- Written by: Kamran Mofid
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Barclays makes £500m betting on food crisis
Outrage as bank revealed to be major speculator while millions face starvation
"The food market is becoming a playground for investors rather than a market place for farmers. The trend of big investors betting on food prices is transforming food into a financial asset while exacerbating the risk of price spikes that hit the poor hardest."- Written by: Kamran Mofid
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Rupert Murdoch's second daughter attacks News Corp values in keynote address at Edinburgh television festival
(Tea Party, Fox News, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan: You must take heed for these words Elisabeth has spoken are true.)
“Tensions within the world's most powerful media family were dramatically laid bare on Thursday when Elisabeth Murdoch set out her own vision of media leadership, emphasising humanity over profit and criticising her father's News Corporation for operating with an absence of values.
Giving the keynote MacTaggart address at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, Rupert Murdoch's second daughter also explicitly contradicted her brother James, chose to praise the BBC, and argued that the Olympics experience demonstrates that television is a force for storytelling rather than a route to political power.
Speaking in public for the first time about the phone-hacking affair, which prompted her to fall out with her brother a year ago, Elisabeth Murdoch said that News Corp had to ask "significant and difficult questions about how some behaviours fell so far short of its values" in the wake of what happened.
She said the lesson from the affair was that any organisation needed to "discuss, affirm and institutionalise a rigorous set of values based on an explicit statement of purpose" – in contrast to News Corp's traditional mode of governance based on executives second-guessing what Rupert would do…
Elisabeth Murdoch took aim at her younger brother James in an extended passage that referred to his own controversial MacTaggart lecture given three years ago.
That speech ended with James – weeks before the Sun switched to the Conservatives – observing that "the only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit".
Elisabeth said that while loss-making media organisations had their independence "massively challenged", her brother's statement nevertheless "left something out".- Written by: Kamran Mofid
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Photo:niagaraatlarge.com
“A new federal environmental review panel “does not have any right to attribute significance to the spirituality of a place per se,” Taseko Mines Ltd. president Russell Hallbauer wrote in a letter obtained under the Access to Information Act.
Vancouver-based Taseko, which failed in its 2010 bid to get federal approval after a “scathing” federal review, also asked Ottawa to not permit aboriginal prayer ceremonies at pending hearings on the revised proposal.
Children’s plays should also be banned, Hallbauer said in his November letter.
The panel allowed “a group of kindergarten children to present a play, in which the children wore fish cut-outs on their heads, moved around the floor, and then all fell over simultaneously, symbolizing the death of the fish,” Hallbauer wrote.
Allowing opening prayers wasn’t “appropriate” and a “sensational” anti-project film and the children’s play also shouldn’t have been part of a process that is supposed to be “objective and fact-based.”…
One native leader said Taseko’s letter is an affront to aboriginal spirituality.
“We are tied to the land and that’s a spiritual area,” Tsilhqot’in National Government (TNG) tribal chair Chief Joe Alphonse said, referring to the proposed open-pit mine about 125 kilometres southwest of Williams Lake.
“To not even have that as part of the review, you may as well not have a review at all. Let’s go turn the Vatican into a casino hall.
“This is exactly what we’re talking about when a company is allowed to make those kinds of suggestions. It’s wrong.”
Another local First Nations leader, Xeni Gwet’in Chief Marilyn Baptiste, likened Taseko’s proposal to the former government-sanctioned residential schools that “outlawed our spirituality, our drumming and our language.”…
Editing notes on the margins of the document, posted in January, cross out a reference to “spiritual” in a lengthy list of the mine’s potential environmental effects.
“Term spiritual is not used in the act (the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act) and should not be included here,” the editor wrote.
Brian Battison, Taseko’s vice-president of corporate affairs, also stressed that spirituality isn’t part of federal legislation and shouldn’t be considered.
He said the company is objecting to children’s plays, films and prayers because such events bring too much emotion into the hearings.
“The whole process moves so far beyond the true facts that it makes it very, very difficult for everybody, I think, including the panel, to not try to consciously or unconsciously reflect all of that in their findings,” Battison said.
“And what happens is the science and the facts get lost, and if they don’t get lost they get overwhelmed by these circumstances.”…
See the latest report on the Most Destructive Project on Earth: CANADA’S TOXIC TAR SANDS (25 January 2024)- Canadian tar sands pollution is up to 6,300% higher than reported, study finds
In northern Alberta, Canada, filthy craters of crud where old growth forests used to be. Photo:niagaraatlarge.com
Read more:
Meet the Senior Management at Taseko