100,000 protestors confront Italy’s prime minister
The BBC reported on March 3 that more than 100,000 people marched through the streets of Rome in protest of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s labor, welfare and justice policies.
It was part of an increasingly vocal opposition to the way in which media magnate Berlusconi, Italy’s wealthiest businessman turned prime minister, appears to be forcing through legislation that favors himself and his business associates.
Italy’s main labor unions called a general strike for the week after Easter.
Berlusconi’s first government was brought down after only seven months in 1994 by widespread industrial unrest.
However, Berlusconi so far seems unconcerned about the strike threat and he has hinted that he plans to rewrite a clause in the labor law that gives workers who feel they have been unjustly fired the automatic right to get their jobs back. The prime minister believes that current labor legislation stifles industrial flexibility to such a degree that Italy cannot compete within the European Union.
The leftwing opposition is in a state of fragmentation and the main left wing party leadership is in dispute. This weakness may be crucial in the coming weeks.
U.S. tallies nuclear test toll
In the latter half of the 20th century, radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests probably caused 17,000 cancer deaths in the United States. U.S., Soviet and British fallout between 1951-2000 is blamed for a total of 80,000 cancer cases in the U.S. alone.
The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) discovered this when they studied a U.S. government report that has yet to be published.
The head of the IEER, Dr. Arjun Makhijani, believes that people living thousands of miles form the test sites were affected by fallout. “Hot spots were scattered across the United States from California, Oregon and Washington in the west to New Hampshire, Vermont and North Carolina in the east,” he said.
Dr. Makhijani added that in some instances farm children drinking goat’s milk in high fallout areas in the 1950s were as severely exposed to radiation as the worst exposed children after the Chernobyl power plant disaster in the former Soviet Union in 1986.
The task now is to take the report to fallout hot spots and help those people who have been damaged by nuclear weapons.
The fallout was particularly high in Idaho and campaigners there are calling for a full government public information program and for compensation awarded in the immediate area to be extended nationwide.
“The United States has a compensation for the Nevada Test Site neighbors who are geographical ‘downwinders,’” Margaret Macdonald Stewart of the Snake River Alliance said. “There are hot spots thousands of miles from test sites and the new definition of ‘downwinder’ should include all of them.”
Shell sued for complicity in Nigerian human rights violations
A U.S. federal court ruled on March 5 that a civil lawsuit charging Shell with human rights violations will proceed. The ruling held that Shell Transport and Trading Company could be held liable in the U.S. for the persecution and execution of environmental activists in Nigeria.
Despite widespread international protest, noted Nigerian environmentalist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, youth leader John Kpuinen and seven other Ogoni activists were hanged by the Nigerian military government on Nov. 10, 1995. The “Ogoni Nine” had fought Shell’s pollution and oil development in the Niger Delta.
“Shell is here on trial. The company has ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come,” Saro-Wiwa said in his last statement to the military tribunal.
Fulfilling this prophecy, the court refused to dismiss the lawsuit brought by surviving relatives of Saro-Wiwa and Kpuinen, which alleges that Shell played a role in the execution of the two men as well as other violations. The court also refused to dismiss similar claims against Brian Anderson, the former head of Shell in Nigeria, and claims by another plaintiff that she was beaten and shot while protesting the bulldozing of her land by Shell.
The court found that Shell and Anderson’s actions constituted participation in crimes against humanity, torture, summary execution, arbitrary detention and other violations of international law. The court also found that Anderson could be sued under the Torture Victim Protection Act.
Finally, the ruling allows the plaintiffs’ claims under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations to continue because, if Shell did indeed act with the Nigerian military, it would constitute racketeering.
“Multinational corporations must be held accountable when they violate such fundamental international legal principles,”said Jenie Green, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers.
