Divers working to free four trapped miners in the Swansea Valley have been forced to return above ground, after being thwarted by murky water Divers who entered a flooded mine to help free four trapped miners have been forced to return above ground, rescuers said. Specialist divers went into the Gleision Colliery near Cilybebyll, Pontardawe in the Swansea Valley, where the men have been trapped since yesterday morning, but had to abandon their efforts after about 30 metres. But rescuers remain optimistic about the welfare of the miners, named by South Wales Police as Phillip Hill, 45, from Neath, Charles Bresnan, 62, David Powell, 50, and Garry Jenkins, 39, all from the Swansea Valley. Gary Evans of the South and Mid Wales Cave Rescue Team said: “We brought in some divers to see whether it was possible to go through and speed things up. “They went into the water to see whether any progress could be made that way, and they went about 20 to 30 metres, but they weren’t able to go any further.” Rescuers had hoped the divers could assess the situation before all the water had been pumped out, but debris had made the water murky, he explained. He confirmed there was still no contact with any of the men but said they remained “very hopeful”. It is believed the miners, trapped 295ft (90m) underground, would have fled to an air pocket to await rescue. Police said emergency services were continuing a “multi-agency rescue operation”, while the men’s families were being supported by family liaison officers. Fresh rescue teams were brought in this morning to relieve crews which had worked strenuously for at least 12 hours straight. An expert listening device, which can detect movement deep underground, is the among the specialist equipment that has been drafted in as part of the efforts. A fifth miner was last night critically ill in hospital after escaping as flood water engulfed the drift mine yesterday. Two other men who were with him escaped largely unharmed and are aiding the rescue operation. The alarm was raised at the pit at around 9.20am yesterday. A retaining wall holding back a body of water underground failed, flooding a tunnel that the seven men were in. Chris Margetts, from South Wales Fire and Rescue Service, said: “What we have determined is the miners are located approximately 90 metres underground. “They are down a 250 metre main route into the mine… There are numerous little tunnels and old workings which all potentially have air pockets in. “They are experienced miners, they know the layout of the mine, they would know where to go in this situation.” He said they were pumping it out and, once they were in a position to search off the main shaft, they would then systematically look through the smaller tunnels and shafts. “The conditions down there are favourable, it’s not raining, there’s water at the bottom but the air supply is good.” He added that rescuers were very “hopeful and optimistic” that the miners could be freed successfully. He said they were constantly monitoring the quality of the air, but could not communicate with the trapped men. An emergency centre has been set up within the community hall in the nearby village of Rhos to cater for the families of the miners. The Red Cross delivered a haul of blankets and pillows to the centre last night. Neath MP and former Labour cabinet minister Peter Hain said he had spoken with family members, many of whom were in tears. He said he had been assured that everything possible was being done to free the trapped men and vowed resources needed would be brought in to help the rescue efforts. “Nothing is more important than the lives of these men,” he said. He added that he had been given regular updates on the situation himself by the on-scene police commander and rescue crews. “They tried initially to get into the tunnel that the men use to go in and out of the mine but it was blocked with water,” he said. “They have subsequently tried the mine’s air tunnel but there was insufficient oxygen so now they are pumping oxygen in and water out.” Parish priest Martin Perry hailed the spirit of the community and said there was a “real sense of hope” that the miners could be rescued. He told Sky News: “People here are very resilient. On the one hand they are very realistic about the dangerous situation the folk are in, but they have a real sense of hope that things can turn out positively.” Wales guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Michele Bachmann Meets Her Hero Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s and Begs For Endorsment
September 15, 2011 No Comment
enlarge Credit: Tom Tingle/The Arizona Republic There aren’t too many people worse than Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He reminds me of the Dennis Hof from HBO’s Cat House , doesn’t he? He’s a job creator. Michele Bachmann says Arpaio is one of her heroes . Michele Bachmann said she considers Sheriff Joe Arpaio “one of my heroes” in a brief news conference the Republican presidential candidate held before meeting with the 79-year-old sheriff on Wednesday afternoon. Bachmann spent her time with the media – it lasted less than 4 minutes – highlighting her position on immigration and getting Arizonans to understand why she considers the state an important battleground in her efforts to secure the Republican nomination. Bachmann said solving the “border issue” is something that can be done in phases, by first increasing security along the U.S. border with Mexico and then reducing programs, such as in-state tuition for undocumented students, that can entice immigrants to remain in the country without authorization. “I want to solve the border issue,” said Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman. “I want to build the fence that needs to be built.” Bachmann also said she wants Arpaio’s support. “He’s a great guy – anyone would want his endorsement,” she said. He sure is great at locking up brown people and detaining them in pseudo internment camps. Poor Gov. Jan Brewer didn’t even warrant a heads up from Michele. Her visit came as a surprise to many in local Republican and conservative circles. “NOT good form when a presidential candidate comes to Arizona and fails to notify the state party or Governor,” Shane Wikfors of the conservative blog Sonoran Alliance said Tuesday night on Twitter. In a follow-up Twitter message, Wikfors expressed dissatisfaction with the Bachmann campaign “for blowing off conservative supporters in AZ tonight!” He did support Mittens last time so I doubt he’ll give her a thumbs up endorsement, but he might giver her a tour of his detention centers.
Continue reading …Title: Plastic Jesus Artist: Paul Newman Here’s a great song from one of my favorite movie moments in the classic Cool Hand Luke . Written by Ed Rush and George Cromarty in 1957, the song was was intended to be a spoof, but Newman manages to turn it into something a little more moving. Got a favorite song from a movie?
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Duane Buck’s execution was halted after his lawyers contended his sentence was unfair because of a question asked about race during his trial Duane Buck, an inmate on Texas’s death row for the past 16 years, has been spared the lethal injection after the US supreme court stepped in and stayed his execution on the grounds that the jury at his sentencing hearing was told he was a danger to the public because he is black. The fact that it took the highest court in the nation to prevent the judicial killing of a prisoner in such controversial circumstances will put the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, further under the spotlight. He was earlier approached by lawyers of Buck and exhorted to use his power to put a 30-day reprieve on the execution to give time for all parties to look at his case, but Perry did not act. Perry, a frontrunner for the Republican nomination for next year’s presidential election, has presided over 235 executions since he became governor in 2000, the most recent just on Tuesday. Last week he defended his record at a presidential nomination debate at which the Republican TV audience cheered when the number of those who had died under him was mentioned. Buck, 48, killed his former girlfriend and a man in 1995. His guilt is not in dispute, but the fashion in which he was handed out the death penalty is. The jury that gave him the ultimate punishment was told by a psychologist, under prosecution cross-examination, that black people pose a greater risk to violent reoffending if released from jail. Buck is an African-American. The evidence of the psychologist, Dr Walter Quijano, was recognised as a huge legal problem by Texas’s then attorney general John Cornyn in 2000. Six other cases in which Quijano had given racially-tinged testimony were identified and all of them were awarded a resentencing hearing. On legal technicalities, Buck has been awarded no such safeguard. The intervention of the US supreme court gives the prisoner one last chance to plead for commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment. The issue of the death penalty is by no means at an end in Texas, however. The state executes more people each year than any other state in the nation, and has two executions scheduled for next week. Texas United States Capital punishment Human rights Rick Perry Ed Pilkington guardian.co.uk
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Click here to view this media CNN’s resident expert on drawing political false equivalences ruffled Republican tail feathers for once with this bit of commentary after the CNN/Tea Party debate the other night. Not that I disagree with him either on this point as the crazy was front and center all night. It’s just nice to see the shoe on the other foot for a change. GERGEN: Oh, I think that she made a point that resonated back home with a lot of people on the question of the 30-year-old who was dying being allowed to die and the kind of response in the hall. You will recall in that last debate Governor Perry made this point about executions in Texas and there was this big applause and it got a lot of commentary. My sense is that that exchange also will get some comment out there, Anderson, because what I find so interesting is that people in this hall really did groove on much of what they heard. This is what they wanted to hear from these candidates. There are a lot of people around the country who are just like the folks in this room. And yet there are a huge number of people, an equal number of people who I think were horrified by what they heard in this room. I was getting notes about they ought to keep this people locked up and not let them out. Don’t let them do anything to the country. So, this race is increasingly I think bringing to light and once again how divided and how splintered we are and how hard it’s going to be for anybody to govern when this is over.
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Rescue attempt continues to reach men 90 metres underground at Gleision colliery, near Swansea Rescuers remained optimistic late on Thursday night that four miners trapped 90 metres underground in a flooded Welsh colliery could be saved. The incident began on Thursday morning, when water gushed into the Gleision colliery, near Swansea, possibly after the men accidentally broke through into an old flooded shaft. Seven men, including a father and son, were in the drift mine when the accident occurred. Three – among them the son – managed to escape and raise the alarm. The father was left inside. Dozens of rescuers joined the effort to pump water out of the mine so they could reach the men, who were believed to be located 250 metres along a horizontal tunnel cut into the hillside. As families gathered in a nearby village hall to wait for news, the shadow Welsh secretary and local MP, Peter Hain, said the situation was
Continue reading …Democracy in Action: 13% Of Hollywood, Florida Voters Strip Union Workers Of Negotiated Pensions, Health Plans
September 15, 2011 No Comment
enlarge Well, this is novel. It seems that Hollywood, Florida had a referendum and not very many people came, which is really too bad since it means firefighters, police, and other city employees may now have their benefits taken after 13 percent of all registered voters in Hollywood voted for deep cuts to them. Via the Miami-Herald : With a low voter turnout — about 13 percent of the city’s 84,521 registered voters — residents cast ballots to strip police, firefighters and the city’s general employee’s of their current pension plans, allowing the city to save $8.5 million. “This isn’t necessarily something where we look at it and say ‘yay’ we won,” said City Spokeswoman Raelin Storey. “This has been a very difficult time for the city.” Facing a $38 million deficit and unable to come to an agreement with the city’s unions, Hollywood leaders took the risky move of putting the issue to a public referendum. Last year, the city said it had to put $36.6 million into the underfunded pension program. Several cities throughout South Florida are also struggling with sharply increased pension costs, and have been eyeing the Hollywood case to see how it turned out. Yeah, I’ll just bet they are. Basically, 13 percent of city residents (and you can guess which ones), came out to tell public servants they weren’t worth the extra money. Austerity! What bothers me most about this is that it was a referendum. Basically, the city charter says that if no agreement is reached between the city and collective bargaining units, the city has the right to put a referendum on the ballot and call for a vote. How is this good faith bargaining by any stretch of the imagination? Unions obviously aren’t going to take this without a fight. Wednesday’s Miami-Herald: The city has democracy in its corner, with the majority of voters agreeing to change. But union leaders say the referendum circumvented the state’s collective bargaining practice. “If we don’t prevail, that means collective bargaining doesn’t exist in the state of Florida,” said Hollywood Firefighter Union President Dan Martinez. Ralph Dierks, president of the general employees union, said lawyers are reviewing Tuesday’s vote and will soon make a decision on filing a lawsuit. “It is definitely not off the table,” Dierks said. And some law professors and labor attorneys say the unions may have a valid argument that a referendum violates a public employee’s right to collectively bargain. “I’d be stunned if the unions just walked away,” said Bob Jarvis a law professor at Nova Southeastern University. “I definitely think the city is going to have a lawsuit on its hands.” Voters agreed by a more than 10 percent margin that the pension plans for police, fire and general employees needed to be cut to save the city $8.5 million. I don’t view it as anything like democracy when 13 percent of the voters make a decision like this. That’s about 11,000 voters, which is hardly anything near a majority. If this stands, it will mean a lot of challenges to collective bargaining practices across the country. I wonder if ALEC has a recommendation in their “screw the public” toolbox for this. I’m just betting it’s in here somewhere.
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Texas executes more people than any other state in America, and there are currently more than 300 Texan prisoners on death row. Roll over the images on the interactive to find out more about them Garry Blight
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Scandal of $2.6bn bank fraud embroils president’s chief of staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been forced to deny that his protege was involved in a $2.6bn (£1.64bn) bank fraud, described as the country’s biggest ever financial scam. The president’s official website on Thursday issued a statement , saying his chief of staff and close confidant, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, was not linked to the scandal, which has dominated the headlines in Tehran in the past few days. It emerged recently that Iranian regulators had frozen the assets of a businessman, identified by some local media as Amir-Mansour Aria, accused of forging documents in order to obtain credit estimated at around 30tn rials from various financial institutions, including Bank Saderat Iran, one of the largest financial institutions in the Middle East. It is reported that Aria used the credit to buy state-owned companies such as the Khuzestan steel company during the government’s controversial privatisation scheme, which started in 2004. Some conservative websites published a leaked letter reportedly signed by Mashaei, in which he appears to give the go-ahead for the purchase of a state-owned steel company by a private company without the necessary formal procedures. The statement from the president’s office said Mashaei had done nothing wrong. “In continuation of damaging policies against the dedicated government, some newspapers and chain websites have discussed the issue of the banking scam ‘which had been investigated and found by the government’ in order to spread lies and propaganda … and accusing the clean and anti-corruption government of being involved in it,” the statement said. The fraud comes at the time when the president and his allies are caught in the middle of a bitter power struggle with conservatives close to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Some supporters of Khamenei believe that Mashaei is trying to increase his political influence by undermining clerical power and appealing to young people by advocating greater cultural openness. Some analysts speculated that Ahmadinejad was grooming Mashaei to succeed him in the next presidential elections. In its attempt to distance Mashaei from the scam, the statement said it reserved the right to file a complaint against the website Mashregh, the semi-official Fars news agency and newspapers including Keyhan and Tehran Emrooz, which played a key role in revealing the financial scandal in recent days. Fars is believed to be affiliated to the revolutionary guards and the head of Keyhan is appointed directly by the supreme leader. Some analysts believe privatisation has become a cover-up for redistributing the previously state-owned sectors among regime factions and various groups close to the establishment. However, the IMF in June published a statement in which it praised the economic policies of Ahmadinejad, saying the government had been successful “in reducing inequalities, improving living standards and supporting domestic demand”. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Iran Middle East Saeed Kamali Dehghan guardian.co.uk
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Far right’s 10-year grip on government has ended as Danes vote in a centre-left coalition led by Helle Thorning-Schmidt The far right’s 10-year grip on Denmark’s government has ended as the Danes voted for their first female prime minister, handing government to a centre-left coalition. The close general election gave victory to the social democrats, closing a decade of rightwing ascendancy during which a minority government of liberals and conservatives was kept in power by parliamentary support from the europhobic, Muslim-baiting Danish People’s party. Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the social democrat leader and daughter-in-law of Neil and Glenys Kinnock, salvaged her political career by ousting the liberal prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen’s coalition at her second attempt. She is expected to form a government with three other liberal and leftwing parties. Her victory, though, was narrower than predicted and could produce a fragile coalition. Her “red bloc” secured only a three-seat majority of the 175 at stake in mainland Denmark, with almost all votes counted. A further four seats reserved for faraway Greenland and the Faroes islands had still to be declared. The expectation was that the centre-left would emerge with a five-seat margin in the 179-seat chamber in Copenhagen. The social democratic win bucked the trend of politics in Europe where the centre-left has been in the doldrums, unable to capitalise on the fallout from the 2008 financial and economic crisis and stagnation in the EU while also failing to come up with attractive policies on other potent issues such as immigration and Islam. European centre-left leaders claimed to detect a shift in the public mood ahead of elections in France and Italy next year. The DPP, whose influence has forced the passage of dozens of laws countering immigration and whose success over the past decade has made it the model for likeminded parties in Sweden, Finland and The Netherlands who have chalked up notable gains over the past two years, conceded defeat and promised robust opposition. “Immigration policy is our lifeblood. Do you think they can get by without us? No, they can’t,” declared Pia Kjaersgaard, the party leader. The far right has succeeded in making its tough anti-immigrant position the Danish mainstream stance. Thorning-Schmidt is not expected to veer radically from that, but two of her proposed coalition partners, the Social Liberal party and the Red-Green Alliance, performed strongly in the election and espouse less restrictive immigration policies. Analysts said that in a society that prizes consensus, major changes in key policy areas were unlikely. But with economic stagnation and a rising budget deficit dominating the campaign, the outgoing government promised spending cuts while Thorning-Schmidt argued for more investment in education, welfare, and infrastructure. Given the austerity policies favoured across Europe by the dominant centre-right as the response to the lack of growth, Denmark will be watched to see whether the new government will take a different approach and succeed. Denmark The far right Europe Ian Traynor Lars Eriksen guardian.co.uk
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