Showing posts with label Switzerland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Switzerland. Show all posts

Monday, July 15, 2013

Switzerland: radioactive substance found in Lake Biel (water source)

The source is a water discharge by Muehleberg nuclear plant, which is located some 20 km upstream the Aar river, some 13 years ago.

Geologists working in a unrelated project found cesium-137 at levels claimed to be not harmful but still well above what the power plant is allowed to release, especially considering that Lake Biel water is used for human consumption. 

Greenpeace demanded that the Bern Canton prosecutor acts against the culprits. They also raised the matter on how the Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate missed the fault or, very possibly, decided to hide the incident.

The Muehleberg plant is located not far from the Swiss capital Bern. Switzerland has already voted to gradually close all nuclear power plants in the next two decades.

Source: Fox News (via EneNews).


Update: EXSKF has more details: the radioactive releases were not just one but three: mid-1970s, early 1980s and around the year 2000. However even more important were the the atmospheric fallout from Chernobyl (1986) and widespread nuclear testing around 1963:


The full study (open access) is available at Springer Link.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Switzerland: clashes and arrests at anti-authoritarian street party

The third edition of Dance Yourself Free, an anti-authoritarian street party celebrated in Bern, ended in major clashes after thousands marched to the cantonal parliament, where police charged. 



After the police intervention, groups of people attacked some 70 shops and got involved in street clashes with the armed forces. 

It seems that some 60 people were arrested.


Source: Contra Info.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Macabre humor: Davos declares the economic crisis to be over

The club of wealthy jokers from around the World that meets in the Swiss resort of Davos every year to plan their practical and often humorless pranks against you and me, have declared:

The Crisis is over!

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! 

I bet they plan to end unemployment by killing millions through laughter.

Meanwhile, desperate with any sign that would ratify their mad bourgeois optimism, Business Insider thanker the masters of the World for this last joke... which they ironically seem to believe. After all they have been prophesying the end of the crisis since before it even began.

The reality however seems much gloomier: the crisis will continue for years, maybe even for decades until radical revolutionary programs are applied and Capitalism itself is deconstructed.

Actually that's what you get when you browse some other less wishful thinking media. The NYT understands that instead The Crisis has become normality (yeah, pretty much), while The Economic Times interprets instead that The Crisis is NOT over. 

Ah, not, yes, normal... all at the same time, so you can pick your favorite doctrine? Who cares: we just see the facts on the ground and don't care what the aristocrats may say in their luxury fortress. We see everything horribly bad, with a worsening tendency and normalized. It can explode at any moment anywhere or it can remain latent for one, two, three or even more years before people really gets angry and kick some ass... and some head probably too. 

What won't happen, much less any time soon, is any sort of return to the pre-2008 normality. The aristocrats have decreed that people must suffer and die so they keep their profit rates high... it is just up to the people and how much will they withstand: will they march to Auschwitz, whose slogan was quite ironically "work shall make you free", sheepishly or will they raise in arms?

Sooner than later we will see the latter. And then maybe some of those filthy capitalist pigs meeting in Davos will not laugh anymore.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Thin film solar cells now as efficien as glass ones

In yet another step in the development of more efficient solar energy, perfectly able to out-compete thermal and nuclear sources for electricity already, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Material Science and Technology (Empa) have beaten all records with a new kind of thin film solar cells that are not just more effective than their own previous record on the matter (18.7% in 2011) but also that the current record by solar cells on glass substrate (20.3% of light-to-electricity conversion rate). The new flexible foil cell achieves 20.4% of efficiency de facto becoming the new standard and making the path to a World powered only by renewable and sustainable energy sources a step closer. 

Source: Science Daily.

See also: category solar energy in this blog and in my old discontinued blog Leherensuge.


Sunday, November 11, 2012

The many twists of the 'Lagarde List'

If anything is showing the Lagarde List of tax evaders is that some Southern European states, especially Greece but also Spain, have corrupt political and judiciary systems that protect the wealthy oligarchs even at the expense of the state itself. Switzerland in turn is left as the unfriendly neighbor who does dirty business in your backyard, helping the mafiosi.

A very good article on the matter has been published today at Antifascist Calling:

Greek Journalist Acquitted for Blowing Tax Fraud Whistle. Widespread Corruption Linked to Private HSBC Accounts


Earlier this month, Greek investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis was acquitted by an Athens court of charges that he breached data privacy laws with the publication of a list of tax cheats and money launderers.

Vaxevanis, who publishes the investigative news magazine Hot Doc, faced two years in prison and a €30,000 ($38,000) fine over that publication's outing of 2,000 Greeks who hold secret banks accounts at HSBC's private banking arm in Switzerland.

Known as the "Lagarde List," data on high-profile offenders had been transferred to Greek authorities by Christine Lagarde, the former French Finance Minister and current head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where it languished for two years.

While the Greek people are forced into abject poverty under an "austerity" regime designed to enrich their corporate masters, a criminal class of political overseers backed by brutal police and rampaging neo-Nazis, billions of euros were shielded as successive "left" and "right" governments failed to act.

... continue reading at Antifascist Calling (must read, really).

Let's not forget that the original whistleblower, French and Italian citizen Hervé Falciani, is kept under arrest in Spain, where his revelations affected the money laundering machine of the biggest Spanish mafioso respectable investor clan: the Botín family (Banco Santander), who lost some €200 million as result (peanuts for them but still offended).

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Greece: journalist jailed for publishing list of tax evaders

C. Vaxevanis
Costas Vaxevanis was jailed today for daring to publish the list of 1991 tax evaders with large accounts in Switzerland. The so-called "Lagarde List" had been sitting for two years in the Prime Minister's office without any of them (neither Papandreou, nor Papademos, nor Samaras) doing anything on the matter.

While the rotten capitalist tax evaders get away with impunity, those who dare to expose them are jailed overnight. 

And they call it democracy, what in Greek comes to mean people's power... how ironic!

Sources: Occupied London - From the Greek Streets, Greek Reporter (link 1, link 2).


Update: In a video filmed soon before arrest, Costas Vaxevanis explains how police action against him preceded the judicial order of arrest. He defends that the publishing of the list is wholly legal because he did not publish any single money amount, just stating that these are the citizens in the Lagarde List and their banks.


Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Arafat was probably poisoned with polonium 210

I already suspected that: when, in that fated day of 2004, the PA administration, led by the infamous Zionist agent Abu Abbas, brought a distraught Suha Arafat (his widow) to a separate room and somehow persuaded her not to demand an autopsy, it was extremely obvious.

The exact details were not known and the authorities and the media quickly buried the issue under a thick layer of political declarations and farce homages to the only person who had been able to rally the Palestinian People as one and who never fully renounced to their most important claims, becoming a thorn on the side of the colonial Zionist apartheid regime in Palestine (alias Israel).

Now, eight years too late, the case has been reopened. Suha Arafat accepted to give the late Yassir's personal possessions to a North American journalist working for Al Jazeera, Clayton Swisher. After some research it was discovered that they were all full of polonium 210, exactly the same radioactive poison that would kill Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London two years later.

Why would Suha Arafat remain silent all this time and now open Pandora's Box? I have no idea but I'm sure that she has her reasons... personal gain reasons or lack of them thereof. She was in excellent terms with the former ruling clan in Tunisia, the Ben Ali family... until 2007, when she saw her citizenship revoked and her properties frozen. In 2011, after the Tunisian Revolution, she was brought to trial there for corruption.

Let's face it: Suha Arafat is no angel and never was... and her silence was surely bought with money and privileges. When these faltered she decided to do what she had not done in all this time: let the investigation on her husband's death go ahead and call for her husband's body be exhumed and an autopsy performed on it. 

Better late than never.

In the research performed so far on his personal effects, very abnormal levels of polonium 210 have been found, specially where bodily fluids were present (up to 180 mBq, versus less than 7 mBq in a control sample), suggesting that the poisoning was done via food or water.

In addition, no obvious disease was found in Arafat in his late days by the doctors who attended him. Suspiciously enough the Laussane (Switzerland) hospital that hosted him in his last days had destroyed all samples taken from him, making more difficult (no doubt intentionally) the investigation of the death of the Palestinian leader.

While we await for further results, let me advance some guesses: this kind of poisoning by polonium 210 was used for decades by Soviet and then Russian spies. A large flow of Russian (or other ex-Soviet) Jews into the Zionist colonies in Palestine followed the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s, some of which, no doubt had and have connections with either the former KGB (now FSB) or the Russian Mafia (which some argue is impossible to pick apart from a Jewish mafia) or (quite often) both. So I'd bet that the origin of that plutonium is in Russia or some other ex-Soviet reactor (not necessarily: it can also come from Dimona or who knows?! )

However it was given to Arafat by the Zionist secret services, the Mossad, most likely with the support of some agents inside the Palestinian Authority, like maybe the infamous Abbas, on whom suspicions of being at the service of the Mossad have existed ever since. 

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

From the Net: 'Switzerland: Communiqué by ecoanarchist prisoner Silvia Guerini about her hunger strike from 20th to 29th of January 2012' (Contra Info)

Nanotechnologies are going to be one of the discussion points of the World Economic Forum (WEF). This is exemplary of how, along with biotechnologies, they are something more than a simple technological development. They represent a strategic and fundamental choice for the survival of this techno-industrial system; they are the bricks with which the system will rebuild itself in every sector.
 
‘Control the oil and you will control the nations, control the food and you will control the populations.’ (Kissinger, 1970)

(...)

I was transferred to the federal prison of Hindelbank (in the canton of Bern) in the ‘high security with psychological support’ section, which is in reality a psychiatric section, even if not defined as such. The absurd justification for this is the ‘risk of escape’, the only motivation they can use for putting me in this separated and more closed section, in this prison with no walls around but only a fence. Next to this section there is the high security one, built in the 70s for a comrade of the RAF; it is significant that afterwards it was transformed into the section for ‘dangerous’ women with ‘serious psychiatric problems’…

... full story at Contra Info.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Echoes from the Class War (Sep 29) - Occupy USA movement

Main theme: Occupy Wall Street movement spreads through North America: 

Are we witnessing in North America something similar to what we have seen in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Greece or Spain? Hard to say but worth keeping an eye on it. 

Main references:

Outside US borders: Occupy Manchester (England)

Activities without known website (other than my bête noire, Facebook, or mere twitter hash tags) may be found at Occupy Together. They include cities in Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland.

Live feeds:
 
A video report by the people at NYC ··> PO.

Video reports by the people of Chicago ··> OccupyChicago.

Video report at Russia Today ··> PO.

Pickets disrupt foreclosure auctions in California ··> Naked Capitalism.

Opinion: Arun Gupta: The Revolution Begins at Home: a Clarion Call to Join the Wall Street Protests ··> AlterNet.

Liberty Sq.


Susan Sarandon joined the protests

Basque Country:

Errekalde neighbors demand the resignation of Bilbao Mayor Azkuna and Western Basque police chief Ares, for indiscriminate violence and fascist-like occupation of the neighborhood. They ask Amnesty International to investigate the repression  ··> Branka[es], SA[es].

(source)

Solidarity is not a crime
Police pushy against meeting (right) in solidarity with German internationalists, from Hamburg and Bremen, arrested in the eviction of Kukutza social center. Flo and Rafi are kept in the prison of Basauri, being the only people that remain under arrest for the Kukutza clashes ··> Sare Antifaxista[es/ge].

Bilbao: protest against visit by narco-terrorist Colombian ex-president Alvaro Uribe ··> Branka[es].

Marches for independence and socialism in the Gudari Eguna (Fighter's Day, Sep. 27th) across the country ··> Gara[es].


Europe:

Switzerland to quit nuclear power altogether: by an overwhelming majority of the Council of States supported the measure that implies to close down all five existing reactors by 2034 and develop hydroelectric and wind power instead. The measure was approved by the lower house back in June. While nuclear power provides 40% of the country's energy demand, most of it comes from hydroelectricity. Nuclear research is allowed to continue ··> Washington Post, AGI.


West Asia:

Palestine: the struggle against genocide and apartheid continues every day ··> Ilan Against the Wall:
  • Anata: clashes between tree-planting Palestinians and tree-burning Zionist immigrants
  • Arakib: demo against the expulsion of Bedouins ('Israeli citizens') from their ancestral homes ··> video at YouTube.
  • Asirah, Nablus: three injured, including a 10 year-old boy and a journalist, after nazi style attack by settlers with Zionist-military support ··> video at YouTube.
  • Jalgulia: protest last Saturday against land-grabbing by Zionists
  • Nabi Saleh weekly protests ··> video at YouTube.
  • Nil'in: one protester was shot by the Zionist colonial forces in the weekly demo against the Apartheid Wall ··> Further info (and videos) at Nil'in village website.
  • Sheikh Jarrah: weekly protest on Friday.
  • South Hebron Hills: scheduled protests against land-grabbing and expulsions by Zionist planned genocide machine. 
  • Jerusalem: demo against eviction of (Jewish?) homeless squatters ··> video at YouTube.
  • Tel Aviv: vigil in memory of Ibrahim Zaza, 12, murdered by Israeli terrorist bombings in the Gaza Strip concentration camp ··> video at YouTube.

Saudi Arabia: woman to be lashed for driving (women are fighting that way against the Patriarchal oppression of the fundamentalist tyranny) ··> BBC.


America:

Canada:

Ontario: to jail for selling true milk. Michael Schmidt (pictured) convicted for 'selling' raw milk within a consumer cooperative created ex-professo. Meanwhile industrials who add bone powder to milk and other abuses remain at large ··>  Food Freedom.
Vancouver: Demand that Dick Cheney to be put to trial for war crimes ··> video at PO.

Ottawa: protest against tar sands exploitation ··> video at PO. 


USA:

Boston: Demand that Donald Rumsfeld be put to trial for war crimes ··> video at PO.

Palm Beach: Postal workers demonstrate against cuts ··> video at PO.

Secret plans to dump decommissioned nuclear reactors into the Ocean unveiled ··> EneNews, Asahi.


Honduras: Supreme Court judges who opposed coup persecuted by the totalitarian regime of Lobo ··> LINYM[es].

The three honest magistrates who opposed the coup



South Asia:

India: Telangana TRS workers repressed by police ··> video at PO.


East Asia:

Japan:

Former PM Naoto Kan admits to have contemplated evacuating Tokyo (but was overwhelmed by the challenge). He did not even evacuate Fukushima, so... ··> EneNews, ABC.

TEPCO claims 'cold suhtdown' for reactor no. 2 at Fukushima Dai Ichi. This reactor was the only one not damaged in the outside but it had experienced explosions and meltdown anyhow ··> Critical analysis at Ex-SKF.

Tokyo will accept and burn radioactive waste ··> Ex-SKF.

Ocean currents prevent radiation from being diluted. Highest concentrations not necessarily closest to Fukushima ··> EneNews, NYT.