Revolution in Tunisia: News Round-Up
January 16, 2011, 10:22 am
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The citizens of Tunisia rise up, burning banks and the mansions of the presidents’ corrupt family
The long and short of it is that long-time President and dictator, Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali, has been run out of the country by the violent protests that have been going on over the last few days, and the military has taken charge of Tunisia, with no end to the riots in sight.
Bowing to the continuing uprising, the prime minister, Mohamed Ghannouchi, an ally of the ousted president, ceded authority to the speaker of the Tunisian Parliament.
How the State Handles Dissent: Violence and Oppression in the US and Around the World
November 10, 2010, 9:06 pm
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Moscow authorities sanction 1,000 people for opposition protest
UNITED STATES
New bill allows U.S. citizens to be kidnapped and detained without trial indefinitely based on “suspected activity”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has forced the Pentagon to release over 800 pages of classified material documenting “possibly illegal” spying during the Bush administration. The heavily redacted documents include details of a spying program against Planned Parenthood and white supremacist groups in the runup to the Atlanta Olympics, as well as spying on Alaskans for Peace and Justice, an anti-recruiting group, civilian cell phone conversations, and other breaches of spying laws.
Fourteen anti-war activists may have made history today in a Las Vegas courtroom when they turned a misdemeanor trespassing trial into a possible referendum on America’s newfound taste for remote-controlled warfare. The so-called Creech 14, a group of peace activists from across the country, went on trial this morning for allegedly trespassing onto Creech Air Force Base in April 2009. From the start of today’s trial, prosecutors did their best to keep the focus on whether the activists were guilty of allegations they illegally entered the base and refused to leave as a way to protest the base’s role as the little-known headquarters for U.S. military operations involving unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, over Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. But a funny thing happened on the way to prosecutors’ hope for a quick decision. Appearing as witnesses for the Creech 14 today were some of the biggest names in the modern anti-war movement: Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson; Ann Wright, a retired U.S. Army colonel and one of three former U.S. State Department officials who resigned on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and Bill Quigley, legal director for the New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights.
Ken Hayes, Father Louis Vitale and Nancy Gwin, the three human rights advocates who were arrested together with Michael Walli, were each sentenced in January 2010 to six months in prison as well – the maximum allowed for the charge of tresspass. The extremely harsh sentences are intended to deter others from following the example of the ‘SOAW 4.’
“Those who speak out for justice are facing prison time while SOA-trained torturers and assassins are operating with impunity,” said SOA Watch founder Father Roy Bourgeois.
Beyond Deepwater Horizon: Multiple Leaks in Gulf, Additional Spills Around World, and the Next Catastrophes
July 14, 2010, 5:39 pm
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GULF OF MEXICO
As the oil continues to flow, some are charging that another BP operation in the Gulf is an even bigger disaster in the making.
For six months, Ken Abbott managed BP’s engineering documents for “Atlantis,” BP’s deep water platform nearly 200 miles south of New Orleans. He turned into a BP whistle-blower in February 2009 after finding what he says were thousands of Atlantis engineering documents and drawings that were neither complete nor reviewed properly by BP. That, Sawyer now says, was a serious safety violation.
Abbott and his lawyer quickly hired Mike Sawyer, a safety engineer consultant, who examined the BP documents in question. Sawyer tells CNN that oil rig “engineering drawings and specification are the primary means that workers use to ensure that they can operate the platform safely, and can ensure that they can shut it down or at least control any unsafe event.” Atlantis’ engineering documents and drawings, says Sawyer, were so incomplete that he fears another environmental disaster from BP.
The evidence is growing stronger and stronger that there is substantial damage beneath the sea floor. Indeed, it appears that BP officials themselves have admitted to such damage. This has enormous impacts on both the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf, and the prospects for quickly stopping the leak this summer.
AROUND THE WORLD
On May 10th, 2010 ExxonMobile had an oil spill in Nigeria Delta. It is somewhere around the 16th worst oil spill in [wikipedia reported] world history, at 95,000 tonnes (696,350 barrels or 214,475,800 gallons). Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it. Oil spills are a regular occurrence in Nigeria, about 300 a year, it is estimated over the past 50 years about 1.5 million tons have been dumped in the Delta, equivalent to the Gulf War oil spill (the largest spill on record) or 50+ Exxon Valdez.
If 5,000 feet is deep enough to make it very hard to fix any problems with an oil well, it would seem that 8,530 feet would deep enough to warrant extraordinary precautions (if you’re going to be drilling at all, not something I’m in favor of). But Chevron, who’s drilling a well at this depth off the coast of Newfoundland says that a relief well isn’t necessary (even though a relief well could probably have avoided the Deepwater Horizon disaster)
In one case, BP’s CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of a whistleblower, Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe’s tanker facility. BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him. When caught, a US federal judge said BP’s acts were “reminiscent of Nazi Germany.”
Nearly 5,000 miles from the oil-spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, BP and its culture of cost-cutting are contributing to another environmental mess in the Prudhoe Bay oil field on Alaska’s north shore, according to internal BP documents and more than a dozen employees interviewed over the past month.
After two serious oil spills and other mishaps at the remote site, the BP employees fingered a long list of safety issues that have not been adequately addressed, making the Prudhoe Bay oilfield vulnerable to a devastating accident that potentially could rival the havoc in the Gulf.
Chevron Corporation has been trying for weeks to locate the source of a “historic” leak from its Burnaby oil and gas refinery — a leak that has been seeping still-unknown amounts of oil, gas and diesel fuel into the Burrard Inlet since at least April 21.
As the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico continues to dominate headlines around the world, public outrage is being focused more intensely upon BP and its gaffe-prone CEO Tony Hayward. But amidst this crisis, the public should not forget the atrocities committed by other massive oil companies. For example, Royal Dutch Shell‘s drilling operations have been spilling oil into the Niger Delta in Nigeria since 1958. Because Nigeria is an impoverished nation and oil revenues fund a majority of government operations, Shell and other companies have been able to drill and pollute without serious oversight for all these years. It is estimated that 13 million barrels of oil have spilled into the delta, making life even more difficult for the region’s destitute residents. Shell blames the constant spills on attacks from “rebels,” who are in fact minority ethnic groups who feel they have been exploited and displaced by foreign oil companies. But Shell would never consider pulling out of the region or finding ways to avoid ethnic strife. Instead, Shell has proceeded with business as usual, and spilled a record 14,000 tons of crude oil into the delta last year.