Top news: Greenpeace exposes confidential documents on BP oil spill; EU regulation to prevent oil spills is under attack by UK and other gov’ts; Berlusconi freezes nuclear plans for one year or two; ‘Japan ending whaling’ news circulating through the media is a hoax. Sadly enough.
Anti Nuclear Demonstration in Moscow © Vadim Kantor / Greenpeace
#Whaling: a fake news story about Japan scrapping all research whaling was released yesterday, but was then dismissed as a hoax.The story - claimed to originate from Japan's Kyodo new - was tracked back to a US fake news website.
#Nuclear/Action: Greenpeace activists occupied the office of Minister of Energy of Ontario on Tuesday, protesting against the planned construction of new atomic reactors in Toronto. Four Greenpeace Canada activists have been arrested. Greenpeace analyst and campaigner Patrick Stensil explains: "We are occuping the offices of Minister (Brad) Duguid because he continues to move forward with new nuclear reactors instead of considering green and safer options".
Another protest was held yesterday in Moscow: Greenpeace activists dressed as windmills and wearing stilts protested in front of the Nuclear Energy State Corporation (Rosatom), asking for a transition to renewable energy.
#Oilspill: Greenpeace US has revealed thousands of confidential documents linked to the BP oil spill, asking for supporters to help digging 30,000 pages of memos, reports and even flight records about the worst oil spill in American history.
It seems that European public administrations have learned nothing from the BP disaster; UK and other governments have recently opposed EU regulations aimed at preventing oil leaks at deepwater drilling operations. "If these regulations pass they'll be a good first step towards ensuring that oil companies are held responsible for their spills”, Greenpeace oil campaigner Richard George has told the Guardian “The concern right now is that national governments, with the UK at the forefront, are working hard to water down these proposals at the behest of the oil companies."
#Nuclear: The Italian government has decided to freeze its nuclear plans for one year or two -Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi thinks that “one year would not be enough to reassure Italians”; perhaps two years would be enough to make people forget about Fukushima, avoid the anti-nuclear referendum scheduled for June and restart the nuclear program with Areva and EDF? To reassure Italians, Stefano Saglia, the senior industry ministry official in charge of the nuclear relaunch, said that the Mediterranean has never experienced tsunamis. Oh really, Mr. Saglia? What about Messina in 1908?
That’s it for today’s news.
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