Welcome, I am your host Rachel Avery and you are listening to The Daily GRRR! In/Security Edition on 100.3fm, CKMS in Waterloo, Ontario. Soundfm.ca on the web. Today is May 22, 2014.
We are broadcasting from the centre of the Haldimand Tract, the occupied Grand River Territory of the Six Nations (Haudenosaunee).
The Daily GRRR! is a project of the Grand River Media Collective; and is supported by the Community Radio Fund of Canada and CKMS.
Today’s feature comes to us from free city radio on CKUT. It’s an interview with Clive Stafford Smith, who is campaigner at Reprieve, a legal organization working internationally to campaign against the illegality of the US military drone strikes currently taking place in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond. The interview focuses on the impacts experienced by communities targeted by the US strikes.
We will begin today with headlines:
The Daily GRRR! HEADLINES for May 22, 2014
1. No Integrity, No Digs! An Enbridge integrity dig site on Line 9 near Burlington was blocked yesterday by activists opposing the pipeline project. The line has over 12 000 anomalies—features that could cause it to fail—so the blockade was held for 12 hours, one hour for every thousand such anomalies. Despite this high number of problems, Enbridge is only conducting a few hundred integrity digs, and a recent report has predicted that Line 9 has a 90% chance of failure in the near term. This flagrant disregard for safety is one reason the project has received massive opposition, alongside Enbridge’s failure to consult Indigenous communities, and the pipeline’s facilitation of tar sands and fracking expansion. The site of yesterday’s blockade is near Bronte Creek, on traditional Mississauga territory, a creek which flows into Lake Ontario. Blockader Danielle Boissineau states, “At every step of the process, the Tar Sands outsources the risks onto our communities and poisons waterways like the Athabasca River and the Bronte creek while companies like Enbridge get rich.”
Line 9 has received the green light from the National Energy Board after public hearings which have been widely criticised as exclusive, and with a decision that did not address the vast majority of evidence presented.
2. Killer Robots
The first multilateral summit on fully autonomous weapons—killer robots—wrapped up last Friday at the United Nations in Geneva. Many governments present expressed their desire for human decisions and control over attacks in warfare, ensuring the human element of killing doesn’t get erased by drones.
Fully autonomous weapons have not yet been developed, but technology is moving in that direction. This type of weapon would select and attack targets without further action by a human operator. 87 countries participated in the four-day Convention on Conventional Weapons meeting of experts on lethal autonomous weapons systems. Human Rights Watch, who reported on the convention, is a co-founder and coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a global coalition of 51 …read more
From: Daily GRRR
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