Image is from this article on the excellent Canadian environmental journalism outlet, The Narwhal.


The Giant Mine just outside of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada is one of the country's largest recognized environmental liabilities. The mine's 100 plus year history illustrates the continuity between resource colonialism in the late 19th/early 20th century and neoliberalism at the turn of the millennium.

There were several gold rushes in northern Canada/US in the late 19th century, such as the Klondike. The Giant gold strike on was first discovered by settlers about the same time as the Klondike, but as Giant is on Great Slave Lake (named for an Anglicization of the name of local peoples, not after slavery) instead of the Pacific Ocean, it is much less accessible and didn't take off like the Klondike. Parallel with displacement of local Yellowknives Dene people https://ykdene.com/, the town of Yellowknife sprung up around small mining operations through the 30s. It wasn't until after WW2 that the mine was developed at a large scale. Starting operation in 1948, Giant was owned by a Canadian mining conglomerate through the 80s, then some Australians, and for the last ten years of its operating life, by Americans, who went bankrupt and abandoned the property in 1999. The Canadian federal government is responsible for the site and its remediation now, similar to the way the EPA has Superfund sites in the USA.

The project is infamous for poisoning the people and environment of the surrounding area through arsenic poisoning. The ore at giant is arsenopyrite, an arsenic sulphide mineral that often contains gold. Roasting it in large furnaces or kilns releases the gold as well as fine arsenic trioxide dust. The most infamous arsenic poisoning incident was in 1951 when a Yellowknives Dene toddler in died after eating contaminated snow in the fallout area, 2 kilometers from the processing mill's smokestack. Over the years, improvements to the mill reduced the amount of toxic dust released to the environment. This is better than blasting it into the air wildly, but meant that the site accumulated hundreds of thousands of tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust that they chucked in empty mine workings underground. Unfortunately, arsenic trioxide dissolves in water as easily as sugar and so represents a tremendous risk to groundwater and waterbodies nearby, like Great Slave Lake and Yellowknife's water supply.

Arsenic issues contributed to labour disputes as well. In 1991 the union workers of the plant went on strike, refusing management's demand to reduce their salary and wanting better safety measures for workers . The company brought in Pinkertons and strikebreakers, backed by RCMP thugs. The situation escalated, culminating in a bomb planted on a train track deep in the mine. When it was triggered, it killed 6 scabs and 3 Pinkertons. For the next year, the RCMP interrogated mine workers, their family and community without determining who did it, supporting the company in their refusal to sign a new contract until an arrest was made. Finally a worker named Roger Warren confessed to doing it alone and was sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 2014 and died in 2017.

Since 1999, the site has been the responsibility of the Canadian federal government and is being every so gradually remediated. Operated through what are effectively private-public partnership contracts, environmental engineering companies are attempting to clean up and isolate the huge amounts of arsenic trioxide dust. The concept is move the dust into specially ventilated chambers of the underground mine, where it is frozen in place and thus prevented from leaching into groundwater. Active remediation is supposed to be finished in about 15 years at a cost of $1 billion CAD, but will surely take longer and cost more than this. Also, freezing material in place will definitely work because the climate isn't changing, and the Canadian north is definitely not seeing extreme levels of temperature rise.

After active works are complete, the site will require perpetual care.


Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.

English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:

Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.


  • plinky [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 days ago

    Show

    because i don't understand rule changes, you'll get twitter screenshots here https://www.ft.com/content/f6589d13-6014-47d0-8cc5-e98a0b7ad0bc

    A four-star general who flew Black Hawk helicopters and served in Afghanistan, Richardson has frequently warned against Chinese and Russian security threats in the region during her three-year stint at Miami-based Southern Command, which ends on November 7.
    

    In April, Richardson visited Ushuaia, Argentina’s southernmost city, where China had proposed building a port to supply the Antarctic. Following what Argentine media reported as strong lobbying from Washington, Buenos Aires opted instead for a US-led facility and also put on ice Chinese plans for a multi-use port 200km up the coast at Río Grande.

    Richardson said she had been “absolutely worried” about the Chinese proposal in Ushuaia because of its strategic location close to the Strait of Magellan and the Drake Passage.

    The general said she remained concerned about Chinese and Russian activity in Cuba, which has included building spy stations to eavesdrop on the US, and Russian warships visiting Havana. “It’s in the red zone for our homeland . . . We have a lot of nefarious and malign activity and we have no place for it in the Caribbean and Latin America.”
    

    She has also tried to alert Latin American governments to the security risks of adopting 5G infrastructure from Chinese companies such as Huawei, which could open “back doors” into countries’ sensitive data and facilitate hacking or the theft of military or commercial secrets.

    Huawei has said there is “no comprehensible evidence or plausible scenarios” in which its technology would pose a security risk.

    “Digital authoritarianism — that’s absolutely what China is doing,” she said. “You’ve got a Communist government selling these 5G solutions. They don’t respect the rights of their own people and we somehow think they will do that for [us]”.

    The general accused Beijing of “holding countries at risk” in the region when they were desperate for technology, deepwater ports or energy investment. “This is how they get their hooks into the countries,” she said.

    In August 2022, India and the US protested when the Yuan Wang 5, a Chinese naval vessel with antennas used for tracking and surveillance, docked at Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port. The Beijing-funded port was taken over by a Chinese company after Colombo defaulted on debt payments.

    China denies the Yuan Wang 5 is a spy ship but agreed it would not conduct research while it was at Hambantota.

    “The [Chinese] come in with big bags of cash and the BRI and they look like they’re saving the day because countries don’t have a choice,” she said. 
    

    “Strategic competition matters. Democracy is under attack and we have to be investing and competing on critical infrastructure projects for like-minded democracies.”

    • carpoftruth [any, any]
      hexagon
      M
      ·
      4 days ago

      “Digital authoritarianism — that’s absolutely what China is doing,” she said. “You’ve got a Communist government selling these 5G solutions. They don’t respect the rights of their own people and we somehow think they will do that for [us]”.

      Wouldn't it be crazy if we found out that American tech companies and telecoms had a super close relationship with the US security state and that they built backdoors for law enforcement and surveillance institutions to comb through all kinds of nominally private traffic, foreign and domestic? That would be nuts right

    • carpoftruth [any, any]
      hexagon
      M
      ·
      4 days ago

      How about you go find the link to that ft story so we can give this cope a more thorough look

      • plinky [he/him]
        ·
        4 days ago

        Too lib to do cool stuff, too civility-brained to be empire

          • plinky [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            4 days ago

            My only small hope was they could be hub for all business, for small countries doing cool stuff and be too big to be sanctioned over it, but they apparently want to coexist, and not antagonize anyone too much. So they could buy oil from iran or russia, but won't throw couple of billions to tweak usa nose in cuba or buy oil from venezuela

            Don't see how that would work out for them tbh, elites can be bought out, people can't.

            Amerikkka will just coup the goverments, nationalize and reprivatize bri and tell china whatcha gonna do about it nerds?

    • NPa [he/him]
      ·
      4 days ago

      porky-point

      bro look at my capitalist attack dogs, they don't even know what commerce is anymore ooooooooooooooh

      how will they maintain my beautiful fourth reich without even a basic understanding of material reality bateman-desperate