Video and transcript available on link:
Massey Energy Guilty: West Virginia Probe Finds Coal Giant Systemically Failed to Comply with Law
An independent state probe in West Virginia concludes that mining giant, Massey Energy, was responsible for the April 2010 explosion that killed 29 underground coal mining workers. It echoes preliminary findings by federal investigators earlier this year that Massey repeatedly violated federal rules on ventilation and minimizing coal dust to reduce the risk of explosion, and rejects Massey’s claim that a burst of gas from a hole in the mine floor was at fault. The report also notes Massey’s strong political influence, which it uses "to attempt to control West Virginia’s political system" and regulatory bodies. We speak with J. Davitt McAteer, who oversaw the probe and is a former top federal mine safety official. [includes rush transcript]
Guest:
J. Davitt McAteer, lead author of the “Upper Big Branch Report,” which investigates the April 5, 2010, coal mining accident at a Massey Energy mine in West Virgina. He was formerly the assistant secretary of the Mine Safety and Health Administration in the Clinton administration. He is now vice president of Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia.
The Fight over Coal Mining is a “Fight About Democracy”: New Documentary with Robert Kennedy, Jr. Chronicles Campaign to Halt Mountaintop Removal
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: I’ve been involved in the industry, in the coal industry in West Virginia, on and off for 27 years. I was invited down about three or four years ago by the local group at Coal Mountain to help them in their battle to save this last mountain, as Bill says.
Massey Coal is the third largest coal company in the country, but it is by far the biggest practitioner of mountaintop removal mining. Over the past decade, they have leveled an area of the Appalachians the size of Delaware, 1.4 million acres. They’ve cut down 500 of the biggest mountains in the state. And they’ve buried, as Bill said, thousands of miles of rivers and streams.
They have to break the law to do this. They cannot survive in the marketplace without violating the law. They violate labor laws. They violate health and safety laws. And by their own records, they’ve had some 67,000 violations of just one of the environmental statutes. But they’re in violation of many, many other environmental statutes. Last year, I debated Don Blankenship in West Virginia in front of a statewide audience, a televised debate. And I asked him during the debate, "Is it possible for you to do your job without breaking the law?" And he said, "No, it is not." So this is a criminal enterprise, even by his own estimation.
As Bill says, you know, one of the things that they always say in West Virginia is, "Well, coal brings jobs and prosperity to the state." But this is one of the things that my father explained to me when I was 14 years old and he was fighting strip mining in Appalachia. He said, "This ought to be the richest state in the union because of the huge resources they have in West Virginia. But it’s the 49th poorest population, because the benefits of coal do not help the people of the state of West Virginia."
And if you look at the way that Massey operates, Massey doesn’t want to hire—it won’t hire unions. Its whole business plan has been to break the United Mine Workers, which it succeeded in doing in the state. When I was a little kid, there was 151,000 coal miners in West Virginia taking coal out of tunnels in the ground. Today there are fewer than 18,000 left in the state, and most of them aren’t unionized, because the strip industry isn’t, because Massey broke the unions. They’re taking more coal out of West Virginia than they were in 1968, but the money is not staying in the state for salaries or pensions or reinvestment in the community. It goes straight up to Wall Street. Ninety-five percent of the coal in West Virginia is owned by out-of-state interests. And Massey doesn’t like to hire—it won’t hire union labor, but not only that, it doesn’t like to hire people who have a union culture. So it won’t hire, if it can help it, West Virginians. So it advertises in Myrtle Beach, in the Atlanta Constitution, in USA Today, to bring people into the state. They work on these sites, cutting down the mountain. It takes about six years for them to cut down a mountain, and then they move someplace else.
They buy up the communities. They’ve bought up dozens and dozens of communities. They board up the houses. They make the people sign contracts saying that they’ll never come back within 20 miles of that community. And they empty the landscapes of people. So then, when they come to us and say, "Well, we’re bringing prosperity in West Virginia," what we say to them is, "Why is it that the places with the most coal in the state are the places with the poorest people? How can you bring prosperity to a community when you’re emptying the community?"
Well, this film is about a group of people in West Virginia who said, "We’re not leaving. We’re going to stay here. We’re going to protect our mountains." And they climbed up trees and built tree houses. They confronted the industry. They walked—they demonstrated in front of—they walked into the governor’s office. They had public demonstrations.
You know, one of the things that—one of the reasons that I’m interested in what’s happened in West Virginia and that Bill really got interested in doing the film here is that it’s not just about the destruction of the environment. It’s about the subversion of democracy. And wherever you see widespread environmental injury, you’re also going to see the subversion of democracy. And West Virginia is really the template for that dynamic. You’ll see the destruction of the public process at the local level, where people no longer have a say in the allocation of the public trust, the resources of the commons. You’ll see the destruction of transparency in government. You’ll see the capture of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. They become—in West Virginia, the West Virginia DEP has become the sock puppet for the industry that it’s supposed to regulate. You’ll see the widespread corruption of public officials, which you’ve also seen. Virtually every relevant public official in the state of West Virginia is now an indentured servant for the coal industry. And you’ll also see the destruction of the press and the role of the fourth estate. And again, in West Virginia you see the press largely blind, holding a blind eye to this wholesale destruction of the landscapes and to the people whose lives are being destroyed in this process that’s making a few people rich by systematically impoverishing virtually everybody else in the state.
The Last Mountain
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Monday, May 30, 2011
MSHA Failed to Watchdog Deviant Mine Company
MSHA Failed to Watchdog Deviant Mine Company
Today, the Governor’s Independent Investigation Panel submitted to the governor of West Virginia its report on the Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine disaster that killed 29 men in April 2010. Liz Borkowski at The Pump Handle blog has a detailed summary. Be sure to read it, especially if you’re going to bypass the 126-page report.
From a regulatory perspective, the bottom-line is this: Massey Energy, the owner of UBB, was a scofflaw – a repeat violator of critical safety standards; but for a variety of reasons, some explicable and some inexplicable, nothing was done to halt the company’s chronically dangerous practices at the Upper Big Branch mine. At a more visceral level, the transgressions and events leading up to and surrounding the disaster are a blow to human dignity.
MSHA clearly could have done more, according to the governor’s report: “Despite MSHA’s considerable authority and resources, its collective knowledge and experience, the disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine is proof positive that the agency failed its duty as the watchdog for coal miners.” In the year leading up to the disaster, the UBB mine was sending all the signs that it was about to be a big problem:
Inspectors spent 1,854 hours at the mine in 2009, nearly twice the time as in 2007. During 2009, they wrote 515 citations and orders for safety violations, including 48 withdrawal orders for repeated significant and substantial (S&S) violations. The monetary penalties proposed for violations in 2009 and early 2010 totaled nearly $1.1 million.
But MSHA didn’t exercise elements of its regulatory authority. The agency’s inability to place UBB, or any mine, on its pattern of violations list has been well documented. The governor’s report also points out that MSHA chose not to use its power to declare “flagrant” violations at UBB, which come with a $220,000 fine.
The agency also failed “to see the entire picture” and “to connect the dots of the many potentially catastrophic failures taking place at the mine,” the report says. As a result, MSHA lost sight of its most important goal: prevention. “Enforcement aimed at prevention is what Congress envisioned for MSHA when it passed the federal Mine Law,” the report reminds us.
Of course, Massey wasn’t making it easy. The company has years of experience gaming the system. It routinely appeals violations and generally gives MSHA the legal runaround. The governor’s report relays this tale: “Massey’s Vice President for Safety Elizabeth Chamberlin reportedly took a violation written by an inspector, looked at her people and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll litigate it away.’ ”
I feel obligated to highlight one other element of the report, summarized by Borkowski:
Autopsies on 24 of the victims, ranging in age from 25 to 61, found that 17 of them (71%) had coal workers' pneumoconiosis, or black lung disease. Five of them had less than 10 years of coal mining experience. The current limits on coal mine dust, put in place in 1973, were intended to be sufficient to prevent CWP, but have apparently not succeeded in eliminating this irreversible respiratory disease.
Even if the explosion at UBB hadn’t occurred, holes in the regulatory safety net were going to jeopardize these men’s lives anyway. This is no way to treat humankind.
Liz Borkowski's summary is worth reading:
The "Failure of Basic Coal Mine Safety Practices" that Killed 29 Miners
The report references a study by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University's School of Communications; it found that Massey Energy had the worst fatality record among US coal companies from 2000 to 2010. During that time, 54 workers were killed in Massey mines, including the UBB victims. The company had an average of one fatality per 17.5 million tons of coal produced -- compared to one fatality per 296 million tons at Peabody energy, the top US coal producer. The AU team calculated that between 2000 and 2010, Massey was cited for 62,923 violations, and 25,612 of those were "significant and substantial." MSHA proposed $49.9 million in fines for these violations -- although, as the GIIP notes, the company made a habit of contesting proposed penalties, and so far has paid only one-third of the penalties proposed for violations at UBB between 2000 and 2009.
Today, the Governor’s Independent Investigation Panel submitted to the governor of West Virginia its report on the Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine disaster that killed 29 men in April 2010. Liz Borkowski at The Pump Handle blog has a detailed summary. Be sure to read it, especially if you’re going to bypass the 126-page report.
From a regulatory perspective, the bottom-line is this: Massey Energy, the owner of UBB, was a scofflaw – a repeat violator of critical safety standards; but for a variety of reasons, some explicable and some inexplicable, nothing was done to halt the company’s chronically dangerous practices at the Upper Big Branch mine. At a more visceral level, the transgressions and events leading up to and surrounding the disaster are a blow to human dignity.
MSHA clearly could have done more, according to the governor’s report: “Despite MSHA’s considerable authority and resources, its collective knowledge and experience, the disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine is proof positive that the agency failed its duty as the watchdog for coal miners.” In the year leading up to the disaster, the UBB mine was sending all the signs that it was about to be a big problem:
Inspectors spent 1,854 hours at the mine in 2009, nearly twice the time as in 2007. During 2009, they wrote 515 citations and orders for safety violations, including 48 withdrawal orders for repeated significant and substantial (S&S) violations. The monetary penalties proposed for violations in 2009 and early 2010 totaled nearly $1.1 million.
But MSHA didn’t exercise elements of its regulatory authority. The agency’s inability to place UBB, or any mine, on its pattern of violations list has been well documented. The governor’s report also points out that MSHA chose not to use its power to declare “flagrant” violations at UBB, which come with a $220,000 fine.
The agency also failed “to see the entire picture” and “to connect the dots of the many potentially catastrophic failures taking place at the mine,” the report says. As a result, MSHA lost sight of its most important goal: prevention. “Enforcement aimed at prevention is what Congress envisioned for MSHA when it passed the federal Mine Law,” the report reminds us.
Of course, Massey wasn’t making it easy. The company has years of experience gaming the system. It routinely appeals violations and generally gives MSHA the legal runaround. The governor’s report relays this tale: “Massey’s Vice President for Safety Elizabeth Chamberlin reportedly took a violation written by an inspector, looked at her people and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll litigate it away.’ ”
I feel obligated to highlight one other element of the report, summarized by Borkowski:
Autopsies on 24 of the victims, ranging in age from 25 to 61, found that 17 of them (71%) had coal workers' pneumoconiosis, or black lung disease. Five of them had less than 10 years of coal mining experience. The current limits on coal mine dust, put in place in 1973, were intended to be sufficient to prevent CWP, but have apparently not succeeded in eliminating this irreversible respiratory disease.
Even if the explosion at UBB hadn’t occurred, holes in the regulatory safety net were going to jeopardize these men’s lives anyway. This is no way to treat humankind.
Liz Borkowski's summary is worth reading:
The "Failure of Basic Coal Mine Safety Practices" that Killed 29 Miners
The report references a study by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University's School of Communications; it found that Massey Energy had the worst fatality record among US coal companies from 2000 to 2010. During that time, 54 workers were killed in Massey mines, including the UBB victims. The company had an average of one fatality per 17.5 million tons of coal produced -- compared to one fatality per 296 million tons at Peabody energy, the top US coal producer. The AU team calculated that between 2000 and 2010, Massey was cited for 62,923 violations, and 25,612 of those were "significant and substantial." MSHA proposed $49.9 million in fines for these violations -- although, as the GIIP notes, the company made a habit of contesting proposed penalties, and so far has paid only one-third of the penalties proposed for violations at UBB between 2000 and 2009.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Celebrate Earth Day: April 22nd
Consider learning about the Earth, learning about the issues.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org was interviewed on WBUR - worth listening to.
Finding Ways To Mark Earth Day's 40th
Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben talks about small steps people can take to reduce carbon emissions. Climatologist Kevin Trenberth discusses research suggesting that the Earth's atmosphere is trapping more heat than before, and the mystery of where excess heat is being stored.
Environment Massachusetts
MassCleanEnergyCenter
thedailygreen
Maybe consider where your energy comes from.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org was interviewed on WBUR - worth listening to.
Finding Ways To Mark Earth Day's 40th
Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben talks about small steps people can take to reduce carbon emissions. Climatologist Kevin Trenberth discusses research suggesting that the Earth's atmosphere is trapping more heat than before, and the mystery of where excess heat is being stored.
Environment Massachusetts
MassCleanEnergyCenter
thedailygreen
Maybe consider where your energy comes from.
Few people were aware of Massey Energy until its most recent mine explosion that killed workers because of safety problems.
Read about Massey's union busting tactics here
Massey Energy is one of the largest coal companies in the United States, and certainly one of the most controversial. In April 2010 the company received a great deal of negative attention when an explosion at one of its mines in West Virginia killed 29 workers. It later came out that the mine in question had been cited more than 1,000 times for safety violations, and that Massey had similar problems at many of its other facilities. Massey, which for two decades was owned by the engineering giant Fluor, is also notorious for its aggressive anti-union stance and for environmental problems such as a massive coal sludge spill and its reliance on terrain-destroying mountaintop removal projects.
Think about speaking out to expand the bottle bill
As you likely know, the Bottle Bill -- the 5 cent redeemable deposit on some beverage containers -- has been the law for more than 25 years in the Bay State. It is the single most successful recycling program in the state, if not the country, with more than 70% of these containers being recycled.
E-mail your representative today and ask him or her to help pass the Updated Bottle Bill.
But beverages have changed over the years, and the original law needs an update. The reason that bottled water, iced teas, vitamin waters and similar drinks don't have the 5 cent deposit is simply because they were not on the supermarket shelves back in the early 1980s when the law passed. If we had the Bottle Bill deposit on those kinds of drinks, we'd catch 1 billion containers each year, which now end up on the ball fields, the beaches, the playgrounds, or in landfills and incinerators.
Seems like a no-brainer, right? But the bill has been bottled up for years. At the most recent hearing on the bill, there were well over 100 supporters in the room, including the League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club, the Mass Municipal Association and more. The opponents? Lobbyists for Pepsi, for the bottled water companies, for the liquor stores. It looked and sounded to all of us in the hearing room like the public interest versus the the powerful special interests. So we just have to make the public interest voice louder. And that's why I'm asking you to e-mail your legislator today and ask them to get the Updated Bottle Bill out of committee and moving along towards passage.
http://www.masspirg.org/action/healthy-communities/all-legs-bb?id4=es
“We Are Tearing Down Our Mountains”: Photojournalist Antrim Caskey on West Virginia’s Fight Against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining
The Environmental Protection Agency took a significant step last week toward blocking one of Appalachia’s largest and most disputed mountaintop removal coal mines. On Friday the EPA proposed a veto of the Clean Water Act permit issued by the Army Corps of Engineers for the Spruce No. 1 Mine in West Virginia. Earlier this month, we interviewed Antrim Caskey, a photojournalist who has been chronicling the nonviolent fight against mountaintop removal coal mining. Her new book is Dragline.
Massey Energy is one of the largest coal companies in the United States, and certainly one of the most controversial. In April 2010 the company received a great deal of negative attention when an explosion at one of its mines in West Virginia killed 29 workers. It later came out that the mine in question had been cited more than 1,000 times for safety violations, and that Massey had similar problems at many of its other facilities. Massey, which for two decades was owned by the engineering giant Fluor, is also notorious for its aggressive anti-union stance and for environmental problems such as a massive coal sludge spill and its reliance on terrain-destroying mountaintop removal projects.
Think about speaking out to expand the bottle bill
As you likely know, the Bottle Bill -- the 5 cent redeemable deposit on some beverage containers -- has been the law for more than 25 years in the Bay State. It is the single most successful recycling program in the state, if not the country, with more than 70% of these containers being recycled.
E-mail your representative today and ask him or her to help pass the Updated Bottle Bill.
But beverages have changed over the years, and the original law needs an update. The reason that bottled water, iced teas, vitamin waters and similar drinks don't have the 5 cent deposit is simply because they were not on the supermarket shelves back in the early 1980s when the law passed. If we had the Bottle Bill deposit on those kinds of drinks, we'd catch 1 billion containers each year, which now end up on the ball fields, the beaches, the playgrounds, or in landfills and incinerators.
Seems like a no-brainer, right? But the bill has been bottled up for years. At the most recent hearing on the bill, there were well over 100 supporters in the room, including the League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club, the Mass Municipal Association and more. The opponents? Lobbyists for Pepsi, for the bottled water companies, for the liquor stores. It looked and sounded to all of us in the hearing room like the public interest versus the the powerful special interests. So we just have to make the public interest voice louder. And that's why I'm asking you to e-mail your legislator today and ask them to get the Updated Bottle Bill out of committee and moving along towards passage.
http://www.masspirg.org/action/healthy-communities/all-legs-bb?id4=es
“We Are Tearing Down Our Mountains”: Photojournalist Antrim Caskey on West Virginia’s Fight Against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining
The Environmental Protection Agency took a significant step last week toward blocking one of Appalachia’s largest and most disputed mountaintop removal coal mines. On Friday the EPA proposed a veto of the Clean Water Act permit issued by the Army Corps of Engineers for the Spruce No. 1 Mine in West Virginia. Earlier this month, we interviewed Antrim Caskey, a photojournalist who has been chronicling the nonviolent fight against mountaintop removal coal mining. Her new book is Dragline.
Report: Global Warming Skeptics Bankrolled by Koch Industries
A new report from Greenpeace has identified a privately owned US company with ties to the oil and chemical industry as the paymaster of global warming skeptics in the United States and Europe. According to Greenpeace, Koch Industries has spent nearly $48 million since 1997 to fund groups that question global warming.
A new report from Greenpeace has identified a privately owned US company with ties to the oil and chemical industry as the paymaster of global warming skeptics in the United States and Europe. According to Greenpeace, Koch Industries has spent nearly $48 million since 1997 to fund groups that question global warming.
Where have you heard that name before? Maybe here ?
Methane is like the radical wing of the carbon cycle, in today’s atmosphere a stronger greenhouse gas per molecule than CO2, and an atmospheric concentration that can change more quickly than CO2 can. There has been a lot of press coverage of a new paper in Science this week called “Extensive methane venting to the atmosphere from sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf”, which comes on the heels of a handful of interrelated methane papers in the last year or so. Is now the time to get frightened?
Maybe the best way to celebrate Earth Day is to think about the Earth.
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Trump Still Wants to Take Away Your Healthcare - but After the Election
14 January 19
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13 January 19
Trump Still Wants to Take Away Your Healthcare - but After the Election
Susan Rinkunas, VICE
Rinkunas writes: "The Trump administration would very much prefer that Americans go to the polls this November with zero updates on the lawsuit that would overturn the Affordable Care Act and revoke health insurance from millions of people."
Susan Rinkunas, VICE
Rinkunas writes: "The Trump administration would very much prefer that Americans go to the polls this November with zero updates on the lawsuit that would overturn the Affordable Care Act and revoke health insurance from millions of people."
EXCERPTS:
To back up for a second: Yes, there's an active lawsuit threatening Obamacare. After Congressional Republicans tried and failed to repeal the landmark law without a replacement in 2017 (remember John McCain's thumbs down?), they decided to zero-out the penalty for not having health insurance in the massive tax bill passed in December 2017.
A group of states led by Texas filed a suit arguing that without that penalty, the entire ACA was unconstitutional and should be overturned. The Department of Justice, instead of defending current laws in court as is practice, chose to support the Texas lawsuit. On December 18, the Fifth Circuit court of appeals struck down part of the law, but sent it back to a lower court to figure out what to do with the rest of it. Following that, a group of Democratic Attorneys General asked the Supreme Court to take up the case during this session. California AG Xavier Becerra said "We’re asking the Supreme Court to swiftly resolve this repeal lawsuit for the sake of saving lives and ending uncertainty in our healthcare system.”
So that's how we get to today, when, in a filing to the Supreme Court, the DOJ's Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote of the Democratic challenge:
"Petitioners’ requests to expedite consideration of their petitions for writs of certiorari should be denied. Neither the court of appeals’ decision nor the district court’s underlying judgment presents any current exigency that warrants accelerated interlocutory review; to the contrary, the decision below eliminated any such exigency."
Francisco went on to say that the appeals court ruling "creates no present, real-world emergency."
Or in layman's terms: this isn't an urgent matter. Nothing to see here, keep it moving, we're definitely not holding a ball behind our back.
Start with continued efforts to take away healthcare, add in a historically unpopular first-term president who's also been impeached, and Republicans have got themselves a big, big problem.
Trump seems to know this. In April, he suggested that Republicans would have a great plan with lower costs (narrator: there is no plan), but you have to reelect him first:
....are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare. In other words it will be far less expensive & much more usable than ObamaCare. Vote will be taken right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate & win......
27.5K people are talking about this
There are other things the Trump administration doesn't want people to learn before the election, including how much taxpayers are paying for all of Trump's travel to HIS OWN PROPERTIES and what's inside his tax returns. The fate of Obamacare makes three—a trendlet!
Democrats running for president (and even ones who aren't) should be reminding people every day what the Trump administration is hiding.
Cory Booker. (photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
Cory Booker Drops Out of Presidential Race
Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root
Crockett writes: "On Monday, in a move that we all saw coming, Sen. Cory Booker - he of the wide smile and charismatic optimism that's almost too good to be true - announced that he's ending his bid for president."
READ MORE
Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root
Crockett writes: "On Monday, in a move that we all saw coming, Sen. Cory Booker - he of the wide smile and charismatic optimism that's almost too good to be true - announced that he's ending his bid for president."
READ MORE
Detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
Human Rights Advocates Demonstrate, Demand Guantanamo's Closure
teleSUR
Excerpt: "As Jan. 11 marked the 18th anniversary of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp opening by the United States, human rights activists rallied Saturday outside the White House to demand the prison's immediate closure and an end to 'years of torture and human rights violations.'"
READ MORE
teleSUR
Excerpt: "As Jan. 11 marked the 18th anniversary of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp opening by the United States, human rights activists rallied Saturday outside the White House to demand the prison's immediate closure and an end to 'years of torture and human rights violations.'"
READ MORE
An event for missing and murdered Native American women and girls at the Missoula state fair in Montana. (photo: Sara Hylton/Guardian UK)
A Well of Grief: The Relatives of Murdered Native Women Speak Out
Sara Hylton, Guardian UK
Hylton writes: "Native American women and girls are targeted at rates that far outweigh other American women, and are 10 times more likely to be murdered."
Sara Hylton, Guardian UK
Hylton writes: "Native American women and girls are targeted at rates that far outweigh other American women, and are 10 times more likely to be murdered."
EXCERPT:
Residents across Fort Peck Reservation are sensitized to the impacts of the oil industry. The reservation is situated not far from large oil boom towns like Williston and Watford City in North Dakota and is in the direct vicinity of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline expansion. Many of the community members I spoke to discussed the influx of crime, sexual violence and drugs when the Bakken oil boom began in 2006. They’re bracing for what’s to come.
Prairiedawn Thunderchild and her older sister Tahnee Thunderchild learned of those dangers early one evening when they were walking home to their apartment in Wolf Point, a small town of a few thousand people, on Fort Peck Reservation in Montana.
That evening, the girls saw a car with North Dakota license plates approaching. The car began to follow them, and the men, whom they didn’t recognize from their community, told the sisters to get into the vehicle.
The girls knew that a car full of non-native men with North Dakota plates probably meant they were oil employees. They had heard stories of trafficking, kidnapping and sexual assault. They ran and called the tribal police. “[They] probably wanted gross things from us,” Tahnee told me.
“Man camps,” as they have come to be known, house thousands of temporary oil workers with disposable income, who are dealing with the stressors of dangerous working conditions. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would bring in more “man camps” affecting Native American women and communities.
“Oil industry camps may be impacting domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking in the direct and surrounding communities in which they reside,” the Department Of Justice found.
Eight-year-old Macylilly Whitehawk was sexually assaulted and abducted when she was just four years old, and meth was found in her system from the assailant’s semen. Though the assailant was from the reservation, Macylilly’s grandmother and caregiver, Valerie Whitehawk, believes what happened to her granddaughter is linked to the increase in drugs and violence stemming from the region’s oil industry.
Kevin Lyndel 'KC' Massey. (photo: TPM)
A Texas Militia Leader Went Into Hiding. Months Later, He Turned Up Dead.
Derek Hawkins and Marisa Iati, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "More than six months after he went into hiding, the leader of a Texas anti-immigrant militia who was wanted by federal authorities was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, law enforcement officials said."
Derek Hawkins and Marisa Iati, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "More than six months after he went into hiding, the leader of a Texas anti-immigrant militia who was wanted by federal authorities was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, law enforcement officials said."
Massey and other members of the militia were patrolling the border in Southeast Texas in August 2014 when they encountered U.S. Border Patrol agents in the brush. One of the men pointed a pistol at an agent, who fired several shots in their direction but missed, according to court documents.
Then Massey, who had a previous burglary on his record, arrived with a pistol and a rifle. Investigators also found materials in his truck and motel room that could have been combined to make an explosive device. Among the ingredients was suspected ammonium nitrate, which Timothy McVeigh used in 1995 to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City and kill 168 people.
Massey was convicted in federal court in 2015 of being a felon in possession of a firearm. He was sentenced to 41 months in prison.
In May 2019, less than a year after his release, he went to ground, according to court documents. The FBI and U.S. marshals said he “absconded” from his supervised release and plastered his mug shot on social media, warning that he had threatened to “battle” law enforcement.
Convicted felon Kevin Massey is wanted by @USMarshalsHQ, @ATFDallas & @FBIDallas. Massey, convicted of firearms offenses in 2016, allegedly absconded from his supervised release and has threatened to "battle" with law enforcement. If you have info, pls call 1-800-336-0102.
48 people are talking about this
A post from June on a Facebook fan page for Massey said that the “unconstitutional courts” had already cost him more than three years in prison. It was unclear who wrote the post.
“The feds continued to subject KC to their tyranny after release from prison, while serving a double jeopardy sentence of 3 years probation,” the post said. “KC is NOT going to allow himself to be kidnapped again. Death before dishonor!”
!['The Socialists are in a very bobo [bohemian] part of Ivry, with a lot of artist lofts,' said Benjamin Gozlan, a painter and illustrator. (photo: Dmitry Kostyukov/NYT)](https://readersupportednews.org/images/stories/article_imgs37/037500-socialists-france-011320.jpg "'The Socialists are in a very bobo [bohemian] part of Ivry, with a lot of artist lofts,' said Benjamin Gozlan, a painter and illustrator. (photo: Dmitry Kostyukov/NYT)")
'The Socialists are in a very bobo [bohemian] part of Ivry, with a lot of artist lofts,' said Benjamin Gozlan, a painter and illustrator. (photo: Dmitry Kostyukov/NYT)
A New Home for French Socialists, on Paris's Periphery
Norimitsu Onishi, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Short of cash, the Socialist Party has moved its headquarters from a Parisian mansion once owned by a princess to a converted factory in the suburbs."
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Norimitsu Onishi, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Short of cash, the Socialist Party has moved its headquarters from a Parisian mansion once owned by a princess to a converted factory in the suburbs."
READ MORE
A wallaby licks its burnt paws after escaping a bushfire on the Liberation Trail near the township of Nana Glen on the Mid North Coast of NSW, Nov. 12, 2019. (photo: Wolter Peeters/The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media/Getty Images)
Australia Airdrops Thousands of Carrots, Sweet Potatoes to Wallabies Starving From Wildfires
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "In an effort to help one of the many animal species threatened by Australia's devastating wildfires, officials in New South Wales are air-dropping more than 4,000 pounds of carrots and sweet potatoes into the fire-ravaged habitat of the brush-tailed rock-wallaby, an endangered species in the state."
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "In an effort to help one of the many animal species threatened by Australia's devastating wildfires, officials in New South Wales are air-dropping more than 4,000 pounds of carrots and sweet potatoes into the fire-ravaged habitat of the brush-tailed rock-wallaby, an endangered species in the state."
arrots to the rescue!
In an effort to help one of the many animal species threatened by Australia's devastating wildfires, officials in New South Wales (NSW) are air-dropping more than 4,000 pounds of carrots and sweet potatoes into the fire-ravaged habitat of the brush-tailed rock-wallaby, an endangered species in the state.
"This is the most widespread food drop we have ever done for brush-tailed rock-wallabies," NSW Minister of Energy and Environment Matt Kean said, according to CNN.
Operation Rock Wallaby- #NPWS staff today dropped thousands of kgs of food (Mostly sweet potato and carrots) for our Brush-tailed Rock-wallaby colonies across NSW
#bushfires
6,527 people are talking about this
Kean called the airdrop "Operation Rock Wallaby" on Twitter and explained in a statement why it was so important:
"The provision of supplementary food is one of the key strategies we are deploying to promote the survival and recovery of endangered species like the Brush-tailed Rock-wallaby," Mr Kean said.
"Initial fire assessments indicate the habitat of several important Brush-tailed Rock-wallaby populations was burnt in the recent bushfires. The wallabies typically survive the fire itself, but are then left stranded with limited natural food as the fire takes out the vegetation around their rocky habitat.
"The wallabies were already under stress from the ongoing drought, making survival challenging for the wallabies without assistance."
Brush-tailed rock-wallabies are a kind of marsupial. They live in rocky habitats near the east coast of Australia and can climb trees and almost vertical rocks with their sharp claws and strong legs, according to the Australian Government Department of the Environment and Energy. Most of the 15 species of rock wallabies in Australia are considered threatened. The brush-tailed rock-wallaby is considered endangered in NSW and vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. The IUCN last assessed the species in 2014 and reported that there were around 20,000 in the wild, according to Global News.
In the past week, NSW has dropped almost 1,000 kilograms (approximately 2,205 pounds) of carrots and sweet potato to six wallaby colonies in the Capertee and Wolgan valleys, approximately 2,205 pounds to five places in Yengo National Park and almost 100 kilograms (approximately 220.5 pounds) of food and water in the Kangaroo Valley. Provisions have also been sent to Jenolan, Oxley Wild Rivers and Curracubundi national parks.
Kean said that the government would also support the wallabies by managing predators and setting up cameras to see how many animals were present and whether they were eating the food.
"At this stage, we expect to continue providing supplementary food to rock-wallaby populations until sufficient natural food resources and water become available again in the landscape, during post-fire recovery," Kean said.
Operation Rock Wallaby is one of many ways that Australian officials are working to help wildlife recover from the bushfires, which ecologists estimate have killed more than one billion animals. On Monday, the government promised 50 million Australian dollars (approximately $34.5 million) to an emergency wildlife recovery program, Reuters reported.
"This has been an ecological disaster, a disaster that is still unfolding," Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told the press on Monday during a visit to the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital, as Reuters reported. "We know that our native flora and fauna have been very badly damaged."
The fires may have destroyed 30 percent of koala habitat in NSW, and Federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley said that the conservation status of some koala populations might have to be raised from vulnerable to endangered.
The country's most devastating fire season on record has burned since September, The Independent reported. The fires have killed 28 people and torched thousands of homes. Scientists agree that the climate crisis is making Australia's fires worse, according to The Guardian.
"Human-caused climate change has resulted in more dangerous weather conditions for bushfires in recent decades for many regions of Australia," Australia's National Environmental Science Program wrote in November 2019. "Observations show a trend towards more dangerous conditions during summer and an earlier start to the fire season, particularly in parts of southern and eastern Australia. These trends are very likely to increase into the future, with climate models showing more dangerous weather conditions for bushfires throughout Australia due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions."
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