Happening NOW in Brazil! Protesters have occupied the halls and the roof of congress! Hundred of thousands in the streets!
#Brazil #AnonymousBrasil #BrasilAcordou #OGiganteAcordou #protestobsb #changebrazil
Please watch and share:
http://www.livestream.com/anonymousBR
To learn more about the Brazilian uprising please watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIBYEXLGdSg&feature=youtu.be
All Power to the People!
KLM <3
(via theyoungradical)
It’s been two years since the Deepwater Horizon disaster unleashed 4.9 million barrels of oil on the Gulf of Mexico. In the midst of the disaster, BP and its contractors did everything they could to keep people from seeing the scale of the disaster. But new photos released Monday offer some new insight to just how grim the Gulf became for sea life.
The images were released in response to aFreedom of Information Act request that Greenpeace filed back in August 2010, asking for any communication related to endangered and threatened Gulf species. Now, many months later, Greenpeace received a response from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that included more than 100 photos from the spill, including many of critically endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles dead and covered in oil.
Most photos are missing dates and descriptions, though the FOIA request covered the period of April 20, 2010, to July 30, 2010. But they’re pretty shocking—which is probably why they weren’t made public at the height of the spill. “It just makes me furious,” said John Hocevar, a marine biologist who works for Greenpeace. “I had so many conversations with people in various government agencies working on the Gulf spill, and I feel like they were hiding things from all of us.”
“The White House was sitting on this stuff for over two years, at the same time they were saying everything was fine, that the oil was gone, and while they were rushing ahead with plans for new drilling in the Gulf, the Arctic, elsewhere,” Hocevar continued. “It’s just not okay. This is not an acceptable type of collateral damage.”
Mother Jones has requested comment from NOAA but had not received a response at press time.
Jump below the fold to see some of the photos that have been kept under wraps for the past two years:
Click the hyperlink title of this post to see the grim toll for yourselves. It’s remarkable how quickly we’ve moved on from this disaster, even though its effects will be felt for generations.
(via theyoungradical)
— Michael Hastings, The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret (via theyoungradical)
(Source: mohandasgandhi, via theyoungradical)
Evo Morales is Bolivia’s first indigenous president, and he’s bringing some back-to-the-earth philosophy to the country. Bolivia is set to pass The Law of Mother Earth, a sweeping piece of legislation that, as Vice-President Alvaro García Linera…
(Source: GOOD, via theyoungradical)
April 4, 2012 | By Will Allen and Ronnie Cummins | via @CyranoNymous
The world’s most hated corporation is at it again, this time in Vermont.
Despite overwhelming public support and support from a clear majority of Vermont’s Agriculture Committee, Vermont legislators are dragging their feet on a proposed GMO labeling bill. Why? Because Monsanto has threatened to sue the state if the bill passes.
The popular legislative bill requiring mandatory labels on genetically engineered food (H-722) is languishing in the Vermont House Agriculture Committee, with only four weeks left until the legislature adjourns for the year. Despite thousands of emails and calls from constituents who overwhelmingly support mandatory labeling, despite the fact that a majority (6 to 5) of Agriculture Committee members support passage of the measure, Vermont legislators are holding up the labeling bill and refusing to take a vote.
Instead, they’re calling for more public hearings on April 12, in the apparent hope that they can run out the clock until the legislative session ends in early May.
What happened to the formerly staunch legislative champions of Vermont’s “right to know” bill? They lost their nerve and abandoned their principles after Monsanto representative recently threatened a public official that the biotech giant would sue Vermont if they dared to pass the bill.
More on Food | AlterNet
(Source: anonymissexpress, via theyoungradical)
WASHINGTON — December 2, 2011 — The United Nations envoy for freedom of expression is drafting an official communication to the U.S. government demanding to know why federal officials are not protecting the rights of Occupy demonstrators whose protests are being disbanded — sometimes violently — by local authorities.
Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. “special rapporteur” for the protection of free expression, told HuffPost in an interview that the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights.
“I believe in city ordinances and I believe in maintaining urban order,” he said Thursday. “But on the other hand I also believe that the state — in this case the federal state — has an obligation to protect and promote human rights.”
“If I were going to pit a city ordinance against human rights, I would always take human rights,” he continued.
La Rue, a longtime Guatemalan human rights activist who has held his U.N. post for three years, said it’s clear to him that the protesters have a right to occupy public spaces “as long as that doesn’t severely affect the rights of others.”
In moments of crisis, governments often default to a forceful response instead of a dialogue, he said — but that’s a mistake.
“Citizens have the right to dissent with the authorities, and there’s no need to use public force to silence that dissension,” he said.
“One of the principles is proportionality,” La Rue said. “The use of police force is legitimate to maintain public order — but there has to be a danger of real harm, a clear and present danger. And second, there has to be a proportionality of the force employed to prevent a real danger.”
And history suggests that harsh tactics against social movements don’t work anyway, he said. In Occupy’s case, he said, “disbanding them by force won’t change that attitude of indignation.”
Occupy encampments across the country have been forcibly removed by police in full riot gear, and some protesters have been badly injured as a result of aggressive police tactics.
New York police staged a night raid on the original Occupy Wall Street encampment in mid-November, evicting sleeping demonstrators and confiscating vast amounts of property.
The Oakland Police Department fired tear gas, smoke grenades and bean-bag rounds at demonstrators there in late October, seriously injuring one Iraq War veteran at the Occupy site.
Earlier this week, Philadelphia and Los Angeles police stormed the encampments in their cities in the middle of the night, evicting and arresting hundreds of protesters.
Protesters at University of California, Davis were pepper sprayed by a campus police officer in November while participating in a sit-in, and in September an officer in New York pepper sprayed protesters who were legally standing on the sidewalk.
“We’re seeing widespread violations of fundamental First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of a National Lawyers Guild committee, which has sent hundreds of volunteers to provide legal representation to Occupations across the nation.
“The demonstrations are treated as if they’re presumptively criminal,” she said. “Instead of looking at free speech activity as an honored and cherished right that should be supported and facilitated, the reaction of local authorities and police is very frequently to look at it as a crime scene.”
What they should do, Verheyden-Hilliard said, is make it their mission to allow the activity to continue.
Using the same lens placed on the Occupy movement to look at, say, the protest in Egypt, Verheyden-Hilliard said, observers would have focused on such issues as “Did the people in Tahrir Square have a permit?”
La Rue said the protesters are raising and addressing a fundamental issue. “There is legitimate reason to be indignant and angry about a crisis that was originated by greed and the personal interests of certain sectors,” he said. That’s especially the case when the bankers “still earn very hefty salaries and common folks are losing their homes.”
“In this case, the demonstrations are going to the center of the issue,” he said. “These demonstrations are exactly challenging the basis of the debate.”
Indeed, commentators such as Robert Scheer have argued that the Occupy movement’s citizen action has a particular justification, based on the government’s abject failure to hold banks accountable.
La Rue said he sees parallels between Occupy and the Arab Spring pro-democracy protests. In both cases, for instance, “you have high level of education for young people, but no opportunities.”
La Rue said he is in the process of writing what he called “an official communication” to the U.S. government “to ask what exactly is the position of the federal government in regards to understanding the human rights and constitutional rights vis-a-vis the use of local police and local authorities to disband peaceful demonstrations.”
Although the letter will not carry any legal authority, it reflects how the violent suppression of dissent threatens to damage the U.S.’s international reputation.
“I think it’s a dangerous spot in the sense of a precedent,” La Rue said, expressing concern that the United States risks losing its credibility as a model democracy, particularly if the excessive use of force against peaceful protests continues.
New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman welcomed the international scrutiny.
“We live in a much smaller, connected world than we ever did before, and just as Americans watch what goes on in Tahrir Square and in Syria, the whole world is watching us, too — and that’s a good thing,” Lieberman said.
“We’re kind of confident that we’re living in the greatest democracy in the world, but when the international human rights world criticizes an American police officer for pepper spraying students who are sitting down, it rightly give us pause.”
(Source: youthiswasted, via )
Mr Obama has spoken about extending a hand of friendship towards the Muslim world. Now, if he is serious about this hand of friendship, there are a number of things he must address. Where was your hand of friendship when two days into your Presidency you dropped bombs on Pakistan? Where was this hand of friendship when an American citizen, Tristan Anderson, was shot in the head with a gas canister by the IDF for peacefully protesting? Where was Obama’s voice? He was as quite as a mouse. Be a man. Be a man, Obama.
You talk about getting rid of the Lobby groups, in Washington, so why is AIPAC still in your pockets to the tune of $30 Billion dollars over the next decade? Why are AIPAC still determining who is and who isn’t in your administration? Why did you allow AIPAC to chase Chas Freeman away from your administration? Why is your chief of staffs name Rahm Israel Emanuel? Why is your chief of staff a former IDF soldier? Why do you still have the same defence secretary, Robert Gates, that George Bush had?
This is not about black and white, this is about wrong and right. And we should never ever give this man the benefit of the doubt based purely on his race because that makes us just as bad as any other race anywhere in world.
On Afghanistan, I learnt an interesting fact the other day. Since the US led occupation and invasion of Afghanistan, the heroin coming out of that country has increased thirty three fold. Now, all that tells me is that the United States and the CIA are better drug dealers than the Taliban ever were. This is something you, Obama, must address. Do not even look at me until you have addressed these facts.
Why is the President of Afghanistan a former CIA operative and a former Unocal consultant? We know these facts and we are not stupid. As far as Iraq, America owes Iraq billions and billions and billions of dollars. Billions of Iraqi money has been siphoned out of Iraq by American companies. This is something you, Obama, must address.—Kareem Dennis aka Lowkey. 2009.
Fracking will poison New York’s drinking water, critics warn
Opponents of controversial gas drilling method condemn plan as environmental agency sounds alarm bells over staffing levels
A former staffer at a state government agency responsible for regulating hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has warned that allowing the controversial gas drilling method in New York would lead to contamination of the state’s aquifers and would poison its drinking water.
These stark warnings, issued by Paul Hetzler in a letter to an upstate newspaper, came as a current employee and union representative at the Department for Environmental Conservation (DEC) sounded alarm bells over the under-staffed agency’s ability to monitor the industry and to deal with any emergencies if the plan goes ahead.
Fracking is the process of injecting a high-pressure mixture of sand, water and chemicals thousands of feet into hard shale rocks to shatter them and release the natural gas inside.
• Click here for a Guardian explainer on fracking
Plans to remove a statewide ban on fracking advanced by New York governor Andrew Cuomo and the DEC have sparked a wave of opposition from environmental, health and activist groups.
The New York state DEC released its recommendations in July, saying that proposals to remove the ban “struck the right balance between protecting our environment, watersheds and drinking water and promoting economic development.”
But opponents of the plans, which would allow thousands of new wells to be drilled across the state with the exception of New York City and Syracuse, have criticised the DEC for not properly assessing health risks and for failing to include measures to protect water supplies.
In his December 13 letter to the Watertown Daily Times, Hetzler, a former technician responsible for investigating and managing groundwater contamination at the DEC, said: “I’m familiar with the fate and transport of contaminants in fractured media, and let me be clear: hydraulic fracturing as it’s practised today will contaminate our aquifers.
“Not might contaminate our aquifers. Hydraulic fracturing will contaminate New York’s aquifers. If you were looking for a way to poison the drinking water supply, here in the north-east you couldn’t find a more chillingly effective and thorough method of doing so than with hydraulic fracturing.”
The publication of Hetzler’s letter last month coincided with a report from the US Environmental Protection Agency, which linked fracking with water pollution for the first time.
Hetzler calles the proposals for hydraulic fracturing in New York state “insane”, adding: “I’m not saying anywhere you drill will cause a huge catastrophe. There might be a location where geological conditions are favourable, where contaminants don’t travel. But the Marcellus shale is not a homogeneous layer. You can’t predict what is going to happen.”
The Marcellus shale is a black shale rock formation between 2,000 and 7,000ft underground that extends from Ohio and West Virginia into Pennsylvania and New York. Indeed, recent earthquakes in Ohio have widely been presumed to have been caused by the disposal of wastewater generated by fracking there.
Hugh MacMillan, of Food and Water Watch, said: “Hetzler’s letter exposes the shortsightedness of opening up New York to shale gas development. The inherent, long-term risks to the state’s vital water resources cannot be mitigated.”
A byproduct of fracking, according to MacMillan, is the trapping of millions of gallons of fluid underground indefinitely. Once subjected to geological forces over years or decades, that fluid could move about under the earth’s surface in unpredictable ways.
“The dubious economic and environmental benefits of shale gas do not justify these risks,” he told the Guardian.
The DEC’s own environmental impact statement identifies a “significant number of contaminants” in fluids associated with fracking that could reach surface water or aquifers.
It also concludes that releases could have “significant adverse impacts” on water resources and proposes a number of mitigration measures. These include a ban on fracking in the New York City and Syracuse watersheds where the drinking water is unfiltered, and not allowing it in or around “primary aquifers.”
The mitigation measures also include requirements governing spills and releases.
However, union representatives at the DEC have warned that the already-depleted department has too few staff to take on the additional monitoring and inspection fracking would require.
In a statement submitted to the DEC, Wayne Bayer, an executive for the Public Employees Federation union, which represents over half of the state’s DEC 3000 employees, said: “The 25% reduction in existing staff at DEC has crippled our ability to carry out all existing federal and state regulatory and statutory responsibilities.”
He continued: “DEC would also be hard-pressed to adequately provide emergency remedial response and clean up assistance for a major accident of any kind. The moratorium should be extended until there are adequate staffing levels.”
Wes Gillingham, the programme director of Catskill Mountainkeeper, one of a large number of environmental groups active in opposing fracking in New York state, echoed Bayer.
“It is not just a matter of numbers of personnel. We need people overseeing the industry and inspecting the cement around the casings,” he told the Guardian.
“There are not enough inspectors out in the field across the state of New York. At the moment in New York there are only 15 or 17 inspectors for hundreds of existing wells. What’s going to happen when there are thousands of wells being added to every year?”
The DEC did not return multiple requests for comment.
Its public consultation period on its draft regulations, which was extended by a month due to high demand, will close on 11 January, and it will produce a final impact statement and regulations sometime this year.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, who sits on the New York State’s high-volume hydraulic fracking advisory panel, recently alleged that the debate has been hampered by a campaign of “intimidation and obfuscation” by key industry players.
A prominent environmentalist, Kennedy said he was an early optimist on natural gas, but the worst of the industry had battled regulation, stifled public discourse, and persuaded regulators to grant exceptions to existing rule.
(via theyoungradical)
More than 270,000 organic farmers are taking on corporate agriculture giant Monsanto in a lawsuit filed March 30. Led by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, the family farmers are fighting for the right to keep a portion of the world food supply organic—and preemptively protecting themselves from accusations of stealing genetically modified seeds that drift on to their pristine crop fields. via Occupy Monsanto
![elledark:
Shhhh .. Don’t Mention the Murder DronesFrom an article by the always excellent Glenn Greenwald ..“In 3 years, the Obama administration has built a vast drone/killing operation. No president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.” [..]“The President can kill whomever he wants anywhere in the world (including U.S. citizens) without a shred of check or oversight, and has massively escalated these killings since taking office (at the time of Obama’s inauguration, the U.S. used drone attacks in only one country (Pakistan); under Obama, these attacks have occurred in at least six Muslim countries). Because it’s a Democrat (rather than big, bad George W. Bush) doing this, virtually no members of that Party utter a peep of objection (a few are willing to express only the most tepid, abstract “concerns” about the possibility of future abuse). And even though these systematic, covert killings are widely known and discussed in newspapers all over the world — particularly in the places where they continue to extinguish the lives of innocent people by the dozens, including children — Obama designates even the existence of the program a secret, which means our democratic representatives and all of official Washington are barred by the force of law from commenting on it or even acknowledging that a CIA drone program exists (a prohibition enforced by an administration that has prosecuted leaks it dislikes more harshly than any other prior administration). […]
Americans love to think that they are so very informed as a result of the robust, free press they enjoy, while those primitive, benighted Muslims are tragically manipulated and propagandized by their governments. Yet here we have an extraordinarily consequential “vast drone/killing operation,” and while those in the Muslim world are well aware of what it is and what it does and debate all of that openly and vigorously, Americans are largely kept in the dark about it.”.
(picture is of a civilian casualty of US drone attacks)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lx50n3JJtS1qaqu94o1_500.jpg)
Shhhh .. Don’t Mention the Murder Drones
From an article by the always excellent Glenn Greenwald ..
“In 3 years, the Obama administration has built a vast drone/killing operation. No president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.” [..]
“The President can kill whomever he wants anywhere in the world (including U.S. citizens) without a shred of check or oversight, and has massively escalated these killings since taking office (at the time of Obama’s inauguration, the U.S. used drone attacks in only one country (Pakistan); under Obama, these attacks have occurred in at least six Muslim countries). Because it’s a Democrat (rather than big, bad George W. Bush) doing this, virtually no members of that Party utter a peep of objection (a few are willing to express only the most tepid, abstract “concerns” about the possibility of future abuse).
And even though these systematic, covert killings are widely known and discussed in newspapers all over the world — particularly in the places where they continue to extinguish the lives of innocent people by the dozens, including children — Obama designates even the existence of the program a secret, which means our democratic representatives and all of official Washington are barred by the force of law from commenting on it or even acknowledging that a CIA drone program exists (a prohibition enforced by an administration that has prosecuted leaks it dislikes more harshly than any other prior administration). […]Americans love to think that they are so very informed as a result of the robust, free press they enjoy, while those primitive, benighted Muslims are tragically manipulated and propagandized by their governments. Yet here we have an extraordinarily consequential “vast drone/killing operation,” and while those in the Muslim world are well aware of what it is and what it does and debate all of that openly and vigorously, Americans are largely kept in the dark about it.”.
(picture is of a civilian casualty of US drone attacks)
(via theyoungradical)
Things I find of scientific and/or political importance will go here. (Mostly the latter.)
You know, like important political happenings, movements, and things I agree or vehemently disagree with?
So yea, enjoy.
