A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order. When Anderson was smuggled out to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over 26 years; this central truth has no  The outpouring of public anger is emblematic of the rising discontent facing Chinese leaders [Reuters] | |||
| Hundreds of demonstrators protesting against alleged pollution from a paper factory in eastern China's Jiangsu province have clashed with police, forcing authorities to drop plans for a water-discharge project. The Qidong government announced on its website on Saturday that plans to build the water-discharge project had been scrapped. The official Xinhua News Agency said thousands of residents took to the streets but dispersed after the government announcement. The water-discharge project was to be part of a paper-making factory proposed by a Japanese company, Oji Paper. The company denied it was causing pollution and said closing the 110km pipeline would not affect operations at the plant, located in Nantong, Jiji Press reported. Later on Saturday hundreds of police, some in riot gear, arrived in the coastal town just north of Shanghai and took up positions outside the offices. The protesters occupied a government office, destroying computers and overturning cars in a violent protest against an industrial waste pipeline they said would poison their coastal waters.
About 1,000 protesters marched through the coastal city, shouting slogans against the planned pipeline that would have emptied waste from a paper factory in a nearby town into the sea. The Reuters news agency witnessed five cars and one minibus being overturned. Over 1,000 police - some paramilitary - guarded the city government office compound in lines. At least two police officers were dragged into the crowd at the government office and punched and beaten enough to make them bleed. Demonstrators had rejected the government's earlier stand that waste from the factory would not pollute the coastal waters. "The government says the waste will not pollute the sea, but if that's true, then why don't they dump it into Yangtze River?" said Lu Shuai, a 25-year-old protester who works in logistics. The crowds dispersed after local authorities used television, radio, the Internet and text message to announce that the waste water pipeline project at the mill, which belongs to Japanese company Oji Paper, would be "permanently cancelled". Unfettered industrial expansion On Friday, in an effort to stave off the protest, the Qidong city government announced it would suspend the project for further research, but that did not deter the protesters.
The sewage pipe from the paper mill would have discharged into the sea in the port of Lusi, one of four fishing harbours in Qidong, one protestor, who for safety reasons only gave her name as Qin, told AFP news agency. Discharges were set to climb to 150,000 tonnes of sewage a day when the mill was fully operational, according to residents quoted on Friday by the state-run Global Timesnewspaper. Construction on the mill started in 2007. Searches including "Qidong" were blocked on Saturday on Sina Weibo, which has more than 250 million subscribers. The move to close the paper mill's sewage pipeline comes after Chinese authorities this month scrapped plans to build a metals plant in the southwest province of Sichuan following violent protests by local residents concerned about the planned factory's environmental impact. The Chinese government warned on Friday that security would be tightened throughout the country ahead of a major Communist Party Congress this autumn, which should see a new generation of leaders take over the reins of power. |
If the rare earth waste is safe, why Lynas have to spend so much to have it processed in Kuantan, Malaysia. They can process it in their own back-yard which saves them large sums of money. Why? Why? Why?With due respects to your arguments, It is a fact that NON of the States in Lynas’s Home country that is Australia want anything to do with rare earth processing inspite of the potential of generating lots of jobs and taxes for the government. As you are aware, the TWO BIGGEST MINING COMPANIES ARE IN AUSTRALIA. There are more experts in that country on issues of minerals processing and its harmful effects, that is why most if not all mineral mined there are shipped out in non-processed form to THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES LIKE Malaysia, China, India etc. Like they say, a bit of knowledge when you don’t know the full facts is dangerous, more so when you pretend to know it all. I beg to differ, NO LYNAS.Rama, are you willing to take the risk? Is all about money, or quality of life. Australians certainly will enjoy the fruits of the refined metals as well as quality of life.Mr.Rama,are you an expert on rare earth process /radiation matters?If you are,then perhaps you go explain to the Australians to accept Lynas to be located at their backyard
THE PROPOSED RARE EARTH PROJECT IN GEBENG NEAR. …. LOCATED ON THE BANKS OF THE PAHANG RIVER 50 KM SOUTH OF KUANTAN, PEKAN IS THE ROYAL TOWN
Talk of the low level radioactive wastes to be dumped into the Sungei Lembing mines has only served to infuriate the people even more.
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order. When THE CORPORATE TITAN NICK CURTIS OF LYNAS CORP to be smuggled out to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over years; this central truth has not.
Why do we say “law and order” rather than “order and law”? Simple. Law comes before order. Law defines the nature of order. Law is the difference between civilization and chaos. Law is evolutionary: the edicts of tribes, chiefs and dynasties lifted human societies from scattered peril to structured coexistence. The laws of democracy have vaulted us to the acme of social cohesion, for they eliminated arbitrary diktat and introduced collective will. The divine right of kings is dead; it has been reborn as the secular right of an elected Parliament.
The Sun declined to publish my response (below) to Dr Looi Hoong Wah’searlier letter. In the interest of reasoned exchanges, I hope this response to Dr Looi’s latest letter sees the light of day.
In this letter, Dr Looi’s cites the Argonne National Lab’s fact sheet on thorium to argue that only a miniscule portion of thorium-232 which is ingested via food or water is absorbed into the bloodstream, of which only 4 per cent gets deposited in the liver where it is retained with a biological half-life of 700 days.
Live has uncovered the distinctly dirty truth about the process used to extract neodymium: it has an appalling environmental impact that raises serious questions over the credibility of so-called green technology.
The reality is that, as Britain flaunts its environmental credentials by speckling its coastlines and unspoiled moors and mountains with thousands of wind turbines, it is contributing to a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China. This is the deadly and sinister side of the massively profitable rare-earths industry that the ‘green’ companies profiting from the demand for wind turbines would prefer you knew nothing about.
Hidden out of sight behind smoke-shrouded factory complexes in the city of Baotou, and patrolled by platoons of security guards, lies a five-mile wide ‘tailing’ lake. It has killed farmland for miles around, made thousands of people ill and put one of China’s key waterways in jeopardy.This vast, hissing cauldron of chemicals is the dumping ground for seven million tons a year of mined rare earth after it has been doused in acid and chemicals and processed through red-hot furnaces to extract its components.He neglects to mention that thorium-232 is much more readily absorbed into the human body via an inhalation route, and furthermore that 70 per cent of the amount entering the bloodstream gets deposited in bone where it is retained with a biological half-life of about 22 years, all that while irradiating the much more radio-sensitive blood-forming tissues there with highly mutagenic alpha-particles (20 times more damaging to cellular genetic material than beta or gamma radiation).
Could this be the reason for the cluster of childhood leukaemias observed among the children of Bukit Merah? (Recall also the inverse square law — the intensity of radiation from a radioactive particle a metre away from a human body increases a trillion-fold when that same particle sits at micron-level distances on the body’s cells and tissues.)Dr Looi considers that inhalation exposures to thorium-containing dust is solely an occupational problem which is not relevant to the greater Kuantan-Kemaman community. Let’s recall that the ARE rare earths refinery at Bukit Merah, like LAMP, had no long-term waste management plan. Ad hoc arrangements, including the aborted Papan dump site, eventually led to a situation of indiscriminate, clandestine dumping of radioactive thorium-cake wastes at Lahat, Menglembu, Pengkalan, Jelapang, Buntong, Simpang Pulai, among other locations.The Kuantan-Kemaman community similarly faces the prospect of unknown numbers of dump sites at unknown locations scattered in and around the cities if Lynas does not come up with an acceptable plan for long-term waste disposal.Allow me also to bring to Dr Looi’s attention a 1993-1994 study of male miners at the Bayun Obo rare earths and iron mine in Inner Mongolia which was reported in the Journal of Radiological Protection in 2005.In that study, highly dust-exposed miners had 5.15 times the age-adjusted lung cancer rate compared to the rate among Chinese males in the general population. The less-exposed mining staff had 2.30 times the general population rate. Both groups had similar smoking rates (78 per cent vs 67 per cent for the general adult male population).On this basis, the authors concluded that the excess lung cancer risk among the less-exposed was largely due to above-average smoking, and the further difference between the two miner groups was due to high exposure to airborne crystalline silica particulates (mainly) and to thorium-containing dust and its radioactive daughter nuclides such as thoron
Daun Pahang National Agenda Federation of non-governmental organisations why Fuziah Salleh should apologise ? CEO, Nicholas Curtis.Pathological liar and is part of that lie
In the pollution-blighted city of Baotou, most people wear face masks everywhere they go.
‘You have to wear one otherwise the dust gets into your lungs and poisons you,’ our taxi driver tells us, pulling over so we can buy white cloth masks from a roadside hawker
He said during the gruelling two-hour dinner discussion that if Kuantan residents were to keep an open mind towards the facts of the issue, they would be able to see that the plant poses no health or environmental risk.
His assistant, Wee Tiat Eng, Lynas Malaysia Sdn Bhd senior manager (engineering services), even performed a live demonstration by reading the radiation levels of the criticised the rare earth’s “water leach purification” (WLP) residue, which is said to be dangerous, and comparing it with a banana
Finally they are toxic waste lakes that are often very poorly constructed and maintained. And throughout this process, large amounts of highly toxic acids, heavy metals and other chemicals are emitted into the air that people breathe, and leak into surface and ground water. Villagers rely on this for irrigation of their crops and for drinking water. Whenever we purchase products that contain rare earth metals, we are unknowingly taking part in massive environmental degradation and the destruction of communities. MCA president Datuk Seri Dr Chua Soi Lek, who attended the function with several other ministers, also stepped in to say that a person undergoing an X-ray exposes himself to 500 times the radiation found in the rare earth residue.
The lake of toxic waste at Baotou, China, which as been dumped by the rare earth processing plants in the background Live has uncovered the distinctly dirty truth about the process used to extract neodymium: it has an appalling environmental impact that raises serious questions over the credibility of so-called green technology.
‘But these people only care about money. They have destroyed our lives.’
Vast fortunes are being amassed here in Inner Mongolia; the region has more than 90 per cent of the world’s legal reserves of rare earth metals, and specifically neodymium, the element needed to make the magnets in the most striking of green energy producers, wind turbines.the town PEKAN will like this as result of toxic waste dumping of it has been doused in acid and chemicals and processed through red-hot furnaces to extract its components.
Talk of the low level radioactive wastes to be dumped into the Sungei Lembing mines has only served to infuriate the people even more
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order. When Anderson was smuggled out to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over 26 years; this central truth has not. This is a central dilemma: power is too lucrative for anyone to walk away without a shove from the electorate. Some parties have also begun to believe that they can purchase enough voters to ensure victory, but such are the illusions that money tends to induce.
 Melissa Chan, China correspondent since 2007, filed nearly 400 reports during her five years in the country | |||||||||||||
Earlier this week, I left China after five years as an Al Jazeera English correspondent following the decision by the government to revoke my press credentials. At a subsequent Foreign Ministry press briefing, spokesman Hong Lei did not provide a public explanation, only saying that "foreign journalists should abide by Chinese laws and regulations”. But I have not broken any laws. And I believe I have tried to cover China as honestly and equitably as one can. As I say goodbye to China, I think back to some of the issues and people we've covered. I'd like to start with a good memory of China. It was late morning in the autumn of 2009, and our team was on our way to an interview out in the countryside north of Chongqing in central China. We'd driven through many villages before, but something about the bustle of this village compelled us to slow down our car and hop out for a look. Everyone seemed so happy. There was a festive atmosphere, as if it was Chinese New Year. People were gathered outside their doors, chatting away after their breakfasts. A woman cooked noodles at a small stand, steam enveloping her face. One family sold new baby chicks on the street side, while another group hawked duck eggs. Someone drew up a wagon of hand-woven wicker baskets, and I bought one for 20 yuan (the equivalent of $3), strapped it to my shoulders, and wandered around with the rest of the crowd. This was quintessential China - the daily proceedings of hundreds of millions, going about their business and working to create better lives for themselves. The place was at once traditional and modern, farmers on their mobile phones and an unbroken line of trucks pushing their way along the main street, heavy with construction material for new buildings in the old village. You could somehow sense that everyone was excited for the future, that things were changing, and that this was the little town that could. That may have been whimsical thinking on my part, but it was very much how I felt at the time. Sad memory A sad memory of China came later on the same day. Our team met and interviewed Yi Dade, a fisherman who had managed to do very well for himself. That was not the case for many other farmers, many of whom have been increasingly left behind by China's economic development. So there was much for Mr. Yi to be thankful for. Unfortunately, his successful fisheries business had caught the attention of local gangs, who bribed officials, and proceeded to seize his property on the banks of the river.
Yi Dade told me his tale while his wife sat next to him, weeping quietly and whispering repeatedly to herself, "My son was just a child." Incredibly, someone had thought to take pictures as evidence in the aftermath of the attack, and I examined the photographs of the stunned victims, the bright red of fresh blood pouring from their heads, confused expressions on their faces. Their bewildered looks seemed to ask, "How could this possibly happen to us? How could our government allow something like this to happen?" China is a country of contradictions. One minute you marvel at the speedy transformation, the new wealth, the great hope of many. Another minute, and in this case powerfully felt because it can all happen in one day, you're disgusted by the corruption, the systemic problems of a one-party authoritarian state, and the trampling of individual human rights and dignity. Millionaires to paupers That is what I have tried to capture in my five years crisscrossing the country. For a couple of years there, our team was on the road somewhere in China every week. We've spoken to everyone from millionaires to paupers. Along with manmade news and happenings, there have also been major natural disasters, most notably the 2008 Sichuan earthquake which killed 70,000. But there was also the lesser-known high altitude Yushu earthquake on the Tibetan plateau. That hit in 2010, and I remember Tibetans from the time telling us how admirably hard the People's Liberation Army soldiers had worked during rescue efforts. There was real respect for the Han Chinese soldiers, many of them from poor backgrounds themselves. The local Tibetans had been won over a fair bit, but the government missed the opportunity to build bridges when reconstruction efforts flailed, funds for survivors were siphoned off by corrupt officials, and authorities lapsed to their hardline selves. Today, Yushu is yet another place off-limits to foreign journalists, part of a huge area placed under lockdown following a string of self-immolations by Tibetans protesting China's rule. From the initial excitement of witnessing how the ethnic divide could be narrowed, the story of Yushu had turned bitter, and relations between Tibetans and Han Chinese there are at a new low. Missed opportunities It is precisely these sorts of conflicts, of good and bad decisions, of missed opportunities, that the country needs to take a hard look at in this critical political year. They've played out locally in the stories I have examined, but issues such as corruption and the rule of law weave from the fisherman, Yi Dade, through to the Tibetan victims of the Yushu earthquake, and all the way up to the country’s political leadership.
The only way to do any of this will take audacity, because the party would have to place itself and its members under the same independent and impartial system. Leaders are not unaware of this dilemma - that's why things have been so rocky and commentators, both inside and outside the country, have talked about what kind of institutional reforms need to start taking place. China has a lot going for it, and that is especially felt when you've spent so much time talking to the people there. They can be incredibly resilient, despite the fact that some have definitely received the short end of the stick. Like any country, people also worry and complain, and like journalists on any beat, I've looked at those worries and complaints. It's part of the process of making a place I love a better one for its people. I hope to be back in China one day, sooner rather than later. As for the government's decision to revoke my press credentials, I'd like my final note not to sound bitter or angry, because I don't want to look back a few years from now and read this piece and see myself having been like that. I don't deny I've been both at some points in recent days, but those sorts of feelings are best left to fade away, rather than stick around for the record. After all, one expulsion cannot take away the incredibly fun, instructive, heart-breaking and heart-warming five years of almost 400 reports I've filed. That's a lot of stories on a lot of subjects from a lot of places in the country. And I'm grateful to have had this life-changing opportunity. |
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