Dear Kitty. Some blog

This is a video from Dutch NOS TV about the flooding disaster, once again, in Missouri, USA.

See also here.

London Racist Police Brutality - For more videos, click here

This video from London, England, says about itself:

Black Postman is assaulted by cops for refusing to move his van. Policeman at back punches him in groin, big crowd, possible injury.

From British weekly The Observer:

Minister is dragged into police race row

· Forces accused over Muslim audit
· Home Secretary urged to intervene

* Mark Townsend, crime correspondent

* Sunday June 29, 2008

The home Secretary is at the centre of the worst race row to engulf the police service for almost a decade as chief constables stand accused of blocking an inquiry into discrimination against Muslim officers.

Jacqui Smith will be asked to intervene tomorrow after the damning revelation that at least 20 police forces refused to co-operate with the first audit into the treatment of Muslim and black officers. Information from those forces that did take part suggested there was routine racial discrimination against them.

Accusations that police forces refused to co-operate with the audit, which was conducted jointly by the National Association of Muslim Police and the think-tank Demos, is bound to cause consternation in government. Initially, only 11 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales replied to the questionnaire on the promotional prospects, rank and number of Muslim and black officers employed. As a result of this ‘poor rate of return’, the deadline was extended by another month. Even then barely half - only 23 - co-operated.

See also here.

British police face discrimination lawsuit from top Muslim officer: here.

USA: how Rightist suspect Hatfill was treated vs. how Muslim suspects are treated: here.

This video from Britain is called Bhopal Disaster - Channel 4/BBC - The Yes Men.

From British daily The Guardian:

Booker-shortlisted novelist begins hunger strike over Bhopal

Randeep Ramesh in Delhi

Thursday June 12, 2008

Indra Sinha, the author of a Booker-shortlisted novel set in the aftermath of the tragedy of the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, yesterday began an indefinite hunger strike in support of survivors protesting against “government indifference” over their plight.

Sinha, a longtime supporter of the Bhopal campaign, told the Guardian that he wanted to “give something back to people who had given me so much. The survivors have gone through hell and been let down by everybody that matters. The judges, politicians have all sold them down the river.”

More than two decades ago, white clouds of toxic gas escaped from American multinational Union Carbide’s pesticide plant. The gas killed 5,000 people that night and 15,000 more in the following weeks - and there is evidence that hundreds of children are still being born with birth defects.

Sinha joins another nine activists in Delhi who began fasting this week. The protestors, who include children and survivors, have complained of being beaten by police after they demonstrated outside the prime minister’s office in the Indian capital.

Set in the slums of a town a re-imagined Bhopal, Sinha’s Animal’s People is a damning indictment against corporate greed and indifference to human suffering. Its climax is a hunger strike to shame the authorities into helping the survivors.

“I know the problem with a hunger strike is that it hurts you more than the government but there has to be some moral pressure on this government which appears dazzled by Dow Chemicals (which brought Union Carbide in 2001) and promises of god knows what investment. How long can I go on (without food)? I don’t know honestly.”

The author, who is based in southern France, said that the real problem is that there has been no case made against Union Carbide, the question of Dow becomes one of “public relations”.

“Because no American executive has ever been brought before a court of law there has been no rigorous investigation of the facts. So it is not a legal or moral problem but one of image. Next week Dow are sponsoring an event at the Cannes advertising festival which is about using marketing for good causes. It is absurd.”

Dow, one of the world’s largest chemical companies, purchased Union Carbide in 2001 and says it never owned or operated the Bhopal plant. Therefore it has no responsibility for the events in 1984. The disused Union Carbide factory in Bhopal contains about 8,000 tonnes of carcinogenic chemicals which continue to leach out and contaminate water supplies used by 30,000 local people.

Satinath Sarangi of the Sambhavna Trust, which helps to rehabilitate victims, said the government is washing its hands of Bhopal. No one, he says, has taken responsibility for cleaning up the site and paying the high cost of medical bills.

“We need to catalyse global opinion about the issue. The government tries to buy us off with empty promises but really there’s nothing.”

This video from the USA is called TPMtv: McCain Can’t Quit John Hagee.

From British daily The Guardian:

Karma comedians

Stone’s claptrap about China is of a piece with a thriving industry dealing in unscientific nonsense

* Saturday May 31 2008

So Sharon Stone thinks the Sichuan earthquake was caused not by friction between tectonic plates on the Longmenshan fault, but by Beijing being “not nice” to the Dalai Lama. Given that Tibet has been under Chinese rule since 1951, karmic retribution must have a 57-year time lag, but that didn’t stop Stone musing on the seismic catastrophe: “I thought, ‘Is that karma?’ When you are not nice, bad things happen to you.”

Sharon Stone’s nonsensical statement became extra bitter because Sichuan province, where the earthquake struck, is close to Tibet, and many Tibetans live there.

Bad things did happen: within 24 hours of her statement, the Xinhua news agency had dubbed Sharon the “public enemy of all mankind”, perhaps an epithet more suited to US televangelist John Hagee, who in 2005 announced that God unleashed Hurricane Katrina because He was cross after a “homosexual parade”. And, to prove that retribution-based stupidity hasn’t bypassed the UK, Glenn Hoddle also asserted in 1999 that “some people have not been born [with two hands and two legs and half-decent brains] for a reason … the karma is working from another lifetime. It is not only people with disabilities. What you sow, you have to reap.”

Worryingly, though all this lunacy generated the ridicule it deserved, the last few years have seen a spate of new age “self-help” books blaring out an identical, if less targeted, message: that everything in an individual’s life is created by them. From infamous bestseller The Secret (DVD excerpt: “everything that’s coming into your life, you’re attracting into your life”) to weirdo-manual Ask And It Is Given, which channels “the teachings of the non-physical entity Abraham” (sample chapter title: “Unwanted things cannot jump into your experience uninvited”), the philosophy is the same: whatever is happening to you, it’s your fault.

It’s religion for the non-religious, with all the shame, guilt and illogical pronouncements but none of the community. Instead of acts of God, we are told there are no accidents; instead of God’s will, all happenings are manifestations of our own consciousness. And many people accept either the religious or new age explanations because, given the devastation caused by disasters and traumatic events, it’s less scary to think they are a response to wayward human behaviour. That way, if we just change our actions, we won’t have to fear pain and suffering in the future.

In truth, we can only make sense of the world by rejecting these ideas and the more pervasive “everything happens for a reason” mentality, and by accepting that life is random and unjust. Bad things happen to kind people every day, for no reason at all. Our chances in life are largely predetermined by our place of birth, and religious people are as likely to die in tragedies as atheists. Earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes hit for scientific reasons alone; to attribute them to the wrath of God or “the universe” is to deny the victims of these catastrophes their innocence.

Paradoxically, though Stone apologised for her errant statement - which seemed more an ill thought-out comment on China’s treatment of the Dalai Lama than an intentional slur on the victims of the disaster - she has been pulled from the country’s billboards, and her films are now banned in its cinemas. The authors of books like The Secret have profited from pushing sinister anti-scientific nonsense on to the disadvantaged, sick and desperate, but have never been forced to deliver an acknowledgement or apology, let alone been penalised. And homophobe John Hagee has become a millionaire by driving the fear of God into the weak and gullible while also endorsing John McCain, who might just become the next US president.

“Is that karma?” No, Sharon. It’s anything but.

· Ariane Sherine is a television comedy writer

From British daily The Independent:

Such is the relentlessness of Tony Blair’s public immersion into matters of faith these days that Alastair Campbell’s “we don’t do God” assertion in Downing Street has now been fully exposed for what it was: a skilful piece of diversionary spin.

See also here. And here.

This video from the USA is called John McCain’s Myanmar (Burma) Connection.

From The Independent weekly in the USA:

McCain Aides Forced to Quit over Ties to Burmese Military Junta

By Leonard Doyle, The Independent. Posted May 13, 2008.

The McCain campaign reeks of special interests.

Two top aides to the Republican presidential nominee John McCain have been forced to resign over their ties to the Burmese military junta, providing yet another embarrassment for Mr McCain who is trying to present himself as the scourge of special interests in Washington.

Douglas Goodyear, who had been chosen to run the 2008 Republican convention, said he was resigning “so as not to become a distraction in this campaign” after it was revealed he was connected to a lobbying firm that has represented Burma’s military leaders.

Newsweek reported at the weekend that the DCI Group, a lobbying firm, represented Burma until last year. Mr Goodyear, its chief executive, “was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Burma’s military junta, which had been strongly condemned by the State Department for its human-rights record and remains in power today,” the magazine said.

Mr Goodyear had been given the important task of running the Republican convention in Minneapolis this summer and the controversy threatened to highlight the role of lobbyists in Mr McCain’s campaign.

While Mr McCain publicly portrays himself as a crusader against special interests, many of his closest advisers are former or current lobbyists. Doug Davenport, another McCain aide and former DCI chief executive, has also quit.

Talking about natural disasters, like in Burma now: The tsunami in Sri Lanka: A case study in US humanitarian missions: here.

Top McCain Campaign Adviser Outsources U.S. Jobs: here.

From Think Progress in the USA:

Laura Bush’s Katrina Amnesia: Slams Burmese Govt. For Ignoring ‘Warnings’ Of Impending Natural Disaster

In an “unusual foray into foreign policy” yesterday, First Lady Laura Bush admonished the Burmese government for its “inept” response to the recent cyclone that killed over 20,000 people. The First Lady heaped particularly harsh criticisms on the Burmese government for not adequately warning residents about the incoming storm …

In fact, equally harsh criticism could be leveled at President Bush. As Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck in 2005, Bush was on vacation, and the White House ignored warnings about the dangers ahead

See also here on Burma. And here.

This video from the USA is called Imperial Sugar Refinery Fire.

By Naomi Spencer:

US: Six dead, dozens injured in Georgia sugar plant explosion

9 February 2008

At least 6 workers died and more than 60 suffered injuries in a massive explosion and fire Thursday evening at a Savannah, Georgia, sugar refinery.

The disaster is the latest in a series of devastating and preventable industrial accidents linked to the build-up of combustible powders, for which federal safety investigators recommended regulatory standards in 2006.

BBC video about this explosion: here.

The sugar industry already had a bad safety record in the seventeenth century in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Latino workers die on the job at higher rates than others in the USA: here.

From the USA, this is a video about the February 5, 2008 tornadoes.

US tornado photos: here.

By Jerry White:

Tornadoes kill at least 54 in Southern US states

7 February 2008

At least 54 people were killed and hundreds more injured as a series of powerful tornadoes swept across five Southern US states late Tuesday and overnight, destroying and damaging homes, schools, hospitals, businesses and factories from Arkansas to Kentucky. …

As is the case in so many natural disasters, there was a social component to this tragedy. Inevitably, those who suffered the most were working class families forced to live in homes vulnerable to high winds and extreme weather.

In western Kentucky, for example, three people were killed as a storm tore through a trailer park outside of Greenville in Muhlenberg County, one of two mobile home parks hit in the county, state police said.

Trailer homes—which an increasing number of families are compelled to buy to save money—are known as “tornado deathtraps,” accounting for more than 40 percent of all tornado deaths in the US since 1985, and more than 50 percent in recent years. In 2007, 52 of 81 people killed in tornadoes lived in mobile homes, while 16 lived in permanent homes, according to the National Weather Service.

Recent tornadoes in the Southern US: both a natural and social disaster: here.

This video is called A day in Gannet City.

From BirdLife:

Victory for biodiversity as oil company gets fined over Erika oil spill

24-01-2008

On 16 January, the French oil company Total and the Italian shipping classification society RINA were fined by a Parisian court over their involvement in the huge oil spill that resulted from the sinking of the tanker Erika off the coast of France. The Erika was a 24 year old rusting, Maltese-registered vessel that broke in two during a storm in 1999. The ship leaked 20,000 tonnes of oil in the sea and affected up to 400 km of the Brittany coast.

The oil disaster affected about 150,000 birds and killed 72,000 of them, mainly Common Guillemots Uria aalge, Atlantic Puffins Fratercula arctica, Northern Gannets Morus bassanus and Black-legged Kittiwakes Rissa tridactyla.

This video from Britain is called Gloucestershire Flooding Video 23/7/07.

By Paul Mitchell:

Britain: Thousands still displaced from homes flooded last summer

23 January 2008

Thousands of people in Britain are unable to return to their homes months after they were flooded last summer. Latest estimates suggest over 9,000 families are still living with friends or relatives or in temporary accommodation and that 2,000 of them spent Christmas in caravans.

The misery is made worse by the sight of rising river levels threatening their homes this week because of heavy rainfall. The Environment Agency has issued hundreds of flood warnings and flood watches with its spokesman David King saying, “We’re particularly worried about the Severn Valley—from Shrewsbury right through Gloucester—but also the North, particularly Yorkshire, Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire.”

The most terrible consequence of last summer’s floods was the loss of 13 lives. Many more could have died had it not been for rescue efforts of the emergency services in what was described as “the worst peacetime disaster in living memory.”

The Blairite-Brownite British administrations have followed George W. Bush slavishly on the Iraq war. It seems Bush’s disastrous policies during and after the hurricane Katrina disaster have also been an “inspiration” to them …

Flooding in US Midwest: A disaster created by capitalism: here.