At a time of economic crisis which has driven million of Americans into poverty and homelessness, the public should demand that DHS officials are held accountable for the wasteful misuse of taxpayers’ money. … Read More
Sustainable in the City: Community Solidarity When the SHTF
I knew that when the needs of the unprepared are not met, they are more likely to participate in breakdowns of society that eventually lead to them taking matters into their own hands. … Read More
Avoiding Typhus Post-Collapse
Typhus has two forms, epidemic typhus and Murine typhus and both can kill. Outbreaks of typhus have killed millions of people through the ages. … Read More
Greek govt threatens to arrest teachers over strike
The announcement marks the third time this year that the Greek government has invoked emergency laws to force strikers to return to work. Greece is due to receive €7.5 billion in loans soon, the latest tranche of a €240-billion rescue package signed in 2010; Athens currently has no money to pay pensions and wages. To cope with the personnel gaps, Athens plans to require two additional hours of work each week from high school teachers, and plans to transfer 4,000 of them to remote regions of the country. The government broke a longstanding taboo last month by agreeing to dismiss some 15,000 public-sector workers by the end of 2014, a key demand by the EU and International Monetary Fund for Greece to qualify for further rescue loans, Reuters reported. According to OLME, the union representing the teachers, about 10,000 part-time teachers could be dismissed once their temporary contracts expire. The union has called for a 24-hour strike when university exams start on May 17. However, under Greek law the government has the right to forcibly mobilize workers in the event of a civil disorder, natural disaster or public health risk.“This is a very authoritarian move from the government because it has issued civil mobilization orders for secondary education teachers in the public school system even before they decided to stage a strike during the university entry exams. Geek law is very explicit that civil mobilization refers to wars and natural disasters, not forms of civil protest,” Panagiotis Sotiris, sociology lecturer at the University of the Aegean, told RT.“It’s really interesting to see that one of the legal experts, who has insisted for many years on the unconstitutionality of these emergency laws, is no other than the current Minister of Justice in the Greek government, Mr Antonis Roupakiotis,” he said. Education Minister Constantine Arvanitopoulos justified the ban by arguing that students had a right to take exams without disruption; teachers will be served a civil mobilization order to go to work on that day, or risk arrest.“These threats by the prime minister and his government are directly against the overwhelming majority of workers and society,” Greece’s Syriza party, which opposes the bailout, said in a statement. The Greek government has in recent months intervened frequently to shut down mounting anti-austerity strikes. Earlier this year, it interrupted week-long walkouts by local sailors that led to food shortages on Greece’s islands, and strikes by metro workers that disrupted transport in Athens.“The Greek government tries to meet the nominal terms of the bailout agreements in terms of budget cuts, reducing public investment of preparing lay off of thousands of public servants and public-sector workers of making extremely dangerous decisions, for example, there is no money currently for HIV tests for blood samples. The Greek government puts all the cost on Greek society in order to remain within the terms of the bailout agreements,” professor Sotiris told RT. The Greek economy has been struggling to gain traction amid the austerity measures mandated in country’s bailout terms. Deep spending cuts and tax hikes have reduced Greece’s budget deficit, but have also left the country stuck in recession, now in its sixth year. Last year, the financial crisis reached boiling point: It was feared that Greece would be forced to abandon the Euro currency used by 17 European Union nations, sparking a chain reaction in financial markets and further aggravating the eurozone debt crisis. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), over the last three years Greece has nonetheless made progress in bringing down its budget deficit, austerity has nearly tripled Greece’s jobless rate since its debt crisis began in 2009. Greek unemployment is said to be more than twice the Eurozone average, with overall joblessness at a record high of 27 percent. Athens cut the minimum monthly wage for those under 25 years old by 32 percent to about 500 euros in a bid to boost hiring, but joblessness in the 15-to-24 age bracket recently soared from 59.3 percent in January to 64.2 percent in February.Medical patients at risk in crisis-stricken Greece Morale has been particularly hard-hit in the crisis: The number of Greeks who attempted suicide has been on the rise in recent years. There were 677 suicide attempts in 2009, 830 in 2010 and 927 in 2011, according to official figures. A number of Greek pharmacists have also faced serious medicine shortages due to price controls and tight cash flows. “We are in a critical situation and we don’t know what’s going to happen even the next day,” pharmacist Dionysis Evgenidis told RT. Greeks in need often visit the Doctors of the World charity in Thessaloniki. RT’s Tom Barton spoke to patients who said they fear for their future. “I went to the pharmacy to buy injections for my baby but couldn’t find any so now that I’m unemployed I came here,” one desperate mother said. The highest risks are for those with serious health conditions like diabetes or cardiologic problems, who must receive treatment every day. “It’s very serious for them not to have their medicine. If they do not they could die,” Sofia Gorane, from Doctors of the World told RT. … Read More
How shoppers can help prevent Bangladesh-type disasters
While rescue workers continue to dig through the rubble of Rana Plaza, the collapsed Bangladeshi garment factory responsible for the deaths of 433 people (and counting), Americans are faced yet again with the stark reality of consumer culpability in these disasters.Major clothing retailers like Wal-Mart, Joe Fresh, JCPenney and the Children’s Place were each found to have subcontracted manufacturing to the crumbling factory in Savar, where workers were making an average of $38 a month and coerced to report to work even after the walls of the building were literally falling apart. In November, fire ravaged another garment factory near the capital city of Dhaka, leaving 112 dead. Again, pieces of clothing from Sears, the Walt Disney Co. and other major retailers were found among the scorched remains.In the aftermath of such tragic, and preventable, losses of life, many consumers are left asking themselves what role they can play in discouraging disasters like this from happening again. And, fortunately, there are answers. The collective power of workers is a real thing, and the collective power of consumers is, too.Continue Reading… … Read More
Bush weeps while talking about Hurricane Katrina and dead soldiers
Former President George W. Bush openly wept while talking about some of the biggest disasters of his tenure at the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on Thursday. At the conclusion of his speech, Bush mentioned “the people of New Orleans who made homemade boats…
Ammonium nitrate mixed with negligence behind Texas fertilizer plant explosion – experts
The blast occurred on Wednesday night and was so powerful that it caused a 30-meter-fireball and was registered as a 2.1 magnitude quake by seismologists. Police say between five and 15 people are estimated to have been killed in the disaster so far, but there are fears that the overall death toll will reach dozens. More than 160 people have been taken to hospitals, with 24 of them in critical conditions. The city of West, which neighbors the plant, is evacuated due to the contamination by toxic fumes. “The most likely cause of the powerful explosion is the ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer and pesticide, which is also a powerful explosive and is known to have caused quite a number of disasters around the world,” UK chemist Christopher Busby said. “America’s most deadly disaster, in Texas City in 1947, happened when a fire detonated 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate stored on a ship.” The expert added that apart from the damage from the blast itself and the fire it started in the neighborhood, the incident poses other risks to health. For instance, the Texas plant stored large amounts of ammonia, a gas used to produce ammonium nitrate.“Ammonia is very toxic. It’s a respiratory irritant and it would cause serious upper respiratory tract problems. And it’s also produced when ammonium nitrate itself is heated up. If you heat it up to about 3,500 degrees, it dissociates into ammonia and nitride acid. These two would be quite toxic fumes to anyone inhaling them,” he explained. Doctor John Price, a professor of mechanical engineering from Australia, stressed that such a larger amount of ammonium nitrate shouldn’t have been stored so close to an inhabited area. “Well, the question is the ammonium nitrate,” he said. “Now, the quantities of ammonium nitrate that exploded during this event is about, I would say, something in the order of the hundred tons as the ammonium nitrate exploded, which means that was being stored only in the next block on the side of the town. And it resulted that the explosion has ripped through the town with a very strong pressure pulse, which has damaged many buildings.” He also commented on the footage of the blast, speaking about its possible causes and pointing out some lethal mistakes which were made as the crisis was tackled. “People were watching the fire from a distance of about 1km from the plant. The fire was very large at that stage and what happens is the fire then goes underneath probably one of the ammonium nitrate storage vessels and eventually heats it up until it explodes. It takes about half-an-hour to an hour for fire to explode in an ammonium nitrate storage vessel.” “So this is what has happened, that the fire has got out of control and basically heated up the vessel. What seems to me to be wrong about this whole incident is that instead of evacuating the plant, when the fire establishment could not control it, there seemed to be brought up more and more fire people and they were putting them at risk. I don’t know, it sounds as if there have been a lot of deaths among fire people,” he added.The chief safety expert at the Russia’s Nitrogen Industry Institute, Igor Solovyev, reminded that there haven’t been any serious accidents at fertilizer plants in half a century and that serious violations of safety arrangements must have led to the Texas explosion. ”The burning of some flammable materials could’ve caused the blast,” he said.“Undoubtedly, the human factor is to blame here. It’s 100 per cent. There aren’t that many things, which can explode at the fertilizer production. The ammonium nitrate or saltpeter is, possibly, the only one. The explosions of the ammonium nitrate stated occurring about 80 years ago when the technologies were only being developed and the switch to large-scale produce was made. Back then it happened due to the lack of information. But there were no such explosions during the last 50 years. “The fire-safety rules must’ve been violated. I don’t know about the US, but in Russia the organic, flammable materials are forbidden from being stored together with ammonium nitrate. They could’ve simply brought some timber and organize a temporary storage. If it caught fire and the saltpeter was around – especially, if it was in an enclosed space – it could’ve promoted the detonation,” Solovyev added. … Read More
