Please stand up to corporate lobbying against proposed EU laws requiring oil, gas and mining companies to publish payments to foreign governments. Pass strong laws that will help citizens spot corruption and ensure the money is used to lift millions of people out of poverty.
February 1, 2013 "A full-scale invasion of Africa is under way. The United States is deploying troops in 35 African countries, beginning with Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger. Reported by Associated Press on Christmas Day, this was missing from most Anglo-American media."
Christine Marie, in Socialist Action, February 5, 2013: "The profits from France’s mines in Niger have been the target of the MNJ, the Niger Movement for Justice. The MNJ is a mostly Tuareg group that has been demanding a share of the revenues and an environmental cleanup. Kidal, one of the northern Malian towns recently taken by French forces, and the heart of Tuareg spiritual life, is at the center of a uranium-prospecting project given a 2007 go-ahead by the Malian government of over 20,000 square kilometers. Oklo Resources was due, as late as last October, to start drilling in May 2013. Malian uranium reserves have been estimated at 5200 tons"
William F. Engdahl. " Mali for the Pentagon is but the next building block in the militarization of all of Africa by AFRICOM using proxy forces like France to do the dirty work. "
"The biggest Brazilian investor in Africa - and one of the biggest investors in the continent from anywhere - is Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, which is usually known as Vale. It is one of the three biggest mining companies in the world and is the world's biggest iron ore miner, controlling about 27% of the global market. It also produces coal, nickel, copper, bauxite, alumina, aluminium and a wide range of other commodities. As a result of the needs of its mining operations, it also invests heavily in power plants, railways and port infrastructure. Vale currently has investments totalling $7.7bn in nine African countries and plans to invest more than $18bn in Africa over the next five years but much will depend on the direction of global markets over that time." "The firm's biggest investment, however, is its Moatize coal mining project in the Moatize Basin of Tete Province in northwestern Mozambique."
" “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure,” he said. One of the world’s largest dealers of petroleum coke is the Oxbow Corporation, which sells about 11 million tons of fuel-grade coke a year. It is owned by William I. Koch, a brother of David and Charles. Lorne Stockman, who recently published a study on petroleum coke for the environmental group Oil Change International, says, “It’s really the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth,” he said. "
Patrice Lumumba. Etienne Davignon. Bilderberg. Umicore "brags that it shares 50% of the global market in materials for lithium-ion batteries". David Cronin’s book Corporate Europe: How Big Business Sets Policies on Food, Climate and War will be published in August. It is available for pre-ordering from Pluto Press (www.plutobooks.com).
"La population a hérité de 50 millions de tonnes de résidus radioactifs stockés à Arlit et Areva continue de pomper gratuitement 20 millions de mètres cubes d'eau par an pendant que la population meurent de soif", a dénoncé M. Mamane. Selon lui, "les rues et les habitations d'Arlit sont construits à l'aide de résidus radioactif et la nappe phréatique usée et contaminée s'assèche par la faute d'Areva". "Le pire c'est que Areva continue de nier tout cela", a-t-il déploré.
Jos EU:n sopimuksiin Yhdysvaltojen ja Kanadan kanssa sisältyy investointisuoja, ulkomaisille sijoittajille avautuu mahdollisuus toimia kansallisen lainsäädännön vastaisesti. Markus Kröger (Suomen Akatemian tutkijatohtori Helsingin yliopistossa)., HS Vieraskynä 31.10.2013: "... lyhyessä ajassa on syntynyt joukko mittavia voittoja tekeviä lakiasiaintoimistoja, jotka etsivät aktiivisesti asiakkaita syytteiden nostamiseksi hallituksia vastaan... Investointisuoja tekee mahdolliseksi kansainvälisen korvausvaatimuksen, vaikka esimerkiksi kaivos rikkoisi paikallista ympäristölainsäädäntöä tai kaikki maan asukkaat olisivat hanketta vastaan ja onnistuisivat pysäyttämään sen."
CODESRIA Kenya extracts soda ash, limestone, gold, cement and gemstones but its resources are not exploited on a scale comparable to neighbouring Tanzania, Uganda or the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, the recent discovery of commercially viable oil reserves in Turkana [http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/...], the impending arrival of a new port and oil refinery on the island of Lamu, enormous rare earth and titanium deposits found in Kwale [http://allafrica.com/stories/201307...], and discoveries of gold in Narok and Migori [http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/...] have caught the eye of new investors, hungry to turn a handsome profit from the country’s untapped resources.
President Condé of Guinea at Davos , Jan 2014 (Guardian 22.1.14): "... we live in a global economy. We simply can't deal with the network of corruption embedded in a few key western institutions from a distance of nearly 3,000 miles. These corrupt practitioners operate from the west, but their practices are global and require a global response. Only tighter, more responsive and highly co-ordinated action between law enforcement authorities in both developing nations and the world's financial centres will be effective... With international legal co-operation, Guinea will soon be announcing the outcome of an investigation into some of the most disturbing allegations of mining corruption in Africa's history. I ask other countries to do the same with their own financial institutions."
Patrick Bons on "... the difference between bogus ‘Africa Rising’ rhetoric as GDP increases thanks to raw materials exports, and Africa crashing in terms of fast-shrinking wealth, especially in resource-cursed countries like Nigeria and South Africa. To fail to acknowledge the distinction is to import from malevolent Northern economists what University of Pretoria political economist Lorenzo Fioramonti calls a Gross Domestic Problem. It means ignoring women’s unpaid labour, pollution, social ills and a variety of other variables that should be measured as losses from net income. The biggest of these GDP-blind factors in Africa is the depletion of natural resources, which when mined or drilled out are only counted as GDP credits on the income accounts, but not as debits, as they should be since a source of future income is now gone. "
Le blog de Stefan Bekier [Interprète de conférence, ancien militant de l'opposition de gauche en Pologne] 21 mai 2014: Volynets[ président du Syndicat indépendant des mineurs d'Ukraine (NPHU), également président de la Confédération ukrainienne des syndicats libres (KVPU),] explique : « Les séparatistes essaient d'arrêter le travail des groupes industriels comme Donbassanthracite, de porter un coup à l'économie, et, lorsque les mines s'arrêteront, de faire sortir les mineurs dans la rue. C'est fait pour aggraver le chaos et provoquer des troubles à l'est du pays. »
Lappi 11.5.2010 klo 13:02 | päivitetty 3.6.2012 klo 17:20 Helsingissä Sokli-tempaus Helsingissä järjestettiin tiistaina Soklin kaivoksen vastainen mielenilmaus. Sokli erämaana -kansanliike ja Kemin-Sompion paliskunta järjestivät Sokli-tapahtuman Helsingin keskustassa Paasikiven aukiolla.
I am a data scientist, software engineer and architecture consultant passionate in solving big data analytics problem with distributed and parallel computing, Machine learning and Data mining, SaaS and Cloud computing.
future scarcities, wave of extinctions, supply bottlenecks a tidal wave of unrest the breakdown of social order a tsunami of disaster "In March, for the first time, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper listed “competition and scarcity involving natural resources” as a national security threat on a par with global terrorism, cyberwar, and nuclear proliferation... There was a new phrase embedded in his comments: “resource shocks.” "
In 1999, Cameco set up a subsidiary, Cameco Europe Ltd., in low-tax Zug, Switzerland. Cameco then signed a 17-year deal to take the uranium it produces in Canada, sell it to Cameco Europe, and have Cameco Europe make the final sale to the end customers all across the world.
Everybody's heard of the controversy over lithium supplies, which are a key component of the lithium-ion battery packs going into EVs. Lithium deposits are concentrated in just a few mostly non-western countries (China, Bolivia, Chile). Most experts think there's enough lithium for the foreseeable future, though some of it is in countries hostile to the U.S. (including, as we've recently discovered, Afghanistan). But there is growing concern over another key raw material for the electric car -- rare earth minerals.
Child labor in artisanal gold mining is common in many countries worldwide, particularly within West Africa’s gold belt, which spans Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal. Mali is Africa’s third largest gold producer.
In the Obama years, US Africa Command has also built a sophisticated logistics system, officially known as the Africom Surface Distribution Network, but colloquially referred to as "the new spice route". Its central nodes are in Manda Bay, Garissa and Mombasa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe in Uganda; Bangui and Djema in the CAR; Nzara in South Sudan; Dire Dawa in Ethiopia; and the Pentagon's showpiece African base, Camp Lemonnier.
Joan Martínez Alier: "President Rafael Correa of Ecuador asks when and where Marx criticizes mega-mining...[...] But what would Marx have said of mega-mining and the ideas of President Correa?" "... there are concepts in Marx that the arrogance mixed with ignorance of President Correa have caused him to forget."
"La population a hérité de 50 millions de tonnes de résidus radioactifs stockés à Arlit et Areva continue de pomper gratuitement 20 millions de mètres cubes d'eau par an pendant que la population meurent de soif", a dénoncé M. Mamane. Selon lui, "les rues et les habitations d'Arlit sont construits à l'aide de résidus radioactif et la nappe phréatique usée et contaminée s'assèche par la faute d'Areva". "Le pire c'est que Areva continue de nier tout cela", a-t-il déploré.
Canadian gold-mining company Infinito Gold Ltd. announced its intentions to go forward with a $1 billion lawsuit against Costa Rica over the retracted Las Crucitas open-pit gold mining concession in northern Costa Rica (Oct 2013)
Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks. The algorithms can either be applied directly to a dataset or called from your own Java code. Weka contains tools for data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, and visualization. It is also well-suited for developing new machine learning schemes.
BBC News forum posts: 2,594,745 comments from selected BBC News forums and > 1,000 human classified sentiment strengths with a postive strength of 1-5 and a negative strength of 1-5. The classification is the average of three human classifiers.
Digg post comments: 1,646,153 comments on Digg posts (typically highlighting news or technology stories) and > 1,000 human classified sentiment strengths with a postive strength of 1-5 and a negative strength of 1-5. The classification is the average of three human classifiers.
MySpace (social network site) comments: six sets of systematic samples (3 for the US and 3 for the UK) of all comments exchanged between pairs of friends (about 350 pairs for each UK sample and about 3,500 pairs for each US sample) from a total of >100,000 members and > 1,000 human classified sentiment strengths with a postive strength of 1-5 and a negative strength of 1-5. The classification is the average of three human classifiers.
SentiStrength estimates the strength of positive and negative sentiment in short texts, even for informal language. It has human-level accuracy for short social web texts in English, except political texts.
{. Schouten, {. Bueno, W. Duivesteijn, и M. Pechenizkiy. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 36 (1):
379--413(января 2022)Funding Information: This research is supported by EDIC project funded by NWO. We thank the EDIC consortium and the ZGT hospital for allowing us to analyse the data from the DIALECT-2 study. We especially thank Niala Den Braber (PhD candidate at Universiteit Twente and researcher internal medicine at ZGT hospital) and prof. dr. Goos Laverman (internist-nephrologist at ZGT hospital) for giving us clinical valuation of our findings. In addition, we thank our colleagues dr. Robert Peharz for giving us useful insights on Markov chains and DBNs and dr. Maryam Tavakol for guiding us towards the MovieLens dataset..