On day 58 of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, the US government forced BP to allocate $20 billion to compensate victims affected. While US lawmakers decried the fact that only $71 million had been paid out last Tuesday, the contrast with the Niger Delta is striking. Victims in the small village of Ebebu have waited for 40…

That BP covered up its worst-case scenario of gushing 100,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico simply confirms what many people living in Nigeria’s oil region have long protested about. In the Niger Delta, companies like Shell routinely under-report spill figures and volumes to limit their liabilities in terms of fines…

من المسري اليوم تعرضت شواطئ القرى السياحية والشواطئ العامة بالغردقة للتلوث، إثر ظهور بقع زيت كبيرة امتدت إلى جميع شواطئ المدينة، من الجونة شمالاً، حتى منطقة سهل حشيش جنوباً، لمسافة تزيد على نحو 20 كيلومتراً، فيما لم تحدد الجهات المعنية مصدر التلوث حتى الآن. وقرر عدد من أصحاب الفنادق والقرى السياحية، تقديم بلاغ ضد وزارتي…

As the US government takes BP to task over the disasterous Gulf of Mexico spill, many Nigerians (including twitter users) are asking, ‘what about Shell?’. There is nothing clean about Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta, where daily oil spills are  frequently ignored for months and where ‘clean up’ methods include dumping oil-drenched soil into pits before…

A Chatham House event last Thursday launched the new report “Unpaid Debt: The Legacy of Lundin, Petronas and OMV in Sudan, 1997-2003,” on the role of oil companies in fuelling war and atrocities in Sudan. A group of aid agencies that worked in Sudan during the civil war, the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan (ECOS), have called for an…

Claire Hall from Espacio Bristol-Colombia describes how the Colombian army has joined in the repression of striking BP workers in Casanare. from Upside Down World: “A five month long mobilisation against BP in the Casanare region of Colombia has escalated after the Colombian army entered the BP installations with force this week and confronted workers who have been peacefully…

I’m posting a few pieces which have emerged from C Words starting with this piece by curator Sophie Hope on C Words, activism, and the art world, continuing with “what the stewards saw”, and ending with a wallop “It was doomed from the start” from Gary Anderson of the Institute for the Art & Practice…

An article by John Vidal in The Observer this week finds that the enormity of oil pollution in Nigeria ‘dwarfs’ BP’s Deepwater Horizon blow-out. Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta…

In a blunt display of corporate censorship, Chevron officials denied respected human rights activist and Niger Delta women’s leader Emem Okon and a global delegation including Justice In Nigeria Now from its annual Shareholder Meeting in Houston yesterday (picture credit: Rainforest Action Network’s Change Chevron campaign).  The company, which is facing multiple lawsuits regarding its…