Nigerian Villagers Lose Lawsuit Against an Oil Giant

by Yemisi Akinbobola, Africa Renewal

In a stunning and dramatic legal ruling that echoed from the serene court chambers in the Netherlands to the heart of rural Niger Delta in Nigeria, the District Court of The Hague dismissed all but one of the lawsuits brought against Royal Dutch Shell, an Anglo-Dutch oil and gas company, by a group of farmers seeking compensation for the environmental damage caused by the company.

The lawsuit was filed in 2008 by four fishermen and farmers accusing Shell of ruining their livelihoods through environmental degradation. The claims centred on oil spills that occurred between 2004 and 2007 at the Ibibio-I oil well in the village of Ikot Ada Udo in Akwa Ibom State. The villagers wanted Shell to repair the damages caused to their communities by cleaning up the oil spillage, adequately maintaining pipelines to prevent future leaks and paying compensation for loss of livelihoods.

Restoring Natural and Cultural Resources in Navajo Country

by Sam Koplinka-Loehr, Waging Nonviolence

As the Arizona sun crests the ridge of Big Mountain, it casts a deep red hue on Peabody Energy’s Black Mesa coal mine. Less than a hundred yards away, in the shadow of the towering coal processing plant, the Benally family gets ready for a day of school, work and sheepherding.

Black Mesa Mine is one of two coal mines located in the middle of the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona—the other is Kayenta Mine, just five miles down the road. Both mines opened in the late 1960s, but the Benally family has lived there for generations.

Norman Benally has been a community activist almost his entire life and remembers herding sheep on this land before Peabody arrived.

“I’ve seen the landscape change, literally,” he said.

A Corporate Mineral-Security Complex in Peru

by Luis Manuel Claps, NACLA

Peru is a mining conflict country. In September of this year, the Defensoría del Pueblo (National Ombudsman Office) reported 223 social conflicts in September alone, with more than two thirds of them linked to minerals. The report also registers 196 dead and 2,369 injured in disputes over natural resources from 2006 to 2011. The database of the Latin American Observatory of Mining Conflicts (OCMAL) registers 34 cases across Peru. Even though the State has increased its presence in some mining areas and has its own Social Conflict Administration Office, the front line often becomes the ugliest side of corporate-community relations.

by Amr Salahi, Middle East Monitor

Ever since the Syrian regime gassed its own citizens in the Damascus suburbs in a chemical attack on August 21, the issue has rarely been out of the Western news media. However, the debate has been very simplistic. Any observer would be forgiven for thinking that the only crime committed in Syria was this chemical attack, and that the Syrian people had not been subjected to a genocidal war at the hands of a ruthless sectarian dictatorship for two and a half years.

An Interview with Marieme Helie Lucas

by Maryam Namazie, Fitnah

by Ramesh Jaura, IDN

NAGASAKI — More than 50,000 nuclear weapons have been eliminated since the historic Reykjavík Summit between the then-US President Ronald Reagan and his counterpart from the erstwhile Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, which culminated in the groundbreaking Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in December 1987. But 17,300 nukes remain, threatening many times over the very survival of human civilization and most life on earth, as the 2013 Nagasaki Appeal points out.

China’s Third Plenum Signals New ‘Paramount Leader’

from chinaworker.info

“More market, less freedom, and much more power to Xi Jinping”—this was the verdict of Beijing-based journalist Ola Wong, on the decisions of the recently concluded third plenary meeting of the CCP’s 18th Central Committee. Third Plenum meetings have a special status in China’s authoritarian system, because of the key 1978 meeting (11th Central Committee’s Third Plenum), which sealed the triumph of Deng Xiaoping over Mao Zedong’s designated heir Hua Guofeng and launched the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) onto the path of pro-capitalist “reform and opening.” Expectations among the capitalists in China and globally have accordingly been high.

For the Uranium Exploration and Mining Accountability Act

by Curtis Kline, Intercontinental Cry

Native Americans in the northern Great Plains have the highest cancer rates in the United States, particularly lung cancer. It’s a problem that the United States government has woefully ignored, much the horror of the men and women who must carry the painful, life-threatening burden. The cancer rates started increasing drastically a few decades after uranium mining began on their territory.

According to a report by Earthworks (PDF), “Mining not only exposes uranium to the atmosphere, where it becomes reactive, but releases other radioactive elements such as thorium and radium and toxic heavy metals including arsenic, selenium, mercury and cadmium. Exposure to these radioactive elements can cause lung cancer, skin cancer, bone cancer, leukemia, kidney damage and birth defects.”

Today, in the northern great plains states of Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, the memory of that uranium mining exists in the form of 2,885 abandoned open pit uranium mines. All of the abandoned mines can be found on land that is supposed to be for the absolute use of the Great Sioux Nation under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty with the United States.