Spanish Authorities Arrest Anonymous Activists

Madrid - Police say they have arrested four suspected hackers allied to the loose-knit Anonymous movement in connection with attacks on Spanish political party websites.

A National Police statement said two servers used by the group in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic have been blocked.

It said the four included the alleged manager of Anonymous' computer operations in Spain and Latin America, who was identified only by his initials and the aliases "Thunder" and "Pacotron."

The four are suspected of defacing websites, carrying out denial-of-service attacks and publishing data on police assigned to the royal palace and the premier's office online.

Tuesday's statement said the arrests were part of an Interpol operation.

Quadruple Transplant a Failure

Ankara, Turkey - A Turkish hospital says world's first quadruple limb transplant has failed.

Hacettepe University says doctors had to remove two arms and two legs that were transplanted on 27-year-old Sevket Cavdar because of tissue incompatibility.

Doctors attached the limbs on Cavdar on Friday night. He had lost his arms and legs in 1998 when he was accidentally electrocuted.

The operation followed a failed triple limb transplant two months ago at another hospital in the southern city of Antalya. The doctors there were forced to remove a leg from a patient also due to tissue incompatibility. The same patient also received two arms.

Monsanto Agrees to Pay Victims of Dioxin in West Virginia…But Not Much

By Matt Bewig

 

United States - Giant chemical corporation Monsanto has agreed to a tentative settlement requiring it to pay nearly $100 million to settle claims that its factory in Nitro, West Virginia, contaminated the small town and its residents with the toxic chemical dioxin, a cancer-causing waste byproduct of the manufacture of the herbicide 2,4,5-T.

 

For about 75 years, between 1929 and 2004, the Monsanto plant churned out herbicides, rubber products and other chemicals, although it made 2,4,5-T only from 1949 to 1971. Monsanto sold 2,4,5-T (later found to be contaminated with dioxin) to the Army for use in making Agent Orange, which it sprayed on Vietnamese jungles and farms. The dioxin is estimated to have killed and maimed an estimated 400,000 people and caused 500,000 birth defects in Vietnam, but federal courts dismissed a case brought by Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.

 

Shortly after the Monsanto plant closed in 2004, a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of tens of thousands of people who lived, worked and went to school in Nitro after 1949. The suit alleged that Monsanto spread toxic substances, including dioxins, all over the town, exposing residents to dioxin levels 100,000 times higher than acceptable. The lawsuit demands medical monitoring for at least 5,000—and as many as 80,000—current and former Nitro residents. Under the tentative agreement announced on February 24, 2012, Monsanto will pay for a 30-year medical monitoring program with a primary fund of $21 million for testing, and up to $63 million in additional funding, if needed; $9 million to clean the homes of class members of dioxin; and court-approved legal fees incurred during seven years of litigation.

 

Before the agreement is finalized, however, a fairness hearing must be held to give class members a chance to object to its terms. That hearing is scheduled for June 18, when expert testimony must be presented to prove the settlement is appropriate. Already Charleston, West Virginia, lawyer Thomas Urban, who represents some Nitro residents, has filed a motion objecting to the $9 million cap on cleanup costs, (an expert for the residents estimated the cost at between $945 million and $3.8 billion), and also the fact that only 3,000 to 5,000 class members would receive any medical monitoring, when there are potentially 80,000 class members.

 

Despite the seemingly large dollar amount of the settlement, Monsanto, which in 2010 earned a profit of $1.1 billion on revenues of $10.5 billion, announced that the settlement would not affect ongoing earnings per share, but that the one-time expense would reduce previously reported earnings per share by .05 percent.

Keystone Pipeline Lobbyists Were Hillary Clinton Fundraisers

By Matt Bewig

 

United States - Environmental group Friends of the Earth (FOE) last week sued the State Department for access to communications between it and lobbyists promoting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, two of whom were prominent fundraisers for the 2008 presidential campaign of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That project, in which Canadian oil company TransCanada wants to build nearly 2,000 miles of pipeline to carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, requires a presidential permit from the State Department. FOE originally filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the materials in 2010.

 

Two of the lobbyists named in the FOIA request, Gordon Giffin of McKenna, Long & Aldridge, and James Blanchard of DLA Piper, were fundraising bundlers for Clinton’s presidential bid, and DLA Piper was the largest single corporate source of employee and PAC contributions to her campaign. Both Blanchard and Giffin served as U.S. Ambassador to Canada under President Bill Clinton, Blanchard from 1993-1997 and Giffin from 1997-2001.

 

A third pipeline lobbyist, Paul Elliott, worked on Clinton’s campaign as national deputy director and chief of staff for delegate selection. Although the Obama administration recently rejected the permit, TransCanada is preparing a new permit application, leading Damon Moglen, climate and energy project director at FOE, to explain the continued relevance of the request: “The communications we seek are key to ensuring that the State Department isn’t letting lobbyists’ personal connections to Secretary Clinton or President Obama bias its decision-making."

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