Author: m1k3y

A wildfire is raging for a third day in the hills of northern New Mexico near the nuclear laboratory where the atomic bomb was first developed.

The blaze came within a few kilometers of a dump site where around 20,000 barrels of plutonium-contaminated waste is stored at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

However, officials said that the fire is being kept at a safe distance and there is no danger of it reaching the low-level radioactive materials.

The Los Alamos laboratory, which was established during World War Two as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb, remains one of the top nuclear arms manufacturing facilities in the US.

The cause of the fire is believed to be a fallen power line.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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In fact, the real profanity is that almost a million properties are standing empty in England and Wales, while millions of impoverished people have nowhere safe to live. Britain has a housing crisis, and the scale of that crisis makes squatting a practical, sensible option for many desperate people. There are currently half a million homeless people in this country, and another 500,000 who are “precariously housed” – sleeping on friends’ sofas, living in temporary accommodation. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of properties are standing entirely empty in London alone, patrolled by security guards, waiting for their value to increase when the market picks up again.

In these circumstances, squatting is starting to look like a principled response to the moral bankruptcy of contemporary housing inequality, as well as the smart option for homeless people with nowhere else to go. There are currently 15,000 squatters in England and Wales – the law is different in Scotland – and as the cuts come in, that number is likely to rise.

The prospect of a wave of squats and occupations poses two problems for this Government. When thousands of people squatted in London after the Second World War, they were lauded as heroes, bravely responding to the housing shortages created by the Blitz. But when housing shortages are the direct result of bungled forward planning and ideological austerity measures, the presence of squatters is an embarrassment. More importantly, Britain has a long tradition of occupation and squatting as a form of political resistance, dating back to the Diggers and Levellers of the 1640s, and continuing through contemporary university and workplace occupations.

If it comes into force, the new law will make criminals of students who occupy their universities, of outraged citizens who occupy their council buildings, of striking employees who occupy their places of work. Taking over an empty building and using it to set up a family home or a community garden is itself a political statement, but it is the more overtly political occupations which the Government is keen to do away with. Occupations like the Deptford anti-cuts space, where activists took over a disused Job Centre and used it to train locals to fight the cuts.

The occupation of private property by the poor and outraged is a matter of principle, as well as a practical response to hardship. If we believe that it is unfair for the wealthy to buy up empty buildings while millions of people squeeze through their lives in narrow, crumbling council blocks, in hostels or on the streets; if we believe that ordinary people should not be criminalised for protesting peacefully against Government-imposed austerity, then it is up to all of us to stop this spiteful new law in its tracks.

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Bangladesh tops the list of countries having the greatest number of ships scrapped every year, with India and Pakistan trailing far behind. Some 200 Bangladeshi companies pay a combined $100 million in taxes each year. The metal scrapping business is so lucrative it supplies about 1.5 million tonnes out of the nation’s total steel consumption of about five million tonnes, the World Bank study said. 

Most of the ship breaking companies are located on a roughly 20km stretch of beach in Chittagong district, situated on the Bay of Bengal in southeastern Bangladesh. Some 18,000 unskilled and unprotected workers manually handle poisonous chemicals and are also exposed to the risk of explosion. 

Between 2005 and 2007, a total of 270 ocean-going vessels, categorised as end-of-life-ships, were dismantled there. This year alone, some 70 such vessels have been cleared for scrapping, a majority of which failed to obtain either prior clearance to use the yards or no-objection certificates to continue scrapping operations. 

On June 1, the US Maritime Administration cleared the cargo vessel Harriette for scrapping on the beaches of Chittagong, with support from the US Environmental Protection Agency. Earlier, the ship Probo Koala, which figured in a controversial toxic waste dumping off the Ivory Coast in August 2006, was also sold for scrapping and docked on the ship breaking beaches of Chittagong. The ship has since been renamed the Gulf Jash.

The soil and waters in ship breaking areas are showing high levels of toxicity, with environmental protection limited and virtually no proper management of deadly chemicals – among them asbestos, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and other ozone-depleting substances (ODS) and heavy metals. According to the World Bank report, soil contamination tests showed concentrations of cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury and oil. The same report predicts the accumulation of substantial amounts of poisonous chemicals including asbestos, PCBs, ODS (mainly polyurethane foam) and paints during the next 20 years if safety measures are not put in place immediately.

According to an investigation conducted by the Department of Explosives, Greenpeace, the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, and BELA, 123 workers have died while dismantling ships on the beaches of Shitakunda in Chittagong from 1998 to March this year. “The figures are those which are actually reported. We have no knowledge on workers whose bodies are simply thrown into the sea. So, we assume deaths could be much higher,” said Taslima Islam, senior lawyer at BELA.

Since 1998, a total of 72 incidents of violent explosions and chemical spillage have taken place in ship breaking yards. Hundreds of workers who have survived with chemical burns and life-long physical disabilities have never been compensated properly, the lawyers said.

On top of this, vast areas of mangrove trees – the lifeline of the local ecosystem – have been cleared to accommodate dismantling operations.

From Bangladeshi ship breakers defy court ruling – Features – Al Jazeera English

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kellyoxford: Best photo from last night’s riot in Vancouver. Photo by Rich Lam/Getty Images

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The meeting between Ginsberg and Leary marked an anchor point in the history of the 1960s drug-soaked counterculture. Leary, the credentialed purveyor of hallucinatory drugs, was suddenly invited into the center of the artistic, social and sexual avant-garde. It was Ginsberg who helped convince Leary that he should bring the psychedelic revolution to the masses, rather than keep it among an elite group. Filling out one of Leary’s research questionnaires in May 1962 the poet Charles Olson wrote that psilocybin “creates the love feast,” and “should be available to anyone.” Thomas Lannon, the library’s assistant curator for manuscripts and archives, explained that at the time these substances were not regulated by the government, and that Leary and his group did not consider them drugs but aids to reaching self-awareness. (via New York Public Library Buys Timothy Leary’s Papers – NYTimes.com)

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Then, in the third week of February, the revolution began. Shaka stuck close to his uncle, who had fought in Libya’s war with Chad in the 1980s. His uncle grabbed an RPG launcher when Misurata’s armory was overrun. After blasting two of Qaddafi’s tanks, he was shot dead. His weapon, still stained with blood, was handed to Shaka. Essraity, whose house had been hit by a tank shell, joined him on the front line, as did Hazim “Haz” Bozaid, a powerfully built 29-year-old with a goatee, a stocking on his head, and a black Sepultura T-shirt. An import manager, he was also the lead vocalist and guitarist in a local thrash and death-metal band called Acacus. “I was inspired by Megadeth, Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, Chuck Schuldiner’s Death, that sort of stuff. It was not easy to find in Libya, so if you got something on tape, you guarded it like gold,” he told me.

At first, their unit moved around the city, so bringing guitars to the battlefield was not possible. Shaka left his acoustic model in his car, and his electric guitar—“a Gibson, but a Chinese Gibson”—at home. Both were stolen when Qaddafi’s troops raided his house. They also kidnapped his father, who had not been seen since.

…

The revolutionaries’ strategy was to starve the snipers out, cutting off their supply stream by blocking the road with huge shipping containers full of wet sand and metal filings. Shaka’s job was to shoot the tanks, armored cars, and bulldozers that tried to move the containers. Before loading his weapon, he wrote his uncle’s name on the RPG. For Bozaid, a machine gunner who put his body count at more than 25, preparation for battle meant listening to Slayer on his smart phone.

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Reflecting the growing impatience in Congress with the war in Afghanistan and the sometimes tepid support from Pakistan, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont grilled Gates during a Capitol Hill hearing, demanding: “How long do we support governments that lie to us? When do we say enough is enough?”

Gates responded that based on his 27 years at the CIA and more than four as Pentagon chief, “most governments lie to each other. That’s the way business gets done.”

“Do they also arrest the people that help us, when they say they’re allies?” Leahy pressed.

“Sometimes,” replied Gates, adding, “and sometimes they send people to spy on us, and they’re our close allies. That’s the real world that we deal with. ”

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