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.

  • Beetle [hy/hym]@hexbear.netEnglish
    52·
    13 days ago

    I made a list compiling the events from a few sources including cestmocro and plant.eenolijfboom on instagram:

    1. Weekend of 2/11 and 3/11: Flyers are spread around football stadium calling for israhelli boycott in football. A pro Palestine protester wearing a keffiyeh gets beaten up by Ajax supporter and ends up in hospital.
    2. Monday 4/11: There’s a call from a pro Palestine group to protest in front of the stadium during the game on Thursday.
    3. Wednesday 6/11 afternoon: Mayor of Amsterdam forbids the protest in front of stadium and also forbids protests on some other locations like the Dam square. Protest is allowed on a location 1km from stadium. Protest organisers are warning protesters to not go on the streets alone while wearing keffiyeh or other Palestinian symbols due to previous attacks.
    4. Wednesday evening: Maccabi supporters tear down Palestinian flags and burn at least one. They also yell racist chants and display banners and stickers glorifying the IOF and genocide. A taxi driver is beaten up by maccabi supporters and his car is destroyed. In a local taxi drivers group there is a call to mobilise in response.
    5. Thursday 7/11 afternoon: Maccabi supporters are in the city chanting fuck you Palestine on Dam square resulting in some fights between pro Palestine protesters and Maccabi supporters. Police arrest some pro Palestine protesters because protesting was not allowed in that area. Other protesters are brought by the police to the assigned location where they are allowed to protest. Protesters aren’t happy with this because they are not in hearing distance of the football game they were protesting against, so in small groups they leave to protest elsewhere. Maccabi supporters on their way to the game are filmed chanting islamophobic phrases. Sources give different translations for the chants, but it’s something along the lines of fuck arabs and Israhelli army will win. According to BDS NL it’s part of a longer song that includes ‘there are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left’.
    6. Thursday during game: Maccabi supporters yell through minute of silence for victims of Spanish floods.
    7. Thursday evening after game: Maccabi hooligans move to city center, do normal hooligan shit but there’s a lot of tension between them and locals for obvious reasons. Lots of taxis are driving near the hooligans honking because of the taxi driver that was beaten up the evening before. Police is surrounding the hooligans while they move through the city center to protect them from locals including the taxis. The pro Palestine protesters are also still in the city in smaller groups sometimes attempting to come near the hooligans but police is holding them back. Police is trying to get the hooligans into busses to bring them to their hotel but a lot of the hooligans escape to roam through the city in smaller groups. This is where they get confronted by pro Palestine protesters who then showed them how welcome they are in Amsterdam. Several Maccabi hooligans get beaten up and get swimming lessons. 5 Maccabi supporters end up in hospital, 20-30 are wounded and 63 protesters are arrested. The police is using the videos to arrest more protesters.

    Edit: added some more details on Thursday evening from the video linked.

    Some additional notes from myself on how media is reacting:

    Note how the police only ever acted to arrest/remove pro Palestine protesters and did not act when protestors were attacked, flags were destroyed, or racist chants were yelled by Maccabi supporters. They’re also calling the protesters ‘rioters’ in their official reports to media and didn’t use a single bad word like ‘hooligan’ or ‘rioter’ for the Maccabi supporters. The one sidedness of the mayor and police is very apparent and people are angry. Amnesty NL is calling the events unacceptable (going with the narrative of the police) and losing credibility as are almost all ‘left’ political parties.

    All large Dutch new outlets yesterday were only reporting on the poor IOF nazis getting beaten up with no word about all the events that came before. This obviously angered people even more and now media are slowly publishing ‘recap’ articles are that mention at least some of the racism and provocation but still go fully with police narrative.

    Antizionist jewish organisations that are speaking out about the hypocrisy are getting completely ignored by media outlets while zionist jews will get exclusive interviews about how afraid they were for weeks to come.