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Four workers were killed and one injured in a chemical leak at a DuPont plant near Houston, Texas on Saturday.
A valve began leaking methyl mercaptan, a chemical used to make insecticides and fungicides, around 4am at a plant stationed in La Porte, about 20 miles east of Houston. Officials say the leak was contained by 6am, but the five employees who were in the unit at the time responded to the accident and were exposed to the chemical. The cause was not immediately known.
Methyl mercaptan is also often used to add odor to natural gas, which has no smell, for safety purposes.
According to the Houston Chronicle, among the victims were 39-year-old Robert Tisnado and his 48-year-old brother Gibby Tisnado, who had worked at the plant for six years. USA Today also wrote that the leak killed a supervisor who had been with DuPont for more than 40 years.
The Chronicle continued:
The Associated Press reports:
This is not the first time in recent years that DuPont workers have been killed by overlooked safety hazards in the company’s factories around the country. As NBC News writes:
Plant manager Randall Clements said in a statement, “There are no words to fully express the loss we feel or the concern and sympathy we extend to the families of the employees and their co-workers. We are in close touch with them and providing them every measure of support and assistance at this time.”
He added that DuPont will cooperate with officials investigating the cause of the accident.
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Security researchers have recently exposed a sophisticated new “military grade” malware program which is specifically targeting governments, academics and telecoms and, according to new reports, is suspected as being the handiwork of U.S. and British intelligence agencies.
According to security analysts with the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab, which has been tracking the malware known as “Regin” for two years, the technology has two main objectives: intelligence gathering and facilitating other types of attacks.
Perhaps most notable, security researchers point out, is that none of the targets are based in either the U.S. or U.K. According to the Guardian, 28 percent of victims are based in Russia and 24 percent are based in Saudi Arabia. Ireland, with 9 percent of detected infections, has the third highest number of targets.
Since initial signs of the malicious software emerged in 2008, there have only been 100 or so victims uncovered globally. These include telecom operators, government institutions, multi-national political bodies, financial institutions, research institutions, and individuals involved in advanced mathematical/cryptographical research.
Described as highly complex, the malware works by disguising itself as Microsoft software and then stealing data through such channels as “capturing screenshots, taking control of the mouse’s point-and-click functions, stealing passwords, monitoring the victim’s web activity and retrieving deleted files,” according to Guardian reporter Tom Fox-Brewster.
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Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, told Fox-Brewster that his firm does not believe Regin was made by Russia or China, “the usual suspects.” According to Fox-Brewster, this leaves the U.S., U.K. or Israel as the “most likely candidates,” an assumption that Symantec threat researcher Candid Wueest said was “probable.”
On Monday, Intercept reporters Morgan Marquis-Boire, Claudio Guarnieri, and Ryan Gallagher published the first of an investigative series on Regin. Specifically, they note, Regin is the suspected technology behind both a GCHQ surveillance attack on Belgium telecom operator Belacom as well as an infection of European Union computer systems carried out by the National Security Agency. Both attacks were revealed last year through documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
On Sunday, Symantec was the first to report on the technology, publishing a technical whitepaper which described Regin as “a complex piece of malware whose structure displays a degree of technical competence rarely seen.”
“Its capabilities and the level of resources behind Regin indicate that it is one of the main cyberespionage tools used by a nation state,” the paper continues.
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In yet another blow to the Egyptian revolutionaries whose hopes have been repeatedly dashed since the protests they initiated in 2011 swept former autocratic ruler Hosni Mubarak from power, a court on Saturday dropped all the remaining criminal charges, including allegations of murder, that had been levied against the nation’s former president.
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Al-Jazeera America reports:
In response to the news, Egyptian-American journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous tweeted:
Though army tanks blocked off access to Tahrir Square in Cairo following the court’s announcement, some Egyptians got as close as they could to express their disappointment with the ruling:
The New York Times adds:
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LIMA, Peru – Even as the presence of major oil and gas corporations is nearly ubiquitous at the U.N. climate talks in the Peruvian capital known as COP20, fossil fuel divestment campaigns have gained ground in various countries and are moving to counter the influence of the “dirty energy” lobby here.
As the COP20 enters its second and final week, delegates from 195 countries are still trying to address the urgency of climate change by reaching an international agreement to decelerate global warming. However, activists are worried that the influence of fossil fuel companies within COP20 might slow down an already sluggish process.
“The premise is simple, according to the movement organisers: if it is morally wrong to wreck the planet, it is morally wrong to profit from that wreckage.”In response to climate inaction, student organisers have called for fossil fuel divestment. The movement aims to disinvest endowments from a list of 200 companies that are ranked by the largest known fossil fuel reserves.
Divestment campaigns advocate full divestment from the list, which includes Gazprom, Petrobras, PetroChina, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, among other major companies. The intention of the campaign is both to erode financial support for major oil corporations, as well as revoke their own moral license.
Maddy Salzman, a former organiser of Fossil Free Washington University, sees divestment as a potential solution to the current stalemate on climate action. “The necessary legislation and investment decisions cannot and will not be made in our current political system, and as citizens we must play a role in making the changes we believe in,” she told IPS.
The motivation behind the campaign stems from a 2011 Carbon Tracker Initiative report which warned that about four-fifths of the total known fossil fuel reserves worldwide must remain in the ground in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
The premise is simple, according to the movement organisers: if it is morally wrong to wreck the planet, it is morally wrong to profit from that wreckage.
There are hundreds of campaigns across four continents seeking fossil fuel divestment. While most of these campaigns target university endowments, they also include state pension funds, cities, and places of faith.
Some campaigns, including at U.S. and Canadian universities, have already succeeded in obtaining commitments from their investment officers to divest their funds.
Divestment campaigns, while local, connect to broader international issues. Students involved with fossil fuel divestment campaigns are quick to acknowledge that their movement is a global one – an international solution that parallels the stalemate at the U.N.
In fact, they’ve recently launched Global Divestment Day, a day of action to elevate the growing momentum around fossil fuel divestment campaigns.
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In the case of the U.N. climate negotiations, divestment has helped shed light on the influence of the fossil fuel industry at these talks.
“Even here at the annual meeting to create global policy to respond to climate change, fossil fuel companies have an influential pressure and continue to dilute the strength of the outcome of the COPs,” Dyanna Jaye, chair of the Virginia Student Environmental Coalition, told IPS.
“While the science becomes increasingly alarming, we continue to be fed another profit-driven story about continuing the use of fossil fuels,” said Jaye, a youth delegate with the SustainUS youth advocacy group in Lima.
On Monday, climate activists at the U.N. talks protested outside an event hosted at the conference venue by fossil fuel giant Shell. The event, initially titled “Why Divest from Fossil Fuels When a Future with Low Emission Fossil Energy Use is Already a Reality?”, has since changed names and times on multiple occasions.
Sally Bunner, an organiser with Earlham College Responsible Energy Investment, explains why fossil fuel companies cannot be part of a solution at COP20.
“Fossil fuel companies are irresponsible, because it has been proven for many decades that the extraction and burning of fossil fuels poisons people, water, air, and soil,” she said, referring to human rights implications. “Unfortunately, the fossil fuel industry hasn’t switched to a better form of energy production because it’s not profitable for them to do so.”
The Shell event is not the only example of industry presence at the conference. Oil companies have been meeting with delegations from numerous countries negotiating in Lima. On Saturday afternoon, the British Columbia Minister of Environment, Mary Polak, tweeted that she was going to meet the Climate Change Advisor for Chevron, a major player in the fossil fuel industry.
Questioned in the social network about the motives of their meeting, Polak answered that “you can’t change oil company behaviour if you won’t talk with them.”
Representatives from both Chevron and TransCanada have participated in closed stakeholder meetings with the Canadian delegation, designed to brief Canadian non-governmental organisations.
While they are allowed to be present in those meetings, many youth delegates have noted the disproportionate representation of a stakeholder that comprises such a small number of the general Canadian population.
© 2019 Inter Press Service
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Under the banner of “‘Così non va!'” (This is unacceptable!), a general strike is sweeping Italy on Friday as public and private sector workers stage their opposition to austerity reforms that erode worker protections.
Organized by the first and third largest unions in the country—the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro and the Unione Italiana del Lavoro—the eight-hour walkout hit 50 cities across the country, with massive protests slated for Turin, Milan, Rome, and Genoa.
The unions say the massive work action has so far stopped half of the country’s trains, buses and flights.
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Friday’s strike is the latest in a series of public demonstrations against Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s new Jobs Act, which slashes a number of key labor protections, including by making it easier for companies to fire workers without severance compensation and more difficult for employees to stage grievances against unlawful dismissal.
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The Italian government is also planning to cut spending to a number of public services in 2015, part of an austerity package advanced by Renzi.
The cutbacks come at a time of high poverty and joblessness in Italy, where people under the age of 25 face an unemployment rate of 43.3 percent.
The protests, which are still ongoing, can be followed on Twitter:
Tweets about #cosinonva lang:en
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A North Carolina law that forces physicians to show and describe an ultrasound to patients seeking an abortion is “ideological in intent” and violates doctors’ free-speech rights, ruled a federal court on Monday.
“This compelled speech, even though it is a regulation of the medical profession, is ideological in intent and in kind,” wrote Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson in the decision (pdf) striking down the state mandate.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel asserts that the “the state cannot commandeer the doctor-patient relationship to compel a physician to express its preference to the patient” and that the 2011 law is a violation of the First Amendment.
Reproductive rights groups welcomed the news.
“Exam rooms are no place for propaganda and doctors should never be forced to serve as mouthpieces for politicians who wish to shame and demean women,” said Nancy Northup, President and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which along with Planned Parenthood, American Civil Liberties Union, and ACLU of North Carolina Legal Foundation filed suit against the law on behalf of several North Carolina physicians.
North Carolina’s mandatory ultrasound law is said to be among the most extreme in the nation. Describing the specifics of the mandate, Jessica Mason Pieklo, senior legal analyst with RH Reality Check, writes:
The law was preliminarily blocked in October 2011 following the suit and was permanently struck down as unconstitutional by a federal district court in January 2014. Monday’s decision upholds that ruling.
“Today’s ruling marks another major victory for women and sends a message to lawmakers across the country: it is unconstitutional for politicians to interfere in a woman’s personal medical decisions about abortion,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in a press statement.
“This law is about trying to shame a woman out of having an abortion, pure and simple,” added Louise Melling, deputy legal director for the ACLU.
Four other states have enacted laws similar to North Carolina’s. However, in November 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a similar law from Oklahoma, allowing the ruling from the Oklahoma Supreme Court blocking the measure as unconstitutional to stand.
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Control of the struggling York City School District in Pennsylvania has been handed over to the state, effectively paving the way for public education in that county to be provided exclusively by a private company.
State officials had previously said that, if approved for a receivership (as a state takeover is called), they would bring in Charter Schools USA, an ‘education management company’ based in Florida, to operate the district.
According to the York Dispatch:
The Dispatch reports that district teachers, parents, and students have been vigorously opposed to the plan. Following the judge’s ruling on Friday, a group of about 20 students and staffers protested outside the York County Judicial Center.
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In a statement, the state’s largest school employee union said Linebaugh’s decision “ignores the will of the community, puts students’ education at risk, and paves the way for a corporate takeover of the city’s schools.”
“The newly appointed receiver’s charter school plan is just as troubling as the last-minute power grab,” said Michael Crossey, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association. “There’s no real plan at all for more than 1,000 of the school district’s students with special needs. Apparently, they think these students should just enroll in cyber programs if they want to stay in district-operated schools or if a charter school provider can’t educate them. That is just astonishing.”
The PSEA and other organizations said would appeal the judge’s decision; the York County School District itself filed an appeal Friday.
“Be it noted that today’s education ‘reformers’ don’t much care for democracy,” educational policy analyst Diane Ravitch wrote at her blog. “They would rather turn public schools over to a for-profit corporation that siphons off 20 percent in management fees and pays itself outlandish rental fees rather than trust parents and local citizens to do what’s best for their children.”
“Choice?” she continued. “There will be no ‘choice’ for the families of York City. Their children will have to attend a charter school whose headquarters are in Florida. Yes, it is the death of local control and democracy in York City.”
Ravitch notes that “[t]his is what we would expect from the outgoing Corbett administration, which actively promoted privatization.” But it begs the question: “What will the new Tom Wolf administration do?”
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A groundbreaking new study is confirming what green campaigners have long argued: in order to stave off climate disaster, the majority of fossil fuel deposits around the world—including 92 percent of U.S. coal, all Arctic oil and gas, and a majority of Canadian tar sands—must stay “in the ground.”
The research is a boost to world-wide green campaigns, from the bid to stop the Keystone XL pipeline to grassroots protest against Arctic drilling.
The new findings were published in the journal Nature and authored by Christophe McGlade and Paul Ekins, both of whom hail from the University College London.
They write, “Policy makers have generally agreed that the average global temperature rise caused by greenhouse gas emissions should not exceed 2 °C above the average global temperature of pre-industrial times.”
The researchers explain that they employed a “single integrated assessment model that contains estimates of the quantities, locations and nature of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves and resources” to determine what it would take to stay below this limit.
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“Our results suggest that, globally, a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and over 80 per cent of current coal reserves should remain unused from 2010 to 2050 in order to meet the target of 2 °C,” the researchers explain.
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While this is not the first study to note that fossil fuels are being dangerously over-exploited, the research is unique in that it pinpoints the national locations of specific reserves that must remain untapped.
The scientists find that 92 percent of U.S. coal reserves, and 100 percent of Arctic gas and oil, and 90 percent of Australian coal reserves, must be left alone. In addition, 100 percent of Arctic oil and gas must remain beneath the earth. Furthermore, most Canadian tar sands must remain unexploited, the study concludes.
This graphic created by the Guardian summarizes other location-specific findings by researchers:
The researchers note that their findings, ultimately, mean that, despite the industry drive for exploitation, staving off disaster requires a different course. “[P]olicy markers’ instincts to exploit rapidly and completely their territorial fossil fuels are, in aggregate, inconsistent with their commitments to this temperature limit.”
After large public rallies in France on both Saturday and Sunday in which millions of people collectively expressed notions of unity in the wake of violent attacks in Paris last week, the French government on Monday announced the deployment of 10,000 soldiers to patrol its own streets and to defend what it described as “sensitive sites”.
Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French Defense Minister, said the military troops would be fully deployed by Tuesday evening and called the order “the first mobilization on this scale on our territory.”
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According to the New York Times:
Broadly reported as the obvious and appropriate response to last week’s attacks, in an essay published over the weeked by Common Dreams, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern cautioned the French government about over-militarizing its reaction to the violence perpetrated by just a few individuals. Arguing that some lessons must be taken from the failed U.S. response to attacks in 2001—including a reduction of civil liberties at home and large-scale and bloody wars abroad—McGovern said France should recognize “the challenge is to learn from U.S. mistakes after 9/11 and address root causes, not react with another round of mindless violence.”
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Speaking before a session of the new Syriza parliament in Athens on Tuesday, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras declared that Greek negotiators will not succumb to “blackmail” from European lenders and will adhere to their promise to end austerity policies in the state.
“We are not in a hurry and we will not compromise,” Tsipras told the assembled lawmakers. “We are working hard for an honest and mutually beneficial deal, a deal without austerity, without the bailout which has destroyed Greece in recent years, a deal without the toxic presence of the Troika.”
Tsipras made the comments as tense negotiations with other European financial ministers and lenders representing the Troika lenders—which include the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund—continued in Brussels.
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On Monday, those talks collapsed after finance minister Yanis Varoufakis rejected a proposal put forth by the Eurogroup ministers because it called for an extension of the current bailout scheme with no alterations to the terms. Greek leaders face a Friday deadline by which they must agree on a short term aid package.
The Guardian, quoting sources close to the Greek finance ministry, said that it was “highly probable” that on Wednesday Greece would submit a request for a temporary loan agreement, which they say would exclude the austerity conditions set in the existing bailout.
The Guardian reports:
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To that same point, during his parliament speech, Tsipras announced that the government would vote on a series of social reform bills on Friday, including a bill that deals with labor reform and restores collective bargaining agreements, which were previously scrapped “by the Troika to serve the interests of the oligarchy.”
During his speech, Tsipras conceded that in the brief time since the leftist Syriza party took power, the country’s huge economic problems have not yet been solved. However, he said that Greeks display a newfound pride and can hold negotiations with their EU counterparts as “equals.”
“Three weeks after the elections and already our people feel that they are living and breathing in a different country,” he said.
Tsipras continued: “What radically changed is the feeling of the average Greek citizen, that they no longer feel this disdain and humiliation. The Greek people now feel proud and dignified.” Greece will no longer behave like a “colony” and will no longer allow themselves to be treated “as if they are the untouchables of Europe.”
As with the ongoing Brussels talks, Tsipras said that Greece will now “negotiate as an equal partner”—a step which he declared is the first “concrete change” since Syriza was elected to power.
“For the first time, Greece has its own voice,” and it is a voice, he said, that has been shared in expressions of solidarity throughout Europe. On Saturday, 5,000 people marched to the Banque de France in Paris to denounce the EU’s austerity agenda in Greece, and in London hundreds of pro-Syriza demonstrators rallied in Trafalgar Square.
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