June 2013
Oil Spilled Into Ecuador's Rivers Reaches Peru | Environment News Service →
ens-newswire.com
Interesting oil spill. The state owned pipeline broke from a landslide caused by heavy rain (and, I presume, a very poor site assessment - the line is on the side of an active, landslide volcano right next to a major river. Brilliant.).
Oil spilled from Petroecuador’s Trans-Ecuador pipeline after a May31 landslide in the Andean foothills has reached the Peruvian Amazon.
The landslide that destroyed a 330-foot section of the pipeline is blamed on heavy rain in the province of Sucumbios near the El Reventador Volcano, one of Ecuador’s most active volcanoes.
The broken pipeline spilled some 11,000 barrels, or 420,000 gallons, of crude oil into the Quijos River, a well-known whitewater adventure river on the eastern slopes of the Andes.
The oil was carried east into the River Coca, a tributary of the Napo River, which flows into the Amazon River.
The oil has polluted drinking water in the city of Puerto Francisco de Orellana, also known as Coca, a city of 80,000 and the capital of Orellana Province. Clean water is being supplied by tanker truck.
Petroecuador has also distributed food rations and cans of drinking water to the residents of 13 other Ecuadorean communities affected by the spill.
Student expelled from college for being a lesbian, forced to repay scholarship funds →
advocate.com
A conservative Christian college in Omaha expelled a student one semester before her graduation when they found out she was a lesbian — and then demanded she repay them for scholarship funds she had earned.
Grace University has refused to transfer Danielle Powell’s credits to another school unless she pays $6,300, the tuition from her spring semester in 2011, when administrators found out she was gay. Powell would have been the first in her family to earn a college degree.
Michael James, executive vice president at Grace University, justified the college’s actions to The Huffington Post, affirming that its student handbook forebade “sexually immoral behavior.” Quoting from the handbook, James stated:
“Any student involved in sexually immoral behavior, including premarital sex, adultery, and homosexual acts, is at minimum placed on University probation and may be subject to a Judiciary Hearing.”
Powell and her wife started a petition to get Grace University to drop its demands. (By the way, they’re the couple who got engaged onstage at a Macklemore concert — watch the video!) She deserves better than this. Help her out?
“If men could get pregnant, abortion clinics would be like a Starbucks. There would be two in every corner and four in every airport, and morning after pills would come in different flavors like sea salt and cool ranch.”
—Nasim Pedrad as Arianna Huffington, Saturday Night Live (via the-moon-follows-me)
“
1. White terrorists are called “gunmen.” What does that even mean? A person with a gun? Wouldn’t that be, like, everyone in the US? Other terrorists are called, like, “terrorists.”
2. White terrorists are “troubled loners.” Other terrorists are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are obviously troubled loners.
3. Doing a study on the danger of white terrorists at the Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined by angry white Congressmen. Doing studies on other kinds of terrorists is a guaranteed promotion.
4. The family of a white terrorist is interviewed, weeping as they wonder where he went wrong. The families of other terrorists are almost never interviewed.
5. White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists are apparently mainstream.
6. White terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other terrorists are long-running conspiracies.
7. White terrorists are never called “white.” But other terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.
8. Nobody thinks white terrorists are typical of white people. But other terrorists are considered paragons of their societies.
9. White terrorists are alcoholics, addicts or mentally ill. Other terrorists are apparently clean-living and perfectly sane.
10. There is nothing you can do about white terrorists. Gun control won’t stop them. No policy you could make, no government program, could possibly have an impact on them. But hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent on police and on the Department of Defense, and on TSA, which must virtually strip search 60 million people a year, to deal with other terrorists.
” —Juan Cole, 08/09/2012
Juan Cole actually wrote this 4 days after a white terrorist, yes, terrorist, murdered 6 and injured 4 people at a Sikh gurdwara in Wisconsin. The terrorist who committed said crime spoke of an impending “racial holy war” beforehand and was a member of white supremacist/neo-Nazi hate groups.
(via sailorfemme)
