After reading this article on the website, I almost fell off, of my chair.
Check it out:
well, that's good that it reached a settlement at least, except this here:Oil-trading company Transfigura has said it has reached a settlement with 31,000 people in Ivory Coast who claimed they were made ill by toxic waste dumped around the capital, Abidjan.
That is the most ridiculous thing I"ve read all week.Under the deal, which sees Transfigura pay the claimants nearly $50m, the alleged victims have accepted that there was no link between the deaths, injuries or miscarriages suffered and exposure to the waste, the company said
There are numerous studies that claim opposite.
........more than 20 independent experts had examined the case.
..........These independent experts are unable to identify a link between exposure to the chemicals released from the slops and deaths, miscarriages, still births, birth defects, loss of visual acuity or other serious and chronic injuries," it said.
I don't know what kind of experts were hired, but one needs to have both education and knowledge to be able to have such status, yes??
would you not agree??
Maybe the experts were amatures or were paid off.
ONe or the other. Who knows, yes??
Maybe there's a third option to the above that I can't think of at the moment.
I will say this and that is people who are more educated than others do have options regarding health, income, and able to make more informed decisions.
People in Ivory Coast may be less well-off than we are in the western world.
Maybe they took this settlement based on thier poverty level and decided that thier local government, which should have been involved (the article makes no mention of it), didn't.
And that's a sad thing.
When government should and could get involved in something like this that affects it's own citizens, it fails to.
Read the article on Al Jazeera if you like on the history of this oil company and it's dealing on similiar issues when it tried to dump material in Amsterdam, but couldn't and then decided to move on to Africa to do so.
Is Africa a dumping ground or something just b/c some of the African states are less well-off than the rest of the western world who wouldn't stand for this crap??
Anyways....here's the link:
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