The US is sending $25 million in nonlethal aid to Libyan rebels to cover "vehicles, fuel trucks and fuel bladders, ambulances, medical equipment, protective vests, binoculars, and non-secure radios," the White House informed Congress April 21 in a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A State Department official told ABC News the aid will be "in support of key partners, including the Transitional National Council." The letter does not state whether US military advisors will be involved in providing the aid. (ABC News, April 20)

The US Department of Defense (DoD) announced April 20 that high-value Guantánamo Bay detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri will be subject to capital charges and tried in a military court. According to the Pentagon, the chief prosecutor for the DoD's Office of Military Commissions plans to charge al-Nashiri with orchestrating the 2000 attack on the USS Cole that left 17 dead and 40 injured. The office will also bring charges in connection with an attack that same year on a French oil freighter that claimed the life of one crewmember and spilled 90,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Aden.

One year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the world is witnessing the new horror of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. While last spring the world held its breath for weeks wondering when BP technicians could get the Gulf gusher under control, the world has now been similarly in grim suspense for weeks wondering when TEPCO officials can get the Fukushima radiation leaks under control. Yet, amazingly, nuclear energy's boosters are continuing even now to portray it as a viable alternative to fossil fuels. The Obama administration has pledged no retreat from (oxymoronic) "clean nuclear power" plans—even as it takes the energy industry's side in litigation seeking to hold it liable for global warming.

Tokyo Electric Power Company on April 17 issued a plan for cooling down the reactors and reducing radiation leaks within six to nine months at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant on Japan's Pacific coast. The plan was announced as a pair of remotely controlled robots measured radiation levels inside three of the reactor buildings too high for workers to endure.

An April press release from the Center for Biological Diversity:

A Deadly Toll: The Gulf Oil Spill and the Unfolding Wildlife Disaster
Last year's BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe spilled 205.8 million gallons of oil and 225,000 tons of methane into the Gulf of Mexico. Approximately 25 percent of the oil was recovered, leaving more than 154 million gallons of oil at sea. In addition to the oil, nearly 2 million gallons of toxic dispersants were sprayed into the Gulf's waters. This did not actually reduce the amount of oil left in the ocean, but merely broke it into smaller particles, which may actually make the oil more toxic for some ocean life and ease its entry into the food chain.

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments April 19 in American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut regarding whether electric utilities contributed to global warming. The court is being asked to decide (1) whether states and private parties have standing to seek judicially-fashioned emissions caps on five utilities for their alleged contribution to harms claimed to arise from global climate change caused by more than a century of emissions by billions of independent sources; (2) whether a cause of action to cap carbon dioxide emissions can be implied under federal common law where no statute creates such a cause of action, and the Clean Air Act speaks directly to the same subject matter and assigns federal responsibility for regulating such emissions to the Environmental Protection Agency; and (3) whether claims seeking to cap defendants' carbon dioxide emissions at "reasonable" levels, based on a court's weighing of the potential risks of climate change against the socioeconomic utility of defendants' conduct, would be governed by "judicially discoverable and manageable standards" or could be resolved without "initial policy determination[s] of a kind clearly for nonjudicial discretion."

Syria's government passed a draft decree to lift the emergency law and a bill to dismantle the Supreme State Security Court on April 19. The government also approved a third bill to "regulate the right to peacefully protest." Syrians nonetheless took to the streets in large numbers again the next day in the central city of Homs, where activists say more than 20 protesters have been killed this week by soldiers and irregular forces. Demonstrations were also reported in Aleppo, Syria's largest city. (Reuters, CNN, April 20; AlJazeera, April 19)

A Tunisian court on April 19 dropped charges against a police officer who incited protests in several Arab countries when she allegedly slapped a local fruit vendor. Police woman Fedia Hamdi was accused of slapping Mohamed Bouazizi in December in a dispute during which Bouazizi's cart was confiscated after he was allegedly found without a permit. As a result of the encounter, Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of the governor's office on Dec. 17 and died three weeks later. Pro-democracy protesters generally discontented with unemployment, corruption and repression staged several demonstrations following Bouazizi's death. The mother of the late vendor withdrew her complaint against Hamdi, and the Sidi Bouzid Court of First Instance subsequently dismissed the case.