New Documents, Employees Reveal BP's Alaska Oilfield Plagued by Major Safety Issues

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 a serious oil spill last November and other mishaps, 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.

"The condition of the [Prudhoe Bay] field is a lot worse and in my opinion a lot more dangerous," said Marc Kovac, who has worked for BP on Alaska's North Slope for more than three decades. "We still have hundreds of miles of rotting pipe ready to break that needs to be replaced. We are totally unprepared for a large spill."

Kovac, a mechanic and welder who is the steward of the United Steelworkers union local 4959, said a lot of employees share his feelings, but "don't want to risk their jobs for speaking out." Kovac said he was willing to take the risk because BP has been slow to deal with the Prudhoe Bay problems and that "many lives are at stake."

Some of the employees, speaking anonymously, said BP follows an "operate to failure" attitude.

Kovac said that means BP Alaska avoids spending money on "upkeep" and instead runs the equipment until it breaks down...

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Jason Leopold @'Truth-out'

Child prison secret restraint tactics 'revealed'

Bioluminescence in the Gippsland Lakes

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Parkour from 1930

Israel Stops Listening to Its Judges

The Israeli government is facing legal action for contempt over its refusal to implement a Supreme Court ruling that it end a policy of awarding preferential budgets to Jewish communities, including settlements, rather than much poorer Palestinian Arab towns and villages inside Israel.

The contempt case on behalf of Israel’s Palestinian minority comes in the wake of growing criticism of the government for ignoring court decisions it does not like -- a trend that has been noted by the Supreme Court justices themselves.

Yehudit Karp, a former deputy attorney general, compiled a list of 12 recent court rulings the government has refused to implement, but legal groups believe there are more examples. Many of the disregarded judgements confer benefits on Palestinians, either in the occupied territories or inside Israel, or penalise the settlers.

Critics have accused the government of violating the rule of law and warned that the defiance has been possible chiefly because right-wing politicians and religious groups have severely eroded the Supreme Court’s authority over the past few years.

Senior members of the current right-wing government of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including the justice minister, Yaakov Neeman, have repeatedly criticized the court for what they call its “judicial activism”, or interference in matters they believe should be decided by the parliament alone.

Legal experts, however, warn that, because Israel lacks a constitution, the court is the only bulwark against a tyrannical Jewish majority abusing the rights of the country’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens, as well as 4 million Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.

Ilan Saban, a law professor at Haifa University, said: “Unlike most -- if not all -- other democracies, Israel lacks a political culture that respects limits on the power of the majority.”

Even the protections offered by Israel’s basic laws, he said, were not deeply entrenched and could easily be re-legislated. The lack of both a formal constitution and a tradition of political tolerance, he added, was “a dangerous cocktail”.

Israel’s liberal Haaretz newspaper went further, warning recently that, in “slandering the judiciary”, government officials had provoked a crisis that could “lead to the destruction of Israeli democracy”.

The country’s highest court is due to rule in the coming weeks on whether the government is in contempt of a ruling the court made four years ago to end a discriminatory scheme, known as National Priority Areas (NPA), that provides extra education funding to eligible communities.

The High Follow-Up Committee, an umbrella political body representing Israel’s large Palestinian minority, launched the case because only four small Palestinian villages were classified in NPAs, against some 550 Jewish communities. The scheme, introduced in 1998, is believed to have deprived Palestinian citizens, a fifth of Israel’s population, of millions of dollars.

Although the court ruled in February 2006 that the scheme must be scrapped, the government has issued a series of extensions until at least 2012.

Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal centre that launched the contempt petition, said: “This case has become a symbol of how the government refuses to implement decisions it does not like, especially ones relating to constitutional protection and minority rights.”

However, she said that punishing the state for its actions would not be easy. “After all, the court is not going to jail the government. The best we can hope for is a fine.”

The NPA case is only one of several that have highlighted a growing trend of law-breaking by the government...

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Jonathan Cook @'Counterpunch'

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'Oh-dear!'

Little Axe: from blues to hip-hop and back

 

New blues ... Little Axe. Photograph: York Tillyer

Skip McDonald was playing a gig in Portugal, billed as just him and guitar. A fair portion of the audience had seen the billing and decided an evening of traditional blues was just what they wanted. They might have wanted traditional blues, but they didn't get it. On entering the venue, they came across a stage upon which stood not a stool, a microphone and a guitar, but a selection of samplers and computers, as well as the setup for a full rock band."The purists were outraged," says McDonald. "About 20 of them started walking out. The rest of them stayed and we got on fine. It was a particularly good gig."

He can laugh about it now, because 17 years after starting his Little Axe project, in which the old Delta blues is reinterpreted with the aid of technology, what was a revolutionary approach to an old music has become the norm. Beck and Moby took McDonald's ideas and placed them in the mainstream. McDonald, who's flattered by his imitators, would be happy with their kind of sales, but more important to him is his mission to redefine what constitutes the blues.

"I don't like the way music is put in little boxes with a label on it," McDonald says. "I hear the blues in a lot of different types of music that no one would ever call the blues. And I don't think the blues has to be about pain. You might have a lyric about going across town where there's a woman who's nice to you. The blues can be joyous. There are two types of music: deep and shallow. For me, the blues is anything that starts with an emotion."

McDonald was born Bernard Alexander in Dayton, Ohio in September 1949. He was taught to play blues guitar when he was eight by his father, a steel worker who played at weekends. McDonald's father drilled home the importance of having a steady job, but the son wanted to chance his arm making it in music. He left home at 17, playing jazz, funk and disco up and down the east coast before he met bassist Doug Wimbish and then, in 1979, drummer Keith LeBlanc. As the house band of Sugarhill records, the trio played on some of the early hits of hip-hop – The Message, by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five; White Lines by Grandmaster Melle Mel. Rap's modern take on the blues hit him "like a left hook from nowhere. Those early gigs in Harlem were just completely crazy."

McDonald went from Sugarhill to recording with Afrikaa Bambaataa and James Brown ("a serious man. I learned to call him Mr Brown"), with Sinéad O'Connor and – in another association with a label – the On-U Sound imprint of the English producer Adrian Sherwood, where the McDonald-Wimbish-LeBlanc trio formed the core of Tackhead, the avant-garde funk band that often served as On-U Sound's house band in the 80s.

McDonald first recorded as Little Axe in 1994, and his latest album, Bought for a Dollar, Sold For a Dime, takes McDonald full circle by reuniting the Sugarhill trio for the first time in 17 years. "To be true to yourself sometimes you have to go back to the beginning," he says, echoing the album's lyric about how a man must return to the crossroads to find himself. "I have a chemistry – a telepathy – with those people." But Little Axe remain a broader church. At one gig, the band were joined on stage by superfan Robert Plant.

"He's known for heavy metal, but I hear a blues singer," McDonald says. "I get into trouble for saying this but when I hear Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones they're immersed in blues. It's an endless journey for us all. I feel like I'm just getting started."

Dave Simpson @'The Guardian'

(Thanx Owen!)

Fin (Thanx Fifi! Again)

Borneo Coal Plant Poses Triple Threat

It's hard to think of a worse place to build a coal-fired power plant than a strip of pristine beach nestled between Borneo's rich rainforests and its Coral Triangle, one of the most biodiverse marine ecosystems in the world. Unfortunately, that's exactly where the Malaysian government is now fast-tracking the construction of a new 300 megawatt facility.

Local villagers, who may be displaced, are unsurprisingly against the project, and a growing number of international organizations are now jumping into the fray. Together, they have formed a collective known as SOS Borneo to call attention to the potentially catastrophic consequences of the planned plant.

It's not only the global warming emissions these groups are concerned about. If the plant is built, transmission lines may cut through the rainforest. Jamie Henn, with 350.org, writes that residents of the rainforest include endangered species such as orangutans, Borneo pygmy elephants, and the last 40 Bornean rhinos in the world. In addition, sulfur dioxide pollution and acid rain also pose threats to the forest, to local fisheries and to the Coral Triangle area, which is home to three-quarters of the world's coral species.

The good news is that Borneo has energy options other than dirty coal. A University of California Berkeley audit found that a combination of energy efficiency improvements, biofuels (from palm plantation waste), hydropower, and geothermal would be better than a fossil-fueled plant. In the long-term, solar and ocean energy could provide enough power for the island and bring needed green jobs to boot.

Interestingly, Jeremy Hance reported for Mongabay that locals in the area are afraid their landscape will end up mimicking the degradation in American coal states, where air and water pollution, deforestation, mining have devastated the ecosystem. It's too bad America has to be the model for how not to generate energy. Let's hope Borneo can be an example of how to do things the right way.

As Henn sums up, "Stopping this coal plant is about more than protecting one strip of beach, it's a symbol of a global fight to protect our increasingly fragile planet against the onslaught of dirty energy -- from the island of Borneo to the Gulf of Mexico."

Sign this petition to issue your SOS, and tell Malaysian officials to stop this destructive coal plant.

Tara Lohan @'Change'

OOOPS!!!

(Thanx Fifi!)

UNKLE - Saviours & Angels