Slashdot Mirror
Mafia Sinks Ships Containing Toxic Waste
Hugh Pickens writes "For years there have been rumors that the mafia was sinking ships with nuclear and other waste on board as part of a money-making racket. Now, BBC reports on a sunken vessel that has been found 30km off the coast of Italy. Murky pictures taken by a robot camera show the vessel intact, and alongside it are a number of yellow barrels with labels indicating the contents are toxic. The ship's location was revealed by Francesco Fonti, an ex-member of Calabria's feared 'Ndrangheta crime group, who confessed to using explosives to sink this vessel and two others as part of an illegal operation to bypass rules on the disposal of toxic waste. Experts are now examining samples taken from the wreck, and an official says that if the samples prove to be radioactive then a search for up to 30 other sunken vessels believed scuttled by the mafia would begin immediately. 'The Mediterranean is 0.7 percent of the world's seas. If in this tiny portion there are more than 30 (toxic waste) shipwrecks, imagine what there could be elsewhere,' says Silvestro Greco, head of Calabria's environment agency."
spicy meatball!
Those ships? Fuggedaboutit!
Fuck. Me. I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be a person with no moral fibre at all. I can't imagine it, must be weird.
Toxic waste sleeps with the fishes...
Actually organized crime in the US has also been linked to similar dumping, just not on that large a scale.
Tony Soprano was a waste management consultant.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
So then what? Nothing happens to these people? If they are connected to this mess and convicted they should press them into service as part of the clean up process of all this crap. Make them work cleaning up the lethal crap they felt no qualms about exposing everyone else to.
"If it makes me $1000, I'll do it. That it will harm 10.000.000 people, it doesn't matter".
That said, nuclear waste is not necessarily the most dangerous imaginable. Believe it or not, the humble dioxines can be more dangerous. If for no other reason, because they accumulate in the body without ever leaving it (except for liposuction).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
That whole country is corrupt as hell. Did you know that most merchants will claim their visa /debit machines are broken so you have to pay cash? Did you know that you have to pay 3+ euros in most places just to sit down?
A friend of mine went to italy and he says it was NOT worth it. There is so much crime, and even the "honest" shopkeeps constantly overcharge you, 10 euro for a fanta after you have already drank it, etc...
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
If the government didn't want them to dump this waste out at sea, they would ease the restrictions on the disposal of toxic waste. Once again we witness how government regulation results in MORE pollution rather than less.
Just imagine those waify PETA chicks getting all mad and kicking the big bruiser mafia guys asses!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
I don't have a hard time imagining crooked corporations paying to have their chemical waste disposed under the table like this, but who has nuclear waste that would do this? At least here in the US I can't see a power plant getting away with this - they have to keep close account of their material and it is audited pretty closely as well. That would leave mostly medical and scientific sources. I suppose they don't dispose of that directly so the company they paid to take care of it must be crooked.
The people that made this decision deserve to fry. Too bad it is impossible to create a justice system that I would actually trust to make those sort of decisions.
EPA doesn't apply. The EPA is a United States government agency with no jurisdiction whatsoever in Italy.
EPA's Italian counterpart, however, does have jurisdiction and probably someone in that organization received some nice bribes.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Yes, because obviously the Italian Mafia in ITALY has to have permission from the EPA, in the U.S.A., to do anything.
If they are connected to this mess and convicted
Good luck with that, as they say. If it's anything like NYC, Justice will pretty much need two separate news crews, six NYPD detectives, nineteen passersby, and a televangelist to witness one of the "made men" machinegun down a busload of out-of-town nuns at high noon in Times Square on the day before Election Day to be served.
Then the appeals process begins...
There's only 24 ships! 24 is the highest numbah!
What I could never understand is why italy isn't able to clean out the mob more efficiently. Stories like this one though explains a lot...
Is it possible that these mafia people are stupid? Imagine we can reprocess nuclear waste, in many of the ways that slashdotters will include below. Now this nuclear waste conveniently stored underwater, is fuel that we can use to power our toys with. This is assuming that there wasn't any damage to the containers, and a big cleanup isn't required. Hopefully, when the world comes to its senses, and makes better use of its resources, we won't have these kinds of problems. (It always drives me crazy that there are organizations that will burn or throw away or sequester potentially useful materials. Sure mercury is poisonous. Extract it from your waste, and sell it to someone that needs it. The same with CO2, and even radon. I wonder about gold production from mining landfills.)
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
This has long been suspected, and there's a connection to Somali piracy. The mysterious blogger "TokyoTom" has an excellent summary of the research indicating that European companies were using the lack of a government in Somali to dump toxic waste illegally near the coast of Somali, which really wreaked havoc after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, which washed a lot of the crap onshore and caused mass illness.
There were always suspicious that this illegal dumping was a money source for the Mafia, although even legit businesses seem to have no problem with it. I don't defend Somali pirates, but people forget that it originated from fishers trying to get illegal dumpers to leave the area, then to try to get compensation for what the dumpers did. This doesn't justify piracy, but it does give lie to the notion that they lack a legitimate grievance and are simply out for money, and it helps to explain why they enjoy such support from Somalians.
I'm surprised the Mafia didn't screw up so bad sooner.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Make them and their children eat the fish that swim around the wrecks.
Step 1: To the coast of Somalia and let the pirates seize the ship.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!!!
Problem solved
WTF? Over?
Don't you have to have some kind of license from the EPA to dispose of toxic waste? Did the producers of the waste not verify the license? There are not that many places to dispose of toxic waste. I am sure it was more than just the guys in the mafia who were in on this. I think the producers of the waste should be responsible for the clean up.
Well... First of all I don't think the EPA has jurisdiction over Italy.
Second, they're the Mafia, I don't think they worry all that much about legality.
Third, I kind of thought that the whole reason this was a story was because it was illegal.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
i hope they soon realize the next time they order fish in a restaurant that the fish comes from the same ocean that they sunk those ships, all that water circulates so pollution one part of the ocean gets around to the rest...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
To get a good impression of 'Ndrangheta's involvement with toxic waste, go see Gomorra. Excellent movie, even though it is somewhat depressing to realize that is based on reality.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
The line between major corporations and the mafia is a grey one. Do we really think that if a major corporation could get away with this, that they wouldn't do it, if it contributed significantly to their bottom line? Corporate behavior is all about cost-benifit analysis. The mafia operates by a slightly different risk profile. It also seems likely that what we think of as the mafia owns substantial portions of equity in our major corporations.
Why do I think this comment is appropriate to the discussion? Because I watch the behavior of legitimate corporations and see similarities. Gold mining companies often create huge pools of arsenic waste. The oil sands companies in Canada create huge and persistent pools of massively polluted water, sucking away and polluting water that would have otherwise gone for agriculture or human consumption. Major shipping companies routinely dump their oil laden bilge water in the open ocean. How exactly does this behavior not fall under the category of "organized crime"?
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Mafia Ship (to the gambling/whorehouse ship in International Waters): We didn't see nothin' if you didn't see nothin'
The Mediterranean is 0.7 percent of the world's seas. If in this tiny portion there are more than 30 (toxic waste) shipwrecks, imagine what there could be elsewhere,' says Silvestro Greco, head of Calabria's environment agency.
Isn't that like saying "OMG, this chainsaw massacre crime scene is just .00000000000000000001% of the earth's surface, so if there's 5 dismembered bodies here just imagine how many more there could be elsewhere?! You should totally give my Agency more money."
a subduction zone might be a good place for nuclear waste.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Don't you have to have some kind of license from the EPA to dispose of toxic waste? Did the producers of the waste not verify the license?
Please tell us you aren't that naïve; this is the real world not the world as you think it should be or would like it to be.
Should be Funny.
For years one of Haiti's largest industries was the receiving of waste too toxic for even the most high-tech of US processors to handle. Of course that was one of Baby Doc's businesses, and equally obviously there was no waste-processing facility adequate for the task in Haiti, but that never stopped DOW or any of the other mega-corps that paid them to take the stuff away. The EPA only cares if the waste is going to be disposed of in the US, if it's going elsewhere they don't really care much. Their responsibility stops at the edge of their jurisdiction. I rather suspect that most of the European environmental bureaucracies function much the same, with exceptions for obvious issues like acid rain.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Now you did it. This calls for the death match of the Calabria mafia vs. Green Jihad. I have never thought I'd side with the annoying jihadis.
Destination Unknown, indeed.
This is something I think about all the time.
It could be argued that we are all immoral, because we are not interested in the consequences of our actions. The mafia crook dynamiting the ship with toxic waste isn't much different from an "waste resources" executive who bargains to send toxic waste to countries who need the money. One is exalted, one reviled, yet they both basically do the same thing. The executive simply pretends that the waste is properly disposed of in another country. The mafia crook doesn't kid himself. He knows the truth, and accepts it.
Which person is more immoral? Where does accountability figure into the equation? And where in a capitalist equation do you enter the morality quotient? Who enforces it?
These questions are simply not asked, because no one really wants the answer. For me, voluntary ignorance is immoral, and represents one of the great evils in the world today.
Imagine a world where all the movies from the early nineties come to pass. If suddenly we do have to live through movies from the 90's, here are some reasons to kill yourself now:
Battle field earth
Encino Man
MANY Batman's
Spice World
'The Mediterranean is 0.7 percent of the world's seas. If in this tiny portion there are more than 30 (toxic waste) shipwrecks, imagine what there could be elsewhere,'
4,285 sunken ships. ish.
The US Navy had dumped waste of all kinds in deep ocean trenches off the coast of California for years. I'm sure they have stopped now but the total to date had to be WAY more than the mafia have dumped.
There are ticking time-bombs of toxic waste that are just waiting for the ocean to eat through the barrels so they can kill massive amounts of wildlife. They are so deep that it would probably be very expensive, if it's even possible, to recover the waste. I wish I could include a link to some authoritative site that will confirm the information but it's not the kind of information that our government wants to publicize. I only found out about it through someone who was in charge of hazardous waste management at a major defense research company.
It's a nightmare scenario if ever there was one.
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
'The Mediterranean is 0.7 percent of the world's seas. If in this tiny portion there are more than 30 (toxic waste) shipwrecks, imagine what there could be elsewhere,' says Silvestro Greco,
Hmm, 30 is 0.7% of 4290 so if 30 is the average number of toxic vessels in the ocean were screwed. I think we need a bigger sample size, and perhaps a less bias sample size.
Just imagine that it could be anywhere from 0 to something less than infinite. We should give this guy money to find out.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
All of my sibling posts seem to gloss over the meat of the argument and instead focusing on the USA != Italy part.
He's saying that the producers of the waste should be responsible for the cleanup, for not verifying the credentials of the people paid to dispose of the waste.
The problem, though, is that the government itself is corrupt, and most likely the "company" (a shell company that probably would turn up no connections to anybody or any money) had completely legitimate documentation acquired through bribes. There's no way that the producers of the waste could know about the fraud.
I can understand that there *might* be some problems if you dump some really poisonous stuff in a shallow sea (surely, even the Mediterranean has enough water to dilute any poisons beyond detection), but what's the problem with dumping radioactives? This is usually solid stuff, that will stay exactly where you put it. It's also encased in barrels, which in this sunken ship are still intact. The bottom of the ocean sounds like a pretty darn good place to put this stuff. If you avoid upwellings, where most of the ocean life exists, the rest of the ocean is a barren desert. No nitrogen - no plankton - no fish. So go out there and sink all this waste to some deep trench. Ten thousand years later it will all be harmless and we can mine it and make cars from it or something.
Donations to the "Francesco Fonti And His Family And Their Pets Memorial Fund" can be sent to their former neighbours in Calabria.
So if you go to the middle east there are regularly news reports about how the west (possibly with some specifics), are dumping toxic/radioactive waste off the coast of Somalia/Egypt/Iraq/Pakistan/other muslim country with a coast. And we - in the west- tend to regard these as nonsense. But now we're finding out that we are getting toxic waste dumped off the coast of western countries - that seems like it might be tip of the iceberg. Somalia isn't nearly as likely as italy to catch these things (albeit rather slowly), who knows what we could find in the deep waters off countries that don't have the ability to patrol their own coasts.
I guess the Mediterranean will soon be full of Bart Simpson's favorite seafood.
In the Godfather 7: Godfather TRON what we see is that after the murder of a local police captain, Michael retreats to Sicily and meets a local woman. He asks her hand in marriage, and there is much rejoicing. On their honeymoon, they swim in the warm waters off the coast. Michael suspects there is a bomb in his car, ready to kill his new innocent bride.
But as the bomb explodes, she is burned badly. However, having become a mutant with healing powers, she recovers and grows adamantium claws! Michael makes her an offer she cannot refuse and she has an epic battle with Godzilla at the end. Her mutant name becomes "Olive Slicer"!!!!
Bartkid sez,
This reminds me of an old Serbian proverb (I believe I ran across it in Sebastian Junger's nonfiction collection, Fire):
A fool can throw a stone in the sea which the wisest man cannot retrieve.
What would be interesting is to find out who are the clients (Companies) that paid the Mafia to do this? Must be some powerful companies and individuals involved.
'The Mediterranean is 0.7 percent of the world's seas. If in this tiny portion there are more than 30 (toxic waste) shipwrecks, imagine what there could be elsewhere,'
well, it sounds as if they re already using RIAA math.
I remember many stories a couple of decades ago about medical waste washing up on the shores of NY and NJ. I don't recall any of them explicitly stating that the mob could be involved. Although it was well known that they controlled garbage hauling across the region.
I hate our species...
I would say that the mafia has just made about 200 million new enemies by doing this.
Some of those 200m people will be very powerful and respond by using same techniques as the mafia uses.
And probably other mafias will probably want to punish this, because this will probably tenfold efforts to stem organized crime.
I would not hesitate for a second crushing the scull of someone who is responsible for this.
We skip the hard part and pass the savings on to us!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The part of international law that covers this is the London Dumping Convention which prohibits this sort of thing. http://www.imo.org/Conventions/contents.asp?topic_id=258&doc_id=681
Low level radioactive waste dumping and industrial waste dumping were prohibited in 1994 and 1995 respectively. Interestingly, in the US, some "permanent" radioactive waste storage sites such as at Humboldt 3 reactor will have to be moved if there is much sea level rise as a result of global warming since disposal at sea is not allowed. Ahh the tangled webs we weave.
If in this tiny portion there are more than 30 (toxic waste) shipwrecks, imagine what there could be elsewhere,' says Silvestro Greco
Well I don't see the fucking Italian mafia anywhere else.
Like believing god will wash you sins away anytime you ask. I wish daily that I could lie, cheat and steal to get what I want. But NO, I have ethics and no god who will "wash away my sins" just for asking.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
This is a great example of why "the solution to pollution is dilution" is NOT the way to do things!
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/1999/July/316enr.htm
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
What? This is just outsourcing to another vendor what corporations have been doing 'in house' since... well, ever.
God created woman, and she had 3 breasts.He said to the woman, "Is there anything on you that you'd like to change?"She said, "Yes. Could you get rid of this middle breast?"God snapped his fingers and it was done.She exclaimed, holding the third breast in her hand,"What am I going to do with this useless boob?"And God created man.
I'm so proud that once in a while Italy makes the Slashdot headlines.
Actually, I think the emphasis was a bit wrong on "ethics" and "morals". A more correct definition is that some people lack "empathy". See, psychopathy.
Morals and ethics can be see as an agreed upon code, but empathy is something built in and arguably hard-wired. See, mirror neurons.
In effect, most of those morals and ethics -- and the real reason why most people go along with them -- are based on that empathy. We're hard-wired to be nice to our fellow humans. Well, about 97% of us, anyway. We don't kill basically because at a hard-wired level something says "well, _I_ wouldn't like to be killed." We don't steal for the same reason. Etc.
To address your objection: We agree to not have sex with a 14 year old, basically because nowadays we understand that it would cause some psychological harm and that it would make her parents very unhappy. And we're nicer than that.
But it's a bit deeper, actually. It's not just about direct harm, it's that we tend to understand that others have the same needs on Maslow's pyramid, so to speak. Even without knowing what those are. We tend to realize that others need to feel safe too, for example. Or that they need their private space too. Etc.
Basically while the actual social contract may vary and is subjective, it's based upon something which doesn't. Sure, we may find different solutions to the same problem, but that problem is real and pretty objective. (You can actually see it on an MRI scan, if you want something which isn't dependent of subjective interpretations.)
A second factor is that, essentially, we're social animals and want to belong in a group of our peers. (See Maslow's pyramid again.) We want to be accepted, maybe even appreciated, etc. We're prepared to work out a compromise to that end, so the group can function or even exist.
There are rules and morals and ethics which, basically, solve _that_ problem. They're how the group organizes itself, so it can exist as a group. I won't stress you, if you won't stress me, and all that, in a nutshell.
That's something that all the moral relativists seem to miss. They dig up some seemingly arbitrary rule, like "don't have sex with too young people", and wave it as a banner for the idea that all rules are just arbitrary conventions. But they miss the foundation for that body of rules, and the purpose they serve. But I digress.
Sociopaths are amoral basically because they lack that foundation which makes the other people be moral and ethical. The difference is basically at a different level than the morals and ethics themselves.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sorry, but I hate the math in Mr. Greco's quote. It's like saying, "Wow, look how high the murder rate is in Washington D.C.! Washington D.C. is 0.00003% of the surface of the earth. Imagine how much murder there is in the rest of the world!"
The waste on those ships comes from businesses that have either consigned it to shady transporters or have knowingly sent it directly to the ship dumpers. In the United States, the RCRA law requires 'cradle-to-grave' responsibility for the waste with signed manifests to licensed transporters and disposal operations at each step. The waste generator retains final responsibility for the waste wherever it ends up. There is therefore no incentive for a waste generator (i.e. the business that created the waste) to send it away with a ship dumper because it would eventually be found and traced back to its source requiring expensive cleanup and re-disposal at a licensed site, not to mention the very stiff criminal and civil penalties for the individuals responsible...i.e. those who signed the waste manifests.
There's only one problem with that "summary" -- it's factually wrong on almost every count. The fishing there is Asian, not European, and most of it is well off coastal waters. If you follow all of the links, there's not one that has anything substantiating the claims of toxic waste dumping. The real problem in Somalia is that the Muslim extremists have taken over most of the country, and have spread their hedonistic values while enslaving my home. Fuck you.
First off there is no such thing as the Mafia. It is nothing more then the realm of conspiracy theory nut jobs wearing tin foil hats.
There is no way such a large scale criminal organization could exist. Such a large scale operation is simply the result of an over active imagination.
If there was such a large network of organized crime the implications are staggering. Democrats and Republicans alike could easily be seen as a bed and wed member of such organizations with a network of judges, law enforcement; the list runs top to bottom. No institution would be safe if such organizations existed.
With out much effort a simple shallow dig could easily expose connections to such organizations. If such agencies of criminal behavior existed the people would easily rise up and topple such an organization as hiding such activities on such a large scale would be near impossible.
In fact to supress such scrutinty would take a coordinated effort of industry titans, politicians, and the complete hijacking of main stream media outlets.
Total nonsense. Mafia... psh.. the wet dream of tin foil hat wearing fruit cakes. There is no such thing as the Mafia nor any evidence that large portions of the global political elite are involved.
Move along... nothing to see here. I said MOVE ALONG!
If there was such an organization it would be far to easy to put the pieces together and actually see an organized effort to supress basic rights, enslaved people to a tiny elite, and rebuild the old world aristocracy and build a new world order with such a corrupt organization at the helm.
Nope... no such thing. This story is a total fabrication. Get your tin foil hats out if you are willing to believe such nonsense...
No a corrupt organization wouldn't fabricate circumstances to enrich themselves... why next thing you'll believe that politicians have consistently invested in dead end industries then used legislation 5-8 years later to suddenly transform once dead industries into economic powerhouses fueled by new legislation. That kind of conspiracy is the realm of fiction authors not real life. And certainly tracking the salvage industry back 10 years wouldn't lend itself to some suprising names who are all ready to clean up this mess. Double the bonus, skip out on the expensive disposal and clean up... well cleaning up. That kind of consipiracy is total nonsense and anyone beliving it must be a tin foil hat wearing fruit loop. No such thing as conspiracies, cartels, price fixing corporate ceos, mafia, and all that nonsense. Life is simply too complex for the pesantry to understand and Mafias and big evil boogie men are just an easy out for intellectually challenged cattle... err people.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish?
'The Mediterranean is 0.7 percent of the world's seas. If in this tiny portion there are more than 30 (toxic waste) shipwrecks, imagine what there could be elsewhere,'
well, it sounds as if they re already using RIAA math.
Sounds like he's trying to suggest there are 42,857 toxic shipwrecks spread throughout the rest of the world. And the Mediterranean ONLY has 30. Comparatively, what's the big deal?
Everyone knows that Trioxin makes zombies. If this keeps up the entire Mediterranean will be filled with zombie fish.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I moved to Italy, about a 100km from this site, in 1982. I have therefore practically been raised in this toxic waters which ironically and sadly are some oft the most turquoise and clear in Europe.
It makes me sad as I love the sea and spend a lot of time in anïd on it. Here is to hoping that modern tecnology will help us clear this mess off. I agree with other posters that it probably has been happening elsewhere since the eighties and that the problem is much bigger around the world.
As for the local Mafia, the n'Drangheta, it is pervasive, omnipresent and trhough corruption it is very influential in politics. Nowaday's the core business is trafficking people, drugs and weapons. As such they do a lot of harm but are not visible and less trouble to your average business than, say, 20 years ago.
Dennis Onstenk
Laws are an arbitrary decision by those in power that you shouldn't do something, like smoking marijuana, driving over the posted speed limit, or murder.
Ethics are codes of conduct formed by groups of people, such as professional organizations or religions (it is unethical to take a bribe).
Morals are when you just know doing something is wrong (e.g., empathy --- you KNOW that murder is wrong)
The law, ethics, and morals can agree with each other, but they don't have to.
Free Martian Whores!
Corporations already pollute as much as they can "within the law". If there were no laws, there would be major companies sinking boats with radioactive junk on board. So tell me, does a law create morals? Is the mafia sinking a boat for money really THAT much difference in terms of "moral fibre" compared to what a corporation does? The ONLY difference is the public corporation is acting within imposed laws and the mafia is breaking them. Remove the laws, and most corporations would be doing exactly the same thing.
Don't you see litter all over the place where you live? That's the same thing, but on a "single person" scale. A single person deciding that its ok to throw their trash where it doesn't belong, and not thinking of "the greater good".
"In a world where polluting is criminal, only criminals will pollute." ... actually hang on, that would be pretty good actually.
Now there will be radioactive sharks with friggin' lasers!
to make Vito sleep with the fishes. Now he has to sleep with 2 headed fishes
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Slashdot, the nerd's tabloid.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
ship with an I.C.B.M.?
Yours In Peace,
Kim Jong iL
"Rice, of the 600 block of East 27th St. in Baltimore, had 29 prior convictions for crimes such as breaking and entering, Guglielmi said. He had been released Saturday from the Baltimore County Detention Center, where he had been held after his arrest by county police last year for stealing a car in the city. He was found guilty in December of unauthorized removal of property and was sentenced to 18 months in prison."
29 PRIOR CONVICTIONS!
Good for you man, thanks for removing that scumbag. I'm really sorry you had to go through that crap, but congrats on sticking up for yourself and self defense (of property and person) in general. I've been through similar, but luckily it never had to escalate to that extreme.
1 $ now > 1 life later. :(
(Homegoing 1989 - Del Rey Books)
--- http://www.astroturtle.com
So soon, we will see pirates of this kind around Italy?
http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/1307/
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
This was an approach to making money in the game Elite that players soon figured out. Fill out your hold with radioactives, which the market would pay you to take, then dump them after you hyperspaced into another system. Proceed to the space station as though nothing happened.
I don't find this surprising at all, but I doubt you can extrapolate the poor social outcome of the South Italians to the whole planet (as the article implies, at some level). Even the Chinese wouldn't do the same because they'd be too afraid of being caught.
Nobody seems to be pointing out the obvious implications of this: that corruption and nuclear energy make really, really bad bedfellows - but they're sleeping together nonetheless. And this is not the first time, and won't be the last. And it's not just a European thing.
So many people on Slashdot seem to think that resurrecting the nuclear power zombie will solve the world's energy problems. They seem to forget that the reason nuclear fell out of public favour in the first place - remember, in the 1950s the media and science fiction couldn't say 'atomic!' fast enough - was the big reactor corruption scandals of the 1970s. Not just Three Mile Island and Sellafield. Anyone here old enough to remember Karen Silkwood?
As the environmentalists keep pointing out - and most Slashdotters keep dismissing as 'fearmongering' - the big problem with fission is that it produces really nasty toxic byproducts. Okay, so we can manage these risks with careful storage and disposal. Science to the rescue, right? Nuclear has the best security and safety in the world, right?
Only, this isn't what's happening. A known criminal organisation can get itself deeply into the nuclear-safety loop without apparently all these best-practices safegrounds and checks and balances actually cutting in.
Rethink your assumptions. Nuclear isn't nearly as safe as you think it is because the organisations running it are not nearly as trustworthy as you think they are.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
What a discovery to be made. Especially now that we are considering returning head-long into the nuclear age.
-Oz..
Why is this a big deal?
Farmers dump fertiliser into the ocean. This creates blooms and subsequent dead zones. The farmers aren't punished.
The fisheries of most countries are under-regulated, leading to extinctions. The fishermen and the responsible governments aren't punished.
We all dump CO_2 into the air. This changes the pH of the ocean, acidifying it drastically and causing massive extinctions. It also changes the temperature of the earth, destroying ecosystems and having devastating effects on water flow patterns. We are not punished.
Likewise mercury, and a thousand other toxins. We dump so much Hg into the water that health researchers highly recommend limiting intake of higher-order consumers like salmon. Who is punished?
The mafia dump toxins into the ocean. WHO CARES? We have proven time and again that we don't care about the health of the oceans. We already know that governments want more excuses to punish other forms of organised crime. What's new?
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
The Law versus Morals distinction I understand. I even understand why to make the distinction between "Professional Code of Ethics" versus Moral. ("Professional Code of Ethics" versus Moral is really just a variation of Law versus Moral.) But assuming an objective, non-relativist morality, why do you want to draw a distinction between Ethics and Morality?
If what is right is right and you ought to do what is right, then there is only one moral/ethics. Peoples opinions and codifications of that right may differ and have flaws and some codifications may get more notoriety than others. Some aspects of what is right might even need to be balanced against some other part. But it seems arbitrary to try to split "what is right" into Ethics and Morals.
(This is an honest question. I've seen so many make a big deal over drawing a distinction, but they never give a good reason why that particular dichotomy is useful (except on occasion as ploy to frame the question to make relativism more attractive). I agree that morality has many aspects (e.g. personal, inter-personal, social, environmental, etc.) but why the emphasis on this particular distinction.)
According to previous reports in 2007, the mafia had managed to corrupt/bribe/threaten officials at the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment: An Enea manager is said to have paid the clan to get rid of 600 drums of toxic and radioactive waste from Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, and the US, the turncoat claimed, with Somalia as the destination lined up by the traffickers.
Worryingly, the arrested ENEA officials were also accused of seeking 'clandestine production of plutonium' on behalf of the Mafia. The countries or organisations the plutonium was destined for have not been named.
Well, they do have some moral fiber: '100 drums were secretly buried somewhere in the southern Italian region of Basilicata. Clan members avoided burying the waste in neighbouring Calabria, said the turncoat, because of their "love for their home region"'. link Nice of them, eh?
First rule of dumping has to be "don't shit where you eat". They sank these vessels in their own back yard, so to speak -- something that should be regarded as a last resort. It's not at all unreasonable to believe they've already used up the easily accessible places that AREN'T in their own back yard. It's reason enough to check, in any case.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
As a resident of Salt Lake City I can say we are the only ones in the nation importing waste from Italy, thanks to Energy Solutions (as in the Energy Solutions Erena, formerly known as the Delta Center, now known as the tox box among other nick names). I will say nothing other than victory is ours. Not in my back yard.
"We multitask like you breath, I couldn't think as slow as you if I tried"
As alluring as it is to presume the US is better than other countries regarding nuclear waste, it just ain't so.
i'm a bit of a fan of this cosa nostra thing but wasting my planet is indeed one step too far. Can't they just do drugs and prostitution like any decent maffia does ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
I'm sure Italy would be delighted if you could provide them an example of any country that has been able to clean out its own local mob so they could copy their methods. Do you know one?
in a New Jersey Bally's locker room, a former waste ship captain said the coast guard makes them go a hundred miles out to sea, BUT...
they open the stopcocks the minute they leave shore to save fuel!