http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1132274.html
Haaretz's Amira Hass awarded journalism prize by media watchdog
By Haaretz Service
Haaretz: Wed., December 03, 2009
The Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders on Wednesday
awarded veteran Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass a "Press Freedom" prize,
for "independent and outspoken reporting."
In granting the award, the watcdog's committee cited Hass' articles about
the Gaza Strip during Israel's winter offensive against Hamas in the coastal
territory.
Hass, who has lived in both Gaza and the West Bank, has also been awarded a
number of prizes in the past for her reporting.
She was awarded the Golden Dove of Peace Prize by the Rome-based
organization Archivo Disarmo in 2001, and won the UNESCO Guillermo Cona
World Press Freedom Prize in 2003.
In October this year, the International Women's Media Foundation granted
Hass the Lifetime Achievement Award.
***
From: Sid Shniad
Canada's image lies in tatters. It is now to climate what Japan is to
whaling
The tar barons have held the nation to ransom. This thuggish petro-state is
today the only obstacle to a deal in Copenhagen
George Monbiot
The Guardian: November 30, 2009
Syncrude Oil Sands, Mine and Refinery, the world's largest oil sand
operation producing crude oil at Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, October 20,
2001. Photograph: Greg Smith/Corbis
When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world's
peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher
pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed?
Think again. This country's government is now behaving with all the
sophistication of a chimpanzee's tea party. So amazingly destructive has
Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh
into this fight, that I've broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to
Toronto.
So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured
nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down
the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards
dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest
commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of
the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as
any waged by George Bush.
Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new
climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real
villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in
December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.
In 2006 the new Canadian government announced it was abandoning its targets
to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol. No other country that had
ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by
6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%.
It is now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its
legal obligations. The Kyoto protocol can be enforced only through goodwill:
countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss
their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller
than that of any other rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won't
accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the
international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too
easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren't worth the paper
they're written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen
void.
After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other
nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it
singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets
for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December
2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups
to the country that had done most to disrupt the talks. The climate change
performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world's 60 richest
nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada
came 59th.
In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which
showed the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. During the
meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc
walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted
by his bullying. Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for
hours (and eventually won) against Canada's obstructions. A concerted
campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth.
In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to
wreck the talks. The rest of the world must do everything in its power to
stop it. But such is the fragile nature of climate agreements that one rich
nation â?" especially a member of the G8, the Commonwealth and the Kyoto
group of industrialised countries â?" could scupper the treaty. Canada now
threatens the wellbeing of the world.
Why? There's a simple answer: Canada is developing the world's second
largest reserve of oil. Did I say oil? It's actually a filthy mixture of
bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most
of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast
mining operation on earth. An area the size of England, comprising pristine
forests and marshes, will be be dug up â?" unless the Canadians can stop
this madness. Already it looks like a scene from the end of the world: the
strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale.
To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. Three
barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. The contaminated
water is held in vast tailings ponds, some so toxic that the tar companies
employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface. Most are unlined. They
leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations
people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and
auto-immune diseases.
Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining
crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six
million homes. Alberta's tar sands operation is the world's biggest single
industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth
continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark.
Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest
per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely
begun.
Canada hasn't acted alone. The biggest leaseholder in the tar sands is
Shell, a company that has spent millions persuading the public that it
respects the environment. The other great greenwasher, BP, initially decided
to stay out of tar. Now it has invested in plants built to process it. The
British bank RBS, 70% of which belongs to you and me (the government's share
will soon rise to 84%), has lent or underwritten £8bn for mining the tar
sands.
The purpose of Canada's assault on the international talks is to protect
this industry. This is not a poor nation. It does not depend for its
economic survival on exploiting this resource. But the tar barons of Alberta
have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured
Canada's politics and are turning this lovely country into a cruel and
thuggish place.
Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of
Neanderthals to trample over it. Timber firms were licensed to log the
old-growth forest in Clayaquot Sound; fishing companies were permitted to
destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get-rich-quick schemes
impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it
affects the whole world. The government's scheming at the climate talks is
doing for its national image what whaling has done for Japan.
I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an agreement at
Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The
immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world
comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How
could that be true?
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