RICHARD MAUER and ANNA M. TINSELY, - McClatchy Newspapers
Stephan:
ANCHORAGE — The causes of the disastrous blowout and gas explosion on BP’s leased Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico are a long way from being determined.
Yet already BP’s actions are facing unprecedented scrutiny, thanks to a years-long history of legal and ethical violations that critics, judges and members of Congress say shows that the London-based company has a penchant for putting profits ahead of just about everything else.
Over the past two decades, BP subsidiaries have been convicted three times of environmental crimes in Alaska and Texas, including two felonies. It remains on probation for two of them.
It also has received the biggest ever fine for willful work safety violations in U.S. history and is the subject of a wide range of safety investigations, including one in Washington State that resulted last week in a relatively minor $69,000 fine for 13 ‘serious’ safety violations at its Cherry Point refinery near Ferndale, Wash.
While BP has said it accepts responsibility for the spill, it denies that it’s guilty of a systematic pattern of safety and environmental failures.
‘We are a responsible and professional company,’ said BP Alaska spokesman Steve Rinehart. ‘We work to high standards. Safety is our highest […]
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RICHARD BLACK, Environmental Correspondent - BBC News (U.K.)
Stephan: The living systems of the planet are so closely interlinked, and we are so ignorant, and so cavalier about disrupting them.
Sperm whales may put a gentle (and unwitting) brake on climate change
Sperm whale faeces may help oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the air, scientists say.
Australian researchers calculate that Southern Ocean sperm whales release about 50 tonnes of iron every year.
This stimulates the growth of tiny marine plants – phytoplankton – which absorb CO2 during photosynthesis.
The process results in the absorption of about 400,000 tonnes of carbon – more than twice as much as the whales release by breathing, the study says.
The researchers note in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B that the process also provides more food for the whales, estimated to number about 12,000.
Phytoplankton are the basis of the marine food web in this part of the world, and the growth of these tiny plants is limited by the amount of nutrients available, including iron.
Faecal attraction
Over the last decade or so, many groups of scientists have experimented with putting iron into the oceans deliberately as a ‘fix’ for climate change.
Not all of these experiments have proved successful; the biggest, the German Lohafex expedition, put six tonnes of iron into the Southern Ocean in 2008, but saw no sustained increase in carbon uptake.
The Polarstern The Lohafex expedition was […]
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SIMON ATKINS, - Gerson Lehrman Group
Stephan: Mayan shamans, trained to open to nonlocal consciousness foresaw something highly numinous, which is why they settled on this date. I think this may well be what the Mayan 2012 prophecy is about. This is a very conservative assessment of what may be a major transition. I chose it because it is easy to get overwrought about things like this. However, I am going to follow this closely.
Summary
Should we be concerned about NASA’s warning about solar flares? On June 8, a meeting called ‘The Space Weather Enterprise Forum’ was held at the National Press Club in DC. NASA says that the sun is going to produce very high solar flare levels and that our technology & society will be greatly affected. NASA warns that a century-class solar storm coming before the middle of 2013 could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina.
Analysis
NASA says, ‘Earth and space are about to come into contact in a way that’s new to human history’. And you may have seen articles and YouTube videos that abound on this subject, like this one: ‘Powerful Solar Storm Could Shut Down U.S. for Months’, found at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,478024,00.html. As an atmospheric scientist, studying the sun for a couple of decades now, I have to say one thing: ‘Oh please, enough drama. This is fear-mongering, mainly hyped-up into a sensationalistic story to grab every soul’s attention.’
As we know, every week, around the planet, there are natural disasters, some small and some large.
So when we hear about a prediction of a large solar flare taking out power […]
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Stephan: A bad policy, a bad war, a bad tactic. The shadow continues to extract its price, even though decades have passed.
HANOI, Vietnam – Thirty-five years after the Vietnam War, a $300 million price tag has been placed on the most contentious legacy still tainting U.S.-Vietnam relations: Agent Orange.
A joint panel of U.S. and Vietnamese policymakers, citizens and scientists released an action plan Wednesday urging the U.S. government and other donors to provide an estimated $30 million annually over 10 years to clean up sites still contaminated by dioxin, a toxic chemical used in the defoliant.
The funding also would be used to treat Vietnamese suffering from disabilities, including those believed linked to exposure to Agent Orange, which was dumped by the U.S. military in vast quantities over former South Vietnam to destroy crops and jungle cover shielding communist guerrilla fighters.
Washington has been slow to address the issue, quibbling for years with its former foe over the need for more scientific research to show that the herbicide sprayed by U.S. aircraft during the war caused health problems and birth defects among Vietnamese.
‘We are talking about something that is a major legacy of the Vietnam War, a major irritant in this important relationship,’ said Walter Isaacson, co-chair of the U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/Dioxin, which released the report. ‘The cleanup of our […]
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DANIEL TENCER, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Our fears are destroying us. We give ourselves over to the shadow in the belief it will protect us. It never does.
The Pentagon’s spy unit has quietly begun to rebuild a database for tracking potential terrorist threats that was shut down after it emerged that it had been collecting information on American anti-war activists.
The Defense Intelligence Agency filed notice this week that it plans to create a new section called Foreign Intelligence and Counterintelligence Operation Records, whose purpose will be to ‘document intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism and counternarcotic operations relating to the protection of national security.’
But while the unit’s name refers to ‘foreign intelligence,’ civil liberties advocates and the Pentagon’s own description of the program suggest that Americans will likely be included in the new database.
FICOR replaces a program called Talon, which the DIA created in 2002 under then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as part of the counterterrorism efforts following the 9/11 attacks. It was disbanded in 2007 after it emerged that Talon had retained information on anti-war protesters, including Quakers, even after it was determined they posed no threat to national security.
DIA spokesman Donald Black told Newsweek that the new database would not include the more controversial elements of the old Talon program. But Jeff Stein at the Washington Post reports that the new program will evidently inherit the old Talon database.
Story […]
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