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Category: Protests

  • Over 130,000 People Call On Chubb To Drop Trans Mountain

    Earlier today, activists from Stand.earth, 350 Vancouver, and Leadnow visited the Vancouver B.C. offices of multinational insurer Chubb to deliver petitions with over 130,000 signatures calling on the company not to renew their policy on the Trans Mountain pipeline. Today’s event is part of a campaign that has already led to commitments from 15 insurers to rule out doing business with the pipeline and other tar sands projects.

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  • Striking Alabama Coal Miners Want Their $1.1 Billion Back

    History repeated itself as hundreds of miners spilled out of buses in June and July to leaflet the Manhattan offices of asset manager BlackRock, the largest shareholder in the mining company Warrior Met Coal. Some had traveled from the pine woods of Brookwood, Alabama, where 1,100 coal miners have been on strike against Warrior Met since April 1. Others came in solidarity from the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania and the hollows of West Virginia and Ohio.

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  • Hundreds Of NYT Tech Workers Just Walked Off The Job

    Over 300 members of the New York Times Tech Guild walked off the job this afternoon in a planned half-day work stoppage to protest the New York Times Company’s aggressive union-busting. The stoppage was a specific protest against three unfair labor practices, or ULP’s, that the News Guild contends New York Times bosses management engaged in while trying to delay, distract or outright bust their tech workers’ fledgling union.

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  • Palestine Action Is Hitting Drone Maker Elbit Hard

    A new short film by Real Media follows the group Palestine Action over the past year. Activists have carried out sit-ins and sabotage against Elbit premises, shutting factories down, smashing windows, damaging equipment, graffiting and splashing walls with red paint to symbolize Palestinian blood. According to the film, Palestine Action have carried out more than 70 actions against Elbit in their first year, including 20 high-profile occupations of sites and factories.

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  • Palestinians Are Calling For International Support For Those Arrested In May

    The fund’s aims are to provide legal representation for defendants and to support the detainees’ families, “many of whom already live in dire socio-economic conditions, by ensuring that they do not have to bear the financial burden of these legal costs alone”. The fund has already raised over $67k of its $307k goal. Palestinians who joined the May uprising were struggling against Israel’s ongoing colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian land. They were fighting against racism and state brutality, and for freedom and autonomy. They deserve our support.

    The post Palestinians Are Calling For International Support For Those Arrested In May appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Police Arrest 10 People as Mountain Valley Pipeline Protests Top 932 Days

    On Monday, 10 people locked themselves to construction equipment and other apparatuses at a Mountain Valley construction site in Elliston, Virginia. The group blocked construction for 8.5 hours and were joined by nearly 100 pipeline fighters in support of them. All 10 people who locked down to block construction were later arrested.

    Their target, Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), is a 42-inch diameter, 300-plus mile, highly volatile, fracked gas pipeline that runs through West Virginia and Virginia. It’s one of many extraction projects connected to the larger buildup of fracking in the Marcellus and Utica Shales in Central Appalachia.

    The devices that Monday’s protesters used to prevent pipeline construction reflected Appalachia’s extensive biodiversity. They brought in two wooden structures that blocked vehicles from entering the worksite. They resembled the Candy Darter fish, a native species which is facing extinction and is threatened by the MVP, and a yellow finch. (The finch was reminiscent of the Yellow Finch Camp tree-sit blockades, in which people held off construction on an area of the MVP not far from Monday’s action.)

    Daryl Downing, a 24-year retired Air Force Officer of Richmond, Virginia, locked himself to one of these devices.

    Downing spoke to Truthout about swearing an oath to defend the country against all enemies, foreign and domestic. “(I’m) protecting my country and protecting my fellow citizens from a domestic enemy, in this case a fossil fuel company,” he said. He said he felt the need to take bold action in the face of imminent crisis.

    “The existential threat of climate change is upon us, and shame on me if I sit at home writing my Virginia delegate,” Downing said. He was charged with two misdemeanor charges of obstruction of free passage and trespassing and released on his personal recognizance.

    Five other people locked themselves to construction equipment, including a sideboom, which is used to carry and lay pipe. Peatmoss, who chose to use a pseudonym, one of the protesters who locked down to equipment, stated before the action, “When the cops tell me to unlock myself from this equipment, I will refuse. Despite the vast power of the state, I have the power to refuse in ways that cause real disruption, and you do too.” Peatmoss was charged with two misdemeanor charges of obstruction of free passage and trespassing a felony charge of misuse of a vehicle. They were released on $2,000 bail.

    Police, including Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department officers and Virginia State Troopers, arrived soon after the group took over the site. People present counted at least 23 police cars and two transport vans, and advocates reported that police harangued local businesses into harassing the pipeline defenders and non-related customers. Those that weren’t locked down to devices were eventually moved by the police across Highway 460 in front of a Dollar General store.

    Stephanie Thomas of Serve the People Cleveland, an organization that provides mutual aid, harm reduction, direct action and political support,

    told Truthout that officers from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department were patrolling the local Dollar General store, pushing customers out of the store and blocking the door from being entered.

    All of those locked down received two misdemeanor charges of obstruction of free passage and trespassing. Kricket (a pseudonym) also received a felony charge of misuse of a vehicle. All arrested were either released on their own personal recognizance or received bail.

    Resistance to the MVP is not a new phenomenon. It began in 2014 when the project was first proposed. The struggle has included a number of construction blockades, rallies, local art-based actions, protests outside Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioners’ homes and tree-sits. After 932 continuous days, the Yellow Finch Camp is one of the longest running tree-sits in the country.

    The criminalization of MVP protesters is not a new phenomenon, either. The Yellow Finch tree-sits were dismantled by Virginia State Police after Wren and Acre, two tree-sitters who blocked construction, were extracted by police on March 23 and 24, 2021. They both pled guilty to two misdemeanors of interfering with property rights and obstruction. They were held without bail for a month and a half in Western Virginia Regional Jail before being sentenced. Acre was sentenced to over two and a half additional months and Wren to approximately one more month of jail time for being in the tree-sits.

    These charges and sentences are part of a larger pattern of the state suppressing protests targeting resource extraction. For instance, activist Jessica Reznicek was recently sentenced to eight years in a federal prison for damaging the Dakota Access Pipeline.

    However, these acts of state suppression don’t appear to be slowing down those fighting the MVP. Monday’s action comes on the heels of another direct action held on August 6, in which two people were arrested and charged with various misdemeanors for obstruction, trespass and conspiracy.

    Those involved in the MVP resistance emphasize that their target is not simply the pipeline — it’s resource extraction on a larger scale, which is fueling the climate crisis.

    “Right now, we’re looking at a future with extreme water shortages, accelerating difficulty in growing food, mass human displacement due to natural disasters and manmade disasters caused by pipelines like these,” said Amanda Cochran, a pipeline fighter who locked down during Monday’s action.

    Currently, there are wildfires across 15 states and large areas of British Columbia. As a result, the air quality on the East Coast has become even more polluted and toxic. Water Protectors in northern Minnesota are currently fighting Enbridge’s treaty-violating Line 3 pipeline, running from so-called Canada to Lake Superior, Minnesota, and the headwaters of the Mississippi River.

    The MVP is owned by a joint venture, but EQM Midstream Partners, a Pennsylvania-based company, will operate the pipeline and own a significant interest. The pipeline’s construction is several billion dollars over budget and still missing important water-crossing permits, including for the Jefferson National Forest. In a letter dated May 27, the Environmental Protection Agency recommended that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers not grant MVP a Section 404 Clean Water Act permit, stating, “EPA has identified a number of substantial concerns with the project as currently proposed.” Hundreds of violations have occurred during construction, resulting in over half a million dollars in fines in West Virginia and over $2 million in fines in Virginia.

    Those resisting the MVP say they’ll continue until the project is halted.

    “When the pipeline was proposed they said it would be done in 2018. Three years past its supposed end date and it is nowhere near finished. The fight against it is not finished either, and will not be finished until the project is finally dropped,” said Maxwell Shaw, an activist who locked down to construction equipment in Monday’s action.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Demonstrators and security forces harass, obstruct journalists covering Tunisia protests

    On July 25 and 26, 2021, protestors and security forces in Tunis, Tunisia, assaulted and harassed at least six journalists covering demonstrations, according to news reports, journalists who spoke to CPJ and posted their experiences on social media, and a statement by the National Syndicate of Tunisian journalists (SNJT), a local trade union.

    The journalists were covering anti-government demonstrations in the city’s Bardo district, which began on July 25 after President Kais Saied fired Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi and suspended parliament, according to news reports.

    On July 25, unidentified protestors threw rocks at Yassine Gaidi, a photojournalist at the Turkish-owned Anadolu Agency, hitting him in the head and feet, according to a Facebook post by the journalist, news reports, and the SNJT statement.

    Gaidi received stitches on his legs at a local hospital following the attack, and was released the same day, according to those sources and a Facebook post by photojournalist Hamzaa Kriistou, who witnessed the incident.

    Also during that demonstration, protesters threw rocks and water bottles at Yosra Chikhaoui, a reporter for the independent news website Hakaek Online; Zied Hosni, a reporter for privately owned radio station Shems FM; and freelance photojournalist Mohamed Tata, according to news reports, the SNJT statement, and Chikhaoui, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

    Chikhaoui told that she received multiple bruises on her body from the objects. Hosni was hit in the chest and legs, and Tata was hit in the legs, according to those sources and a Facebook post by Hosni, which did not specify the extent of their injuries.

    Also on July 25, security forces grabbed Kriistou, a photojournalist for the state-run news agency Tunis Afrique Presse, by his back and arms to stop him from covering the protests in Bardo, according to the SNJT statement and a Facebook post by the journalist.

    On July 26, protestors shoved Walid Abdallah, a correspondent for Saudi news channel Al-Arabiya, and called him a spy while he attempted to cover the protests, according to a report by his employer, which included a video of the attack.

    Also on July 26, Tunisian security forces raided the Tunis office of Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera, ordered staff to leave the building, and confiscated equipment, CPJ documented at the time. As of today, the office remains closed, and its staff is obliged to work remotely without having access to their professional equipment, according to the broadcaster’s Tunis bureau chief, Lotfi Hajji, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

    Separately, on July 28, plainclothes police officers briefly detained a New York Times reporting team consisting of Cairo Bureau Chief Vivian Yee, Tunis correspondent Massinissa Benlakehal, and a third journalist who did not want their name disclosed, according to a report by the newspaper and Yee, who communicated with CPJ via email.

    The team was covering protests in Tunis’ al-Tamadon neighborhood when officers detained them and brought them to a local police station to check their documentation, according to those sources. Police held the team for about two hours, questioned Benlakehal, and then released the journalists without charge; Yee told CPJ she was unable to specify what officers asked Benlakehal about.

    CPJ emailed Tunisia’s Central Police Office and Nouri Lajmi, the president of the Independent High Authority of Audiovisual Communication, the country’s broadcast regulator, for comment, but did not receive any replies.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Extinction Rebellion Launch Plans For UK Rebellion

    Beginning on Monday 23 August, Extinction Rebellion will take to the streets again, with plans to disrupt the City of London to target the root cause of the climate and ecological crisis – the political economy – until the UK Government agrees to implement our new, immediate demand: that the UK Government ‘stop all new fossil fuel investment immediately’.

    The post Extinction Rebellion Launch Plans For UK Rebellion appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • A Global Anti-Olympics Movement Rises

    NOlympics LA, the group that Droesch is part of, was launched in 2017 out of the Housing & Homelessness committee of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. It has since grown into a larger campaign made up of various political organizations. Their hope is that with enough pressure and correction of disinformation, they can undo the deal that city officials made with the Olympic organizing committee to bring the games to Los Angeles in 2028.

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  • Covid Fear Management Policies: Distractions from and Tests for Looming Climate Collapse

    Photo by Jarr1520;

    Strategy of reward and punishment

    In the newly coined so-called War on Covid, the arsenal is eclectic. There is not only science, in the form of experimental RNA vaccines hastily developed by giants of the pharmaceutical industry, but also semi-authoritarian or full-blown authoritarian government measures imposed and legally validated by declarations of states of emergencies. The panoply of edicts include mandatory face masks indoor and sometime outdoor, depending on the country; enforced or unenforced social distancing recommendations; limitation of public or even private gatherings; and more drastic measures like lock-downs and curfews.

    The crescendo of assaults on personal liberties eased up for a few months, but governments are now using, because of the spread of the Delta variant, the threats of reinstating their coercion as an insidious blackmail to force people to get vaccinated. In other words, if one has the temerity to refuse the salvation brought by Big Pharma’s vaccines, life shall be so extremely problematic and isolated as almost to make one a social pariah. In France President Macron is defining a new ideology that could be called semi-authoritarian neoliberalism, while in the Philippines neofascist Duarte is entirely blunt in his approach. Regardless, both politicians have the same goal: to get their entire population vaccinated. They use a strategy of psychological warfare based on reward and punishment, a bit similar to that used on lab mice.

    Photo by Robert Muller

    In the case of Macron, the reward for the good and fully vaccinated French citizens is that they will carry, as a badge of honor, a Pass Sanitaire. The misfits, refuseniks, pesky bad citizens who still refuse to see the light and comply, will receive punishments. These bad French apples will be deprived from travel except in their own vehicles, and from cultural events like concerts, movies and museum exhibits.

    Duarte’s fascist approach, if more brutal, is in a sense a bit more honest. It is still about manipulating his population with the rewards versus punishments principle, but there are many sticks and basically no carrots. Case in point: Duarte is seriously considering locking up in their homes those Filipinos who refuse to be vaccinated. One can only wonder what will happen to the vast homeless population in the Philippines.

    Photo by Grey Area

    Vaccines, the universal silver bullet

    Covid management styles and policies have been diverse in tone and strategies, but it seems that governments worldwide are all watching, then mimicking, at times, each other’s minor achievements to avoid major failures. Only one question is on their minds, which seems to be the universal governmental panacea, independently of ideology: how do we get the entire population vaccinated?

    In the more sophisticated media manipulation of Western democracies, the secondary questions are as follows. How do we convince the citizenry that the coercive measures put in place nearly 18 months ago, in a quasi entirely undemocratic fashion by decrees etc., were gently forced on people for their own good rather than in an attempt to avoid a global economic collapse? And further, how do we persuade them that these measures will be entirely lifted one day to go back to an almost mythological happy pre-Covid world?

    Jonathan

    In other words, how can leaders, with varying degrees of incompetence and undisclosed ties to giant global corporate interests, make people believe that they are acting for the common good rather than to avoid a global stock market crash? Altruism and the collective social good rarely guide the paths of politicians anywhere, and citizens in large numbers have finally caught on to this reality.

    People have become more doubtful about what they are told, either directly by their elected officials, or through mainstream media outlets via so-called experts charged with propagating — yes, like propaganda — the government narrative with powerful bullhorns, and sort of carpet-bombing people’s brains with a relentless coverage of the immense danger of Covid, especially the brand new Delta variant, and the great virtue of vaccines as being almost 92 percent accurate silver bullets against the pandemic.

    Unfortunately, a one-note intrusive narrative eventually has an undesired effect on a fragment of the population. This is precisely what is going on in France since Macron made the choice, which could be fatal to his political future, to jam through parliament, in the middle of the summer holidays, a law infamously called Pass Sanitaire, to blackmail French people into mandatory vaccination. Many opponents perceive it as a pass to submission, and they have decided to make their voices heard, loud and clear, in the streets. Will this movement of dissent be long lived, contagious to other countries, or ultimately twisted and hijacked for a political purpose? This is so far a question in limbo.  The large scale protests, however, were unexpected.

    Illustration by Mike Finn

    A smoke screen to mask climate collapse

    A year ago the Covid-19 pandemic accounted for about 75 percent of the media coverage across the board worldwide. This alone, if a virus could have been granted the Person of the Year award from Time Magazine, would have assured it the coveted price. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won person of the year in 2020, but if it had been Creature of the Year, SARS-CoV-2 would have won. As matter of fact, one can easily argue that without the Covid crisis, Donald Trump would have likely been reelected. In political, sociological, and economic affairs, the microorganism has been a game changer.

    So far, Covid has not been a seed of much needed social change but instead has been used as a nasty new tool for disaster capitalism to thrive by changing some fundamental economic parameters, as well as serve as a powerful device to concentrate wealth. What could be better for capitalism than to convince taxpayers that their money needs to be injected by the trillions into corporate conglomerates? Across the world, in all the COVID-19 stimulus funding schemes, the lion share went to corporations while private citizens got the crumbs. Wall Street should have crashed but didn’t, because vast amounts of public funds were pumped into the global financial markets. Airlines that were saved from bankruptcy by a Covid bail out should have been nationalized; instead Air France, for example, remained a private company with an overpaid CEO while France’s government became a bigger share holder.

    Photo by Jeanne Menjoulet

    The bait and switch worked on a global scale. It worked with the financial aspect, just like it worked in the semantic of fear. For the media, it’s all about key words. Some might have noticed that at first it was COVID-19, then it became simply Covid, but now, probably because the word’s traction is wearing off, governments or corporate-controlled outlets have switched to Delta variant. It is today’s winner in the fear factor department, and it is repeated ad nauseam. This element of constant fear has established a nice level of docility in a majority of the global population, as well as a numbing anxiety focused on the narrow topic of the pandemic, and the easy vaccine fix proposed by governments.

    The cloud of anxiety has obstructed from many the clarity that WE, as a species, face a threat much greater than a virus. How gullible many of us might be to believe that a pandemic, which so far has killed a quarter of the number of victims of the Spanish flu 100 years ago, is more of an existential threat than the unfolding climate collapse? It is pathetic and ironic for governments and their media servants to use a pandemic as a smoke screen for a much bigger problem, especially when a substantial potion of Earth is currently being consumed by fires.

    Photo by Glenn Lewis

    Last time I checked, 800 wild fires were burning in Italy, Turkey was scorched, the US northwest was still burning, Greece was baking with a 45 degree Celsius temperature, Siberia had been burning for months, and there were killer floods in Germany and China. Meanwhile, the so-called climate experts on mainstream media hardly connected these climate crisis events. They barely connected the dots between extreme weather events and catastrophic climate change by softly saying “isolated extreme weather events could be a manifestation of global climate change.” It shouldn’t be “could be” but are; it shouldn’t be “climate change” but climate crisis. The global fear of Covid is highly lucrative. By contrast a fear of climate collapse — or actually a recognition of its imminence — would lead people to reject the global capitalist system that is driving our species into the abyss. It would lead human societies away from consumption and toward zero-growth economies and population models that would deal capitalism a fatal blow.

    Photo by Ian Sanderson

    We have more or less collectively experienced, since March 2020, a life of fear and a sort of lingering collective anxiety. Fear is usually correlated with a reduction of critical thinking and greatly diminished opposition against the abuse of authority.

    The protests in France show that fear can lose ground. Citizens do not have to surrender their fundamental rights of freedom and liberty to the whim of governmental authority based on semi-valid cognitive notions, or purely arbitrary ones, at times absurd, which appear to serve an agenda foreign to the common good. Popular resistance, whatever forms it may take in France and elsewhere, is always a viable option. At critical times in history it even becomes a civic duty.

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  • Reverend William Barber Leads Moral Monday March For Voting Rights To US Capitol

    On Monday August 2, 2021, Reverend William Barber II walked alongside Jesse Jackson leading several thousand on a revival of that same moral imperative. Their Moral Monday March was to demand that Congress restore the Voting Rights Act, signed by President Johnson on August 8, 1965, by passing the For The People Act, legislation which will strike down at the Federal level, all new voting restrictions passed in States like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Arizona.

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  • Remembering The Battle Of Blair Mountain

    “Somewhere around 15,000 miners engaged in three days and nights of crossfire with thousands of the more “well-to-do” members of West Virginia society, including every cop in the entire state and all the gun thugs the mine operators could find available to hire. It was an explicitly multiracial uprising, led by a union movement that had for decades been explicitly antiracist, acutely aware of the ways the bosses used the racial divide in the US to keep the working class in a constant state of conflict. So much of the labor movement of the day rejected this strategy and employed their own strategy of radical inclusion.”

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  • Guatemala Protests Call For Resignation Of President Giammattei & Corrupt AG

    A large number of opposition movements and parties, including indigenous, campesino and student organizations have organized at more than 60 meeting points in the capital and across the country, in what some are calling a ‘Plurinational strike’. Indigenous authorities issued a call on Thursday, urging the population to support mobilizations by taking to the streets to show rejection of the government and its corruption and flagrant mismanagement of the state.

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  • Seattle Vigil Against Racist Medical Negligence

    Hundreds of protesters gathered at Westlake Park in Seattle on the afternoon of July 24 for the Healthcare Equity March. This was the most recent of a series of protests centered around Kaloni Bolton, a 12-year-old Black girl who died tragically at the beginning of this year as a result of medical negligence.

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  • Rio Tinto in Serbia: The Jadar Lithium Project

    The company has been looking forward to this for some time.  For an outfit found wanting in dealing with inhabitants of a land whose culture it eviscerated in a matter of hours in May last year, Rio Tinto could think grandly about another future. The Anglo-Australian mining giant could add its name to a sounder, more environmentally sensitive programme, join the responsible future gazers and stroke the ecological conscience. Forget the destruction of the Juukan Gorge Caves in Western Australia.  It was time to control the narrative.

    Eyes have shifted to the Balkans.  The company is promising $2.4 billion for the Jadar lithium-borates project in Serbia provided it gets the appropriate permits.  In the coming weeks, it will transport a pilot lithium processing plant in four 40-foot shipping containers, suggesting a sure degree of optimism.  From its science hub located on the outer parts of Melbourne, the company’s research team claim to have identified an economically viable method of extracting lithium from the mineral jadarite.

    A statement from the company outlined the importance of the Jadar project.  “Jadar will produce battery-grade lithium carbonate, a critical mineral used in large scale batteries for electric vehicles and storing renewable energy, and position Rio Tinto as the largest source of lithium supply in Europe for at least the next 15 years.  In addition, Jadar will produce borates, which are used in solar panels and wind turbines.”

    Those at the company are already anticipating a nice public relations coup.  The project “would scale up Rio Tinto’s exposure to battery materials, and demonstrate the company’s commitment to investing capital in a disciplined manner to further strengthen its portfolio for the global energy transition.”

    In terms of schedule, Rio Tinto hopes to start construction of the underground mine in 2022, with saleable production commencing in 2026.  Full production is anticipated three years later.  The complement will comprise 58,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate, 160,000 tonnes of boric acid and 255,000 tonnes of sodium sulphate.

    The company hopes to win over the Serbian authorities by promising rich additions to the local economy and stroking the ego of strategic significance.  “It’s not a huge mine,” Sinead Kaufman, Chief Executive of Rio’s Minerals division, told reporters, “but from a lithium perspective, it’s going to be the largest producer in Europe for at least ten years and bring lithium to the market at scale.”  Estimates are put at 1% of gross domestic product coming directly from Jadar itself, with 4% being the indirect contribution to the Serbian economy.  The mine will come with incidental additions: relevant infrastructure and equipment, electric haul trucks, a beneficiation chemical processing plant dealing with dry stacking of tailings.  In all, enough lithium will be available to power a million electric vehicles.

    All this rosiness cannot detract from the issue of environmental sustainability.  Rio promises that a commissioned environmental assessment impact will be made available for comment “shortly”.  “We are committed to upholding the highest environmental standards and building sustainable futures for the communities where we operate,” states the company’s CEO Jakob Stausholm.  “We recognise that in progressing this project, we must listen to and respect the views of all stakeholders.”

    These statements are at odds with reality, both current and historical.  Rio Tinto’s Serbian subsidiary firm Rio Sava Exploration is currently facing charges by two Serbian NGOs, the Coalition against Environmental Corruption and the Podrinje Anti-Corruption Team, PAKT, citing violations of environmental regulations since 2015.

    In fact, Rio’s conduct has produced something of a green awakening in Serbia.  A disparate number of environmental groups, academics and politicians have found rare common ground.  In June, the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences sent a letter to Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Zorana Mihajlović outlining the grave implications of permitting the project to go ahead.  “The mine would cause great and irreversible damage not only to the area where it would be located, but to the entire country.”  The location of the mining complex would threaten agricultural land, forests, meadows and the water supply areas in Mačva.  “Tailings with toxic residues from ore processing would span over 160 hectares.”

    Last month, protesters gathered at Loznica to vent their concerns.  At the gathering, Marijana Petković of the Ne Damo Jadar initiative gave an insight into the way Rio dealt with locals.  “They came in 2004, they never answered us as people on three key things: what to do with the noise; with the water; what is the minimum amount of pollution.”

    An online petition against the mine has also attracted 125,685 signatures.  It describes the Jadar Valley as having “Serbia’s fertile land” marked by “thousands of sustainable multi-generational farms.” It speaks to fears about the imminent poisoning of water sources.  “The process of separating chemically stable lithium from jadarite ore involves the use of concentrated sulphuric acid.”  The process would be undertaken some 20km from the Drina River using 300 cubic metres of water per hour, with the chemically treated water returned to the Jadar River.  Entire basins of water, and water sources beyond Serbia, risked being contaminated.

    The petitioners also take issue with the lack of transparency on negotiations between Rio Tinto and the Serbian government, fearing “potential corruption on the government’s behalf.”  Some homework of the company’s sketchy record on the environment was also recounted, including “the destruction of a 45,000 year old sacred Australian Aboriginal cave.”

    Rio Tinto is a company loose with figures, selective in its consultative process (some call it bribery) and its accounts. The London Mining Network documents a record replete with ruthless indifference, environmental crimes, and human rights abuses.  At the company’s 1937 annual general meeting, chairman Sir Auckland Geddes expressed his gratitude to the fascist forces of Spain’s General Francisco Franco, who had crushed a mining revolt that threatened the smooth operations of the company.  “Miners found guilty of troublemaking are court-martialed and shot,” he noted with approval.

    The company is currently the subject of an investigation by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) on suspected breaches of disclosure rules on the value of Mongolia’s Oyu Tolgoi mine, the company’s biggest copper growth project.  The expansion of the mine, coming in at $6.75 billion, is $1.4 billion higher than Rio’s own estimate in 2016.

    Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vučić, sufficiently troubled by the indignation, is floating the idea of putting the project to a referendum.  This is unlikely to trouble Rio Tinto, whose promises of economic manna for Serbia through jobs and placing it at the forefront of the lithium-electric car revolution is bound to mask potential environmental depredations.  As with its record in other countries, this mining giant’s understanding of consultation and accountability is estranged from that of a local populace treated as nuisances rather than citizens.

    The post Rio Tinto in Serbia: The Jadar Lithium Project first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Actions Demand NY Close Groups Backing Settler Genocide In Palestine

    In the morning they picketed the Long Island home of Justin “Yaacov” Fauci, who moved from New York to invade and steal Palestinian lands including the Al-Kurd family home. He became notorious in a video that went viral of him publicly admitting his crime when he stated, “If I don’t steal it, someone else is gonna,” as he invaded the Palestinian home. In the afternoon, the advocates marched in Brooklyn, NY and picketed the offices of New York Attorney General Letitia James to draw attention to New York-based Zionist nonprofits helping settlers – like Long Island-born Fauci – to participate in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.

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  • ‘Block The Boat’ Hits New Jersey

    Last weekend activists activists held an action at a port in Elizabeth, New Jersey, attempting to block an Israeli-operated cargo ship from unloading. The Haifa-based shipping company ZIM has been targeted by the BDS movement over its connection to Israeli apartheid and last month Bay Area protestors successfully stopped ZIM from offloading in Oakland.

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  • Coal Miners Hit Streets Of NYC To Protest Corporate Greed

    Faced with intransigence from the company and increasing hostility on the picket line, a caravan of striking miners and their supporters came back to New York City to voice their demands and hold a rally on July 28 in front of the NYC headquarters of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and Warrior Met’s biggest investor. In this TRNN report, part of our ongoing series “Battleground Brookwood,” we give an update on the strike and hear directly from striking miner Mike Wright.

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  • Climate Campaigners Hold “Tug-Of-War” In Front Of Leinster House

    Protesters gathered before the Dail today and staged a “tug-of-war” to highlight fracked gas imports and the climate implications of data centres. Members of Extinction Rebellion Ireland dressed as representatives of tech companies as part of their campaign, holding the rope on one end during a tug-of-war while children pulled on the other.

    The post Climate Campaigners Hold “Tug-Of-War” In Front Of Leinster House appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • City Hall Protest Over NYC Homeless Relocations Leads To 11 Arrests

    Housing advocates dubbed de Blasio a broken record for his repetitive phrases such as a “Recovery for all” and references to New York’s bright future, which they say ostracizes the homeless community. In response to the mayor’s “empty promises,” several organizations held the “de Blasio Broken Record” Action, during which they demanded a halt to the transferal of unhoused individuals from hotels to shelters.

    The post City Hall Protest Over NYC Homeless Relocations Leads To 11 Arrests appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Striking Coal Miners Return To New York To Picket Investor

    The miners who dig black rocks from beneath the soil of Alabama returned to New York July 28 to protest outside the steel-clad offices of BlackRock Fund Advisors on East 52nd Street. The investment firm owns 13% of the Warrior Met Coal company in Brookwood, Alabama, where 1,000 miners have been on strike since April 1.

    Hundreds of miners from throughout the Appalachian coal belt filled four police pens on both sides of the block, joined by supporters from a dozen-odd New York unions, cheering loudly when the drivers of Verizon vans, Uber taxis, and food-delivery and garbage trucks passing by honked their horns in support.

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  • NC Activists Challenge Subsidies For Weapons Maker

    The protesters, including about 50 people and three dogs, marched nine miles to the future plant site — an unusually vibrant display of local resistance to the decades-old sales pitch that undergirds the U.S. military-industrial complex in communities nationwide: that ethics and profligate public spending should be overlooked in exchange for producing jobs.

    The post NC Activists Challenge Subsidies For Weapons Maker appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • PopularResistance.Org 2021-07-28 15:13:41

    In step with the cancellation, Plains All American Pipeline has requested state and federal agencies to revoke necessary permits for the Byhalia Connection — what would have been a 49-mile route connecting a refinery in Memphis to an oil terminal in northern Mississippi, running through a series of majority-Black neighborhoods in Tennessee. The pipeline was a joint venture between Plains and Valero Energy Corporation.

    The post appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Facial recognition and the NSW protest crowds

    NSW Police have not ruled out its use of facial recognition technology to identify thousands of protestors from a Sydney anti-lockdown rally on Saturday, despite calls from experts to pause its use. But it won’t confirm the use of the technology either.

    Its potential use at a public protest has raised alarm among experts, who say the police need to be more transparent in how they deploy the controversial technology, which remains largely unregulated in Australia.

    Following the protests in Sydney’s CBD on Saturday, police established a taskforce to identify individuals at the rally. At least 22 detectives have been tasked with identifying the crowd of thousands which participated in the event in defiance of public health orders.

    Police Minister David Elliot said the taskforce would “forensically investigate all CCTV and social media footage collected over the course of the afternoon’s protest”.

    Image: NSW Police.

    NSW Police declined to answer questions on what technology they were using to identify protestors and which databases they would be matched against because of “operational reasons”.

    However, The Daily Telegraph has reported police would use facial recognition technology, Uber records and OPAL ticket data to track down anyone they believe attended the protest.

    A NSW Police spokesperson queried that report, but told InnovationAus police would use “all resources available to them” to identify protestors.

    “I do entirely expect that [NSW Police] will be making use of their facial recognition capabilities in order to identify protestors,” said Deakin University senior lecturer Dr Monique Mann.

    There is nothing legally stopping the police from deploying the technology, Dr Mann said, but doing so raises serious questions because in Australia facial recognition technologies are being operated “outside an appropriate legal framework”.

    Australian Human Right Commissioner Ed Santow said law enforcement should not be using facial recognition because effective legal protections are not yet in place to prevent its misuse or overuse.

    “‘One-to-many’ facial recognition, which is used to identify people in a crowd, is prone to high rates of error,” Mr Santow told InnovationAus.

    “Those errors are more likely to affect people of colour, women and people with a physical disability. When police make an error using facial recognition, this can result in significant human rights violations, including unlawful arrest and detention.”

    The NSW Police set up a covert Facial Recognition Unit three years ago in anticipation of a national biometrics database which would have given them access to passport and licence photos from around the country.

    A joint security committee rejected the federal government’s underlying legislation for the scheme in 2019 because it lacked adequate privacy and security safeguards.

    But the NSW Police unit has continued operating, including trialing the national database without legislation, and morphed the unit into an intelligence tool for police.

    In a rare media interview this month, police from the unit said they now mainly match images of suspects against a database of people who have already been arrested in the state. Police flagged plans to expand the unit and promised transparency to get the public on board.

    But this week NSW Police declined to confirm or deny if the technology will be used to identify anti-lockdown protestors, who breached public health orders by gathering in the Sydney CBD on Saturday.

    “The police have an important role in keeping the community safe, especially during the current pandemic,” Mr Santow said.

    “It’s vital, therefore, that the technology used in law enforcement is safe and reliable, with effective legal protections.”

    Experts this month backed the call by Australia’s Human Rights Commission for a moratorium on the use of facial recognition and algorithms in important decision-making until adequate protections are in place.

    Dr Mann said there are some limited scenarios where the use of facial recognition is proportionate and warranted. But the potential use by NSW police during a protest without an effective legal framework or even transparency on how it is being used is alarming.

    “When you’re just rolling it out across the city — in terms of live identification in public spaces, or even after the fact through identification of people with CCTV camera or images on social media — with no protections, with no oversight, with no transparency, then that is really concerning,” she said.

    “We need to really think about sort of the type of society he wants to live in.”

    The post Facial recognition and the NSW protest crowds appeared first on InnovationAus.

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  • More Protests In Brazil Over COVID Crisis

    Protesters have taken to the streets across Brazil once more to demand far-right President Jair Bolsonaro step down over his government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as well as recent corruption allegations. Demonstrators marched in Rio de Janeiro and several other cities nationwide on Saturday in the latest display of public anger and frustration to hit the South American nation in recent weeks.

    The post More Protests In Brazil Over COVID Crisis appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Court Stops Police From Blockading Line 3 Protester Camp

    “The Hubbard County sheriff has been served notice that his illegal campaign of militarized harassment and obstruction against our clients must end now,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Center for Protest Law and Litigation, a project of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. “Any ongoing effort by him to blockade the camp, turn it into an open-air prison, or criminalize people for coming to and from the property will subject him to a contempt action.”

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  • Former heads of state, politicians, artists, and intellectuals call on Biden to “Let Cuba Live”

    Over 400 former heads of state, politicians, intellectuals, scientists, members of the clergy, artists, musicians and activists from across the globe have issued an urgent appeal to United States President Joe Biden to lift the 243 unilateral coercive measures that were imposed on Cuba by former president Donald Trump. They argue that these measures “have intentionally throttled life on the island and created more suffering.”

    The post Former heads of state, politicians, artists, and intellectuals call on Biden to “Let Cuba Live” appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Medicare for All Rallies in 50 Cities

    Why is the U.S. an outlier with regard to health care? What keeps the country from adopting a universal health care system, which most Americans have supported for many years now? And what exactly is Medicare for All? On the eve of scheduled marches and rallies in support of Medicare for All, led by various organizations such as the Sunrise Movement, Physicians for a National Health Program, the Democratic Socialists of America and concerned citizens throughout the country, the interview below with Peter S. Arno, a leading health expert, sheds light on some key questions about the state of health care in the United States.

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  • German Olympic Gymnastics Team Will Wear Unitards In Protest Against ‘Sexualization’

    Germany’s women’s Olympic gymnastic team will wear unitards at the Tokyo 2020 games in protest against the “sexualisation” of the sport.

    The team will wear full-body outfits that cover their legs from hip to ankle. This is an obvious difference from the traditional leotard which usually leaves the entire leg and hip exposed on the female gymnasts. The unitard, although breaking from conventions, doesn’t defy the rules of the competition.

    The post German Olympic Gymnastics Team Will Wear Unitards In Protest Against ‘Sexualization’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Just Out of Jail, Winona LaDuke Decries Militarized Crackdown on Line 3 Protests

    Just Out of Jail, Winona LaDuke Decries Militarized Crackdown on Enbridge Line 3 Pipeline Protests

    Nearly 600 Water Protectors have been arrested during ongoing protests in Minnesota against the construction of the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline at the Shell River, which the partially completed pipeline is set to cross in five places. On Monday, authorities arrested Indigenous leader Winona LaDuke and at least six others. She was just released from jail yesterday and joins us after three nights in jail. LaDuke describes how the Canadian multinational corporation Enbridge, which is building the pipeline, has funded more than 40 police squads from around the state to crack down on protests, saying, “It is a civil crisis when a Canadian multinational controls your police force.” LaDuke is executive director of Honor the Earth. She says Enbridge’s efforts to finish construction come as investors are increasingly pulling out of the fossil fuels sector. “Who wants to have the last tar sands pipeline? It’s the end of the party.”

    Please check back later for full transcript.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.