"Deleted BBC news article on toxic-waste dumping by commodities giant Trafigura. Trafigura and their lawyers Carter Ruck had been pursuing an ongoing libel case against the BBC over a news story from May 2009. In the story "Dirty Tricks and Toxic Waste in the Ivory Coast", the BBC's Newsnight programme stated: "It is the biggest toxic dumping scandal of the 21st century, the type of environmental vandalism that international treaties are supposed to prevent. Now Newsnight can reveal the truth about the waste that was illegally tipped on Ivory Coast's biggest city, Abidjan". The programme alleged that a number of deaths had been caused by the dumping of this toxic waste, which had originated with Trafigura. Until this week the story was still available on the BBC website. The link stopped working some time on December 10th or 11th, but at the time of writing the Google cache is still available. Trafigura and Carter Ruck have become notorious for their willingness to use the UK's repressive media laws to suppress legitimate criticism and comment. A number of other UK media have already been bullied into censoring stories about this case, but until now the BBC had stood firm. Unfortunately it appears that even the UK's world-renowned public service broadcaster has now been muzzled by a rich corporation seeking to use the law to cover up the truth about its activities." - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet

Wonder how much of this Trafigura is responsible for: http://www.inhabitat.com/2009... - Steven Perez

This sort of thing is just absolutely disgusting. Even now that the Somali piracy stories are mainstream, we still rarely hear about the toxic contamination and overfishing that led up to it, if ever. The rich of the world using the poor parts of the world as dumping ground is depressing. yet environmentalism is typically pitched as about helping the planet in a vague way. - Lo the Baker