June, 17 2011, 05:49am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Greenpeace International 24-hour press desk on +31 20 718 2470
Contact the Greenpeace ship Esperanza on +47 5140 7986 / 7 / 8
Greenpeace Picture Desk, jnovis@greenpeace.org, +3 629001152
Greenpeace International Video Desk, julie.konop@greenpeace.org +1 267 239 7288
Global Head of Greenpeace Kumi Naidoo Faces Jail For Scaling Arctic Oil Rig
The International Executive Director of Greenpeace, Kumi Naidoo, has entered an exclusion zone to scale a controversial Arctic oil rig 120km off the coast of Greenland. He is now demanding that the rig's master orders an immediate halt to drilling, and is requesting a copy of the rig's missing oil spill response plan. The document has been at the centre of a month-long campaign of direct action in the Arctic.
GREENLAND
The International Executive Director of Greenpeace, Kumi Naidoo, has entered an exclusion zone to scale a controversial Arctic oil rig 120km off the coast of Greenland. He is now demanding that the rig's master orders an immediate halt to drilling, and is requesting a copy of the rig's missing oil spill response plan. The document has been at the centre of a month-long campaign of direct action in the Arctic.
At 6.54. am this morning an inflatable speedboat carrying Naidoo was launched from the Greenpeace ship Esperanza. It evaded a Danish navy warship that has been circling the rig for several weeks then he climbed a 30 metre ladder up the outside of one of the platform's giant legs.
His action comes a week after the operators of the oil platform, Cairn Energy, obtained an injunction against Greenpeace from a Dutch court, imposing fines of 50,000 Euros a day for any breach of the exclusion zone. Cairn sought the injunction after 20 Greenpeace activists had been arrested on the rig for stopping the rig operating. As the head of the global organisation Naidoo himself volunteered to scale the rig and personally deliver a new appeal to the rig for an end to dangerous Arctic oil drilling. As he scaled the platform he carried the signatures of 50,000 supporters from all over the world who have demanded that Cairn explain exactly how it would deal with a BP style deep water blow-out in the Arctic.
Before leaving the Esperanza for the race to the Leiv Eiriksson he said:
"For me this is one of the defining environmental battles of our age, it's a fight for sanity against the madness of a mindset that sees the melting of the Arctic sea ice as a good thing. As the ice retreats the oil companies want to send the rigs in and drill for the fossil fuels that got us into this mess in the first place. We have to stop them. It goes right to the heart of the kind of world we want and the one which we want to pass onto our children."
He continued:
"The Arctic oil rush is such a serious threat to the climate and to this beautiful fragile environment that I felt Greenpeace had no choice but to return, so I volunteered to do it myself. Cairn has something to hide, it won't publish its plan to clean up an oil spill here in the Arctic, and that's because it can't be done. I'm going onto that rig to give them the names of fifty thousand people who've emailed them to demand they publish their plan, and I won't leave until I have it in my hands."
"People may wonder why I as an African care about what's happening in the Arctic, but scientists say that the unprecedented warming up here could have grave knock-on consequences for vulnerable people across the world. That's because a warming Arctic could dramatically change weather patterns many thousands of miles away. At some point we have to draw a line and say no more, and I say we draw that line here and now in the Arctic ice."
Greenpeace has made repeated requests for Cairn's oil spill plan, including making a visit last month to the company's headquarters to ask that it be made public. Cairn claims the Greenland authorities won't allow it to publish the spill plan, but Greenpeace has legal advice making it clear that Cairn could easily publish the plan if it wanted to. Publication of such a plan is normal practice in the industry and the Arctic Council's Offshore Oil and Gas Guidelines clearly state that oil spill response mechanisms should be in place before drilling begins and that operators should allow for public review and comment on the oil spill response plan.
Before granting the injunction last week, the Dutch judge made a point of highlighting the dangerous nature of Arctic drilling and how unusual it was that Cairn had not released its spill plan. He said:
"It must be conceded to Greenpeace International that the oil disaster which occurred in the Gulf of Mexico showed the great risk of drilling at great depths. Capricorn [a fully owned subsidiary of Cairn Energy] has not disputed that if a similar scenario were to develop at the drilling locations at issue, it would be very difficult due to the climactic circumstances in the area, which permit navigation for only a few months a year due to the formation of ice, to stem an oil spill. A leak of this kind could indeed have major consequences for humans, wildlife and the environment in a large region... The injunction judge has taken note of the fact that Capricorn is not willing to publish its oil spill plan."
Kumi, 45, was a youth leader in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, where he was arrested several times and charged with violating provisions against mass mobilisation, civil disobedience and for violating the state of emergency. He lived underground before being forced to flee South Africa and live in exile in the UK.
ENDS
***video and stills available***
Greenpeace is a global, independent campaigning organization that uses peaceful protest and creative communication to expose global environmental problems and promote solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future.
+31 20 718 2000LATEST NEWS
AI Firm Sued Over Chatbot That Suggested It Was OK for Child to Kill Parents
"In their rush to extract young people's data and sow addiction, Character.AI has created a product so flawed and dangerous that its chatbots are literally inciting children to harm themselves and others," said one advocate.
Dec 10, 2024
"You know sometimes I'm not surprised when I read the news and I see stuff like 'child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse' stuff like this makes me understand a little bit why it happens."
That's a message sent to a child in Texas from a Character.AI chatbot, indicating to the boy that "murdering his parents was a reasonable response to their limiting of his online activity," according to a federal lawsuit filed in Texas district court Monday.
The complaint was brought by two families in Texas who allege that the Google-backed chatbot service Character.AI harmed their two children, including sexually exploiting and abusing the elder, a 17-year-old with high functioning autism, by targeting him with extreme sexual themes like incest and pushing him to self-harm.
The parents argue that Character.AI, "through its design, poses a clear and present danger to American youth causing serious harms to thousands of kids, including suicide, self-mutilation, sexual solicitation, isolation, depression, anxiety, and harm towards others. Inherent to the underlying data and design of C.AI is a prioritization of overtly sensational and violent responses."
Google is also named as a defendant in the suit. In their filing, the plaintiffs argue that the tech company supported Character.AI's launch even though they knew that it was a "defective product."
The families, who are being represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project, have asked the court to take the product offline.
The explosive court filing comes not long after a mother in Florida filed a separate lawsuit against Character.AI in October, arguing that the chatbot service is responsible for the death of her teenage son because it allegedly encouraged him to commit suicide, per CNN.
Character.AI is different than other chatbots in that it lets uses interact with artificial intelligence "characters." The Texas complaint alleges that the 17-year-old, for example, engaged in a conversation with a character modeled after the celebrity Billie Eilish. These sorts of "companion apps" are finding a growing audience, even though researchers have long warned of the perils of building relationships with chatbots, according to The Washington Post.
A spokesperson for Character.AI declined to comment directly on the lawsuit when asked by NPR, but said the company does have guardrails in place overseeing what chatbots can and cannot say to teen users.
"We warned that Character.AI's dangerous and manipulative design represented a threat to millions of children," said Social Media Victims Law Center founding attorney Matthew P. Bergman. "Now more of these cases are coming to light. The consequences of Character.AI's negligence are shocking and widespread." Social Media Victims Law Center is the plaintiff's counsel in the Florida lawsuit as well.
Josh Golin, the executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit children's advocacy group, echoed those remarks, saying that "in their rush to extract young people's data and sow addiction, Character.AI has created a product so flawed and dangerous that its chatbots are literally inciting children to harm themselves and others."
"Platforms like Character.AI should not be allowed to perform uncontrolled experiments on our children or encourage kids to form parasocial relationships with bots their developers cannot control," he added.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Over 75 Nobel Laureates Call On Senate to Reject RFK Jr. as Health Secretary
"In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public's health in jeopardy," said the winners of the prestigious prize.
Dec 10, 2024
Nobel laureates rarely wade into politics as a group, but Monday marked the second time in two months that dozens of winners of the prestigious Nobel Prize have banded together to speak out against the agenda of President-elect Donald Trump—this time, calling on U.S. senators to reject his nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
More than 75 Nobel laureates signed a letter warning lawmakers about Kennedy's record of attacking the very agencies he would have power over if confirmed to be Trump's secretary of health and human services, his history of amplifying discredited conspiracy theories about public health—sometimes with deadly consequences—and his "lack of credentials or relevant experience in medicine, science, public health, or administration."
"In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public's health in jeopardy and undermine America's global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors," wrote the Nobel laureates.
Kennedy has alarmed dental experts with his proposal to remove fluoride, which prevents tooth decay, from public drinking water—a plan that Trump has said "sounds OK." The president-elect also said Sunday he would have Kennedy investigate the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism, which was the argument made by a 1998 article that has since been retracted and has been debunked by numerous international studies.
The environmental lawyer—whose views and political ambitions have been disavowed by other members of the prominent Kennedy family—has also been condemned for falsely claiming in a letter to the prime minister of Samoa in 2019 that the measles vaccine itself may have caused a measles outbreak that had killed 16 people there. By the time the outbreak was over, 80 people had died, and experts partially blamed "increasing circulation of misinformation leading to distrust and reduced vaccination uptake."
"Maybe there are some [senators] who will read this and think: 'Well, we really do want to protect the health of our citizens. They didn't elect us so that we could kill them,'" Richard Roberts, a co-author of Monday's letter and the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his discovery of split genes, told The New York Times.
Other beliefs of Kennedy's include his rejection of the established scientific fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS and his claim that unpasteurized raw milk "advances human health" and that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has purposely suppressed that information.
Food scientists say there is no documented proof that raw milk has the health benefits proponents like Kennedy claim it does, but there is ample proof that unpasteurized milk contains bacteria and viruses, including H5N1, the avian flu that's been detected in dairy cow herds in at least 15 states.
The Nobel laureates noted that Kennedy has also been a "belligerent critic" of the FDA and other health agencies and employees that are part of DHHS, calling for vaccine scientists to be imprisoned and threatening to fire FDA and National Institutes of Health employees.
"The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve—not threaten—these important and highly respected institutions and their employees," reads the letter, which was signed by Nobel Prize winners including economist Simon Johnson, vaccine scientist Drew Weissman, and Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who won the prize in physiology or medicine for discovering microRNA.
Dozens of Nobel laureates also signed a letter in October endorsing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential run and warning that Trump's economic agenda would "lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'People Power Works': Shell Backs Down in Anti-Protest Lawsuit Against Greenpeace
"Shell thought suing us for millions over a peaceful protest would intimidate us, but this case became a PR millstone tied around its neck," said the co-executive director of Greenpeace U.K.
Dec 10, 2024
The United Kingdom-based oil giant Shell agreed Tuesday to settle a major lawsuit the company brought against Greenpeace after activists from the group boarded and occupied a company oil platform last year to protest fossil fuel expansion.
Greenpeace said in a statement that as part of the settlement, it agreed to donate £300,000—roughly $382,000—to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, a charity that helps save lives at sea, but will pay nothing to Shell and accept no liability. The donation represents a fraction of the over $11 million in damages and legal costs defendants faced, the group said.
The Greenpeace defendants have also "agreed to avoid protesting for a period at four Shell sites in the northern North Sea."
"Shell thought suing us for millions over a peaceful protest would intimidate us, but this case became a PR millstone tied around its neck," said Areeba Hamid, co-executive director of Greenpeace U.K. "The public backlash against its bullying tactics made it back down and settle out of court."
"This settlement shows that people power works. Thousands of ordinary people across the country backed our fight against Shell and their support means we stay independent and can keep holding Big Oil to account," Hamid added. "This legal battle might be over, but Big Oil's dirty tricks aren't going away. With Greenpeace facing further legal battles around the world, we won't stop campaigning until the fossil fuel industry stops drilling and starts paying for the damage it is causing to people and planet."
"These aggressive legal tactics, the huge sums of money, and attempts to block the right to protest pose a massive threat."
Shell brought the case, which Greenpeace characterized as a "textbook" strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP), in February 2023 and sought $1 million in damages from activists who boarded a Shell-contracted ship carrying equipment to drill for oil in the North Sea.
"When the protest ended, the only damage Shell could find was a padlock which, they alleged, our activists broke. That's it," Greenpeace U.K. said Tuesday. "Yet they came after us with a million-dollar lawsuit, which they justified for their spending on safety."
The group, which warned that the case had dire implications for the right to protest, credited a "sustained, year-long campaign against the suit" for forcing the oil behemoth to back down. The campaign, according to Greenpeace, "turned the legal move into a PR embarrassment for Shell."
"The case was dubbed the 'Cousin Greg' lawsuit by Forbes after a scene in the Emmy-awarded drama Succession, in which the hapless character threatens to sue Greenpeace to universal dismay," the environmental group noted Tuesday.
Greenpeace is currently facing several other SLAPP suits, including one brought by Energy Transfer, majority-owner of the Dakota Access pipeline. The group said Tuesday that the Energy Transfer suit "threatens the very existence of Greenpeace in the U.S."
"These aggressive legal tactics, the huge sums of money, and attempts to block the right to protest pose a massive threat. It could stop Greenpeace being able to make a real difference on the things that matter most," the organization said Tuesday. "It's part of a growing trend by powerful corporations and governments to crush peaceful protest—using draconian laws or intimidation lawsuits like this."
"It seeks to silence the people most impacted by the climate crisis. This threatens the global fight for climate justice," the group added. "We won't give up. This is Shell versus all of us."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular