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ANKARA (AFP) - Police detained 40 protesters Tuesday in a demonstration against government plans to build Turkey's first nuclear power plant, a day before the tender process was to open, activists said. Several dozen members of environmental groups, among them Greenpeace, demonstrated outside the energy ministry in central Ankara, brandishing banners that read "No to nuclear." Some of the protesters, dressed in black overalls and their faces painted white, lay on the ground posing as corpses. Police officers detained about 40 people on the grounds that the demonstration was unauthorized, Greenpeace said. Overriding strong opposition from environmentalists, the energy ministry...

September 12, 2008, 0:20 p.m. Crossing the LineTop NASA climatologist James Hansen endorses eco-vandalism. By Henry Payne Prominent NASA climatologist James Hansen, a close ally of global-warming activist Al Gore and one of the world’s leading scientific voices warning of a global climate crisis, has endorsed eco-vandalism. Hansen’s controversial turn stems from testimony he gave this month in a London criminal trial against Greenpeace supporters who were accused of defacing — at a cost of $60,000 in property damage — Kingsnorth, an English coal plant. Hansen testified in support of the defense’s assertion that the Greenpeace members had a...

"Six Greenpeace activists have been cleared of causing criminal damage during a protest over coal-fired power. " "Outside the court, activist Mr Stewart said the verdict was "a tipping point for the climate change movement". He said: "When 12 normal people say it is legitimate for a direct action group to shut down a coal-fired power station because of the harm it does to our planet then where does that leave government energy policy?"

Moore, founder of environment watchdog Greenpeace, said since the '70s, activists have overreacted to the threats posed by nuclear energy, while ignoring its benefits "as if all things nuclear were evil." Even the infamous Three Mile Island incident near Middletown, Penn., is no reason for irrational fears, said Moore, whose group is a grassroots movement that aims to unite business, environmental, academic, consumer and labor communities to support nuclear energy. As a result, there are some 104 nuclear plants safely operating today in the United States, Moore said. "Nuclear energy is not a nuclear weapon," he said. And unlike fossil...

PORT MORESBY (AFP) - Environmental group Greenpeace said Thursday that its activists had boarded a logging ship in Papua New Guinea to prevent it exporting timber to China. Greenpeace Australia Pacific said four activists climbed on a loading crane aboard the ship Harbour Gemini at Paia Inlet on PNG's southwest coast to stop logs being loaded. Greenpeace argues the ship is being operated by Malaysian-owned logging company Rimbunan Hijau, which it accuses of breaking PNG's forestry laws. "We need to urgently protect these ancient forests to save our climate," Greenpeace campaigner Sam Moko said in a statement. "Greenpeace is asking...

ALMOST ten years ago, a jury acquitted Lord Melchett, a British aristocrat who headed Greenpeace, of the wilful destruction of a field of genetically modified (GM) crops in Norfolk. Though police caught Lord Melchett and 27 other activists in the field, the jury was unwilling to convict. Talk of “Frankenfood” and “genetic pollution” sowed popular fear of GM crops. Ten years on and anti-GM activists are still at it: in June, unknown vandals destroyed a field of genetically modified potatoes near Tadcaster, North Yorkshire. If they are ever caught, they may find themselves in for rougher treatment than their forerunners:...

The answer is ... children. Well, maybe a few of them qualify as young adults. But the young 20-somethings of America are becoming extremely politically active and they have chosen their cause: the environment. P Here's an example of what I am talking about. Greenpeace has a summer campaign called "Change It", which teaches 140 young people how to move lawmakers with grassroots campaigns. For 140 slots, Greenpeace received over 1,000 applications. The Greenpeace student coordinator Amanda Starbuck says, "To me, this is the strongest student movement since the 1960s ... The current generation is very environmental-minded and [has] a...

Greenpeace, in an assessment of the 2008 Olympic Games, said Beijing had met most of its environmental commitments. "We are glad to see that Beijing has improved its infrastructure in preparation for the Olympics," Lo Sze Ping, Greenpeace China's Campaign director, said. "It has made public transport more convenient, upgraded home heating systems, improved water treatment and, to some degree, reduced its reliance on fossil fuels." The worldwide environmental nongovernmental organization yesterday released a report: Lessons from Beijing, an independent assessment of the environmental initiatives of Beijing's 2008 Olympic Games. The report acknowledged Beijing's increased use of energy efficient technologies...

After many mind-sapping years of trawling through the morass of health scare stories, I formulated a number of laws, one of which was the Law of Beneficial Developments: The intensity of the scaremongering attack on any new development is proportional to the level of benefit that it endows. Unbelievably, the Chlorine Scare has returned. According to the science editor of the Daily Telegraph, Babies exposed to chlorinated water are at risk of heart problems.

A Ketchikan jury correctly convicted a Greenpeace ship's captain of criminal negligence for sailing in Alaska waters without the proper oil spill response plan, the state appeals court ruled Thursday. The opinion partly cancels a 2005 decision by a Ketchikan judge to overturn guilty verdicts against Greenpeace Inc. and Arctic Sunrise Capt. Arne Sorensen of misdemeanor charges. At the time of its anti-logging campaign, the ship was carrying more than 70,000 gallons of "petroleum products," according to district court documents. In Alaska, non-tank vessels larger than 400 gross tons must file an oil spill response plan application five days before...

Americans still say protection should be a priority over the economy, but nearly three in four favor offshore drilling. With the U.S. economy mired in a slump, Americans still believe saving the environment is more important than fixing the economy, according to a new poll released Thursday. But consumers are more closely divided on the issue than they have been in the past. According to a CNN/Opinion Research poll, 49% of Americans say protection of the environment should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth. That compares to 44% of those surveyed who said the economy...

PARIS (Reuters) - Greenpeace France activists on Wednesday blocked for the second day the entrances of three of the four quarries used by EDF to build its new-generation nuclear reactor, the environmentalist group said. But French power group EDF said the action was not preventing building of the 1,600-megawatts reactor. "The action is not hindering the works," an EDF spokeswoman said, without giving more details. Work at the building site of Flamanville were partly halted at the end of May following an order from France's nuclear safety authority (ASN) due to several irregularities, but EDF was given the go-ahead to...

TOKYO (AFP) — Japanese police on Friday arrested two Greenpeace members who had alleged corruption in the country's controversial whaling programme, accusing the activists of stealing whale meat. Police raided five locations, including the international environmental group's Japan headquarters in Tokyo, officials said. Police arrested Junichi Sato, 31, a prominent voice in the media against whaling, and fellow Greenpeace member Toru Suzuki, 41, a police spokesman said. Last month, Greenpeace said a lengthy investigation revealed that whalers on the taxpayer-backed hunt had taken home meat and sold it on the black market. It intercepted one box of meat and...

Greenpeace declares war on coal June 16, 2008 GREENPEACE has called for all coal-fired power stations to be shut down by 2030 as part of a radical energy plan The environment group wants an immediate ban on new coal-fired power stations - and extensions to existing plants - and for the Federal Government to start planning on shutting them down for good. The group has released a roadmap - Australia's Energy (R)evolution - to turn the tide of increasing greenhouse-gas emissions. "Avoiding catastrophic climate change means an inevitable phasing out of coal," the roadmap said. "The single biggest contributor to...

The organisers’ graphic prediction on how global warming will affect La Manga has caused sales of houses in the coastal area to drop by 50 percent. MADRID - A group of real estate developers and property owners in La Manga del Mar Menor - a spit of sandy, low-lying coastal land and Murcia's premier beach resort - are threatening to take Greenpeace to court over its graphic predictions of what global warming may do to the area, which they say have caused house prices to plummet. The lawsuit, which the plaintiffs plan to present unless Greenpeace agrees to an out...

ANKARA, Turkey - Turkish tuna fishermen rammed their boat into a Greenpeace ship Friday and pelted it with lead fishing weights, the environmental group said. No one was injured. The fishing vessel was among several that swarmed the Arctic Sunrise, which was carrying activists campaigning against overfishing in the Mediterranean. The boat rammed the Greenpeace ship at high speed, said Yesim Aslan, a spokeswoman for the group. The barrage of lead weights damaged a helicopter that the activists had used earlier in the day to document the vessels' activities, Aslan said.

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - A top Canadian official sought to calm an international uproar over hundreds of ducks killed at Canada's biggest oil sands plant by promising, at a U.S. oil industry event on Monday, that the incident will not go unpunished. The deaths of 500 ducks last week on a Syncrude Canada Ltd wastewater pond was unacceptable, Industry Minister Jim Prentice said during an acceptance speech after Canada was named "Country of the Year" by Energy Magazine. "We anticipate those responsible will face full scrutiny under Canadian law and, insofar as the government of Canada is concerned, there will...

Food: Today's headlines are filled with Americans expressing their fears of food shortages and frustration with spiraling grocery prices. As part of the solution, it's time to give genetically modified crops a try.There's much resistance to overcome, however. In the fall of 2006, Friends of the Earth publicly asked governments in the hungry African countries of Ghana and Sierra Leone to recall American food aid that contained genetically modified rice. Four years earlier, when southern Africa was tormented by famine, the U.S. offered 540,000 tons of genetically modified grain. Though the World Health Organization estimated that nearly 14 million Africans,...

When Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore first began second-guessing his opposition to nuclear power, he did what any good environmentalist would do: He buried it. The activist had already helped spearhead Greenpeace’s fight against nuclear testing and had gained international recognition after being arrested for shielding a baby seal from a hunter’s club. “I had always been afraid of nuclear waste,” he said in an interview. “I thought if I got anywhere near it, it would kill me. But deep down, intellectually, I knew it could work.” As global warming grew from scientific theory to public concern in the late 1980s,...

The captain and first officer of the anti-sealing ship the Farley Mowat were due to appear in court in Sydney, N.S., on Sunday, a day after their arrest off the west coast of Newfoundland. They have been charged with interfering with the seal hunt after a confrontation with a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker two weeks ago. Their vessel was boarded and seized Saturday in the Gulf of St. Lawrence by RCMP officers, working with officials from the federal Fisheries Department and the coast guard... Paul Watson of the international group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which owns the vessel, said its...

Why he says they're wrong to view nuclear energy as 'evil'. Moore: 'Gas costs three times as much as nuclear, at least … Solar costs 10 times as much.' Patrick Moore is a critic of the environmental movement—an unlikely one at that. He was one of the cofounders of Greenpeace, and sailed into the Aleutian Islands on the organization's inaugural mission in 1971, to protest U.S. nuclear tests taking place there. After leading the group for 15 years he left abruptly, and, in a controversial reversal, has become an outspoken advocate of some of the environmental movement's most detested causes,...

Alaska Science Forum December 25, 2003Growing California Glaciers and Carbon CalculationsArticle #1678by Ned Rozell This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute. Believe it or not, California has glaciers and they’re growing. These were two facts I learned at the recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, when about 10,000 scientists gathered to present their work and catch up on the research of others. During the last 50 years, glaciers on the...

Beginning in the mid-1980s, Greenpeace, and much of the environmental movement, made a sharp turn to the political left and began adopting extreme agendas that abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism. I became aware of the emerging concept of sustainable development—the idea that environmental, social, and economic priorities could be balanced. I became a convert to the idea that win-win solutions could be found by bringing all interests together around the same table. I made the move from confrontation to consensus.Environmentalism has turned into anti-globalization and anti-industry. Activists have abandoned science in favour of sensationalism. Their...

Greenpeace activists have breached security at Heathrow Airport and climbed on top of an aeroplane. Four people were arrested after unfurling a banner from the top of the British Airways Airbus A320, which had arrived from Manchester.

WHEN the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior was sunk by the French in the port of Auckland in 1985 the world was appalled. The bombing of the converted trawler was deplored as a violent and dangerous act: Portuguese photographer Fernando Pereira was killed. But in a bizarre development, a founding member of Greenpeace has embraced the tactics of the French secret service. Canadian Paul Watson is a sinker of ships. Captain Watson left Greenpeace in 1977 and formed the US-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society -- a vigilante environmentalist group that has sunk 10 ships since 1979. Sea Shepherd's actions have split...

Japanese whalers seize British protester and tie him to harpoon shipBy RICHARD SHEARS - More by this author » Last updated at 23:00pm on 15th January 2008This is the moment a British anti-whaling activist was taken captive on a Japanese harpoon ship. Giles Lane appears to be crying out in pain as the sailors surround him and bind him. In the dramatic pictures his companion, an Australian, is wrapped around with rope and seems powerless to help. Scroll down for more... Captured: Giles Lane, left, appears to cry out while his Australian companion (right) looks on Colleagues of the pair...

Two members of the radical anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd are reportedly being held against their will on a Japanese whaling ship in Antarctic waters. In a vessel called Steve Irwin, members of the group had been pursuing Japan's annual whaling hunt in the Antarctic for almost a month. After locating five Japanese whaling boats this morning, two of its activists – Australian Benjamin Potts and British man Giles Lane – boarded the Yushin Maru No 2 vessel. They handed the crew a letter advising them they were "illegally killing whales" and were then detained. "They were successful in delivering the...

TWO anti-whaling campaigners were last night taken hostage and tied to a mast in freezing conditions after a high seas clash with Japanese whalers in the Antarctic. The two crew members of the Sea Shepherd protest ship, Steve Irwin, Benjamin Potts and Giles Lane were tied to the radar mast of Japanese harpoon vessel Yushin Maru after the pair tried to hand over a petition calling for an end to whaling. The drama on the high seas unfolded shortly after 6.30pm when the two men tried to board the ship. A scuffle ensued before the pair was taken hostage and...

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- Greenpeace said Monday it has disrupted the Japanese whale hunt off Antarctica by chasing the fleet's whale processing factory ship out of the whaling zone. The six-vessel fleet "scattered and ran" early Saturday when it realized the Greenpeace vessel Esperanza was "heading toward them at high speed," Greenpeace expedition leader Karli Thomas told New Zealand's National Radio. The fleet's three whale hunter vessels "can't operate without the (factory ship) Nisshin Maru there to process the kill," she added.

Greenpeace has released its updated Guide to Greener Electronics and, ohhhh...Nintendo...not doing so well. In fact, Nintendo has received the first score of absolute zero that Greenpeace has ever handed out. It's almost as if, as soon as I really start to like a company's products, GreenPeace just HAS to slam them. But the story behind Nintendo's 'zero' has a lot more to do with the way it reports its practices than its actual practices. The Wii might not have any brominated flame retardants in it...but Nintendo has no policy against using BFRs and doesn't report whether or not it...

Activists Strip Before Peres Speech (IsraelNN.com) A group of Greenpeace activists stripped off their clothes Thursday afternoon at Tel Aviv University shortly before President Shimon Peres began a speech at a conference on nuclear arms. The activists had painted radiation symbols on their stomachs and called on those present to “strip the Middle East of weapons of mass destruction.” Activists said they were protesting because no speakers at the conference doubted Israel’s need for nuclear weapons. Peres joked about the strippers, saying “I think we should turn down the air conditioning in here, I was concerned for their health.” On...

<p>Fire officials found three separate “points of origin,� all near the intersection of Silverado Canyon Road and Santiago Canyon Road. Two were on one side of the road, and the third was on the other. “Whoever did this knew what they were doing,” said Kris Concepcion, a fire authority battalion chief. Also, the fire traveled 3 miles in its first 20 minutes when it was ignited about 6 p.m. Sunday, he said.</p>

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Hundreds of loggers and angry residents have surrounded eight Greenpeace members who tried to leave an Amazon town with a scorched tree trunk for an exhibit on global warming, the environmental group said Wednesday. The activists are holed up in the makeshift headquarters of the federal environmental agency in the town of Castelo dos Sonhos, Greenpeace campaigner Andre Muggiati said. "They are still surrounded and the situation is tense," he said by telephone. The region in the Amazon state of Para is part of the so-called "arc of destruction," the southern edge of the rain...

THE HAGUE Greenpeace activists on Saturday blockaded a cargo ship they claimed was carrying newsprint made from trees felled in Canadian old growth forests. The environmentalists said they were preventing the 560-foot ship Finnwood from unloading its paper cargo at Terneuzen port, 130 miles south of Amsterdam, and were daubing on its side a slogan calling for newspapers not to use paper made from old growth forests. Hilde Stroot, campaign leader for Greenpeace Netherlands, said more than 1.7 million acres of Canadian forest — home to threatened species such as the lynx, wolf and caribou — are cleared each year....

MORE kangaroos should be slaughtered and eaten to help save the world from global warming, environmental activists say.

NEW HAVEN, Conn., April 2 (UPI) -- U.S. geologists have found the sensitivity of Earth's climate to changes in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide has been consistent for 420 million years. A popular predictor of future climate sensitivity is the change in global temperature produced by each doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. The study confirmed that during 420 million years, each doubling of atmospheric CO2 translated to an average global temperature increase of about 5 degrees Fahrenheit. The scientists used 500 data points in the geological records as "proxy data" -- indirect measurements of CO2. "Proxy data ... are...

We Won't Be Cute, We Won't Be Patronized & We Won't Be Denied Our Future http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgvnqv1-_D4

Greenpeace's co-founder -- now a consultant to the forestry industry -- took a swipe at Leonardo DiCaprio's new eco-documentary, "The 11th Hour," calling it a "climate-changing rant" that misleads the public about the dangers of deforestation. DiCaprio had no comment on the piece. "He again calls for more discussion and urges people to see 'The 11th Hour,'" his publicist Ken Sunshine said. "The 11th Hour" is a critically lauded film, narrated and co-written by DiCaprio and co-directed by Nadia and Leslie Petersen Conners. It examines how industrialization has decimated the Earth's eco-systems. But in his op-ed titled "An Inconvenient Fact"...

GM protest goes awry as passers-by grab fruit, run Greenpeace's protest against the lifting of a ban on open-field trials of genetically-modified (GM) papaya yesterday was met with an unexpected reaction from a crowd of onlookers. Passers-by took matters, and tonnes of papayas dumped by Greenpeace, into their own hands, and ran off. The environmental group dumped the papayas in front of the Agriculture and Cooperatives Ministry yesterday to make its objection to the lifting of the ban loud and clear to the government. It was the second protest about the controversial issue in five days after reports the ministry...

Hundreds of people posed naked on Switzerland's shrinking Aletsch glacier on Saturday for U.S. photographer Spencer Tunick as part of a Greenpeace campaign to raise awareness of global warming.

The Vatican has urged all Catholics to stop donating money to Amnesty International, accusing the human rights group of promoting abortion.The Vatican described abortion as "murder" The Vatican, which regards life as sacred from the moment of conception, said it was an "inevitable consequence" of the group's policy change.  Amnesty said it was not promoting abortion as a universal right.  But the group said that women had a right to choose, particularly in cases of rape or incest.   "No more financing of Amnesty International after the organisation's pro-abortion about-turn," said a statement from the Roman Catholic Church's Pontifical...

Telling Each Other What to Do Gateway Pundit notes the Vatican has urged Catholics not to donate to Amnesty International over AI's endorsement of abortion. Opinio Juris says "Whether the Vatican is right to do this is a question for another day, but what I'm interested in is the ability of one NGO (the Vatican) to pressure another (Amnesty International)."Although nongovernment organizations have existed for millenia, the modern NGO really burst onto the public scene in the last 30 years as it assumed a new role quite different than that implied by its name. Unlike old-time nongovernment organizations like...

The Alabama Department of Homeland Security has taken down a Web site it operated that included gay rights and anti-war organizations in a list of groups that could include terrorists. The Web site identified different types of terrorists, and included a list of groups it believed could spawn terrorists. The list also included environmentalists, animal rights advocates and abortion opponents. The director of the department, Jim Walker, said his agency received a number of calls and e-mails from people who said they felt the site unfairly targeted certain people just because of their beliefs. He said he plans to put...

MONTGOMERY, ALA. — The Alabama Department of Homeland Security has taken down a website it operated that included gay-rights and antiwar organizations in a list of groups that could include terrorists. The website identified different types of terrorists and included a list of groups it suggested could spawn terrorists. The list also included environmentalists, animal rights advocates and abortion opponents. Howard Bayliss, chairman of the gay-rights group Equality Alabama, said he didn't understand why gay-rights advocates would be on the list. "Our group has only had peaceful demonstrations. I'm deeply concerned we've been profiled in this discriminatory matter," Bayliss said....

Environmental activists are building a replica of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat—where the biblical vessel is said to have landed after the great flood—in an appeal for action on global warming, Greenpeace said Wednesday.

Environmentalists keep telling us they love humanity. So apparently it's just people a lot of them have trouble with. This tendency is being noted with alarm even by former environmental crusaders, as the hysteria over global warming escalates. In the British documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, describes many in the environmental movement today as "anti-human", adding they tend to see people as "scum." Moore says that's why they think "it's OK to have hundreds of millions of them go blind or die" and in particular why "the environmental movement has evolved into the strongest...

Greenpeace reponds to El Jobso's letter declaring Apple a greener company. All that sweet talk just ain't enough for the tree humpers. (Not even the promise of LED backlit LCDs? Ok, fine.) According to their scale, the new measures will bring Apple to a 5.0 on their 10 point scale (that's up from the 2.7 they were ranked at before.) What they're asking for is: Apple which is not just green skin-deep, but green to the core Poetic, isn't it? We're no experts on what's green and what puts the toxic nipple clamp on Mother Earth's sweet teat. But the...

The five liberal judges on the Supreme Court, the same five who gave cities the right to confiscate the property of poor people in Kelo v. New London, just decided, against historical fact and scientific evidence, that the EPA should control CO2. Eventually, when the Democrats are in power, this might mean stringent controls on industrial plants, power plants and internal combustion engines – controls that will greatly increase costs and reduce efficiency – in order to limit a harmless substance that all plant life needs in order to grow.

The latest report from environmental group Greenpeace again rates Apple in last place of all technology companies the organization ranks. “Apple, having made no progress since the launch of the Guide in August 2006, continues to languish in last place, far behind all other major manufacturers,” reads a statement from Greenpeace. Greenpeace began its public assault on Apple last August with the first Green Electronics Guide. The report scores companies on their use of hazardous chemicals, recycling and take-back policies. It uses information published by the companies for the report. In early December, when a new report was published, Apple...

Greenpeace and more than 70 other groups are urging Vice President Gore to use his influence on the Board of Apple to convince the Cupertino-based company to be a "green leader" in the electronics industry. Apple's Board of Directors, of which Gore is a member, is due to send out a statement recommending that stockholders vote against two proposals that would strengthen the iPod maker's environmental policies, according to Greenpeace. Draft board documents say that their board "unanimously" opposes both proposals, but Greenpeace and 73 other groups called on Gore to enlist his leadership in persuading Apple to instead support...