Monthly Archives: September 2023

Shell Employees Urged to Revolt as Oil Giant Faces Internal Backlash for Ditching Renewables

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“Shell bosses sacrifice our safety for short-term profits, even their employees see it,” said one campaigner. “No point waiting for them to grow a conscience.”

By Julia Conley. Published 9-29-2023 by Common Dreams

Photo: rawpixel

Anti-fossil fuel campaigners on Friday urged employees of oil and gas giant Shell to speak out as loudly as possible about their objections to the company’s pivot away from renewable energy, after thousands of workers expressed support for an angry open letter penned by two of their colleagues.

On the company’s private platform, a letter published by Lisette de Heiden and Wouter Drinkwaard of Shell’s low-carbon division garnered 1,000 “likes” and 80,000 views earlier this month and was reported on by Reuters Wednesday.

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UN Report Urges End to Forced US Prison Labor—a ‘Contemporary Form of Slavery’

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One of the U.N. experts who compiled the report after visiting the U.S. earlier this year said its findings “point to the critical need for comprehensive reform.”

By Brett Wilkins. Published 9-28-2023 by Common Dreams

There are no minimum wage or overtime pay requirements for prison work Photo: Meer

A report published Thursday by United Nations human rights experts condemns systemic racism in the U.S. criminal justice system and policing, while describing “appalling” prison conditions and decrying forced unpaid convict labor as a “contemporary form of slavery.”

The U.N. International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in the Context of Law Enforcement report follows a visit to the U.S. earlier this year by a team of human rights experts. The U.N. officials collected testimonies from 133 affected people, visited five prisons and jails, and held meetings with advocacy groups and numerous government and police officials in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, and Washington, D.C.

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Supreme Court Could Trigger Hundreds of Billions in Corporate Tax Cuts ‘With the Stroke of Pen’

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A new report warns that huge tax gifts for corporations and “a $340 billion hole in the federal budget” are among the potential consequences of a case SCOTUS is set to hear in December.

By Jake Johnson. Published 9-27-2023 by Common Dreams

Photo: Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

A Washington-based married couple’s challenge to an obscure provision of the 2017 Republican tax law has the potential to become “the most important tax case in a century,” with far-reaching implications for federal revenues, key social programs, and Congress’ constitutional authority to impose levies on income.

That’s according to a new report released Wednesday by the Roosevelt Institute and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).

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FCC Chair Confirms Plan to Reinstate Net Neutrality Rules Eviscerated Under Trump

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“To allow a handful of monopoly-aspiring gatekeepers to control access to the internet is a direct threat to our democracy,” said Michael Copps, a Common Cause special adviser and former FCC commissioner.

By Jessica Corbett. Published 9-26-2023 by Common Dreams

FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel Photo: Internet Education Foundation/flickr/CC

Open internet advocates across the United States celebrated on Tuesday as Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel announced her highly anticipated proposal to reestablish FCC oversight of broadband and restore net neutrality rules.

“We thank the FCC for moving swiftly to begin the process of reinstating net neutrality regulations,” said ACLU senior policy counsel Jenna Leventoff. “The internet is our nation’s primary marketplace of ideas—and it’s critical that access to that marketplace is not controlled by the profit-seeking whims of powerful telecommunications giants.”

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US High Schoolers Launch Green New Deal for ‘Our Schools and Our Futures’

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“Public schools belong to us, and we know we deserve better,” said a Sunrise Movement organizer and the youngest school board member in Idaho.

By Olivia Rosane. Published 9-25-2023 by Common Dreams

Young organizers hold up a banner celebrating the “Green New Deal for Schools Summer Camp 2023.” (Photo: Sunrise Movement)

In the face of right-wing attacks on public schools—including climate education—more than 50 high schools nationwide launched the Green New Deals for Schools campaign Monday.

The campaign, organized by the youth-led Sunrise Movement, is demanding that school boards and districts act to provide buildings powered with renewable energy; free, healthy, local, and sustainable meals; support for finding well-paying, unionized green careers; plans for extreme weather events; and instruction about the climate crisis.

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Panama Canal drought: Rolling ecological crisis is raising prices everywhere

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Climate change and El Niño are causing global shortages of everything from Barbie dolls to natural gas

By James Meadway. Published 9-21-2023 by openDemocracy

The Agua Clara (Clear Water) Locks at the Atlantic (Caribbean Sea) end of the canal. Photo: Dan Lundberg/flickr/CC

It’s been another summer of extreme weather and the relentless drumbeat of climate change syncopating with the warm-water Pacific Ocean cycle of El Niño has reverberated across the globe.

Floods in the Balkans and North Africa have killed thousands, wildfires have raged across much of the Mediterranean, India’s rice crop has been hit by drought and Canada’s wheat harvests by floods. Meanwhile, in Central America, the driest weather in decades is menacing one of the most important transport arteries on earth.

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Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner Ramzi bin al-Shibh Unfit for 9/11 Trial, Says Military Judge

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“This decision by the military judge today does mark the first time that the United States has formally acknowledged the CIA torture program produced profound and prolonged psychological harm,” said al-Shibh’s lawyer.

By Brett Wilkins. Published 9-22-2023 by Common Dreams

Ramzi bin al-Shibh holds a document while posing for this 2010 photo. 
(Photo: International Committee of the Red Cross)

A U.S. military judge on Thursday found Guantánamo Bay prisoner Ramzi bin al-Shibh—who stands accused of being a key 9/11 organizer—unfit to stand trial because he suffers from mental illness his attorney says was caused by CIA torture years ago.

Air Force Col. Matthew McCall severed al-Shibh, a 51-year-old Yemeni, from the conspiracy case involving four other defendants who allegedly organized the cell of militants in Hamburg, Germany who hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 and flew it into the north tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. Al-Shibh had been charged as an accomplice in the case.

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Nebraska Women Gets Two Years in Prison After Giving Abortion Pills to Teen Daughter

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“In this particular case, here’s the audacity: Self-managed abortion is not even a crime in fucking Nebraska,” said one rights advocate.

By Jessica Corbett. Published 9-22-2023 by Common Dreams

Mifepristone The pill is one of two used in medication abortions. Photo: Robin Marty/flickr/CC

Amid a wave of right-wing efforts to quash abortion rights across the United States, a Nebraska judge on Friday sentenced Jessica Burgess to two years in prison after helping her teenage daughter end her pregnancy and bury the remains in early 2022.

Police have said that over two years ago, then-17-year-old Celeste Burgess took abortion pills—provided by her mother—at approximately 29 weeks pregnant and gave birth to a stillborn fetus, which the pair burned and buried in Norfolk, Nebraska.

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Ethics Group Asks SEC to Probe Musk Claims About ‘Gruesome’ Neuralink Monkey Trials

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“It seems obvious to everyone but Elon Musk that Neuralink’s device is unsafe,” said one critic. “Now he is deliberately misleading investors and the public by outright lying about the company’s monkey experiments.”

By Brett Wilkins. Published 9-21-2023 by Common Dreams

Animal 15. Photo: PCRM

After obtaining records showing a dozen monkeys were euthanized in “gruesome” trials, a national physicians group on Wednesday asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate claims made by Elon Musk, owner of the biotech firm Neuralink, about the company’s experimental brain implants.

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) requested an SEC probe into possible securities fraud committed by Musk when he claimed that “no monkey has died as a result of a Neuralink implant” during testing of the company’s implantable brain-computer interfaces (BCI), and that the animals who died were all already terminally ill when chosen for experiments.

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ALA Decries ‘Attacks on Our Freedom’ With Record Book Challenges So Far in 2023

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The data reflects a growing right-wing movement to restrict the topics taught in public schools and the media that children have access to.

By Olivia Rosane. Published 9-20-2023 by Common Dreams

Banned Books Week installation on the second floor of Kennedy Library on Monday, September 24, 2018. Photo: Kennedy Library/flickr/CC

A record number of library books were challenged during the first eight months of 2023, the American Library Association revealed Tuesday.

The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) documented 695 attempts to remove a total of 1,915 library titles as of August 31. That’s up from the 681 challenges to 1,651 distinct titles for the same period in 2022, and last year as a whole broke the overall record for book challenges since data collecting began more than two decades ago.

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