Sime Darby have released their plans for their regeneration of Battersea Power Station. This Friday (14th) 10:00am-6:00pm and Saturday (15th) 10:00am-4:00pm will see an exhibition of these plans at the Consultation Suite, Battersea Power Station (Gate 2).
These plans have been reported to involve the demolition of the chimneys, and replicas being constructed as the degredation of the current structures is said to be too much to allow a conservation effort.
Around 3,400 homes, including 500 classified as “affordable” will be built on the 29-acre site, as well as two hotels, 160,000 sq ft of offices and dozens of shops and restaurants in a new “high street”. This work is part of their 12-year development project, with a park and walkway projected for completion as early as next April.
Visit www.batterseapowerstation.co.uk for more information.
Email powerstation@batterseasociety.org.uk with your thoughts on the proposed plans.
As one of the world’s largest brands, Coca-Cola is drunk globally at most major events, organisations and in normal day-to-day life, but controversy is never far away from the corporation’s door as their actions are felt by all of those unable to defend themselves.
They pedal their work in communities, but always fail to mention their crippling effects on non-western countries, the drastic effects to the environment around their bottling plants and the mysterious deaths associated with their work.
The Olympic sponsor’s chokehold on the drinks market is unassailable, but as opposition to their activity grows, legal challenges will continue to bombard Coca-Cola until something drastic changes in their behind-the-scenes work.
Carmen Garcia and German Gutierrez made the following film telling the story of Daniel Kovalik and Terry Collingsworth as they attempt to take on one of the most recognisable companies on the planet using The Alien Tort Claims Act, an act dating back to the early days of the American Constitution.
Click below to watch the film on the ever-intriguing thoughtmaybe.
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Far-right violence against immigrants has become endemic in parts of Germany and that won’t change anytime soon. The public and the police are too often indifferent to extremism, despite the risk it poses to the country’s reputation. Deep down, Germany still hasn’t grasped that it needs to embrace its minorities…
This Monday, 10th September, a large scale protest will be held opposite the Houses of Parliament, rallying for the release of Shaker Aamer.
As London 2012 draws to a close this Sunday, demonstrators aim to bring what they call the Guantanamo Torture Olympics into the public conscioussness, and to bring Shaker Aamer back to London.
The organisers have outlined their aims, in a press release saying, ‘We are calling for Shaker Aamer’s immediate release, an end to torture and abuse in Guantanamo and for the Torture Team of Guantanamo Bay to be made accountable for crimes against humanity.’
All other UK prisoners have been released from Guantanamo, so why is it that Aamer remains detained?
A picture of what is believed to be Buddleia growing beneath Battersea Power Station’s south east chimney taken earlier this month shows the continued degradation of the grade 2 listed building. English Heritage seem to be blasé about the upkeep of the iconic building, having allowed such a large plant to take hold amongst the scaffolding.
Photo courtesy of Keith Garner
Sime Darby, the Malaysian Company who bought the aging building earlier this year, finalised the contract last night. With their plans to regenerate the power station set to start within months.
Despite Sime Darby’s history of global deforestation ( see Friends of the Earth report) in relation to their Palm Oil business, they have had put little effort into the removal of this particular plant.
Tan Sri Liew Kee Sin, leader of the consortium, has claimed that the regeneration will produce up to 26,000 jobs. But how long will these jobs remain, and at what expense to the power station itself will this take over cause?
Tan Sri Liew Kee Sin claims they will build “a vibrant, accessible and functional town centre for Vauxhall, Nine Elms, Battersea area”. A town centre completely privately owned.
We aim to interview English Heritage about Battersea Power Station, do you have any questions you want posing to them?
Olympic impact on UK retail sales. August brings the worst sales growth this year.
UK retail sales values were down by 0.4% on a like-for-like basis from August 2011, when they were down 0.6% on the preceding year. On a total basis, sales were up 1.6%, against a 1.5% rise in August 2011.
Stephen Robertson, Director General, British Retail Consortium, said: “There’s no evidence here of any Olympic boost to retail sales overall. Sadly, apart from April – distorted by Easter timings – August saw the worst sales growth this year.
It’s clear people were absorbed by the magnificent Olympics and had little interest in shopping, especially for major items. Usually-reliable online sales suffered, putting in the worst sales growth since we started the measure four years ago. Some retailers told us online activity was particularly thin in the evenings. If people weren’t watching television they were more likely to be following the sport on PCs and mobile devices than shopping.
On October 8th Wandsworth Council plan to lay off all the staff at Kimber Road, York Gardens and Battersea Park adventure playgrounds. This would involve knocking down all the wooden structures, that the children themselves have often helped build.
If you would like to help us campaign to try and reverse these appalling plans, then please contact Wandsworth Against Cuts: wac.doc@btinternet.com
Tonight, Brian Barnes will speak on London Tonight, ITV, discussing the proposed plans for the regeneration of Battersea Power station.
The plans outlined are to demolish the chimneys first, then build 800 luxury flats, starting in 2013. Work would start, initially fairly soon, though as a riverwalk has been planned for completion next April.
Sime Darby, the Malaysian company set to undertake this project, has been named by Friend of the Earth as one of the worst contributors to deforetation worldwide.
A year ago, the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, raised eyebrows in the darker recesses of Whitehall by telling some home truths in her BBC Reith lectures about the security and intelligence agencies.
She returns to her three key themes – torture, terrorism and secrecy – on Thursday with the publication of a short book, Securing Freedom, based on those lectures. It is a refreshing antidote to the rhetoric deployed by ministers and their acolytes who appear too frightened to come clean on any issue relating to that elusive but overarching concept of “national security”. Here are some points that MI5, MI6, the CIA and the new justice secretary Chris Grayling should note:
1. “Torture is illegal in our national law and in international law. It is wrong and never justified … Torture should be utterly rejected even when it may offer the prospect of saving lives … I am confident that I know the answer to the question of whether torture has made the world a safer place. It hasn’t.”
MI5 and MI6 remain embroiled in the unresolved dispute about their role in the abuse and torture of terror suspects. The government tried to push allegations under the carpet by compensating UK residents and citizens taken by the CIA to Guantánamo Bay – and no sooner had it done so than evidence emerged in Libya showing how MI6 helped arrange the abduction of Libyan dissidents to Tripoli, where they say they were tortured by Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police. “There are clearly questions to be answered about … whether the UK supped with a sufficiently long spoon,” says Manningham-Buller, who was head of MI5 at the time. MI6, which was ultimately accountable to then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, says the rendering of the dissidents to Libya in 2004 was authorised by ministers.
2. “Rushing to legislate in the wake of a terrorist atrocity is often a mistake,” says Manningham-Buller in a clear reference to the Blair government’s practice of drawing up more and more “counter-terrorism” laws, a practice sharply criticised by Ken Clarke, now sacked as justice secretary. “We compound the problem of terrorism if we use it to erode the freedom of us all,” she adds. To the surprise of her former colleagues in MI5, she used her maiden speech in the Lords to attack the Labour government’s proposal to detain suspected terrorists without charge for up to 42 days.
Will the reshuffled government succumb to pressure from the security and intelligence agencies and introduce more laws they hope will frighten terrorists, ignoring the root causes? Governments, including the British, talk to terrorists, and, Manningham-Buller reminds us, they have “too often preferred the stability of the devil we know to the uncertainties of democracy” – a reference to the Arab spring and Britain’s close relations with Middle Eastern autocracies.
3. “The scrutiny of the security and intelligence agencies will evolve, and it is right that it should. But, given that intelligence to counter these threats will still be needed, that scrutiny will never be able to be transparent. For to secure freedom, within a democracy and within the law, some secrets have to remain.” And there’s the rub. “Overt information may be more important than secret intelligence. There are those, the sceptical observers I wish the readers of intelligence to be, who believe that governments hype threats for their own purposes to ensure legislation proceeds through parliament.”
The coalition government is determined to push through into law its “justice and security” bill designed to prevent any information from the security and intelligence agencies, domestic or foreign, from ever being disclosed in court. The very existence of such secret hearings would be secret, if the government has its way. Ironically, its fate may well end up in the hands of Manningham-Buller and others in the (unreformed) House of Lords.
British Conservative politicians have been booed at the Paralympics in London amid protests against cuts to disability benefits.
The government has faced heat for awarding Paralympic Games sponsors Atos a contact to carry out “fitness to work tests” on people on incapacity benefits, which opponents claim has driven disabled people to poverty and even suicide.
Atos Healthcare, a global IT company, was given the £400m (NZ$796m) contact at the beginning of last month.
The British government claims more than £600m (NZ$1.19b) each year is being spent on overpayments to people who no longer qualify for the level of benefits they are receiving, the BBC reports, and so is now basing its payments on the Atos Work Capability assessments.
However, action group Disabled People Against The Cuts says less than 0.4 per cent of incapacity payments are fraudulent, but the government is looking to cut spending in the area by 20 per cent.
Opponents to the assessments say more than 1,000 people who had their benefits cut as they were deemed fit work subsequently died last year.
DPAC’s Roger Lewis told the BBC the assessments were causing “huge damage and distress to disabled people”.
“We now have a situation where we know that people have gone through the Atos assessments who have unfortunately died as a result. Some have committed suicide. Some have had heart attacks.”
Last Friday saw a large protest at the Atos’s London headquarters, as well as a demonstration at the Department for Work and Pensions, also in the capital.
Both Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne have now been loudly booed by crowds at Paralympic events.
Cameron received his negative reception when he was shown on the big screen at the Aquatic Centre, while Osborne was on the end of deafening disapproval at a packed London Olympic Stadium as he was announced to present the medals for the 400m T38.
Not all UK politicians have been booed by Paralympic crowds, with former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown receiving a “rather contrasting reaction” as he presented medals at the swimming, the Guardian reported.
It is not clear if the reception for the Conservative MPs is related to the Atos contract, or simply a reflection of the slumping support for the Tory-led Government in the polls.
British paralympians have also spoken out against proposed cuts to the disability living allowance, telling the Guardian that without benefit they would not have been able to participate in society, let alone sport.
“Without DLA I would not have been able to do what I did or be a top athlete,” Ade Adepitan, former-Paralympic wheelchair medallist told the paper.
Athletes also hid their security pass lanyards, which bear the Atos logo, during the opening ceremony to the games, however ParalympicsGB rejected this was a protest, rather claimed they had been tucked under their uniforms as it was windy.
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