Fracking for Uranium

first accidentally and now on purpose.

by John Upton / Grist

What has 92 protons, deforms growing children, sickens adults, and is being squeezed out of its underground lair by frackers operating in Pennsylvania?

U[hh], uranium!

The toxic and radioactive heavy metal is naturally trapped in the Marcellus shale, the fossil-fuel-laden rock formation popular with frackers that stretches from upstate New York through Pennsylvania to West Virginia and Ohio. We know the uranium is in there, and we know fracking sets it free, because scientists have been saying as much for years.

China Mining Tibet To Death

by Claude Arpi / Niti Central

On March 29, China’s State media reported that 83 miners had presumably died following a major landslide at the site of a gold mine in Gyama Valley, near the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. A few days later, 66 miners were confirmed dead and 17 were declared missing despite massive rescue efforts.

Reports from Tibet further stated that the miners (only two of them were Tibetans) were asleep in their tents when the tragedy occurred. They were buried by a 3-kilometre wide and 30 metres deep mass of rocks and debris.

In Memoriam: Joe Feller, Much More Than a Law Professor

by Holly Doremus / Legal Planet

Joe Feller, second from left, with students in his Natural Resources Field Seminar in 2008. Photo by Bret Birdsong.

Today I learned the sad news that Joe Feller, Professor of Law at Arizona State University, has died after being hit by a car. Joe was a fine scholar (coincidentally, I was reading a terrific piece he wrote on The Adjudication that Ate Arizona Water Law when the news came in), but he was so much more than that. Joe, whose father David was a highly respected labor and civil rights lawyer for two decades before he joined the faculty at Berkeley Law, knew firsthand that (to borrow the words of Dan Tarlock) environmental law is all about marrying wonder to power.  Joe loved the west’s great landscapes, even the ones most people don’t find picturesque or beautiful. He knew that law review articles don’t save landscapes. Joe did just that. He used every tool available, from buy-outs to litigation, to reduce the amount of livestock grazing on some of the west’s most ecologically fragile lands. And he got his students out to those lands, passing along both his love of them and his deep understanding of how easily and lastingly they could be damaged by careless use.

Smuggler Caught with More than 10 Percent of an Entire Species

by P. Tanson / Traffic

Ploughshare tortoises, native to Madagascar, are one of the most critically endangered species on the planet. And, while countless conservation groups are actively working to save them, the arrest of a wildlife smuggler in Thailand is proving just how easily a handful of criminals could bring about their demise.

Authorities say they recently arrested a 38-year-old Thai man at an airport in Bankok attempting to collect a bag containing 54 ploughshare tortoises smuggled in from Madagascar. Although that may seem less severe than some larger scale environmental crimes, this haul of tortoises actually accounts for nearly 13 percent of the estimated 400 or so individuals thought to still be in existence in the wild.

Fracking Boom to Hit New Mexico

 by Kevin Robinson-Avila / from the Albuquerque Journal

 

FARMINGTON — Preliminary results from Mancos shale wells in northwestern New Mexico are boosting industry excitement about a new oil and gas boom in the region.

Companies must learn a lot more about the shale formation before any gushers explode, but some of the 22 exploratory wells drilled to date have shown solid commercial potential for oil and gas production, according to industry executives who attended a conference this week in Farmington to discuss production potential in the Mancos play, a previously untapped section of the San Juan Basin.

14 Religious Leaders Arrested at Climate Action in DC

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Dear friends,

Yesterday, along with 14 other religious folk, clergy and committed “laity,” I was arrested for standing at the White House with signs and songs, reciting the names of more than 100 people who had been killed by one result of the climate crisis: Superstorm Sandy.

The action was organized by Interfaith Moral Action on Climate, of which The Shalom Center is a vigorously active member. We were calling on the president to act swiftly to heal our Mother Earth from the climate crisis, from the plagues that modern Pharaohs — Big Oil, Big Coal, Unnatural Gas — have brought upon us.

FinSpy Software Used To Surveil Activists Around The World, Report Says

by Gerry Smith / the Huffington Post

FinSpy surveillance software, marketed worldwide to law enforcement agencies as a way to monitor criminals, is widely used by repressive governments to spy on human rights groups and dissidents, according to a report released Wednesday.

The report by researchers at the Citizen Lab of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto found the software is “regularly sold to countries where dissenting political activity and speech is criminalized.”

FinSpy, named after a line of code in its software, is a surveillance tool that infects computers to capture screenshots, log keystrokes, record Skype conversations and activate cameras and microphones. Gamma Group, a British company, makes the software and markets it to law enforcement agencies as a lawful way to monitor criminals.

Senate Approves Keystone Pipeline in Bipartisan Vote

by Juliet Eilperin / the Washington Post

The Senate voted 62 to 37 Friday in favor of constructing the Keystone XL pipeline, the controversial project that would transport heavy crude oil from Hardisty, Alberta, to Gulf Coast’s refineries.

The bipartisan amendment to the Senate budget resolution, authored by Sens. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.), has no binding authority. But it shows the significant support the proposal enjoys on Capitol Hill, despite the fact that opponents argue its construction will accelerate global warming and could cause harmful oil spills on ecologically-sensitive habitat.

Military Robo-Cheetahs, Obamacare for Microchips and Other Techno-Dystopian Shit You Couldn’t Make Up

by Russ McSpadden / Carbon-based humanoid correspondent for the King Ludd & John Connor Institute of Anti-Technology

[The text of this work is free to share and distribute under the following Creative Commons License CC-BY-ND 3.0]

Genetically Modified Catnip Won’t Save You

The Pentagon has announced that it is currently investigating new mobility technologies that include a robo-cheetah that has already surpassed the fastest recorded speed of any human on Earth.  According to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) the Cheetah-droid is fast enough to run down Usain Bolt who set the world speed record for a human in 2009 when he reached 27.78 mph. The Cheetah was recently clocked at 28.3 mph and is expected, following a series of upgrades, to run much faster. In fact, it is now the fastest four-legged machine in history and it’s a predator.

But don’t worry, as the saying will soon go, “You don’t need to run faster than the fastest blood-thirsty military grade nano-titanium hell beast, you just need to run faster than the slowest flesh bag next to you.”

The Penan Blockade Against a New Gas Pipeline in Borneo

from Survival International

The Penan in Long Seridan are protesting against the building of a gas pipeline which is cutting through their ancestral land.
© Survival

Penan from the Long Seridan region have mounted a blockade to protest against the building of a gas pipeline which is cutting through their ancestral land and destroying their source of drinking water.

The 500km pipeline is being built by the Malaysian national oil company Petronas and is nearing completion. It will transport natural gas from the Malaysian state of Sabah, south to the coast of Sarawak.