Eight people suffocate at Burkina Faso mine after police fire tear gas

Reuters | September 2, 2021 | 

Bissa mine in Burkina Faso. Image: Nordgold.

Eight people suffocated to death when police in Burkina Faso used tear gas against unauthorised gold miners at Nordgold’s Bissa mine, a prosecutor said on Thursday.


About 40 were on site on Wednesday when the police fired tear gas, which “caused panic and the suffocation of the clandestine gold miners”, national prosecutor Wendyam Lambert Sanfo said in a statement.

Sanfo said charges for involuntary homicide would be brought in the case but did not specify against whom. Four people were also arrested on charges of burning 10 vehicles on the site.

RELATED: IAMGOLD halts transport to and from Burkina Faso mine after attack

The police said in a statement on Monday that they had discovered the bodies of six miners at the mine but did not mention firing tear gas.

Nordgold, a Russia-focused miner majority owned by Russian billionaire Alexei Mordashov and his sons, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Burkina Faso and neighbouring West African countries have experienced a gold rush in recent years as informal miners, starved of other well-paying economic opportunities, dig for ore in often dangerous conditions.

(By Thiam Ndiaga and Aaron Ross; Editing by Grant McCool)

ECOCIDE

Congo says 12 dead, 4,400 sick following Angola mine tailings leak

Reuters | September 2, 2021 | 

Credit: Catoca Mining Company

The Democratic Republic of Congo will seek compensation from the owners of an Angolan diamond mine after a tailings dam leak polluted drinking water, causing 12 deaths and making thousands of people ill, the country’s environment minister said on Thursday.


The late-July leak from Angola’s biggest diamond mine turned a tributary of the Congo River red following a rupture in a spillway for the mine’s tailings dam, which stores mining industry waste meant to stay undisturbed.

Researchers at Kinshasha University last month pointed to “huge pollution” that affected some 2 million people, killed fish and caused diarrhoea among river communities.

Congo, which shares a 1,600-mile (2,575 km) long border with Angola, will seek compensation in line with the “polluter pays” principle, where those who produce pollution should bear the cost of mitigating it, Eve Bazaiba told a media conference after visiting the country’s southern Kasai province.

Bazaiba said she could not yet say how much in damages the country could seek. She said 4,400 people had fallen ill.

CATOCA SAID IT IMMEDIATELY SOUGHT TO REPAIR THE LEAK, BUILT TWO DYKES TO FILTER SEDIMENT OUT OF THE WATER AND BY AUG. 9 THE BREACH WAS SEALED

The mine’s operator, Sociedade Mineira de Catoca, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the damages claim and deaths listed by the minister.

The leak and deaths represent the latest in a string of tailings disasters for the global mining industry that investors, executives and environmentalists have tried to curtail with safety and inspection standards introduced last year.

Not all companies – including Catoca – have publicly committed to the standards, which are non-binding, further fuelling questions about how the standards can cause industry-wide change if not all mines and mining companies adhere.

Catoca, a joint venture between Angolan state diamond company Endiama and Russia’s Alrosa, said in a press release last month that tailings leaked into the Lova River, a tributary of the Tshikapa River, which eventually feeds into the Congo River, in late July.

Satellite images reviewed by Reuters show the Tshikapa turned red on July 25.

Catoca said it immediately sought to repair the leak, built two dykes to filter sediment out of the water and by Aug. 9 the breach was sealed.

Alrosa, which holds a 41% stake in Catoca, did not disclose the incident and told Reuters it was not its responsibility to do so as it does not control the mine site.

Endiama, which also holds 41% of the company, also said it was Catoca’s responsibility to make the incident public. In answers to Reuters’ questions, Endiama said it was made aware of the leak on July 30, three days after Catoca said it was seen.

Catoca said it donated food baskets to riverine communities to mitigate the impact of the pollution. Endiama said other measures were being worked on, without providing details.

The International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), the global mining industry trade group, which worked to draw up standards on tailings dams, said it had offered support to Alrosa – which is not an ICMM member – after the leak.

Adam Matthews, chief responsible investment officer for the Church of England Pensions Board, which was also instrumental in drawing up the safety norms, said the leak was a reminder that tailings management requires continued attention from industry, governments and investors.

He said investors and the United Nations are developing an Independent International Institute which would implement the standard and verify companies’ compliance with it.

(By Hereward Holland, Helen Reid and Polina Devitt; Editing by Ernest Scheyder and Richard Pullin)

US court overturns Trump water rule on environmental grounds
MINING.COM Editor | September 3, 2021 | 3:55 am News USA Copper Gold

The San Pedro River is one of the Arizona’s waterways affected by the Trump-era clean water rules. (Image courtesy of Katja Schulz | Flicr Commons.)

Environmental groups welcomed a federal judge’s decision this week to overturn the Trump administration’s scaled back clean water rule limiting the number of waterways overseen by federal regulations.


The ruling by Arizona district court judge Rosemary Marquez said the 2020 Navigable Waters Protection Rule was filled with “errors” and has negatively impacted arid states in the west, particularly Arizona and New Mexico.

The draft version of the rule, which went into effect near the end of Trump’s time in office, was specifically criticized by the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) own science advisory board. They said the norm ignored current scientific understanding and was incompatible with the aims of the Clean Water Act.

“WE WOULD LIKE TO AVOID HAVING EACH ADMINISTRATION CHANGE THE REGULATIONS WHICH LEAVE GREEN ENERGY, MINING, HOUSING AND CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS IN QUESTION” 

Steve Trussell, executive director of the Arizona Rock Products Association

Mining and farming representatives were not pleased with the ruling. Steve Trussell, executive director of the Arizona Rock Products Association, said the ruling reinstates uncertainty around what is regulated, what the regulations are, and how they will be implemented.

“Sadly, the uncertainty of this decision will only harm the … parties which represent job creators and the backbone of America’s economy,” he told Arizona PBS. “We would like to avoid having each administration change the regulations which leave green energy, mining, housing and critical infrastructure projects in question.”

For the six federally recognized Native America tribes who had sued the EPA and Army Corps for passing a rule they claim fail to protect their waterways, this week’s verdict is a victory.

“The court recognized that the serious legal and scientific errors of the Dirty Water Rule were causing irreparable damage to our nation’s waters and would continue to do so unless that Rule was vacated,” said Janette Brimmer, attorney for Earthjustice, which represented the tribes.

The tribes include the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, Tohono O’odham Nation, Quinault Indian Nation, Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

(With files from Reuters)

Barrick, NovaGold closer to Donlin mine decision
Cecilia Jamasmie | September 3, 2021 | 

Donlin Gold project, Alaska, being developed by Novagold, which recently joined EY’s Canadian Mining Index. (Image courtesy of Novagold Presentation, Nov. 2020.)

Joint venture partners Barrick Gold (TSX: ABX) (NYSE: GOLD) and NovaGold Resources (TSX: NG) have published the first results of their 24,000-meter drilling program for their Donlin gold project in Southwest Alaska, which will likely provide the final data needed for an optimized mine plan at the 39-million-ounce gold asset.

The Donlin Gold Project is an intrusion-related gold deposit in southwest Alaska, USA. It is currently in the late feasibility stage of development and is 50/50 owned by NovaGold (TSX:NG) and Barrick Gold (TSX:ABX). The Tintina Gold Province is bordered by two large fault systems and hosts many gold deposits of varying types.

Donlin Gold Project, Alaska | Geology for Investors

www.geologyforinvestors.com/donlin-gold-project/

The primary objective of the 2021 drill program is to complete the necessary work to validate and increase confidence in recent geologic modeling concepts at Dolin.

Having completed 18 drill holes, plus additional partial results for another 11 holes, the partners have detected significant new high-grade drill hole intercepts that hint of potential feeder zones for the larger system.

BARRICK AND NOVAGOLD ARE SIMULTANEOUSLY MAKING HEADWAY ON OBTAINING THE FINAL STATE PERMITS NEEDED TO DEVELOP AN OPERATION THAT MATCHES THE WORLD-CLASS DEPOSIT

“The 2021 drill program has been enormously rewarding — allowing us to improve our knowledge of the geology and mineralization in the ACMA and Lewis deposits which in turn will provide the information required to proceed with a new feasibility study,” Greg Lang, Novagold’s President and CEO, said in the statement.

After this year’s drilling season, Barrick and Novagold expect to be able to turn their attention towards a feasibility study for the proposed mine. The companies are simultaneously making headway on obtaining the final state permits needed to develop an operation.

The pending and final state authorization includes water permits and a right of way agreement for the 482km (300-mile) pipeline that will deliver natural gas to the Donlin mine.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the US Army Corps Engineers and Bureau of Land Management have already granted Barrick and Novagold the federal permits needed to develop the mine in the second largest gold-producing state in the US.

According to the partners, the Donlin deposit hosts one of the largest and highest-grade undeveloped open-pit gold endowments in the world, with an estimated 39 million ounces of gold grading 2.24 grams per tonne in the measured and indicated resource categories.

Rare earths make their way to Colorado’s waterways
Valentina Ruiz Leotaud | September 3, 2021 |

A student collects aquatic insects from the Snake River during a 2015 field trip. (Image by Stephen Cardinale, courtesy of UC Boulder’s Institute for Water and Alpine Research).

New research by a team at the University of Colorado Boulder found that rare earth elements are making their way into the state’s water supplies, driven by changes in climate.


The study, which is the first to look at how rare earth elements move within a watershed that is rich in minerals — the Snake River watershed — was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. According to the document, there is growing concern about REE concentrations because they are not monitored and there are no water quality standards set for them.

The paper is also the first one to dig into how climate change, by altering stream flow and natural weathering processes, is releasing more rare earth elements into streams.

“We documented a concentration range of one to hundreds of micrograms per liter—several orders of magnitude higher than typical for surface waters—with the highest concentrations nearest the headwaters and areas receiving drainage from abandoned mine workings,” the lead author of the study, Garrett Rue, said in a media statement.


THE RESEARCHERS SUGGEST THAT INVESTIGATING AND INVESTING IN TECHNOLOGIES TO RECOVER RARE EARTH ELEMENTS FROM NATURAL WATERS COULD YIELD VALUABLE COMMODITIES AND HELP ADDRESS THE PROBLEMS ASSOCIATED WITH ACID ROCK AND MINE DRAINAGE

Rue and his co-author Diane McKnight also documented that increases in rare earth elements in the Snake River corresponded to warming summer air temperatures, and that rare earth elements are accumulating in insects living in streams at concentrations comparable to other metals such as lead and cadmium shown to be toxic.

“We’re starting to understand that once rare earth elements get in the water, they tend to stay there,” the lead researcher said. “They aren’t removed by traditional treatment processes either, which has implications for reuse and has led some European cities to designate REEs as an emerging contaminant to drinking water supplies. And considering that the Snake River flows directly into Dillion Reservoir, which is Denver’s largest source of stored water, this could be a concern for the future.”

Given these results, Rue and his colleague suggest that investigating and investing in technologies to recover rare earth elements from natural waters could yield valuable commodities and help address the problems associated with acid rock and mine drainage, which are poised to worsen as the climate shifts.

“Rare earth elements are used to make a lot of products. But most of the supply comes from China. So our government has been looking for sources, but at the same time mining has left an indelible mark on the waters of the West,” Rue said. “If we can harvest some of these materials that are already coming into our environment, it might be worthwhile to treat that water and recover these materials at the same time.”
How they did it

To reach their conclusions, the team followed the water quality monitoring process that has been carried out since the 1990s at CU Boulder.

Given the location of the Snake River watershed, it is considered a good natural laboratory for investigating these processes as the area’s pyrite-rich geology allows for acid rock drainage to occur naturally. At the same time, historic mines that disturb large amounts of rocks and soil amp up the process dramatically and cause downstream water pollution.

The Snake River’s Peru Creek part of the watershed has been heavily mined, while the Upper Snake River has not.

What takes place there is that rocks that include sulphide-based minerals, such as pyrite, oxidize when exposed to air and water. The resulting chemical reaction produces sulfuric acid and dissolved metals like iron, which drain into streams. More acidic water can further dissolve heavy metals, like lead, cadmium, and zinc, and as it turns out can carry rare earth elements as well.

“What really controls the mobility of rare earth elements is pH. Acid literally leaches it out of the rocks,” Rue said.

Rue and McKnight also found that both parts of the watershed are now contributing significant amounts of metals downstream, as climate change has brought longer summers and less snow in the winters. Longer, lower stream flows make it easier for metals to leach into the watershed, and concentrate the metals that would otherwise be diluted by snowmelt.

The same processes that mean more heavy metals are finding their way into streams are also acting on rare earth elements.

Obscure precious metal takes center stage for platinum giants

Bloomberg News | September 3, 2021 | 

NOx annihilating nugget. Stock image.

The rise of rhodium, the world’s most expensive precious metal, has made it the No. 1 revenue stream of the biggest platinum miners.


While the metal is well shy of its March peak, rhodium still accounted for 45% of Anglo American Platinum Ltd.’s first-half revenues. That’s more than platinum and palladium put together. For parent Anglo American Plc, the silvery-white metal generated more revenue than the diamonds mined by its De Beers business or the copper it extracts in Chile and Peru.



The scarcity of rhodium — a byproduct of platinum and palladium mining — and its unparalleled ability to curb nitrogen oxides from car exhaust fumes pushed up prices as stricter pollution laws boost demand. In March, it climbed to a record $29,800 an ounce, making it 17 times more valuable than gold.

Originally used for decoration or as corrosion-resistant coating, rhodium has also become the biggest export for South Africa, which produces more than 80% of global supply.

IN SOUTH AFRICAN RAND


“Rhodium prices have retreated somewhat but continue to contribute significantly to revenues particularly for rhodium-rich mines,” said Mandi Dungwa, a mining analyst at Kagiso Asset Management Ltd. in Cape Town.

With rhodium declining more than 40% from its peak, that contribution may not be repeated. Impala Platinum Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Nico Muller expects market tightness to keep the metal above $15,000 an ounce for the next year, but Neal Froneman, his counterpart at Sibanye Stillwater Ltd., expects prices to fall to a more “sustainable level” of about $10,000 over the next two years.

(By Felix Njini, with assistance from Yuliya Fedorinova and Thomas Biesheuvel)

All In by Billie Jean King review – game, set and match

A vivid and inspiring autobiography by the woman who took on the tennis establishment and won

Battle of the sexes ... Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. 

Photograph: Bettmann Archive


Fiona Sturges
Sat 4 Sep 2021 

Billie Jean King learned early that, as a girl who excelled at sport, she wouldn’t always be treated fairly. There was the elementary school teacher who marked her down for using her “superior ability” during playground games, and the tennis official who pulled her, aged 10, from a players’ photo during a California tournament because she was wearing shorts instead of a skirt.

King went on to observe top-ranking teenage boys getting free meals at the canteen of the Los Angeles Tennis Club where she trained, while she and her mother were made to eat the food they had brought from home outside. Later, as a player competing on the international stage, she would see male competitors winning up to eight times the prize money of their female counterparts. “Even if you’re not a born activist,” she writes, “life can damn well make you one.”

King’s memoir ­– written with the sports journalist Johnette Howard and writer Maryanne Vollers – is a vivid and detailed account of her rise to sporting greatness and her struggles to attain equal treatment for women in a shockingly discriminatory sport. She reveals how, in the early 1970s, she forged a path for female players by leading the breakaway movement for the first all-women’s tennis pro tour, despite threats that it would finish her career. Many male players, among them Stan Smith , denounced King’s efforts; the Australian player, Fred Stolle, told her: “No one wants to pay to watch you birds play.” But King was undeterred, persuading eight others, among them Rosemary Casals and Nancy Richey, to sign up to what would become the Virginia Slims Circuit for a token dollar bill. They were called the “Original 9” and their set-up became the basis for the formation of the Women’s Tennis Association three years later. 

King with the Wimbledon trophy following her victory over

 PF Jones in July 1967. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

In 1971, King, who had spent much of the 60s living hand-to-mouth on the measly per diems dispensed during amateur tournaments, earned an unprecedented $100,000; in 1976, Chris Evert’s earnings topped $1m. There were those who felt King’s focus on money was vulgar, but she remained steadfast. As Althea Gibson, the first African American tennis player to win a Grand Slam title and one of King’s biggest inspirations, said: “You can’t eat trophies.”

Elsewhere, it’s with remarkable clarity that King recalls life-changing matches, in some cases walking us through each set. This isn’t as laborious as it sounds. King revels in drama and tension, both in her tennis and in her storytelling; given her status as a record-breaking sportswoman, her occasional lapses into bombast seem forgivable. The build-up to the famous “Battle of the Sexes” match, in which she played against Bobby Riggs, and the circus that surrounded it, is terrifically told. Riggs, a fiftysomething attention-seeker and self-proclaimed “male chauvinist pig”, had challenged King to a prize fight in order to prove that women’s tennis was inferior to men’s, and not worthy of investment. Where King spent the weeks before the match training hard and studying Riggs’s game, he spent much of them taunting her in media interviews and setting up endorsement deals. She thrashed him in straight sets.

King’s campaigning went beyond tennis, of course. She marched for women’s liberation alongside Gloria Steinem and, in the face of ferocious criticism, went public about having had an abortion. King also endured intense and unfair scrutiny about her marriage to the lawyer Larry King and her sexuality. For years, she kept quiet about her relationships with women, for fear of blowing up her career (she is now a staunch advocate of the LGBTQ community). While All In contains plenty of sporting highs and lows, it is her reflections on this denial and secrecy that gives it its emotional heft.

King repeatedly lied to her family, colleagues and the media, even after a former girlfriend, Marilyn Barnett, outed her in 1981 by filing a palimony lawsuit. King writes movingly of her denials of homosexuality, which she says were a result of fear, shame and her own internalised homophobia. “It’s a legacy of so many things, including not knowing if you could trust anyone with the information,” she observes. “People in the closet often take consolation in the idea that at least they’re controlling who knows the truth, when the real truth is that the closet is controlling them.” Later she adds: “I didn’t come out completely and wasn’t comfortable in my own skin until I was 51. I wish I could have done it sooner.”

Nonetheless, the courage and stamina it took King to take on a defensive, intractable and often bigoted tennis establishment, and to win, is no small feat, even if it turned out that her biggest battle would be with herself. All In describes a life comprising one epic struggle after another, both on and off court. “But I came through it,” she writes in the epilogue. “I am free.”

All In: An Autobiography is published by Viking (£20). 

Feminists warned about America’s abortion crisis for years. We were written off as hysterical

Why has the effective end of Roe v Wade been met with shock by so many corners of political life?

Supreme court justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. ‘This outcome was never in doubt. Trump promised to appoint anti-choice judges. He kept that promise.’ Photograph: Doug Mills/AP

Moira Donegan
Sat 4 Sep 2021 11.00 BST

This was predictable. In fact, it was predicted. The end of Roe v Wade and nationwide protections for abortion rights became likely in 2016, the night that Donald Trump was elected. It became inevitable in 2018, when Anthony Kennedy, the fifth pro-choice vote, retired and handed his seat to Trump to fill. But the end of nationwide legal abortion in America has been coming for decades, and there has been no ambiguity about the appetite for Roe’s overturn on the American right. And crucially, feminists have been sounding the alarm for decades, warning in increasingly desperate terms that gradual erosions of Roe’s protections in the law had led to a rapid and widespread loss of abortion access on the ground.

Perhaps the form of Roe’s eventual downfall was a surprise. Few thought that Roe’s fatal case would be over Texas’s new abortion law, with its privatized enforcement system of bounty-hunting civil suits designed to elide judicial review. And among a sea of legal observers, only Cardozo law professor Kate Shaw seems to have predicted that the court would dispose of a long-established constitutional right in so rushed and perfunctory a proceeding as a late-night order on the shadow docket. But this outcome was never in doubt. Trump promised to appoint antichoice judges. He kept that promise. This week his three appointees – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas – did what all of them know they were put on the court to do. They allowed the first state to outlaw abortion within its borders.

So why has the effective end of Roe v Wade, coming in a one paragraph order in the wee hours of Thursday morning, been met with shock by so many corners of political life? The Republican party’s control of the federal judiciary had left little doubt that those judges most inclined to strip women of their rights would have both the power and the opportunity to do so. And yet politicians, pundits, and legal observers had for years assured the public that the justices would not gut abortion rights, despite the clear evidence that they would. We were assured that the Republicans on the court were less determined to gut Roe than they appeared to be, and that those worried about the future of abortion rights were overreacting.

The court would not gut Roe, we were told by politicians and academics, because they said they wouldn’t. Kavanaugh, the ruddy-faced Trump appointee, had referred to Roe as “important precedent”. That this rather tepid comment was a disingenuous bit of posturing meant to ease his confirmation to the court was evident to everyone. Nevertheless, defenders of the confirmation process implored the public to treat it as if it had been uttered in good faith.

In a speech announcing her decision to vote to confirm Kavanaugh, Senator Susan Collins said that she believed Kavanaugh would not vote to overturn Roe, or to gut it procedurally, because “his views on honoring precedent would preclude attempts to do by stealth that which one has committed not to do overtly.” Of course, the court, with Kavanaugh’s help, did effectively overturn Roe “by stealth” – in an unsigned order in the middle of the night.

Of the feminists who opposed his nomination, Collins was dismissive, even patronizing. “We have seen special-interest groups whip their followers into a frenzy by spreading misrepresentations and outright falsehoods about Judge Kavanaugh’s judicial record.” She condemned these women’s concerns as “over-the-top rhetoric and distortions”.

The court would not gut Roe, we were told by the legal world, because the justices were too professional. Barrett, the third of Trump’s appointees, had been a member of an antichoice faculty group while a law professor at Notre Dame. She had given a lecture to a Right to Life group; she had signed a letter condemning Roe and its “brutal legacy”. And yet despite Barrett’s extremist and evidently very passionately held views on abortion, people posing as serious told us that we could not know how she would vote on abortion rights, that the opinions and worldviews of judges would somehow not affect their legal judgement. “My personal views don’t have anything to do with the way I would decide cases,” Barrett told Senator Patrick Leahy when she was asked about her lengthy history of anti-abortion advocacy. The statement insulted both Leahy’s intelligence, and ours.

And yet as conservative, antichoice judges consolidated their power, several myths about the court persisted. We were told that the people who looked like rabidly conservative justices were really reasoned moderates; or that at least they would be professional and impartial in their judgements; or that at least the removal of abortion rights would move slowly. These myths were presented as the only serious way to understand the court. Feminist claims that what appeared to be happening really was happening – that the judiciary really had been taken over by antichoice zealots, that the ability of women to control their own bodies and lives would soon be stripped away – were labeled as delusional and silly. Faith in the integrity of the conservative justices was cast as informed, mature, and intelligent. And it was contrasted with the supposed hysteria of feminists, whose passion and fear was taken as a sign of their own delusion, not as an indication of the seriousness of the problem.
Feminist claims that what appeared to be happening really was happening were labeled as delusional and silly

This notion, that the only intelligent response to a threat to women’s rights is to be calm, blasé, and preemptively assured that nothing very bad or important will result, has been weaponized with particular insidiousness over the course of the abortion debate during the past five years. In the halls of power, contempt for abortion rights activists was nearly complete.

After Kennedy’s resignation, the CNN host Brian Stelter took to social media to scold a liberal activist for her fear of a Roe reversal. “We are not ‘a few steps away from the Handmaid’s Tale’,” he wrote. “I don’t think this kind of fear-mongering helps anybody.” Confronted with women opposed to the confirmation of Kavanaugh, Senator Ben Sasse all but rolled his eyes. There had been, he said, “screaming protesters saying ‘women are going to die’ at every hearing for decades.”

The insistence that Roe is not in danger, and that women’s fear is silly, persists even now, after the court has effectively ended Roe. “Now breathe,” wrote the law professor Jonathan Turley in a blogpost urging women’s rights advocates to calm down, as if they were toddlers in the midst of a temper tantrum. “It is ridiculous to say that it was some manufactured excuse for a partisan ruling.”

Is it ridiculous? The public has no real reason to believe that the supreme court is acting in good faith – aside from the repeated assurances of supposed experts whose predictions have usually been wrong. Instead, it was the so-called alarmist feminists, the ones warning about manufactured excuses for partisan attacks on abortion rights, who got their predictions mostly right. Maybe these women are not so ridiculous after all. Maybe it’s time to start listening to them.


Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Thai protesters hit the streets as PM clings to power

Issued on: 04/09/2021 - 

Pro-democracy protesters took to Bangkok's streets after the country's

 prime minister survived a no-confidence vote 

Jack TAYLOR AFP


Bangkok (AFP)

Pro-democracy protesters vented their anger in Bangkok's heavy rain Saturday after Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-cha survived a no-confidence vote in parliament.

More than 300 demonstrators marched in central Bangkok's main shopping mall district carrying red flags and wearing ponchos in the downpour.

"The government should be gone. If things were good why would we come out to protest?" a 28-year-old demonstrator told AFP.

Ahead of the rally, police used shipping containers to block major routes to the advertised protest site at the central Lumphini Park where protesters had planned to march.

There was heavy police presence across the downtown area with riot police and a water cannon truck stationed at the Ratchaprasong intersection near major shopping malls.

This week Thai lawmakers debated an opposition-instigated censure motion about the government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic and economic management -- Saturday was the third no-confidence motion vote since the 2019 election.

The sluggish rollout of Thailand's vaccination programme and financial pain from restrictions has heaped political pressure on Prayut's government.

The country is reeling from its worst economic performance since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis as well as a deadly third wave of coronavirus infections.

Total case numbers have topped more than 1.2 million with over 12,000 deaths.

Prayut defended his government's handling of the pandemic in parliament earlier this week.

"Thailand’s death rate from COVID-19 is comparatively very low, but we must make sure that there will be no more deaths," Prayut said, adding the decision not to access doses under the global COVAX vaccine equity programme was in Thailand's best interest.

Vaccine supply has been a problem and the country has imported the Chinese-made Sinovac and Sinopharm jabs and received a donation of 1.5 million Pfizer doses from the US after locally produced AstraZeneca vaccines couldn't keep pace.

"Government management of Covid is really bad. My dad is unemployed and my mum got infected despite getting two Sinovac jabs," a 21-year-old male protester told AFP.

Fresh infections tallied almost 16,000 Saturday representing a decrease in recent weeks that has also coincided with a reduction of testing.

In the morning, Prayut and five cabinet ministers clung to power after garnering enough support on the floor of parliament, following a week of speculation some members of the ruling coalition were plotting to withdraw support.

Riot police and water cannon were deployed on Bangkok's streets to block the pro-democracy protests

 Jack TAYLOR AFP

Bangkok has been plagued with regular street protests since late June including clashes between demonstrators and police.

Officers have deployed tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannon while some protesters have retaliated with ping pong bombs and slingshots.

© 2021 AFP

Iran calls on US to stop its addiction to sanctions

Issued on: 04/09/2021 -

Masih Alinejad speaks onstage at a Women in the World Summit 

at the Lincoln Center on April 8, 2016 in New York City 

Jemal Countess GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP


Tehran (AFP)

Iran urged the United States Saturday to stop its addiction to sanctions against the Islamic republic and accused President Joe Biden of following the same "dead end" policies as Donald Trump.

Foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh made his remarks a day after the US Treasury announced financial sanctions against four Iranians accused of planning the kidnapping in the US of an American journalist of Iranian descent.

"Washington must understand that it has no other choice but to abandon its addiction to sanctions and show respect, both in its statements and in its behaviour, towards Iran," Khatibzadeh said in a press release.

On Friday, the Treasury announced sanctions against "four Iranian intelligence operatives" involved in a campaign against Iranian dissidents abroad.

According to a US federal indictment in mid-July, the intelligence officers tried in 2018 to force Masih Alinejad's Iran-based relatives to lure her to a third country to be arrested and taken to Iran to be jailed.

When that failed, they allegedly hired US private investigators to monitor her over the past two years.

Khatibzadeh in July called the American charges "baseless and absurd", referring to them as "Hollywood scenarios".

Under Trump's presidency, Washington unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement between Tehran and six major powers.

The multilateral deal offered Iran relief from sanctions in return for curbs on its nuclear programme.

It was torpedoed by Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from it in 2018.

Biden has said he wants to reintegrate Washington into the pact, but talks in Vienna that began in April have stalled since the ultra-conservative Ebrahim Raisi won Iran's presidential election in June.

At the end of August, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused Biden's administration of making the same demands as his predecessor in talks to revive the accord.

And on Tuesday, Iran's new Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian suggested that the Vienna talks would not resume for two or three months.

Tehran is demanding the lifting of all sanctions imposed or reimposed on it by the US since 2017.

© 2021 AFP