The True price of Oil

"You need to know the story of the Niger Delta, a once lush land of mangrove swamps at the base of Nigeria. In the late 1950s, in the final days of British imperial rule, Shell's local subsidiary discovered it lay on top of vast pools of oil. Britain immediately became its number one user, with the US close behind. In the long decades since, more than $200bn worth of oil and gas has been pumped from beneath the Delta people's feet.

So you would imagine the Niger Delta must now be an oasis of riches, with its 30m people bathing in wealth. But no: they live with nothing and die by the age of 40. While the lifeblood of twenty-first century techno-life is pumped from their land, they live in the Stone Age, with no schools, no hospitals and barely any electricity. They have felt three effects from the petrol. Their land has been poisoned by oil spills; the fish they lived off have been turned into stunted, toxic rarities; and when they ask for compensation, they are shot at."


The full article from The Independent, here.

Ask the Tough Questions About Oil

"As journalism has passed from a hungry to an elite profession, there's no shock value in the fact that Exxon Mobil paid only $5 billion in U.S. income taxes last year while it paid $25 billion to foreign governments. Even with Exxon Mobil making $76,000 a minute, the last thing that occurs to many assignment editors and reporters is to investigate whether a windfall-profits tax would drive Exxon Mobil, BP, and other oil companies to invest in the alternative-energy strategies they boast about in their television commercials.

Then there's the problem of letting general-assignment reporters, rather than energy specialists, cover gasoline prices mainly as a story of consumer suffering."

The whole article from Wired is here.

Iran's handling of protesters

NINE years ago, Ahmad Batebi appeared on the cover of The Economist. He was a 21-year-old student, one of thousands who protested against Iran’s government that summer. He was photographed holding aloft a T-shirt bespattered with the blood of a fellow protester. Soon afterwards, he was arrested and shown our issue of July 17th 1999. “With this”, he was told, “you have signed your death warrant.”
During his interrogation he was blindfolded and beaten with cables until he passed out. His captors rubbed salt into his wounds to wake him up, so they could torture him more. They held his head in a drain full of sewage until he inhaled it.

The whole article from The Economist, here.

Zimbabwe Vote Rigging

Video secretly recorded by a Zimbabwean prison guard appears to show evidence of vote-rigging in the country's recent presidential runoff election.
The footage, shot with a secret camera provided by the British newspaper The Guardian, was posted on the paper's Web site Saturday. The paper said the guard had since fled the country with his family.
The video shows the guard being summoned along with other prison guards to an office at Harare's central jail days before the June 27 runoff between President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
Once there, a supporter of Mugabe's ZANU-PF party instructs the guards to vote by postal ballot while he watches. The ZANU-PF supporter takes careful note of the guards' ballot numbers and which candidate they vote for, and even helps a guard properly fold his ballot and put it inside the envelope.

More info from the CNN article here.

The video on YouTube here.