians — and the upper Midwest are among the most sensitive areas.

This legal battle has a long history. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to set so-called “secondary” air-quality standards limiting ambient concentrations of air pollutants that affect “public welfare,” which includes ecosystems and natural resources. The Center for Biological Diversity and other groups sued the agency in 2005 over its failure to review the secondary standard for acid rain-causing sulfur and nitrogen compounds — a standard first established in 1971 and not strengthened since. That litigation led to the EPA’s current review of the standard, in which the agency admitted that existing standards are inadequate to protect sensitive ecosystems and fish species from the effects of acid rain. Yet the EPA chose to leave these inadequate standards in place, rejecting efforts by the agency’s own scientific experts to devise a new, more protective standard.

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by Molly Rauch

This week the non-profit group Clean Air Watch took a look at how much smog Americans have endured this spring. Clean Air Watch examined the number of states in which smog, or ozone, exceeded national standards in the month of May, as well as the number of times state ozone monitors registered levels above the federal standards.

Smog is caused by pollution from cars, trucks, power plants and other industrial sources. It damages lungs and triggers asthma attacks, among other health impacts. In May 2012, 31 states had smog “exceedences” (the technical term for when an air quality monitor measures ozone levels that exceed federal standards). There were a total of 854 such events. This number is almost triple the number of similar events in May of 2011.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) monitors air pollution around the country through a nationwide network of monitors. (See here for a map of the air-monitoring network.) When a monitor detects ozone, or smog, in violation of federal ozone standards, it is posted on the AirNow website – but that website only shows you what’s happening today, not what’s happening this year.

Clean Air Watch says that, based on these nationwide air quality monitors, we’ve had the smoggiest May in at least 5 years. Why was it so bad? As Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch explained, ozone is created when emissions mix with heat and sunlight.“Hot weather helped trigger a problem,” he said. “We need to tackle the root cause, which is pollution.” O’Donnell also pointed out that global warming will create the weather conditions that will lead to more smog, which is something Moms Clean Air Force is also concerned about.

To add insult to injury, these exceedences are based on the federal ozone standard set by George W. Bush in 2008 – a standard that the EPA admits is too weak to adequately protect asthmatics and others from health damage. John Walke, clean air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, lays the history of that standard bare in painful detail in an illuminating post that will leave you speechless (breathless?) over the compromised process by which the government sets health protective air pollution standards.

It’s a circus of moneyed influence and neglected science.

As Walke points out, the 2008 Bush standard studiously ignored the advice of the scientific board tasked with advising EPA on the health effects of ozone:

“Despite the Clean Air Act requirement that clean air standards be reviewed and revised every five years, the Bush administration delayed and failed to revise the 1997 ozone standards until March of 2008. Then-EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson disregarded the unanimous recommendations of EPA’s independent, expert science advisors that the 84 ppb standard be lowered to between 60 and 70 ppb in order to protect public health with an adequate safety margin. Instead Johnson set the standard well outside that range at 75 ppb.

After Johnson rejected the science advisors’ unanimous ozone advice, the advisors took the extraordinary step of writing a strong letter to him condemning his weaker 75 ppb standard: “[T]he members of the CASAC Ozone Review Panel do not endorse the new primary ozone standard as being sufficiently protective of public health.”

That standard, which the CASAC Ozone Review Panel did not endorse, is still our nation’s standard, because last September, President Obama delayed updating it yet again. As Walke writes, that decision has real-life implications for our nation’s health:

“By blocking a stronger smog standard, first at 65 ppb and then at 70 ppb, the president and White House officials have allowed the following health hazards to occur every year until that standard eventually is strengthened and enforced: 4,300 to 8,000 premature deaths; 2,200 to 3,800 nonfatal heart attacks; and 23,000 to 40,000 asthma attacks.”

All this means that our current smog standard, the one by which state air monitoring stations mark our air’s compliance, is too weak to protect our health. As Frank O’Donnell of Clean Air Watch said, the exceedances are “an underestimation of the true problem.”

Support Clean Air with Moms Clean Air Force

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