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The Writings on the Walls # 1

Blog post - Nov 13, 2009

To capture the essence of C Words, African Writers Abroad have released a constant stream of poetry online and offline, on physical and virtual walls. A leaflet will also soon be made available in the Arnolfini for visitors to take away which features this poetry together with newly commissioned work, contributions from participants on the...

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BP & Shell support ‘astro-turfing’ climate blockers

Blog post - Aug 21, 2009

Lobby groups funded by BP & Shell are organising public rallies in the US to oppose proposed legislation that would cap carbon emissions. The American Petroleum Institute (API) provided “upfront resources” to pay for an events company to organise public protest meetings. The tactic of “astroturfing” has been used by corporations since the 1990s to...

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Romanian Nodding Donkeys

Blog post - Jul 18, 2009

While the train passes through fields of shiny windturbines in Austria, after descending through the Hungarian mountains down towards the Black Sea, the Romanian plains are full of ‘nodding donkeys’, an ancient means of extracting crude from shallow fields in small quantities. As each ‘donkey’ can only extract so much, fields are littered with hundreds of these...

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BP’s extraction operations in Brussels

Blog post - Jul 16, 2009

Only in Brussels for 90 minutes, so not long enough to visit BP’s office on Rondpoint Schumann, adjacent to the European Commission. This provides the company’s easy access for major EU lobbying of various EU institutions. BP — Extracting Influence at the heart of the EU, a report published earlier in 2009 by Corporate Europe Observatory and PLATFORM unmasked BP’s attempts to harness EU foreign policy and legislative...

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Waiting for the first train