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For Immediate Release
October, 09 2013, 10:20am EDT
Contact:
Nick Bennett, nick@nrcm.org, 207.430.0116
Pete Didisheim, pete@nrcm.org, 207.430.0113
NRCM to Release Investigative Report on Risks of Mining in Maine
MAINE
Tomorrow the Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM) will release an investigative report documenting specific risks to Maine from open pit mining for metals at Bald Mountain.
The report: Bald Mountain Mining Risks: Hidden from the Public,is based on information gathered from documents secured by through Freedom of Access Act requests.
The report is being released one week before the Board of Environmental Protection will hold a public hearing on proposed draft rules that would change how Maine regulates mining in Maine. These draft rules have been developed as a result of legislation pushed by the Irving Corporation's interest in pursuing an open-pit mine at Bald Mountain. The BEP hearing is scheduled for Thursday, October 17,starting at 9:00 a.m. at the Augusta Civic Center.
The Natural Resources Council of Maine is the leading nonprofit membership organization working statewide for clean air and water; healthy people, wildlife and forests; and clean energy solutions. NRCM harnesses the power of science, the law, and the voices of more than 12,000 supporters to protect the nature of Maine. Visit NRCM online at www.nrcm.org.
LATEST NEWS
$2 Billion Per Day Spent by US on Iran War Could Have Saved 87 Million Lives, Says UN Humanitarian Chief
A UN official said a proposal to provide food, water, medicine, and shelter to tens of millions of those facing war and poverty could have been funded “in less than a fortnight of this reckless war.”
Apr 21, 2026
US President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is costing nearly $2 billion per day, according to a Harvard analysis based on estimates from the Pentagon. The head of the United Nations’ humanitarian agency said the money could instead be used to save more than 87 million lives around the world.
Tom Fletcher, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), spoke at Chatham House on Monday about a “cataclysmic” funding crisis for the UN, in large part due to the termination of billions of dollars in funding from the US and other major powers such as the UK. Fletcher said his agency has seen its budget cut by around 50%.
"We're already overstretched, underresourced, and literally under attack," Fletcher said, citing the more than 1,000 humanitarians who have been killed in conflicts around the world over the past three years.
The Iran war, launched at the end of February by the US and Israel, Fletcher said, has stretched UN budgets even further, both by causing chaos within Iran and Lebanon—where more than 5,000 people in total have been killed, including thousands of civilians, and more than 4 million displaced collectively—but also by creating economic upheaval that has exacerbated crises elsewhere.
"You have the [Strait] of Hormuz—fuel prices up 20%, food prices up almost 20%, our humanitarian convoys blocked," Fletcher said. "We've had to take those convoys by air and by land. And the impact, which I think we'll be feeling for years, of those price rises on Sub-Saharan and East Africa, pushing way more people into poverty."
Fletcher said that just a fraction of what the US has spent waging the war could have been used to provide a full year of funding for a plan he laid out in January to provide lifesaving food, water, medicine, and shelter to those in dozens of countries facing war and poverty.
“For every day of this conflict, $2 billion is being spent. My entire target for a hyper-prioritized plan to save 87 million lives is $23 billion," he said. "We could have funded that in less than a fortnight of this reckless war. Now, of course, we cannot.”
Beyond the financial toll, he said, US actions may have done irreparable damage to the authority of international humanitarian law and to UN bodies tasked with enforcing it.
He noted the dramatic increase in the number of humanitarian workers killed around the world over the past three years. According to a UN report earlier this month, of the more than 1,010 of them who were killed in the line of duty, over half were killed during Israel's genocide in Gaza and escalating attacks in the West Bank.
"A thousand dead humanitarians in three years," Fletcher said. "When did that become normal?"
He called out the UN Security Council, where the US is one of the permanent members with veto power, for its weak responses to the killing of humanitarians and other flagrant violations of the laws of war.
"Don't just give us a generic statement where you say humanitarian workers should be protected," he said. "Make the phone call, call out the people killing us, stop arming those who are doing it."
He said "big powers" view geopolitics in a highly "transactional" way and do not use the Security Council as a mechanism for defending international humanitarian law.
"I wouldn't have thought I'd need to say that a couple of years ago, that the Security Council should be defending international humanitarian law, and yet here we are," he said.
He said that Trump’s recent violent rhetoric toward Iran—which again verged into outright genocidal territory over the weekend when he pledged to “blow up the entire country” with overwhelming attacks on civilian infrastructure—has only further corroded international law.
“The idea that suddenly it’s okay to say, ‘We’re going to blow stuff up,’ ‘We’re going to bomb you back to the Stone Age,’ ‘We’re going to destroy your civilization,’ that kind of language is really dangerous,” Fletcher said. “It gives more freedom to all the other wannabe autocrats around the world to use that sort of language.”
But he said the aggression of the US and its allies has also made the world more warlike and less "generous," leading countries to put more money into defense that could otherwise go toward alleviating global suffering.
"Whether you're making the cuts [to UN funding] for ideological reasons or because you're too busy bombing someone else or because now you feel more insecure at home and so you have to invest more of your money in defense and less in generosity," he said, "all of that ultimately has an impact on the over 300 million people that we're here to serve."
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Journalists Urged to Condemn Trump-Carr Attack on Free Press at White House Correspondents Dinner
"When you invite fascists to dinner, they devour you," said one critic of the event.
Apr 21, 2026
The White House Correspondents' Association is facing pressure to stand up to President Donald Trump over his administration's relentless assault on the free press.
A letter sent to the WHCA on Monday and signed by prestigious US journalists—including Ann Curry, Bill Press, Sam Donaldson, and Dan Rather—urges the association to use its upcoming White House Correspondents' Dinner to "forcefully demonstrate opposition to President Trump's efforts to trample freedom of the press."
The letter outlines several Trump administration actions that it says have undermined the First Amendment of the US Constitution, including "retaliatory access bans, coercive regulatory investigations, frivolous lawsuits against the press, defunding of public broadcasting, dismantling of international broadcasting, physical restrictions on journalists... the arrest of journalists, and the pardoning of those who committed violence against the press."
The letter says that making a strong statement of resistance to Trump will be particularly important because the president is expected to attend and speak at this year's dinner.
"These are not normal times," the letter states, "and this cannot be business as usual with the press standing up to applaud the man who attacks them on a daily basis."
The letter recommends journalists attending the dinner "speak forcefully, in front of the man who seeks to undermine our country's long tradition of an independent, strong, and free press."
On Monday night, Status News reported that Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr, who has threatened to revoke broadcasters' licenses unless they give the Trump administration more favorable news coverage.
Mark Jacob, former metro editor at The Chicago Tribune and Sunday editor at The Chicago Sun-Times who last week called for the dinner to be canceled, wrote in a Tuesday social media post that Carr's presence at the dinner seemed like a deliberate insult to the journalists attending.
"The suck-up media will never learn," Jacob commented. "When you invite fascists to dinner, they devour you."
In a piece published by the Washington Monthly on Tuesday, journalist Bill Scher said that Trump's presence at the WHCA dinner was a betrayal of the organization's stated mission to celebrate and defend freedom of the press, and Scher also recommended canceling the event.
"A fundraising event to support 'programs to educate the public and the value of the First Amendment and a free press,'" Scher wrote, "should not have a featured speaker who is the biggest peacetime threat to the First Amendment and a free press in American history."
Scher went on to slam the "naive" rationales offered by WHCA members in showcasing Trump at the event.
"There is nothing to be gained by 'showing the president and other politicos the importance of a free press' when the president is exerting state control over the press," Scher contended. "He has employed litigation and threats from the FCC chair to selectively apply the equal time rule and revoke broadcast licenses over their war coverage, and threats from himself to imprison war correspondents."
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Senators Launch Probe Into Hegseth's Gutting of Programs to Mitigate US Killing of Civilians
"The high human toll of this war reflects the administration’s broader disregard for the strategic, legal, and moral imperative to minimize civilian harm."
Apr 21, 2026
A group of Democratic senators has opened an investigation into Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth's assault on federal programs and personnel tasked with mitigating civilian harm in US wars, cuts that helped pave the way for atrocities the American military has committed in Iran over the past seven weeks.
In a Monday letter led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the Democratic lawmakers cite the US missile strike on an elementary school in southern Iran—which killed more than 100 children on the first day of the war—as evidence of the Trump administration's "broader disregard for the strategic, legal, and moral imperative to minimize civilian harm."
Prior to the start of the Iran war, the Democrats note in their letter, Hegseth "reportedly overruled top military leaders and made deep cuts to [the Department of Defense's] mitigation and response (CHMR) programs, fired personnel at DoD’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence (CPCoE) and slashed CHMR staff at the US combatant commands 'by more than 90%.'"
"This included eliminating the entire civilian harm office at Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), removing civilian harm specialists from target development strike teams, and reducing the team of 10 at US Central Command (CENTCOM) to only one full time staff," the letter reads. "Your attempts to gut DoD’s civilian harm institutions contradicts more than a decade of bipartisan consensus and DoD-led reforms, initiated during the first Trump administration, to systematically prevent, and address civilian harm in DoD operations."
The lawmakers also point to Hegseth's public expressions of contempt for "stupid rules of engagement" and "tepid legality," both of which the Pentagon has said get in the way of "maximum lethality." Hegseth also said roughly two weeks into the Iran war that "no quarter" would be given to "our enemies" in Iran—a statement that experts said was a clear violation of international law and a war crime.
"These statements not only harm civilians and undermine established standards, but also endanger US servicemembers with greater risk of reciprocation and erode good order and discipline," the senators write.
Hegseth, the Trump administration's top cheerleader for the war of choice in Iran, is currently facing five articles of impeachment in the US House of Representatives, including one stating that the Pentagon chief has "authorized, condoned, or failed to prevent the use of military force in a manner inconsistent with the law of armed conflict, such as operations resulting in large numbers of civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iran, including a girls’ school in Minab."
Separately, the Pentagon leader is also facing scrutiny over a recent report alleging that his investment broker tried to purchase millions of dollars worth of defense industry stocks weeks before the US and Israel launched their war on Iran.
Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, formally asked the chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to "investigate any attempt by Secretary Hegseth or any other individual to trade on the basis of misappropriated insider information."
"If accurate, the recent public reporting suggests that, prior to launching a military conflict that he was instrumental in planning, the secretary of defense may have misappropriated top secret military information for personal financial gain," Warren wrote. "The SEC must do its part to stem corrupt actions that threaten market integrity and national security."
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