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Journalist Charged in North Dakota with Rioting; Case is Dismissed

posted by martyb on Wednesday October 19 2016, @01:09PM   
from the freedom-of-the-press dept.

butthurt writes:

Amy Goodman, host of the New York City-based leftist news programme Democracy Now! was charged with criminal trespass by the North Dakota state's attorney (prosecutor). The charge was changed to riot, then was dismissed due to lack of evidence when Goodman appeared in court on Monday. The charges stemmed from her presence at a protest in September against construction of the Dakota Access (Bakken) oil pipeline, after the protest was reported on her show.

Coverage:

• Ars Technica
• Democracy Now!
• Democracy Now! (with video and transcript)
• New York Times
• Salon
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op-ed
• The Nation (prior to dismissal)
• Fortune

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Original Submission

• Re:$40 million/job Re:$40 million/job (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 19 2016, @09:23PM

  by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday October 19 2016, @09:23PM (#416350) Journal

  You nailed it. It is not about jobs. It's about the refineries and private profits for corporations. If all the states between point A and point B should suffer the costs of a clean up, should the pipeline leak, well that's tough cookies.

  Wait, dammit, i thought the key to parsing khallow was that anything the US or khallow does is just fine, but now we have to concatenate another exception "unless obama?" No wonder this code keeps returning the wrong answer--it's impossible to debug.

  Sigh. Anyway, you're right about it being bullshit.

  --
  Washington DC delenda est.

  Parent

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• Re:$40 million/job Re:$40 million/job (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 19 2016, @09:56PM

  by khallow (3766) on Wednesday October 19 2016, @09:56PM (#416368) Journal

  Apparently, the project has already passed EPA approval. So they must have something to show for plans on cleaning up spills. One thing about spills from pipelines is that they tend to be very easy to shut down and contain compared to rail car accidents (and you'll never have a string of states affected by a single leak). I've read of several Alaska Pipeline spills, for example, including at least two cases of sabotage/vandalism, and none of the spills ended up being significant. For example, in 1978 someone blew a one inch hole in the pipeline resulting in the largest spill of 16,000 barrels of oil. While pipeline spills tend to be larger, railroad accidents from North Dakota have been rather numerous.

  Parent

  • Re:$40 million/job (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 20 2016, @11:33AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday October 20 2016, @11:33AM (#416579) Journal

    Yeah that's the other point. There are a lot of other pipelines that cross the country. They keep a lot of trucks and train cars off the road that would otherwise transport that product, which saves CO2 itself. Adding another doesn't seem to matter that much.

    In this case I think it was the environmental lobby trying to find another issue to fundraise on. They haven't gotten much love from the Obama administration, and their coffers must be getting low at this point. Their lawyers and lobbyists have expensive homes and lifestyles in DC they have to maintain, you know. The thing is they've been throwing stuff against the wall for the last eight years, hoping that something would stick that they could farm for dollars. They tried the Pacific trash gyre. They tried banning microbeads, the tiny plastic bits put in soaps and toothpaste as abrasives. They tried to attack another pipeline that already crosses the great lakes underwater. They also tried to push tiny homes and entomophagy, but that didn't catch on because what country do they think this is? The Keystone Pipeline was the only one they got any traction with, but god knows why.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.

    Parent