Riggers sought evacuation before Chevron blast - Hahn Karl's blog - 0 views
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Chevron, the second largest U.S. oil major, said it did not receive requests to evacuate the KS Endeavour rig and that staff on board had the right to call a halt to work if they believed conditions were unsafe.
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The accounts convey rising panic from some of those on the platform, who fearing a blowout, checked each morning the volume of smoke billowing from the drilling borehole. "Chevron knew for over a week that the well was unstable yet they refused to evacuate us," said one of the rig workers who gave his account to the RMT union.
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"Our employees and contractor are fully empowered to exercise stop work authority (SWA) when they sense an unsafe work environment," Chevron said, explaining that an SWA gives anyone aboard a rig the power to order a stop to operations in the event safety guidelines are breached.
Shell Accused Over Misleading Figures on Nigeria Oil Spills | Human Rights Now - Amnest... - 0 views
Oil, Money and Secrecy in East Africa - Pipe(line)Dreams - 0 views
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Last year I wrote a post on Tullow Oil’s secret deals in Uganda, contrasting that situation to Tullow’s much more transparent operations in Ghana. After I published that story a Tullow Oil representative contacted me and explained that Tullow’s practices were dictated by local governments. Tullow can be transparent in Ghana because the government wants to be transparent. In Uganda, the official told me, the government does not want contract information published.
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While offering general endorsements of transparency, oil companies typically defer actual requests for contract and other information to governments. “I have tried to communicate with them but they instead refer me to local government officials,” said Kuich, the South Sudanese freelance journalist. Levi Obonyo, former chairman of Kenya’s independent Media Council, says bluntly that oil companies hide behind governments to avoid public scrutiny.
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We shouldn’t forget that the S.E.C. adopted rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act requiring oil and gas companies to disclose payments to foreign governments (section 1504). At the time, The Wall Street Journal reported that, “The rules for section 1504 set a $100,000 threshold, below which companies would not have to report payments. The rules do not contain exemptions for reporting “confidential or competitively sensitive information” or exemptions for instances in which reporting the payments might violate foreign laws.”
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Extreme Oil: Costly, Dirty and Dangerous (Klare) | Informed Comment - 0 views
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Once this surge in U.S. energy production was linked to a predicted boom in energy from Canada’s tar sands reserves, the results seemed obvious and uncontestable. “North America,” he announced, “is becoming the new Middle East.” Many other analysts have elaborated similarly on this rosy scenario, which now provides the foundation for Mitt Romney’s plan to achieve “energy independence” by 2020.
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Perhaps the most notable example of this was Shell Oil’s costly failure to commence test drilling in the Alaskan Arctic. After investing $4.5 billion and years of preparation, Shell was poised to drill five test wells this summer in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off Alaska’s northern and northwestern coasts. However, on September 17th, a series of accidents and mishaps forced the company to announce that it would suspend operations until next summer — the only time when those waters are largely free of pack ice and so it is safer to drill.
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Only after promising to take immensely costly protective measures and winning the support of the Obama administration — fearful of appearing to block “job creation” or “energy independence” during a presidential campaign — did the company obtain the necessary permits to proceed. But some lawsuits remain in play and, with this latest delay, Shell’s opponents will have added time and ammunition.
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CorpWatch : Obama Admininstration Backs Shell in Supreme Court Case - 0 views
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Lawyers at EarthRights International, a Washington-based human rights law nonprofit, say they suspect that a new legal submission - which was signed only by the U.S. Justice Department - reflects tensions inside the government on how to deal with multinational corporations do business in the U.S. Significantly, neither the State nor the Commerce Department signed on to the brief, despite their key roles in the case.
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Filartiga v. Peña-Irala set a precedent for U.S. federal courts to punish non-U.S. citizens for acts committed outside the U.S. that violate international law or treaties to which the U.S. is a party. ATCA has brought almost 100 cases of international (often state-sanctioned) torture, rape and murder to U.S. federal courts to date.
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No plaintiff against a corporation has won on ATCA grounds, although some have settled or plea bargained.
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Kenya, Oil and Populism: Learning from Germany | Global Policy Journal - Practitioner, ... - 0 views
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Unlikely as it may seem, Africa can learn from Germany: Germany is the best managed economy in Europe. Of course, it does not have natural resources, and so its economic management addresses entirely different issues. However, the political foundations for Germany’s success can be generalized beyond the particularities of economic policies. Germany is today the best-run economy in Europe because it used to be the worst. Three generations ago, Germany collapsed into hyperinflation. From that searing experience Germans too emerged with that inchoate sense of ‘never again’. The German genius was to harness those sentiments into practical measures.
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The most important and remarkable step taken by Germany was the third. The sentiment of ‘never again’ was turned into a critical mass of ordinary citizens who understood the economic issues underlying hyperinflation sufficiently to support the new rules and institutions. Collectively, these citizens provided the political defences that made the rules and institutions robust to the pressures for dysfunctional policy choices: this has persisted for three generations.
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Political leaders self-flatteringly see their role as that of taking decisions. In fact, in large part they should leave decisions to their technocrats who are better informed. But only leaders, not their technocrats, can communicate with citizens, presenting a narrative of responsibility towards the next generation in managing good fortune.
US government sides with Shell over victims of crimes against humanity | EarthRights In... - 0 views
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Additionally, I'm confused about why you would criticize the Solicitor General for "tak[ing[ a 19th-Century view of international law" when that is a temporally closer (and thus, presumably more accurate) view of a law enacted in the eighteenth century. I agree with you that this "completely ignores the entire post-World-War-II body of international human rights law," but it is rather obvious that the First Congress could not have intended to address that legal development because those events would not occur for another 150 years!
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oday, the government submitted its brief (below) - and it's on the wrong side. I have rarely been so disappointed in my government.
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The government's position takes a 19th-Century view of international law, basically arguing that governments don't have any business meddling in what other nations do to their own citizens. That's ridiculous, and it completely ignores the entire post-World-War-II body of international human rights law. It's also at odds with US foreign policy, which frequently criticizes other nations - and even authorizes hostile action - based on their treatment of their own citizens.
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The Chevron Pit: Chevron: The NSA of the Corporate World? - 0 views
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Yesterday, a Magistrate Judge in San Francisco granted oil giant Chevron access to many years of private email account information from nearly 40 email accounts belonging to human rights and environmental activists, lawyers, and their allies.
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U.S. Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins of the Northern District of California ordered Google and Yahoo! to turn over years of private email account information from dozens of other Yahoo! and Gmail accounts to Chevron.
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Even if Chevron isn't sweeping up data randomly from millions of people like the NSA, it is indisputable that it is using its vast oil riches to spy on and demand email data from its critics. But if you support the communities in Ecuador who have fought for decades to hold Chevron accountable for its widespread environmental devastation and human rights abuses, you may find yourself on the wrong side of a subpoena.
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Idku - a neglected town stands up against environmental degradation | Egyptian Initiati... - 0 views
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Talking to Idku locals, their pride in their hometown's past glory is hard to miss - “Idku used to be Egypt’s food basket”, they tell me. But so is the bitterness over its lost potential; the neglect, violations, and loss of their livelihoods, “Idku is an orphan town no one cares about”.
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These factors are further confounded by evident climate change impacts: the community’s resilience to the longer and stronger seasonal wave surges is weakened by the uncontrolled raking of Idku’s sand dunes (now almost completely removed) by big-business construction contractors, changing the coastal topography and depriving the area of a natural shoreline barrier.
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Shifting seasons have aggravated the impacts of already declining fish populations on the vulnerable fishermen, diminishing the catch yield and fish variety. Degraded farmland is suffering from increasing salination, with 95% of the famed guava orchards seriously damaged.
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Bowoto v. Chevron Trial Blog - 0 views
Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, The New Oil Wars in Iraq | TomDispatch - 0 views
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It was a moment of remarkable contradictions. Obama managed, for example, to warn against “mission creep” even as he was laying out what could only be described as mission creep. Earlier that week, he had notified Congress that 275 troops would be sent to Iraq, largely to defend the vast U.S. embassy in Baghdad, once an almost three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar symbol of imperial hubris, now a white elephant of the first order. A hundred more military personnel were to be moved into the region for backup.
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In tandem with the military moves, the president and his national security team, perhaps reflecting through a glass darkly the “democracy agenda” of the Bush era, also seemed to have dipped their fingers in purple ink. They were reportedly pressuring Iraqi politicians to dump Prime Minister Maliki and appoint a “unity” government to fight the war they want. (Adding to the farcical nature of the moment, one name raised for Maliki’s position was Ahmed Chalabi, once the darling of Bush-era officials and their choice for that same post.)
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There is, however, no way that an American intervention won’t be viewed as a move to back the Shia side in an incipient set of civil wars, as even retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus warned last week.
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