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Monday Updates on the Spill
It's a spectacular May day in Montreal and coincidently sunlight appears to be breaking through the MSM too. At least so far as the BP gusher in the Gulf story is conncerned.
Last night on CBS's 60 Minutes, in the best tradition of this program, they dug into all aspects of the spew, reporting that approximately a Valdez worth of oil has been gushing in the Gulf waters each week since the April 20 explosion, and a lot of people got to hear for perhaps the first time the extent of the failures, greed and hubris that led to this collossal disaster. An example of the carelessness as reported last night:
...in a drilling accident four weeks before the explosion, the critical rubber gasket, called an "annular," was damaged and pieces of it started coming out of the well. "According to Williams, when parts of the annular start coming up on the deck someone from Transocean says, ‘Look, don't worry about it.'
Here's why that's so important: the annular is used to seal the well for pressure tests. And those tests determine whether dangerous gas is seeping in.
So there you have damage to a crucial instrument for monitoring gas pressure from below being dismissed as unimportant. Watch for yourself:
Lot's more news today concerning all of this, starting with Obama sending a crack team of scientists and enngineers to the Gulf to see if they can succeed where BP has failed. An explanation of why the natural gas pouring into the Gulf is equally and perhaps even a larger long term problem to the environment.
Unbelievably in the face of all this here's the corporate shills of the Republican party arguing that everyone should just trust BP to pay what it owes for the cleanup and damages inflicted on the environment and people's livelihoods. Just like you should trust BP to do the right thing about its use of dispersants in the Gulf - they're employing according to EPA data, Corexit and it ranks far above dispersants made by competitors in toxicity and far below them in effectiveness in handling southern Louisiana crude.
This is some of what is imperiled:
Back soon!
BP and a Compliant Media
Apparently no amount of facts or reports to the contrary will change or make the various medias disregard BP's estimate that 210,000 gallons per day are being spilled into the Gulf. Almost every news site I visited yesterday had the lying BP estimate - the singular exception was the NYT's article linked below. Stenography would seem to be the order of the day, and newspaper companies ask why more people don't subscribe.
Starting a full 2 weeks ago those numbers were discredited and reported by outlets in the MSM as being off by a factor of 5 and perhaps 10, and yet strangley they go back to the BP numbers.
Today scientists in the Gulf say, and the NYT's is reporting, they've discovered giant plumes of oil underneath the surface. One such plume measures 10 miles in length, 3 miles in width and 300 feet in thickness. That's a plot for science fiction movie! And you'll note that NYT's report mentions likely amounts spewing are more likely between 25,000 to 80,000 barrels (1 to 3 million gallons per day!).
Briefly today there was good news in the attempts to do something about mitigating the amounts of oil and gas gushing into the Gulf. BP managed to get the siphon inserted into the broken pipe but that was quickly followed by a setback - as reported by NPR - when two remote control robots crashed into each other and knocked the pipes partially apart and dislodged the mile long pipe. Hopefully they'll get this to work in the near future.
Of all the lies, obfuscations and stonewalling BP has engaged in, it was this from the NYT's report that infuriated me most: BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.
"The answer is no to that," a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. "We're not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It's not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort."
If that's not enough to worry about, there are also significant amounts of natural gas being spilled into the Gulf which depletes oxygen in the waters and could result in the creation of a massive dead zone. "It could take years, possibly decades, for the system to recover from an infusion of this quantity of oil and gas," Joye said. "We've never seen anything like this before. It's impossible to fathom the impact."
Finally, here's a report from National Geographic on the possible effects of the toxic soup now circulating in the Gulf of Mexico.
Omar Khadr and Catch-22
News of a plea deal being offered to Omar Khadr surfaced weeks ago as the Obama administration did not want to be seen prosecuting someone who was 15 years old when he was plucked off the battlefield. Add to that evidence of abuse at the hands of his American captors and you have a PR nightmare for the Obama administration. Rumors have the deal being offered at time served up until now plus five years. At the time Khadr seemed determined to reject the deal and have his day in court.
Now, word is that he's having a change of heart and his defense team are busy negotiating with his prosecutors on a plea deal. It's likely the prospect of a military tribunal where no precedent exists is the determining factor in the decision to negotiate. Such tribunals have been ruled illegal during G.W. Bush's presidency but that has not kept Barrack Obama from maintaining them.
This would also end a potential headache for Canada's Conservatives as Stephen Harper, in spite of a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that Khadr's human rights were violated, has done nothing to protect or repatriate him. Remember Canadians, he'd do the same for you!
Latest on Oil Spill in the Gulf
There's no way for me to begin that doesn't include the day's biggest butthole: Tony Hayward, the BP CEO who said today of the oil spewing into the Gulf, "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume." We would like to offer him a very tiny bit of anthrax or maybe a dollop o' rat poison so he can learn a basic lesson about chemistry and see how that works out.
The NYT's reports that for years, the MMS (Minerals Management Service) has not bothered to require the necessary permits from BP and other major offshore drillers, even though government scientists were reporting major safety concerns, likely environmental impacts and threats to endangered species.
BP had wrong diagram to close blowout preventer. Really, you couldn't make this stuff up. McClatchy says criminal charges against BP are likely.
That didn't take long: From the LA Times, ...seafood shortages are starting to plague markets in New Orleans and throughout the country. Note the LA Times still reporting only 5,000 barrels per day spewing into Gulf.
Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski votes against holding Big Oil companies responsible for their crimes.
More Friday News Stories
I was wrong. I never thought the Conservatives had any intention of making a deal with the opposition on the release of the heavily redacted documents relating to torture of Afghan detainees and were instead involved in a game of chicken with what appears to be a chicken-hearted opposition. Today however all the parties involved arrived at a deal:
If a dispute arises over whether blacked-out records should be divulged to the public, it will be referred to a panel of arbiters who will decide what can be released without compromising national security. The membership of this panel is still under discussion.
NDP defence critic Jack Harris said, “It satisfies concerns about national security, while ensuring Canadians will learn the truth about how the government responded to the possibility of torture by the Afghan authorities to whom detainees were being transferred.”
Let's hope he's right, because I believe if he is a day of reckoning is due for Stephen Harper, Peter Mckay and the rest of the tories.
A 24 year old soldier died yesterday in Afghanistan as the result of and IED. Private Kevin Thomas McKay, just days away from finishing his assignment in Afghanistan, has been killed by an improvised explosive device southwest of Kandahar City. Our sincere condolences to his family and friends.
Sadly, even General Stanley McChrystal admits that all the efforts extended by NATO forces in Afghanistan have not produced much in the way of results.
A little sanity regards off-shore drilling in Canada, in light of the disaster currently taking place in the Gulf of Mexico. The moritorium against oil and gas exploration on Georges Bank, one of the most productive and ecologically sensitive fishing grounds off the East Coast, has been extended to 2015. Needless to say, there are always those who will try and use a disaster like the Gulf spill to further their own agenda - in this case it's Canada's Environment Minister, Jim Prentice shilling for the tar sands in Alberta. Makes you proud, don't it?
Canada's Conservatives are not as tone deaf as those down south and for the moment are talking tough on off-shore drilling rules and regs. Still, they are rejecting a call for a moritorium on such exploration. Environment minister Jim Prentice says ominously, "Here in Canada, we’ve not had those kinds of incidents and that’s because of the strong regulatory environment that we have had with the National Energy Board (NEB).” Isn't that the kind of hubris that led to the spill in the 1st place?
Here in Quebec, physicians have launched an online campaign to move the government to address a shortage of family doctors.
Now, after the horse is out of the barn, Charest is promising to close the barn doors (Introducing new gov't. code of ethics!).
Finally, on this day in 1968, Montreal secured a Major League Baseball franchise - here's the original CBC report. Have a box of tissue handy.
Canadian News Stories From NM&P
So here we are on the eve of the deadline for the negotiated release of the Afghan detainee issue documents that was extended past the original two weeks, as ordered by Speaker of the House Peter Milliken, and there's an impasse. I'm shocked, shocked I tell you. I'm shocked that the impasse didn't occur earlier. I'll say it clearly now, I never expected the tories to relent and and I had even less confidence in the courage of the opposition to hold them in contempt of Parliment and force a snap election.
The leaders of the opposition are poll-watchers and not confident in their abilities to bring the issues at hand to the Canadian public and sway them in their favour. I do not pretend to understand why this is so as the Conservatives would seem to be on the wrong side of issues that Canadians care deeply about but there you have it.
The former Liberal Defense Minister, Bill Graham admits an agreement signed under his watch to protect detainees handed to rough Afghan jailers was flawed and should have included better follow-up monitoring for torture.
The campaign to free Marc Emery from being extradited has begun and I urge you to e-mail Justice Minister Rob Nicholson and let him know how you feel, politely.
Add another big voice to those calling on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to talk about climate change at the Group of 20 summit in Toronto next month. Nicholas Stern, the British economist and author of a seminal 700-page study on the economics of global warming, says the G20 has a role in achieving the “political agreement” that he believes is necessary to advance on the commitments made at the UN climate change conference last December in Copenhagen.
Finally, there are those that hate democracy - they'd much rather shove their agenda down our collective throats than give in to fact that Canadians have spoken on the issue! I really wish people would accept that choice is between the people involved and their maker.If they truly believed in god they'd accept tthat. It's about smug self-righteousness and little else - either that or they don't believe the big invisible guy's in control and not having anticipated what the creatures he created would do, made no provisions for the souls of the unborn.
News May 14th 2010
News Read by Erica Fisher. Produced by Drew Pascoe.
Stories by Erica Fisher, Jose Espinoza, and Jonathan Moore.
CJLO Awarded Funding Grant From the CRFC
CJLO is thrilled to announce that the Community Radio Fund of Canada (CRFC) has awarded us with a grant as part of their Youth Internship Program.
A huge thank you to the CRFC and the members of the selection committee: Kevin Crombie, Blythe McKay, and Lois Ross.
This grant will allow CJLO to launch an after school program for high school students aged 16-18 to learn about the workings of radio and to learn the tools and skills needed to launch a career in broadcasting. Stay tuned for details as we begin the project over the next few months.
CJLO Voted 6th Best Radio Station In Montreal!
Thanks to everyone who voted for CJLO in this year's Montreal Mirror Best of Montreal Poll! Because of you we jumped up two spots from eight to six for best radio station in Montreal!
Special thanks to all of our DJs, staff and volunteers who help power the station by contributing endless hours of time and man power. We really couldn't be as great as we are without you!
News May 12th 2010
Read and produced by Nicholas Fiscina.
Stories written by Nicholas Fiscina, Matthew Phelps and Gareth Sloan.
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