US to withdraw from 1987 missile treaty
IT’S 6pm on a Tuesday in August and residents who have climbed the City Hall steps learn that, once again, there will be no city council meeting. So once again, they will be unable to discuss with local officials the pollution that has been plaguing their small town for the better part of a decade.
Uniontown has an inordinate number of polluters for a town of 2300, and residents say city leaders often dodge their attempts to air their grievances. There’s the landfill next to the historic black cemetery that residents opposed from the beginning but went apoplectic over when it started accepting coal ash after a spill of the waste in Tennessee. There’s the pungent odour from a cheese plant that has released its waste into a local creek, according to an environmental group’s hidden cameras. And then there’s the wastewater from the catfish processing plant, which contributes to an overwhelmed sewerage system that spills faecal matter into local waterways.
Many residents feel all this pollution has been dumped in their backyard — and allowed to continue — because for the most part, they are black, poor and uneducated.
‘‘Look at every black community or poor community,’’ said Esther Calhoun, a resident who has been involved in numerous lawsuits against the town’s polluters. ‘‘The EPA is supposed to be the Environmental Protection Agency, but they’re protecting the rich. What do they do for us? Nothing.’’
It is a similar story across Alabama and much of the country. Many minority communities say their towns have been targeted by polluting industries because residents have few
resources to put up a fight, and state and federal agencies have largely sided with industry when locals have challenged polluters.
Black residents in Union Hill, Virginia; North Birmingham, Alabama; Braddock, Pennsylvania; Burke County and Jessup, Georgia; Waukegan, Illinois and many others have made similar accusations over the past several years.
In Uniontown, residents say the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) has not helped. The department rescinded its civil rights complaint policy in
June in the face of a lawsuit from some state residents. That means the state now has no process for reviewing complaints that environmental problems are disproportionately impacting people of colour. The department said it could not comment on the process because litigation was ongoing, but the EPA in July said it would investigate ADEM’s civil rights policies. The EPA also has faced criticism on civil rights issues. An
agency study published in April found black people were more burdened by air pollution than any other group, even when taking poverty into account. And the agency has taken years, even decades, to respond to complaints. Earlier this year, it denied Uniontown’s environmental racism complaint.
The EPA did not return repeated requests for comment.
Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, said his research showed polluting industries frequently sought out black, poor and rural towns to open shop.
‘‘When you get a series, a pattern, of locating these things in one location, you have to come to the conclusion that this is not accidental.’’
The law did little to protect communities, he said, because it required them to prove industries intentionally targeted them because of their race.
‘‘If you don’t have a smoking gun, it’s difficult.’’
Here in Uniontown, the population is 84% black, and 49% live under the poverty level. Fewer than one in 10 adults have a bachelor’s degree, compared with one in three nationally.
It would be a tough place to live even without the pollution. Many of the shops downtown are vacant or boarded up. Some of the remaining businesses operate out of buildings that appear at first glance to be abandoned. The only grocery store in town recently closed.
Residents blame the pollution for a host of health problems, including asthma and neuropathy, which causes a tingling sensation in their arms and legs. WASHINGTON: The US will unilaterally pull out of a morethan30yearold treaty with Russia that bans a wide array of nuclear weapons, US President Donald Trump says.
The 1987 IntermediateRange Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) was signed by US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in Washington.
It banned nuclear and conventional missiles with ranges of 500 to 5500km, as well as their launchers.
‘‘We’re going to terminate the treaty and we’re going to pull out,’’ Trump told reporters yesterday.
National security adviser John Bolton, meanwhile, set off for Moscow, where he is expected to discuss the withdrawal, which has already drawn criticism from Russia. A source in the Russian Foreign Ministry told state news agency Tass that the US had wanted to take the step ‘‘for many years’’ and had been ‘‘intentionally and gradually eroding the contractual base’’.
The source said the decision was ‘‘in line’’ with the US policy of ‘‘withdrawing from international legal agreements that impose equal obligations on all partners’’ and was based on a US ‘‘dream about a unipolar world’’.
Trump said Russia had been violating the agreement.
‘‘They’ve been violating it for many years. And I don’t know why president Obama didn’t negotiate or pull out. And we’re not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons, and we’re not allowed to,’’ he said.
The US would begin building such weapons again if Russia and China did not come to a fresh agreement on them, he added.
The US and Russia have long accused one another of violating the terms of the treaty.
Washington bases its accusation on Russia’s development of the Novator 9M729 cruise missile, which has a range of 2600km. Earlier this month, Nato called on Moscow to address concerns about the missile, and US ambassador to Nato Kay Hutchison appeared to warn that the US would consider launching military action to destroy it.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed that a Nato missile shield in Romania could launch nuclear missiles at any time. — DPA
❛ We’re not going to let them . . . go out and do weapons . . . and we’re not allowed to