Tag Archives: baton

These Louisiana activists are facing ‘terrorizing’ charges for a stunt they pulled 6 months ago

Early Thursday morning, two activists who have opposed a planned $9.4 billion petrochemical complex in St. James Parish, Louisiana, were arrested for “terrorizing” an oil and gas lobbyist connected to the Taiwanese plastics manufacturer responsible for the development. While the protest action leading to the charges occurred six months ago, the arrests come just a week after residents of the parish won a court battle against the company, allowing them to host a Juneteenth prayer ceremony on a slave burial site on the company’s property.

The charges against Anne Rolfes and Kate McIntosh — two members of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, the environmental health and justice organization that’s been fighting the plastics company, Formosa, alongside RISE St. James, another grassroots environmental justice group — carry a punishment of up to 15 years in prison and a fine of $15,000.

Last year, a judge ruled that Formosa had illegally dumped billions of plastic pellets called nurdles into Texas’ Lavaca Bay and other waterways. The company agreed to pay a $50 million settlement as a result of complaints and lawsuits filed by Texas residents and environmental groups. In December, Louisiana activists sent a sealed container filled with the company’s nurdles to the home of an oil and gas lobbyist in Baton Rouge, as an act of protest against the company’s planned development in Louisiana. The package was accompanied by a letter explaining the box’s contents.

According to Bill Quigley, an attorney representing Rolfes and McIntosh, the Baton Rouge police department called him early Thursday morning, claiming that there were outstanding charges against the two. Both turned themselves in, but they were reportedly taken to the parish prison in handcuffs and leg irons. The two were released on bond late Thursday afternoon.

“The timing is suspicious,” Quigley told Grist. “It seems a little bit more than coincidental that six months pass, and now charges against them are being announced, as the community fights for the cemetery that Formosa resisted so urgently to keep them away from.”

Janile Parks, Formosa’s director of community and government relations, denied that the company had any role in or knowledge of the arrests. “[Formosa] was unaware that this action was going to be taken by the state and had only heard second hand that deliveries of plastic pellets were made … in the Baton Rouge area some months ago,” she wrote.

Quigley also added that the “terrorizing” statute is a much more serious charge than even Louisiana’s critical infrastructure law, which carries up to five years in prison and a fine of $1,000 for trespassing in the vicinity of critical infrastructure like oil and gas pipelines. The “terrorizing” charge is intended for actions such as bomb threats, according to Quigley.

“It’s really hard to believe that what [the defendants] did was a serious terrorizing threat,” he said.

Soon after Thursday’s arrests, a new coalition called the Alliance to Defend Democracy launched what it says is an effort to protect free speech in Louisiana. The alliance includes community leaders, clergy members, and grassroots environmental organizations such as the Coalition Against Death Alley, the Concerned Citizens of St. John, Extinction Rebellion New Orleans, the Greater New Orleans interfaith Climate Coalition, RISE St. James, the Green Army, 350 New Orleans, No Waste Louisiana, and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.

St. James Parish is located in Louisiana’s 85-mile industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, which has been known for decades as “cancer alley.” The area’s Black population has suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19 pandemic, and residents have long suffered some of the highest pollution-linked cancer rates in the country. Many residents say that Formosa’s new development will only make matters worse.

St. James resident Sharon Lavigne, an outspoken critic of Formosa and the founder of RISE St. James, had previously been visited by parish sheriff’s deputies and threatened with arrest for peaceful visits to the burial site on Formosa’s property.

“This is our home, and we’re not just going to let Formosa come here and destroy our lives and the health of our community,” Lavigne told Grist. “I’ll die before I give up. We’re not going to stop. We’re going to have more people join us, and we’re going to be stronger.”

More – 

These Louisiana activists are facing ‘terrorizing’ charges for a stunt they pulled 6 months ago

Posted in Accent, alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These Louisiana activists are facing ‘terrorizing’ charges for a stunt they pulled 6 months ago

The Chilling Rise of Copycat Mass Shooters

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As a string of gun rampages continues in America and beyond, more evidence is emerging that copycat mass shooters are on the rise—a danger amplified and accelerated by social media. Two mass shootings this month build on disturbing patterns seen in other recent cases: an attack on police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and another on mallgoers in Munich, Germany, whose perpetrator displayed a host of behaviors underscoring this troubling phenomenon.

The attacker in Baton Rouge, a 29-year-old black Army veteran who killed three cops and wounded three others before a SWAT officer took him out, was prolific on social media before he struck. Among the many YouTube videos Gavin Long made of himself and shared via Twitter and Facebook are ones where he expressed his admiration for the mass killer who gunned down officers in Dallas just 10 days before Long’s own attack. “With a brother killing the police you get what I’m saying—it’s justice,” Long declared about the Dallas attacker—himself a young black Army veteran who had served in a war zone.

The gun rampage carried out in Munich last Friday by 18-year-old Ali Sonboly threw that city into chaos over fears of a multipronged terrorist attack. (Early reports of active shootings these days invariably are fraught with misinformation—a similar unfounded panic hit Dallas—though Munich had plenty of reason to overreact, with Germany increasingly targeted by ISIS.) But Sonboly, the lone perpetrator who killed nine people and injured numerous others before committing suicide as law enforcement closed in, appears to have had no connection to Islamist terrorism.

Instead, investigators have uncovered a range of evidence suggesting Sonboly was a textbook copycat attacker. The many parallels with past cases are striking:

Obsession with prior mass shooters
One such piece of evidence was literally a textbook: In the apartment where Sonboly lived, investigators found a German-language edition of Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. The book’s author, American psychologist and school shootings expert Peter Langman, told me that his “heart sank” when he learned of that discovery. It was not the first time an attacker displayed an interest in Langman’s case studies. The 18-year-old who went on a rampage at Arapahoe High School in Colorado in December 2013 also had a copy of the book. Investigators in Munich also learned that Sonboly had collected news coverage and other information on past attacks, a behavior familiar from the Newtown killer and many other mass shooters.

Such content helps fulfill the need of aspiring killers to find people they can identify with, says Langman. “Having a role model or an ideology that supports their violent intentions may serve the purpose of transforming what is otherwise aberrant and abhorrent into something admirable,” he says. “It validates their urge toward violence.”

Targeting an anniversary
Sonboly went on his rampage precisely five years after one of Europe’s worst massacres in modern history, the attack carried out in July 2011 in Norway by a lone killer who took the lives of 77 people and injured hundreds of others. As with the Norway massacre, which took place primarily at a youth summer camp, most of Sonboly’s victims were teenagers.

A game the Munich perpetrator reportedly was “obsessed” with

The desire to strike on the anniversary of a high-profile mass killing is not uncommon among would-be copycats, as I documented last year in my investigation of the “Columbine effect.” Since 1999, at least 14 perpetrators who emulated the Columbine killers have plotted to attack schools around the United States on that same date in April.

“Pseudocommando” ambitions
Forensic psychologists specializing in threat assessment have documented numerous mass shooters who cultivated a “pseudocommando” image—those who were obsessed with military weapons and paraphernalia and aspired to a “warrior mentality.” In Sonboly’s case, he may have nurtured such tendencies in part through first-person shooter games, including Counter-Strike: Source, a game that German investigators said he was obsessed with.

Weaponizing social media
Particularly chilling is how Sonboly apparently used Facebook to try to lure young victims to a McDonald’s restaurant across from Munich’s Olympia shopping mall, where he shot seven of his victims. (According to investigators, he may either have hacked a teenage girl’s account or created a phony Facebook page where he promised free food at the restaurant.)

Other recent rampage shooters have used social media as a tool in their attacks: In August 2015, an enraged ex-TV journalist gunned down two former colleagues in Virginia during a live broadcast and then posted his own footage of the killing on Facebook and Twitter, in what was dubbed the first “social-media murder.” And in June, the mass killer who struck inside an Orlando nightclub logged onto Facebook while he was in the process of killing, to see if news of his attack had gone viral. Threat assessment experts warn of more of this behavior to come.

A pre-attack pilgrimage
Another disturbing facet of Sonboly’s attack planning connects to a previous case: Investigators found evidence that he began preparing for the rampage about a year ago, after he visited the site of a 2009 school massacre in Winnenden, Germany. “We found a manifesto of his, in which he considers such attacks,” said Robert Heimberger, the chief of the Bavarian State Criminal Police. “From photos we found on a digital camera, we know that he visited the site and took pictures there.” Heimberger added that Sonboly was “obsessed” with the school shooting in Winnenden.

How the media inspires copycat mass shooters—and six ways it could stop doing so

Other mass shooters have engaged in these types of pilgrimages, seeking inspiration, tactical information, or both. As my investigation last year also showed, there are three publicly known cases in which perpetrators traveled to Columbine High School from other states as they plotted lethal attacks, two of which were ultimately carried out. (One took place in Washington state and another in North Carolina; an attack planned for a school in Utah was thwarted.) And those are just the cases that have been reported in the media—there have been more. In the course of my research on mass shootings, several veteran law enforcement officials have told me about other cases—involving Columbine as well as other sites of high-profile attacks—that have drawn these kinds of visits. (The officials, from regional and federal law enforcement agencies, shared this information under the condition that the details remain private.)

The rise of ISIS-inspired attacks in Europe and the United States has only further complicated the question of what motivates individuals to carry out mass shootings. A complex set of factors plays into this, from mental health to the role of social media. In the aftermath of Orlando, popular wisdom quickly settled on “ISIS terrorist”—but as I reported then, some threat assessment experts suggest that explanation, favoring the ideological over the clinical, may have been too simple or possibly even wrong.

Over the last few months, as I’ve spoken with threat assessment and security experts who work in a wide range of settings around the country, I’ve been struck by a similar theme from many of them: Threat caseloads have been growing, and their “op tempo” has been rising. A bitterly contentious political climate, the threat of terrorism, and global instability undoubtedly are factors. But with mass shootings heavily in the air these days—perhaps in part because of unwarranted hype from the media—some top security experts are concerned that we’ve entered “a new normal.”

During and immediately after the Baton Rouge attack earlier this month, I happened to be attending a conference with numerous law enforcement officials and security experts; unsurprisingly, the atmosphere among this typically stoic group of professionals included some palpable emotion and concern. One veteran school security leader from Colorado spoke of dealing with a record threat caseload over the past year. A leader of a SWAT unit from a Northeastern state described to me the added security contingencies he was now tasked with putting in place for any public events drawing crowds—now there is the added layer of protecting the police as they protect the public.

There is a troubling sense of streams converging, of thresholds being crossed.

“I think that the more the taboo against mass murder is broken, the easier it becomes for the next perpetrator. Thus, it seems to me that this phenomenon is feeding on itself, growing with each new incident,” says Langman. “For those who feel like they are nobody, the path to becoming somebody is very simple—get a gun and shoot a lot of people.”

Read original article:  

The Chilling Rise of Copycat Mass Shooters

Posted in FF, GE, LG, Northeastern, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Chilling Rise of Copycat Mass Shooters

At Least 3 Police Officers Shot and Killed in Baton Rouge

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Update, July 17, 5:42 p.m. ET: The deceased suspect has been identified as 29-year-old Gavin Eugene Long of Kansas City, and he attacked the police on his birthday, CBS News reports.

Update, July 17, 4:49 p.m. ET: Baton Rouge law enforcement officials announced at a press conference Sunday afternoon that there is no longer an “active shooter” situation, and that the deceased suspect was likely the only shooter, according to NBC News. Police initially suspected that there were at least two other shooters at large.

Update, July 17, 3:49 p.m. ET: Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards condemned the shootings. “This is an unspeakable and unjustifiable attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing,” he said.

Update, July 17, 12:39 p.m. ET: The city’s mayor and the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s office have confirmed that three police officers are dead and three others were wounded in the attack. The sheriff’s office reports that at least one suspect is dead, but two others may still be at large.

At least three police officers were shot and killed and at least four other officers were injured during a gun attack in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Sunday morning, according to CNN. The incident occurred just 10 days after an ambush of Dallas police killed five officers and injured nine people.

While no official link has been established, Sunday’s attack comes amid ongoing protests in the city and around the country after the death of Alton Sterling, a black man who was shot and killed by police outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge. Thousands attended Sterling’s funeral on Friday.

Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden told MSNBC soon after the attack that the police officers had been responding to reports of gunfire when they were ambushed by at least one gunman. A Louisiana State Police spokesman told the network that the gunman was shot during the incident. The gunman’s condition remains unclear.

We will update this post as new details become available.

Jump to original:

At Least 3 Police Officers Shot and Killed in Baton Rouge

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Sterling, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on At Least 3 Police Officers Shot and Killed in Baton Rouge

Oil refineries in Louisiana have accidents almost every day

Oil refineries in Louisiana have accidents almost every day

bengarland

Well, OK, Louisiana’s oil refineries don’t have accidents every single day. Just six days a week on average. Actually, to be specific, 6.3 days a week.

Last year, the 17 refineries and two associated chemical plants in the state experienced 327 accidents, releasing 2.4 million pounds of air pollution, including such poisons as benzene and sulfur, and 12.7 million gallons of water pollution. That’s according to a report published Tuesday [PDF] by the nonprofit Louisiana Bucket Brigade, which compiled the data from refineries’ individual accident reports.

Nearly half of the accidents were triggered by the weather, including Hurricane Isaac. Nearly a third were the result of equipment or operational failures. The remaining 12 percent were caused by power outages.

“Year after year our state gets the pollution and the oil industry gets the profit,” said Bucket Brigade director Anne Rolfes.

The findings are grim, but they may actually understate the problem. The nonprofit claims many refinery accidents are underreported or covered up, as the Baton Rouge Advocate reports:

Rolfes said she and Louisiana Bucket Brigade know this is the case because workers tell the organization about the accidents or incidents that don’t show up on the records.

One example involves a release of materials at ExxonMobil’s Baton Rouge facility where there was an initial report of at least 10 pounds of benzene as required by law within an hour of the release.

It turned out the release was more than 31,000 pounds.
The Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association responded by questioning the credibility of the report and saying the industry is “making strong environmental progress.”

If managing to operate safely almost one day a week is your definition of “progress.”


Source
Bucket Brigade: Air pollution increases at refineries in 2012, The Advocate
Mission: Zero Accidents, Louisiana Bucket Brigade
New Report: Pollution from Louisiana Refineries Increasing, Louisiana Bucket Brigade

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

View original post here: 

Oil refineries in Louisiana have accidents almost every day

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, Uncategorized, wind energy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Oil refineries in Louisiana have accidents almost every day

Gulf Coast refineries accidentally belch out a lot of chemical pollution

Gulf Coast refineries accidentally belch out a lot of chemical pollution

Mike Smail

ExxonMobil’s accident-prone complex in Baton Rouge.

“Oops.”

Gulf Coast oil refiners and chemical processors say that a lot, but regulators are doing precious little to rein in what the industry euphemistically calls “upset” emissions.

Upset emissions are inadvertent releases of chemicals by industrial operations when something goes awry. And things seem to go awry awfully frequently. An ExxonMobil refinery in Baton Rouge, La., was averaging two accidental releases every week during one grim stretch.

That’s according to an analysis by The Center for Public Integrity, which found that upset emissions are more prevalent than industry admits or government knows. Some highlights from the center’s investigative report:

[A 411-barrel chemical leak last year] has played out again and again at the sprawling, 2,400-acre ExxonMobil Baton Rouge complex, which encompasses an oil refinery and a chemical plant, and dwarfs the Standard Heights community. The leak marks the 1,068th upset emissions event at the compound in the last eight years, according to a database of incident reports compiled by the Bucket Brigade. Of these events, 172 involved benzene, a carcinogen that can trigger headaches, dizziness and rapid heart rate.

Exxon’s chemical plant had 265 of all incidents. At the refinery, the data show 803 accidental releases over these years; at its height, the facility averaged two a week. …

The steady hazards extend far beyond Baton Rouge. In the Gulf states of Texas and Louisiana, the vast number of plastics, power and gas plants provide an on-the-ground case study of a national problem.

“Non-routine” upset emissions have become regular occurrences at oil refineries, chemical plants and manufacturing facilities.

The upset emissions can pose serious health risks, but the oil and chemical companies say there’s nothing to worry about.

Dr. Mark D’Andrea, at the University of Texas Cancer Center, began tracking 4,000 residents exposed to the poster child of all upsets — the “40-day Release” at the BP refinery, in Texas City, which belched 514,795 pounds of benzene and 20 other pollutants throughout the spring of 2010. Earlier this year, D’Andrea unveiled preliminary data showing the residents have “significantly higher” white-blood cell and platelet counts than their Houston counterparts. The data suggests BP’s release may have increased their risk of developing such cancers as leukemia, the doctor says.

In a statement, BP says it does “not believe any negative health impacts resulted from” its 40-day release. “To our knowledge, the University Cancer Centers’ pilot study does not support a claim for any plaintiff alleging injury from that flaring and has no relevance to those claims,” the company wrote, referring to pending litigation filed by 47,830 residents and workers against BP alleging health ailments caused by the release. D’Andrea has not been hired as an expert witness for either side in the case, but has testified in pre-trial discovery.

For more, read the full report in all its grotesque glory.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Taken from – 

Gulf Coast refineries accidentally belch out a lot of chemical pollution

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Gulf Coast refineries accidentally belch out a lot of chemical pollution