• Our good friends at Shell seriously have no place to talk. As bad as the Deepwater Horizon disaster has been, Shell has created problems as bad, if not worse (and mostly unreported), in Nigeria. A few quick numbers to throw your way on this, courtesy of The Guardian’s recent exposé on Shell:

• 14,000 tons of oil spilled by Shell in 2009

• 98% Shell’s estimate of spills caused by vandalism, theft or sabotage
• 7,000 number of oil spills Shell had in Nigeria between 1970 and 2000
• 2,000 the number of official spillage sites in Nigeria alone source

Two spills, two responses

• There are more than 300 spills, major and minor, a year. It happens all the year round. The whole environment is devastated. The latest revelations highlight the massive difference in the response to oil spills. In Nigeria, both companies and government have come to treat an extraordinary level of oil spills as the norm.
• Friends of the Earth International’s Nigerian head Nnimo Bassey • Regarding the government’s response to the spill, which seems to only highlight the differences between the American and Nigerian responses to major oil spills. With nearly 1.5 million barrels reportedly spilled in the Niger River’s delta in the last 50 years, it seems that the country has resigned itself to the fate. “In Nigeria, they have been living above the law,” Bassey said. They are now clearly a danger to the planet. The dangers of this happening again and again are high. They must be taken to the international court of justice.” source

• 411,000 the number of added May jobs that came from the Census alone (i.e. most of them)
• 9.7% the current jobless rate; expect that to go back up when the Census goes away source

• 1995 Wal-Mart hired a bunch of lawyers to see if they might be vulnerable to a costly class-action discrimination suit from female workers.
• 2001 A bunch of female workers file a class-action suit against the company, claiming bias. It then winds its way through the courts.
• 2010 A lower court decides to let the suit go forward. Wal-Mart plans to appeal that obvious decision all the way to the Supreme Court. source

• What is undoubtedly true is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool kit.
• BP CEO Tony Hayward • Regarding his company’s lack of plan to take care of the massive oil spill that happened on their watch. While there has been some good news today – they managed to cut that pipe, which may allow them to further limit the damage caused by the spill – the fact of the matter is that they didn’t have a plan. Sure, they had tools ready to take care of an Exxon Valdez-like situation, but they had no plan for any sort of trouble below the surface. Hayward calls it “an entirely fair criticism.” We call it downright unbelievable. source

• 513,000 the increase in non-farm payrolls in May, helped by the Census
• five number of consecutive months the job market has improved source

• If the FTC truly wanted to reinvent journalism, the agency would instead align itself with journalism’s disruptors. But there’s none of that here.
• Journo-expert Jeff Jarvis • Regarding a recent Federal Trade Commission report on how to save journalism. He notes as sort of a  key fact that the entire document only mentions the word “blog” once, despite the fact that many blogs are as “real content” as you’re going to get. And the document, overall, seems skewed in favor of establishment journalism, with suggestions that could seriously damage innovation in the industry. “Here, the internet is not the salvation of news, journalism, and democracy. It’s the other side,” he writes. source

• 16% freefall on the London Stock Exchange this morning; oh boy
• 14% fall in the U.S. in its first session since the top kill failed source

• SLAPP means “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” The whole theory behind it is that people complain in public about a company’s service, and the company sues to get them to shut up. In prior eras, this may have meant speaking out at a city council meeting. Now, it means tweeting about bad service or putting up a Facebook group. Here’s the fate one guy met.

• $118 the amount Justin Kurtz had to pay after a towing company wrongly towed his car from his own apartment complex
• 12k the number of people who joined “Kalamazoo Residents against T&J Towing”; 800 joined in the first two days alone
• $750k the amount the towing company sued the Western Michigan University student for defamation source