TURKEY: Eighteen coalminers are missing believed trapped underground in the southern town of Ermenek, in Karaman province, after a pit shaft collapsed yesterday.
Provincial Governor Murat Koca said that flooding inside the mine shaft might have caused the collapse.
Surging water trapped at least 18 workers Tuesday in a coal mine in Turkey, officials and reports said — an event likely to raise even more concerns about the nation’s poor workplace safety standards.
Initial reports said flooding inside the Has Sekerler mine near the town of Ermenek in Karaman province caused a cave-in, but subsequent reports workers were trapped by the water. Turkey’s emergency management agency, AFAD, said a broken pipe in the mine caused the flooding but did not elaborate.
Gov. Murat Koca said about 20 other workers escaped or were rescued from the mine, some 500 kilometers (300 miles) south of Ankara, close to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast
Sahin Uyar, an official at the privately owned coal mine, told private NTV television that the miners were stuck more than 300 meters (330 yards) underground. …
Uyar said the trapped workers’ chances of survival were slim unless they had managed to reach a safety gallery. …
Paul Robeson was one of the greatest Americans, who was loved the world over and he captured the sympathy of the miners of Wales and lived in Britain during the 1930’s.
Performing concerts at Aberdare and Mountain Ash and exhibitions about his life and connections/attachments to Wales were set both in Cardiff and by The National Library of Wales.
Robeson association with South Wales dates from 1928 whilst performing in the hit musical Show Boat in London’s West End during which he met a group of unemployed miners and to provide support to their cause, he visited South Wales on numerous occasions from 1929 onward.
In particular he performed in 1938 in front of a live audience of over 7000 people to commemorate the 33 Welshmen who had given their lives during the civil war in Spain and told his audience: “I am here not only for me, but for the whole world. I feel it is my duty to be here” and at a reception given in his honour by the South Wales National Union of Miners he told his audience:
“You have shaped my life – I am part of the working class, of all the films I have made the one I will preserve is The Proud Valley.”
Pioneering trade unionist Thomas Hepburn remembered
Monday 6th October 2014
MORE than 250 ex-miners and their supporters packed a parish church in Tyneside on Saturday to commemorate the death 150 years ago of pioneering socialist Thomas Hepburn.
Credited with founding mining trades unionism in the north-east, Hepburn lived from 1795 to 1864.
He went to work down Urpeth colliery at the age of eight in 1803 to support his family following his father’s death, and was later blacklisted for leading strikes.
The heroic figure of labour movement history is buried in the churchyard at St Mary’s, where a monument honours him.
Inside the Heworth church the walls were bedecked with more than a dozen banners from the union lodges of former Durham and Northumberland collieries.
Among them was the legendary Follonsby banner, one of the few pit union banners to bear a likeness of Lenin, a hammer and sickle, and red star.
Lingey House school choir sang movingly to commemorate Hepburn’s achievements, with the National Union of Mineworkers’ North East Brass Band also playing inside the church.
At close of ceremony wreaths were laid at Hepburn’s monument.
“The South Wales miners’ strike of 1984-1985 saw the formation of a curious alliance between a plucky group of young homosexuals from London and miners in Dulais Valley. In Dancing in Dulais, an initial wariness on the part of the young gays, the miners, and the miners’ families gives way, through sometimes delicate interactions, to a loving and purposeful solidarity. The unembellished videography captures well this fascinating-to-witness union of two disparate yet ultimately kindred groups. The “Pits and Perverts” benefit concert features the Bronski Beat.”
PETER FROST remembers one of The Sun’s most despicable headlines and how it was taken up as rallying call for working-class unity
It has taken three decades for the BBC and the British film industry to tell the amazing story of Mark Ashton.
Thirty years is a long time, indeed a good few years longer than Ashton’s tragically short life — a life cut short by Aids at just 26 in 1987.
Mark, a mercurial young Irishman, was a gay rights activist and a founder member — some would say the founding member — of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) during the epic miners’ strike of the 1980s.
LGSM came together to support the British miners during the year-long strike of 1984-5.
There were 11 LGSM groups throughout the country. London was the largest.
This video from Britain is called Pride – Official Launch Trailer (2014) Bill Nighy, Andrew Scott, Imelda Staunton [HD].
I loved the film. It made me laugh and it made me cry, but I’ll leave a full review to others. There is a more important story to be told.
The film is about two tough parallel working-class struggles. First the fight by lesbians and gay men in the ’80s against homophobic prejudice, street violence and against the horrifying threat of HIV-Aids.
The other battle was that of Britain’s miners to stop Margaret Thatcher and her government killing off their industry and their union.
This was a time when Sir James Anderton, then chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, made the homophobic judgement that gay Aids sufferers lived in a “human cesspool of their own making.”
On striking miners he was equally crass. He described mass picketing and street demonstrations as “acts of terrorism” and trade unions as “a politically motivated industrial mafia at work.”
In this historical maelstrom Ashton was one of the first to realise the connection between two groups both under attack from bully Thatcher, her savage government and her tame and reactionary police.
Ashton told his gay activist friends: “Mining communities are being bullied like we are, being harassed by the police, just as we are. One community should give solidarity to another. It is really illogical to say: ‘I’m gay and I’m into defending the gay community but I don’t care about anything else’.”
Thatcher, of course, also had the unwavering support of Rupert Murdoch and his awful homophobic and anti-trade union excuse for a newspaper, The Sun.
The paper’s headline-writers certainly linked the two groups in what must be one of the most disgusting headlines ever written. “Pits and perverts” it screamed in huge type on the front page.
The Sun clearly intended to undermine the striking miners’ cause and ridicule or belittle its support from lesbians and gay men. In fact they ended up having exactly the opposite effect.
The so-called perverts appropriated that headline as the title of a massive fundraising event organised by Ashton’s LGSM at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, London.
The concert itself was a huge success — raising £5,650 (the equivalent of more than £20,000 in today’s money) for the striking miners and their families in south Wales.
At the concert David Donovan, from the Dulais NUM, told the 1,500-strong, mostly gay and lesbian audience: “You have worn our badge, ‘Coal not dole,’ and you know what harassment means, as we do. Now we will pin your badge on us — we will support you.
“It won’t change overnight, but now 140,000 miners know that there are other causes and other problems. We know about blacks and gays and nuclear disarmament, and will never be the same.”
The fundraiser was headlined by Bronski Beat, whose lead singer Jimmy Somerville would go on to form The Communards, a group who would record For A Friend, Somerville’s personal tribute to Ashton.
This music video is called The Communards – For A Friend.
“Summer comes and I remember how we’d march/We’d march for love and peace, together arm in arm.”
The new film Pride tells a good story and tells it well, but although one of its main themes is coming out of various closets it is sad that one important closet door remains firmly nailed shut.
Ashton was many things, but he was first and foremost a communist. He never hid that fact.
Sadly the film doesn’t mention what was one of the most important factors that guided and inspired Ashton in all his actions.
I knew, and worked, with Ashton during the miners’ strike when he was general secretary of the Young Communist League (YCL).
It is sad, but perhaps predictable, that the BBC has edited Ashton’s membership of the Communist Party and his leading role in the YCL out of the storyline completely.
I was proud to work with Ashton and other communists raising money and support for the miners.
We helped to picket power stations and fuel dumps, organised fundraisers, demonstrations and street collections.
The savage Thatcher government had sequestered the funds of the NUM which meant that it was pointless for supporters to send donation via the national union.
Instead support groups throughout Britain adopted individual mining communities. Ashton’s London LGSM group twinned with Dulais Valley in south Wales.
They had chosen that particular colliery after meeting some reluctance to accept their support from other miners’ groups.
Ashton and his LGSM comrades raised an amazing £20,000 for the strikers as well as visiting the Welsh pit village in solidarity and to deliver money, food and others supplies.
The alliances which Ashton and his campaign forged between LGBT and trade union groups proved to be an important turning point in the development of LGBT struggles and issues.
Miners’ groups began to support and endorse and participate in various Gay Pride events. Miners Lodge and other trade union banners headed the 1985 Gay Pride rally in London.
That same year, at the 1985 Labour Party conference in Bournemouth, a resolution committing the party to support LGBT equality rights was passed.
The issue had been raised and defeated before. This time unanimous support from the NUM won the vote against fierce opposition from many on the Labour Party national executive.
In 1988 the NUM was among the most outspoken allies of the LGBT community campaign against Section 28 — an attempt to ban any mention of homosexuality in schools.
Ashton was diagnosed with Aids on January 30 1987. Just 12 days later pneumonia took his young life.
His premature death prompted a tremendous response, not just from the gay community but also from the left and the labour movement in general.
Red, pink and rainbow flags and miners’ union banners all fluttered at his impressive Lambeth funeral.
His memory lives on in the Mark Ashton Red Ribbon Fund. His name is still honoured in the ex-mining valleys of south Wales and now the film Pride will introduce at least some of his story to a massive new audience.
Go and see it. It will make you laugh a lot and cry a little, but more important it will inspire you to action — and that is the only legacy communist Mark Ashton would ever have wanted.
Tanzania is actually a rich country – rich in natural resources. Industrial mining companies have been exploiting Tanzania’s gold deposits since the turn of the millennium. But, as in so many of Africa’s resource-rich countries, the profits end up in the hands of a very few.
Every day, in a gold mine in the country’s northwest, rich and poor meet when hundreds of local villagers illegally invade the premises. The Canadian mining corporation Barrick Gold tries to keep the trespassers out, but many people have already lost their lives.
Human rights abuses and deaths caused by London-listed firms should be tried in our courts, says LIZ MAY
SEVEN in 10 MPs polled want British companies held to account in Britain for harm caused in developing countries, amid growing concern over human rights abuses, including loss of livelihoods, injuries and deaths.
In a poll, almost three-quarters (71 per cent) of politicians surveyed favoured action, including over three in five (62 per cent) Conservatives. The proportion of the public behind the move is even larger, at 78 per cent, including the same ratio of Conservative voters.
The Dods poll was conducted online with 100 MPs between July 3 and 28. The Populus research was carried out via telephone interviews with 1,003 members of the public from August 8-10.
This new independent opinion research comes after 1,130 Bangladeshi deaths in the Rana Plaza disaster last year, many of whom were producing clothes for British stores. It also follows the deaths of at least 16 local people at a gold mine in Tanzania owned by a British-registered firm.
The MPs’ poll, from Dods, and the public survey, by Populus, have been published to launch a major campaign to put pressure on the next government to enable British companies to be held to account and bring justice for overseas victims.
Our fair-trade company, Traidcraft, launched the campaign just over a year after British ministers published their action plan on business and human rights in response to UN guiding principles on the issue.
Traidcraft sources products from around 30 countries worldwide as part of its mission to fight poverty through trade. It also campaigns to ensure people living in poverty can benefit from mainstream trading activities.
The government plan was launched by the then foreign secretary William Hague and Business Secretary Vince Cable last September. Though the British government was the first to publish a national action plan, Traidcraft is dismayed by the lack of action since publication, especially on access to justice.
In a hardhitting report, Traidcraft highlights the building collapse at Rana Plaza, where many low-paid young women claim that they were forced to continue work, despite concerns about cracks in the building.
Masuma, a Rana Plaza survivor, said: “There was so much debris, you could barely see. I closed my eyes and started to crawl my way towards the window.”
Traidcraft points to more garment workers’ deaths in Bangladesh and other countries, and is demanding that British companies be held to account if they knowingly source from dangerous or exploitative factories.
In addition, the report — Justice: We Mean Business — outlines how British-listed African Barrick Gold, Tanzania’s largest gold producer, has taken a “heavy-handed” approach to security at the mine, which resulted in several police shootings of local people.
This video from Canada says about itself:
Toronto Tanzania Solidarity
9 June 2011
Approximately 70 people gathered outside the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs for a commemoration held for the seven individuals killed in Tanzania at African Barrick Gold’s North Mara Mine. Peter Munk, who recently donated $35million to the University, is the founder of Barrick Gold.
The Liz May article continues:
Emmanuel Gesabo, the son of 56-year-old Magige Ghati Gesabo, died after police providing security at the mine shot him. Magige said: “He was my eldest son, and my family depended on him so much. He was going to look after me when I got old and now he is gone.”
He is among a group of Tanzanians who are now suing the company in the English courts.
But Traidcraft points out that this option may not be open to similar cases in future.
In order to stop British companies operating with impunity around the world, there must be an option to hold them to account in Britain and for victims to pursue justice in Britain. These polls indicate clear majority support for this option among the MPs and the public surveyed.
In the run-up to the election, we call on all political parties to consider how to enable access to justice for people who have suffered at the hands of British firms. Only then would international trade be truly just.
Traidcraft urges people to join the campaign by requesting postcards to send to party leaders, by telephoning (0191) 491 0855, or by taking action online at www.traidcraft.co.uk/justicecampaign
Liz May is head of policy and advocacy at Traidcraft.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about marching. I’ve been wondering what it means to march when it so rarely ends in direct political change. Do we do it to make ourselves feel better? In the age of social media, is marching an out-of-date product of a bygone time?
Last night I went to an early screening of new film Pride (which goes on general release on September 12). A moving, screamingly funny and ultimately triumphant movie based on the true story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM).
Despite early resistance from traditional mining communities and even the NUM, LGSM became one of the biggest fundraising organisations for the miners, their families and their communities.
It changed the way the left interacted, bringing together disparate groups who had in common an enemy and a sense of their shared humanity.
The film is heart-wrenching pretty much from the get-go — especially if, like me, you’re old enough to remember the strike. I may have only been 10 at the time, but we came of political age early in the ’80s.
I was on those marches and I understood then that the miners’ struggle was my struggle. That my neighbours and I in Hackney were as despised by the tabloids and the Tories as the miners and the gay men and women who supported them.
Our crime was to be inner city kids going to inner city comps.
As I have got older and politics has become less divisive (unless, it seems, if you are a Tory backbencher) the old certainties of the ’80s look attractive. Distance can do that.
But while I would love to see our current politics induce as much passion, what I am certain of is that many of the communities we were fighting for in the ’80s lost and have paid the price for it ever since.
While we now — thankfully and rightfully — have gay marriage and the Equalities Act, we no longer have a mining industry to speak of.
And we have vast swathes of the country which have never recovered, not just from the death of this industry, but from the cruel way they were told that progress has no compassion and the future had no place for them.
After the screening of the film there was a Q&A with several of the actors and the producer.
I asked them what one message they believed a film about the politics of our past can and should teach us about the politics of our present and our future.
The unanimous answer was “take action.” The protagonists in the film did not simply bemoan their lot or that of their fellow men. Instead they organised, agitated and acted.
The film is bookended by two marches. And by the end of it, I knew I had been wrong about marching. That I wasn’t doing it for me. That it wasn’t an indulgence of my lefty conscience to join in.
Pride is a film about finding solidarity in unlikely places and about showing solidarity with unlikely groups. It is a film about the power of empathy — practically, emotionally and spiritually.
It is a film that reminds us that if we have nothing else to give, we can give our support. It reminds us that the right may have tried to rid us of our sense of society but we retain it. That there is nothing outdated or bygone about solidarity.
Pride is a lovely film that had me in spellbound tears from the first opening montage and kept me there rapt throughout.
But more importantly it is a film that has reminded me that political change can and does come through simple acts as well as complex parliamentary ones.
So on Saturday, I will join the last leg of the People’s March for the NHS with my head held high. I will march not because I want to be indulgent in my indignance, but because I want to show the NHS my warmth, gratitude, solidarity and — yes — pride. Show yours and join us.
Emma Burnell is member of Labour Party’s national policy forum and blogs @scarletstandard.co.uk. This article first appeared on labourlist.org.
Pride is on general release from September 12. Details of Saturday’s final march and rally for the NHS can be found at www.999callfornhs.org.uk.
PRESIDENT Danilo Medina buckled to lobbying by mining transnational Glencore Xstrata on Tuesday and vetoed a proposal to create a new national park.
The Loma Miranda National Park would have blocked the expansion of a nickel mine in the forested mountains in the centre of the country, where Glencore was seeking to expand its mining operations.
Mr Medina sent the measure back to the senate with a letter voicing “serious doubts” about the effects of the proposed creation of the national park.
He insisted that his veto did not indicate approval for mining at Loma Miranda and that the project would only be authorised “after they have completed all the required environmental impact studies.”
However, Glencore has previously threatened to close its Falcondo nickel mine in about four years if it is not able to expand to into the Loma Miranda area.
This video is called Birds and Nature of the Dominican Republic.
Miner and union chief negotiator Jessie Green talks to the Star about how mining giant Glencore has locked out 450 workers at its Texas plant – and how they’re fighting back: here.
Tiny, nocturnal primate lives in area threatened by mining
by Nsikan Akpan
5:41pm, August 19, 2014
Genetic tests have spotted a new subspecies of Philippine tarsier, one of the world’s smallest — and arguably cutest — primates. Previously, taxonomists had used physical features, such as body proportion and hair color and length, to determine that there are anywhere between three and seven subspecies of this rare nocturnal mammal. To clarify that confusion, Rafe Brownof the University of Kansas in Lawrence and other researchers recently examined DNA samples collected from tarsiers from across the southeastern Philippines.
The comparison divvied the tarsiers into five lineages, including an unexpected variety on Dinagat Island and the Caraga region of nearby Mindanao Island. Wildlife sanctuaries partially encompass the habitats of the four other lineages, but the realm of the Dinagat-Caraga tarsier has historically lacked protection and is threatened by recent expansion of mining activities, the scientists report August 19 in PLOS ONE.
Eddie Redmayne (My Week With Marilyn, Richard II) and Clemence Poesy (28 Days Later, Harry Potter) star as the passionate young lovers Stephen and Isabelle, brought together by love and torn apart by the First World War, in BBC One’s adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s modern classic, Birdsong.
He was one of 1,516 tunnellers who died in WWI. These men, many of them miners, were described by their leader, Captain Jack Norton Griffiths as “heroes of obscurity … whose names feature only marginally on the great lists.”
Few decorations were awarded to the tunnellers and the Imperial War Museum has not yet published their unit diaries.
Until Sebastian Faulks’s novel Birdsong was published in 1993 and subsequently made into a film, the men involved in the underground war were largely written out of history as were their widows and families.
Early in 1915 recruiters for the Royal Engineers appealed for miners for the newly established tunneling companies set up by Norton Griffiths.
Ironically Griffiths’s family had been builders and timber merchants in Brecon where James Morris met and married my grandmother before taking work in the Tredegar pit.
Many of the tunnellers were miners from the pits of South Wales, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Tyneside and the black country.
In July 1915 the South Wales coalfield had called a five-day strike for better wages. Despite threats to use the Munitions of War Act Lloyd George conceded.
These struggles help to explain why, in an industrialised war, the tunnellers were among the vanguard. One of the first companies to be recruited as “clay-kickers” were from my grandfather’s regiment, the South Wales Borderers (SWB).
As tough union men used to the hazards of working underground — unimpressed with the “King’s shilling” — the miners refused to accept the squaddies pay rate of 2/2d and held out until they won 6/6, virtually the highest pay rate of any front-line troops.
At the start of the war — when recruits were plentiful — James, who had had served abroad in Britain’s empire for six years, was discharged from the SWB reserves.
Recruiters said he was “not likely to become an efficient reservist.” He was 41 years old, in a priority occupation and the couple had five daughters.
His wife Florence was greatly relieved especially as she was soon expecting another baby. She felt that as a one-time professional soldier James had already “done his duty.”
But by the time James’s sixth child, James Morris junior, was born in August 1915 early optimism for the war had vanished and the western front seemed to have stalled.
Early in 1916, fearing the Germans would gain the upper hand, conscription for men up to 41 was introduced — 2.8 million men were conscripted, more than volunteered.
This placed huge pressures on men to answer the “call of duty.” Those who did not come forward were shamed by military tribunals.
The Amman Valley Chronicle of February 1916 called them “shirkers.” My grandfather suddenly enlisted. Now aged 43, with a wife and six children, he was a virtual “father of the trench.”
It has always been a source of my troubled family folklore as to why my grandfather enlisted when he was previously discharged and not eligible for conscription.
Eighty years later James’s only son asked me the question his widow and family had long had to live with: “Why did dad go, he didn’t have to? Why did they take him?”
On August 8 1916 James had been ordered to work on the emplacements above his trench. It was dawn and he was shot and killed by a German sniper.
James had already been recommended for promotion when he was killed in action. After David Cameron spoke of honouring those who had made “the supreme sacrifice,” I wrote asking that James’s promotion be granted along with that of others who were subsequently killed in action.
Armed forces minister Lord Astor said a posthumous promotion could not be granted — though several have been granted to officers. He said: “The Army no longer holds its soldier’s records,” adding that in any case many of the records from WWI had been destroyed in WWII.
Mother Jones’s name lives on in many ways, not least among campaigning women in the US who call themselves Daughters of Mother Jones.
Today, back in the land of her birth, her story is being revived and spread.
Three years ago a Mother Jones Committee was formed in Cork to organise an annual Spirit of Mother Jones Festival. The project is supported by Ireland’s trade union movement.
In 2012 they staged the first festival in celebration of her life. It involved political speakers, poetry and, of course, music. A plaque was unveiled on a street wall close to Mother Jones’s birthplace.
Last year the festival grew, and this year’s festival in the last week of July was the biggest so far, building on its international links with the US and Britain.
Other accomplished speakers included leading academics and trade unionists from Ireland and from the US.
There was a lecture on the Cork Harbour Soviet — the takeover of Cork Harbour by its workers in a dispute in 1921, and the raising of the red flag over the harbour commissioner’s office.
Scargill and Cook were reunited at the festival with a former mineworker from West Virginia, Libby Lindsay, renewing an old friendship.
Thirty years ago women mineworkers from the US raised funds for Women Against Pit Closures during the 1984-5 miners’ strike. The friendships forged then are still strong today.
In a joint address to the audience with Cook, Scargill told the audience that during the strike the people of Dublin sent over enough money in a single donation “to keep all our soup kitchens going for a fortnight.”
Such acts are not forgotten.
A new banner was raised at the festival in honour of Mother Jones and bearing her portrait, pit-head gear and mill chimneys.
The pit-head gear is an image of the winding machinery at Allerton Bywater colliery, the last pit to close in the Leeds district of West Yorkshire.
It was created by Morning Star supporters Joan Heath and Sheila Woodhead and when the reverse side is completed it will be presented to the women mineworkers from the US.
The banner celebrates the transatlantic links forged between women during the miners’ strike. It bears the title: “Women Against Pit Closures, Barnsley Miners’ Wives Action Group, United Mineworkers of America (UMWA) Women Mineworkers, and Daughters of Mother Jones.”
There’s also a quote from Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead — and fight like hell for the living!”
The banner will be taken to the US next year to be handed over to women mineworkers of the UMWA in Illinois, where Mother Jones was buried in a mineworkers’ cemetery at her request.
A replica of the banner will be created for use by Women Against Pit Closures in Britain.
Speaker after speaker at the festival talked of the relevance of Mother Jones’s socialism and activism to today’s struggles.
Hopper told of the growth of the Durham Miners’ Gala and the record crowd which attended this year, before making presentations of framed pictures to the festival’s organisers.
When the festival ended, Scargill, Cook and other activists headed for Dublin, where they joined the picket line of the city’s locked-out refuse and waste recycling service.
In a mirror image of what is happening across Britain, the workers’ jobs were transferred from the public sector to a private operator, Greyhound, which demanded a 35 per cent pay cut.
The workers refused to accept and were locked out. The solidarity of the Dublin workers and the British coalfields during the miners’ strike 30 years ago lives on.
Next year’s Spirit of Mother Jones festival is expected to be bigger still and bring together more trade unionists and political activists from both sides of the Atlantic and both sides of the Irish Sea.
More than 100 years after Amundsen won the race to the South Pole, my research group found that industrial pollution had reached Antarctica more than 20 years before… Thousands of kilometres away, a source of lead, zinc, and silver had been discovered in 1883 at Broken Hill in Australia. Mining and processing operations began soon after, and smelting began at nearby Port Pirie in 1889.
Scott and Amundsen were travelling over apparently untrammelled snow that was in fact heavily contaminated from smelting and mining in Australia, with lead pollution at the time almost as high as at any time since.
It’s a stark juxtaposition of humanity’s less uplifting activities—polluting not only the places we’ve settled but places we haven’t even been yet—and its more inspiring ones, like exploring.
In all, 660 tons of lead have reached Antarctica in the last 130 years, the study notes. The levels of the toxic heavy metal in the ice core samples that the scientists studied peaked in 1900—although they remained high until the Great Depression and started gradually increasing after World War II. It was only in 1990, when laws reducing the use of lead in gasoline and other fuels began to take effect, that the lead levels started declining again. Even today, the lead levels in the Antarctic snow remain four times higher than they were before industrialization.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 