Trojan Asteroid Shares Earth’s Orbit Around the Sun

strange place, reality…

Turns out the moon’s not the Earth’s only traveling companion. Space scientists have discovered an asteroid that’s been following our fair planet for thousands of years, at least — and there may be many more where it came from, according to a recent study.

If other so-called Trojan asteroids are found, they could turn out to be ideal candidates for a visit from astronauts, something NASA hopes will be possible within the next 15 years.

Most of the asteroids in the solar system populate the belt of rocky debris between Mars and Jupiter. But planets can pull asteroids into their orbits, too. More than 4,000 Trojan asteroids have been discovered around the gas giant Jupiter, along with a few around Neptune and Mars.

But no such asteroid had ever been found near Earth. That led some scientists to believe that our planet lacked an entourage.

But others proposed a different explanation: Perhaps there were Trojan asteroids in Earth’s orbit around the sun, but they were simply hidden from view.

The problem was this: In order for an asteroid to attain a stable position in a planet’s orbit, it must find the spot where the gravitational pull of the planet and that of the sun cancel each other out. Two of these spots, called Lagrangian points, lie along a planet’s orbit — one ahead of the planet and one behind it. Drawing straight lines between the Earth, the sun and a Lagrangian point produces a triangle whose sides are equal in length. An asteroid there would hover in the sky at a 60-degree angle from the sun.

Any object that close to the sun would be difficult to see from Earth because it would be overhead mostly during broad daylight, as invisible as the stars.

But Martin Connors, a space scientist at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada, had an idea. Maybe NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, which aims its lens 90 degrees away from the sun, would be able to pick up an oddball Trojan with an eccentric orbit.

Indeed it did. Connors found one candidate whose strange path over six days in late 2010 seemed to match the unevenly elongated orbit typical of Trojans. His team confirmed the Trojan’s identity by spotting it a few months later with another telescope in Hawaii.

computer simulation:

attacks in norway leave at least 87 dead

80 killed in youth camp shooting spree

Police say at least 80 people were killed in a shooting spree at the youth camp of Norway’s Labour Party.

Police director Oystein Maeland told reporters early Saturday they had discovered many more victims after initially reporting the death toll at 10.

Maeland couldn’t say how many people were injured in the shooting.

Hundreds of youth were attending the summer camp organized by the youth wing of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s Labour Party on the island of Utoya.

Explosion near PM’s office in Oslo, seven dead

A powerful bomb tore into the heart of Norway on Friday, killing at least seven people and injuring 15 as it ripped open buildings including the prime minister’s office. It was the deadliest bombing ever in Oslo, normally associated with the Nobel Peace Prize that is awarded there.

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg was working at home on Friday and was unharmed, according to senior adviser Oivind Ostang.

The square where the bomb exploded was covered in twisted metal and shattered glass, and carpeted in documents expelled from the surrounding buildings, which house government offices and the headquarters of some of Norway’s leading newspapers. Most of the windows were shattered in the 20-floor high rise where the prime minister and his administration works.

Oslo police said the explosion was caused by “one or more” bombs, but declined to speculate on who was behind the attack. They later sealed off the nearby offices of broadcaster TV 2 after discovering a suspicious package.

“So far, police cannot say anything about the scope of the damage, aside from that there’s been one or several explosions,” a police statement read.

An AP reporter who was in the office of Norwegian news agency NTB said the building shook from the blast and all employees evacuated as the alarm went off. Down in the street, he saw one person with a bleeding leg being led away from the area.

Public broadcaster NRK showed video of a blackened car lying on its side amid the debris.

Witness Ole Tommy Pedersen was standing at a bus stop 100 meters (yards) from the government high-rise at 3:30 p.m. (1330 GMT) when the explosion occurred.

“I saw three or four injured people being carried out of the building a few minutes later,” Pedersen told AP.

The blast comes as Norway grapples with a homegrown terror plot linked to al-Qaida. Two suspects are in jail awaiting charges.

Last week, a Norwegian prosecutor filed terror charges against an Iraqi-born cleric for threatening Norwegian politicians with death if he is deported from the Scandinavian country. The indictment centered on statements that Mullah Krekar – the founder of the Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam – made to various news media, including American network NBC.

 

 

roman catholic child molesting cartel unstopable by world’s governemnts

from top to bottom, the roman catholic child molesting cartel continues to protect rapist priests. indeed, the church has consistently rewarded bishops who have covered-up child molesting incidents in their diocese…including the current pope and the vatican’s top theologian.

Philadelphia archbishop resigns amid sex scandal 

Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation of Philadelphia archbishop Cardinal Justin Rigali today, sending him into retirement as the archdiocese faces accusations that it covered up a long-running priest sex abuse scandal.

The pope named conservative Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput to succeed him.

The brief Vatican announcement said the resignation of the 76-year-old Rigali was for reason of age. He submitted it on his 75th birthday in April 2010, as required by church law, but the pope did not immediately act on it.

But the Cardinal has been under pressure for his handling of the sex-abuse scandal. In his eight-year tenure, a pair of grand jury reports, one in 2005 and one released in February, have rocked the archdiocese by accusing church officials of covering up abuse allegations against priests.

February’s scathing report resulted in unprecedented criminal charges against a former secretary of clergy for allegedly transferring pedophile priests without warning new parishes.

The grand jury accused church officials of keeping 37 clergy in active ministry despite credible claims that they had sexually abused young people. The allegations came nine years after U.S. bishops promised at the height of the clergy abuse crisis to oust all predators from ministry.

Attorneys File New Child Sex Abuse Lawsuit; Cleric Worked in NC Churches 

A child sexual abuse and cover up civil lawsuit is being filed Tuesday alleging that Fr. Richard Farwell began sexually abusing a teenage boy at St. Ann’s in the early 1980s and continued to molest him at Sacred Heart Catholic Church and in the NC mountains. The suit, seeking damages in excess of $10,000, also alleges that the Charlotte Diocese has concealed child sex crimes by clergy since the Diocese was founded and that such cover ups continue even now.

According to the lawsuit, the Charlotte Diocese knew from the 1980’s that: 1) Farwell was unfit to serve as a parish priest; 2) that Farwell was a member of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous and 3) that Farwell had a multitude of problems, requiring the Diocese to send him to the House of Affirmation, a notorious (and now closed) facility in Massachusetts that treated child abusing clergy from across the country. Despite this knowledge, Diocesan officials allowed Farwell to continue serving as a priest until 2002, when criminal child sex abuse charges abuse were filed against him in Rowan County. In November 2004, Farwell pled no-contest to “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” and received a 181-day suspended sentence.

As U.S. archbishop, the current Vatican enforcer of doctrine & morals reassigned abusive priest, didn’t warn parishioners 

In sworn testimony in 2006 about his time as Archbishop of Portland, Oregon (1986-1995), US Cardinal William Levada said he decided to reassign the offending priest after he underwent therapy.

“The abuse in question had happened 20 years before, or so… the recommendation of the therapy was that he was not at risk for re-abusing and that it would be prudent to reassign him… and prudent also to put conditions that would make sure that he would not be overstressed to do some inappropriate behavior,” Levada testified.

A transcript of Levada’s lengthy testimony on his decision in the mid-1990s was provided to AFP by a lawyer of the victims of pedophile priests in Oregon state.

Levada now heads the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). He was chosen for the post by his predecessor and then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who as pope now has come under criticism for failing to act against priests accused of child abuse in his earlier position as chief Vatican enforcer of Catholic doctrine and morals.

Pope ‘led cover-up of child abuse by priests’ 

In 2001, while he was a cardinal, he issued a secret Vatican edict to Catholic bishops all over the world, instructing them to put the Church’s interests ahead of child safety.

The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it. And, to keep victims quiet, it threatened that if they repeat the allegations they would be excommunicated.

murdoch unmasked as puppet master in uk, us

after years of cover-ups by the metropolitan police in london, a whistle-blower told about phone hacking carried out by reporters in various news organizations owned by rupert murdoch.

as the story began to come to light, it was revealed that members of the met police provided information to reporters about the whereabouts of persons of interest, and that the reporters were able to access people’s phone messages. how far up did this go?

two people implicated in this scandal who have resigned from their jobs had close ties to both the murdoch family and prime minister david cameron.

the head of the metropolitan police has resigned, as well as his number one deputy.

the head of the dow jones company and editor of the wall street journal -  both owned by murdoch  - has resigned. he had been head of murdoch’s british publishing empire when the phone hacking incidents began.

the whistle-blower who first spoke about this, in an article for the ny times, has been found dead. the met police are not investigating his death, nor officially searching for his missing partner.

this whole incident began to unwind when several celebrities proved that their phones had been hacked, and the information obtained was then published by news of the world.

it turns out that there had been two prior investigations into allegations of illegal phone hacking by news of the world reporters, but that police had found no evidence and stopped the investigations.

the metropolitan police where so cozy with murdoch’s media empire, they hired one of his editors as a pr consultant.

back in the us, the fbi is now investigating phone hacking allegations here.

Irish Priests go on a raping spree

Ex-bishop blamed over child abuse

A former senior Irish bishop deliberately misled authorities and failed to report clerical abuse allegations as recently as three years ago, a report has said.

John Magee, a Vatican aide to three Popes, has been blamed for ignoring complaints against priests in the Diocese of Cloyne in Co Cork between 1996 and 2009 and failing to follow official protection rules.

He gave his second-in-command Monsignor Denis O’Callaghan, who admits he was more concerned with the plight of abusive priests than victims, a free hand to defy an edict to report all accusations.

Both Bishop Magee and the Monsignor, the vicar general in Cloyne, refused to co-operate with a Garda inquiry into abuse in 2006.

The inquiry into Cloyne – the fourth damning examination of clerical abuse and cover-ups of the Church in Ireland – found the greatest flaw in the diocese was repeated failure to report all complaints. It found nine allegations out of 15 were not passed on to the Garda.

“It is a remarkable fact that Bishop Magee took little or no active interest in the management of clerical child sexual abuse cases until 2008,” it said.

When reports of failures in Cloyne first emerged in 2009 Cardinal Sean Brady, Ireland’s most senior Catholic cleric, insisted Magee should not resign.

Report on sex abuse ‘to be worse than Ferns’ 

THE Government will today discuss the fourth major report into clerical child sexual abuse when Justice Minister Alan Shatter presents horrific findings from the Cork diocese of Cloyne.

The report’s findings are expected to be even graver than in Dublin and Ferns.

Last night sources indicated that the Cabinet will approve the 400-page report of the Murphy Commission of Inquiry, and order its immediate publication tomorrow.

Preparations were last night being made to allow victims and the media to read in advance the detailed 26 chapters of abuse complaints against 19 priests over a 13-year period from January 1 1996 to 2009.

“An hour has been allocated for a pre-publication read ahead of a news conference which Mr Shatter is planning to hold at midday,” a source said last night.

The report is said to be damning of former Bishop John Magee’s failures to implement agreed child protection procedures.But it likely to highlight the failure of the gardai and health services in dealing with a number of abuse complaints.

severe global depression – no end in sight!

the empire wears no economy
by ted rall

Choose a narative

More than at any previous time in their lives, Americans looking for answers and facts are forced to read between the lines of press and broadcast accounts that bear little resemblance to reality “on the ground”, as they say on cable news. Truth, when it can be coaxed out of propaganda so patently ridiculous that it has become indiscernible from the standard-issue “everything is great, our leaders know best” nonsense of the world’s autocracies, is revealed in sloppy contradictions. Wiseman, though flying on the side of the agenda-busting angels, is no exception: is the US economy generating “meager gains” or “spoils”? Hm.

On its face the official narrative is false to a laughably Orwellian extreme. The recession is over; the recovery is well underway, they say. However, as The Wall Street Journal reports, the recovery is slow and mainly benefiting big business. “While the US economy staggers through one of its slowest recoveries since the Great Recession,” the paper wrote July 5th, “American companies are poised to report strong earnings for the second quarter – exposing a dichotomy between corporate performance and the overall health of the economy.”

Logical holes in the argument gape so wide you could drive a truck through it – if it was worth putting it out on the road without goods to fill it with, or consumers to buy them.

First, high bottom lines don’t necessarily reflect healthy companies. A company can suffer declining sales and market share yet still increase profits by laying off workers, thus reducing payroll expenses. For example, the Internet search giant Yahoo! saw revenues decline 12 percent in late 2010 yet doubled its profits. How’d they do it? They fired one percent of their workforce. If Yahoo! were to continue this trend, it would soon cease to exist.

Second, First World economies are two-thirds reliant on consumer spending. Consumers in the United States, as well as those throughout the world, are in big trouble. The official US unemployment rate is 9.1 percent but the “real rate” – the one calculated the way most other countries do theirs, which includes people whose unemployment benefits have lapsed – is closer to 20 percent, higher than those of Tunisia and Egypt at the start of the Arab Spring. People who still have jobs have suffered pay cuts both visible and invisible, the latter from galloping inflation in fuel and other costs that government agencies intentionally omit from calculations of consumer price indices.

Can an economy “recover” without its people?

Airports and shopping malls throughout the United States are empty. Advertising space on billboards and newspapers go begging. Storefronts from Fifth Avenue in New York to the Las Vegas Strip to small towns in the Midwest are boarded up. The price of homes, which for middle-class Americans are often their sole substantial form of savings, continues to decline after the real estate bubble burst in 2008. Consumer confidence, the measure of people’s willingness to part with cash to buy goods and services, is in the tank.

When 60 percent of Americans rate the economy as poor, don’t count on them to buy stuff.

They’re not.

“Workers’ wages and benefits [now] make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low,” wrote the AP’s Wiseman. “Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable – about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.”

Corporate CEOs may be whistling past the graveyard, raking in huge bonuses and pay raises approved by compliant boards of directors, but the overall state of the economy is a disaster. Recovery? Forget it – there isn’t one. Are we still in a recession? That would be an improvement. By most measures – unemployment, collapsing gross domestic product, falling incomes – this is a global depression. But the government won’t even admit that there’s a problem – except for unemployment and falling wages.

Like his outgoing predecessor George W. Bush, Obama’s response to the 2008 meltdown was to transfer trillions of dollars out of the US treasury into the portfolios of investment banks, insurance companies, airlines and automobile manufacturers, no questions asked. This corporate-based approach relied upon Reagan-style trickle-down economics, the repeatedly failed theory that wealth transferred to the highest echelons of the ruling classes eventually “trickles down” in the form of increased spending, economic activity and hiring to the middle- and working classes. Not surprisingly, this non-response response succeeded in one area: increasing the salaries and perks of corporate executives. Job growth has been non-existent.

The president stayed the course in 2010: “Make no mistake, we are headed in the right direction”, Obama said in July, while allowing: “We are not headed there fast enough for a lot of Americans. We’re not headed there fast enough for me either.”

June 2011: “There will be bumps on the road to recovery.”

Convincing the masses?

Either Obama’s powers of persuasion are lacking or the American people have wised up. Whatever the reason, they don’t believe him. According to the Gallup poll, which asks whether respondents think the economy is improving or getting worse, the mood has become increasingly pessimistic along the bumpy road to recovery.

The Department of Labour announced this week that the US economy had added a mere 18,000 jobs in June, a net loss of 82,000. Eight million jobs were lost during the 2008-09 debacle; some two to three million more since the “recovery” began.

The respected website Shadow Government Statistics currently places the real unemployment rate at 22.8 percent – equivalent to the worst months of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

With nearly one out of four Americans jobless and countless more underemployed, tensions are emerging between classes in this traditionally “classless” society in which both the rich and poor identify themselves as “middle class”. Though the wealthy always do better during tough times (well, during any times!), the gap is widening at an astonishing rate. “US workers averaged $46,742 in 2010, up 2.6 percent from 2009,” according to USA Today. Bear in mind, with a real inflation rate (calculated the same way as inflation is calculated by other Western countries) of 11.2 percent, these workers are losing ground. Meanwhile, the paper noted, “average compensation among S&P 500 CEOs rose to $12 million in 2010, up 18 percent from 2009 – and that’s not counting the potential multimillion-dollar value of stock or stock options, which are granted at set prices and provide holders profits as stock values rise.”

The numbers are jaw-dropping. John Hammergren, CEO of the McKesson healthcare services firm, received $150.7 million in 2010. Fashion maven Ralph Lauren paid himself $75.2 million. “Some of the gains are humongous”, said Paul Hodgson of GovernanceMetrics.

To the citizens of countries for whom $46,000 a year would seem like a king’s ransom, Americans’ resentment of CEOs who receive annual salaries on par with the gross domestic products of some nations no doubt seems petty, if not a little silly. Yet they (and the CEOs) should ignore the prosperity chasm at their own peril. American politics, already more divisive as seen through such phenomena as the nativist Tea Party movement on the far right and the anarcho-libertarians of the left, will fracture further until the center (what center?) no longer holds.

Americans may be better off than most people on the planet. But they don’t feel like it. Perception becomes reality when people are scared.

The world cannot feel safe when its sole remaining superpower is falling apart at the seams. If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, militarism is the desperate last act of an oppressive government in a state of economic collapse.

Real economic indicators

At the core of the when-is-a-recovery-not-a-recovery question is vocabulary. What is a recession? How do we know when it’s over?

Beginning in the 1970s American economists began to define recession as being in effect when GDP falls during two consecutive fiscal quarters.

One result of this definition is that a recession is often not officially “declared” by mainstream economists until it is over – i.e., when GDP begins to rise again. This contributes to a strange reality gap: We are not in a recession until we are in a recovery. Effectively, then, it is rare for the American news media to state at any given time that the US economy is then in a recession. Naturally, this contributes to the perception that newspapers and TV stations lie to them, and that they do so on behalf of an uncaring regime.

The 2008 collapse was exceptionally long. Nevertheless, this rule of the undeclared recession held. On December 1, 2008 the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that a recession head begun on December 1, 2007. They later declared it over as of June 2009. Thus a recession that had lasted one and a half years was only officially acknowledged for six months.

Moreover, the definition of recession is obviously faulty.

For most ordinary people, unemployment is the leading economic indicator. A secondary indicator is income.

Do I have a job?

Can I find a job?

How much can I earn?

The answers to those questions provide the most accurate indicators of economic health. When two-thirds of the economy (or 59 percent now) relies on consumer spending, who gives two figs about whether GDP goes up or down during two consecutive quarters? The fact that the press takes this non-people-based definition of recession seriously provides strong insight into its mindset: People are irrelevant.

“The average American does not view the economy through the prism of GDP or unemployment rates or even monthly jobs numbers,” top presidential advisor David Plouffe says, nearly sounding human. “People won’t vote based on the unemployment rate. They’re going to vote based on: ‘How do I feel about my own situation? Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?’”

Based on that assessment, Obama should start packing. He has not done anything that might have helped the unemployed: extending jobless benefits, forcing banks to renegotiate mortgages for homeowners, imposing national commercial and residential rent control, substantial tax credits for the poor and working class. And it shows: the consumer who lays the golden egg has no money to spend – and economic activity has all but ceased.

People are furious. But they are angrier at the thought that the rich are getting richer and that the president isn’t actively searching for solutions than they are about the fact that they can’t pay their bills.

Two years into Obama’s presidency “we are still treading water at the bottom of a deep hole,” summarizes economist Heidi Shierholz.

fbi plot exposed – 4 dupes convicted

from the village voice:

For two months last fall, I attended every day of my nephew David William’s trial. On countless days, I stood vigil outside of the Manhattan courthouse, lonely even with friends and supporters standing by my side. This week, I will go to the courthouse one last time, when David is sentenced. In its case against the so-called Newburgh Four, the government is asking that my nephew serve life in prison.

David and I have been through a lot together. Coming from the inner city, we know hardship well. Drugs, poverty, crime, and disease are a constant presence in our lives. The government has generally been indifferent to the problems in our communities. David lived in Newburgh, one of the poorest cities in the state, where education and infrastructure have crumbled in the last decade. There are few initiatives that offer counseling or training to at-risk youths. But ultimately, David and I never blamed anyone for our problems, and we knew that solutions would have to come from ourselves.

I have been active in my community, helping people get off drugs. I’m proud to say I’ve been clean since 1992 and have always worked to support others in my community, those living with HIV, ex-offenders, and more. David sold drugs to make money, and went to prison for it. He got out in 2007.

David wanted to keep his younger brother Lord from getting into the same kind of trouble he had. Lord has liver cancer and almost died several times in the months before David was arrested, and David wanted to find money to pay for a transplant. David was also trying to overcome his dyslexia, get his GED, and raise his daughter. In those days, even if the government didn’t help us very much it wasn’t exactly out to get us either.

Until 2008, that is. That’s when the government sent a paid, untrained informant to infiltrate the local mosque in Newburgh, to collect information on the community there. As we learned later, he became an informant to work off charges he faced for fraud.

Posing as a rich Pakistani businessman, the informant Shahed Hussain tried to engage attendees in conversations about jihad and American foreign policy. The community didn’t like him much, so eventually he began hanging out in the parking lot. Eventually, he met James Cromitie, a big-talking Newburgh resident with a history of small-time crime. At first Hussain worked on Cromitie with free meals and stories about Americans abusing Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He tried to cajole him into agreeing to carry out some sort of violent crime. When Cromitie was ambivalent, Hussain offered money, cars, a barber shop and more. It wasn’t enough though and at one point Cromitie cut ties with Hussain for months. After Cromitie was fired from Wal-Mart, he called Hussain to take “the job.” They still needed lookouts, which the government informant insisted be Muslims.

That’s when David and the other two defendants, Laguerre Payen and Onta Williams, entered the picture. They were all Muslim. They were all also broke, and promised tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cromitie assured them that nobody would get hurt.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the government had never sent Hussain to Newburgh. Maybe David would have gotten into some kind of trouble again, or maybe he would have completed his GED and straightened out. Either way, he or the other men would have meant nothing to the government and the public. And David surely never would have become a lookout in a plot to bomb a synagogue in the Bronx.

But the government did interfere with us. The costs for our family have been tremendous. Our lives have been torn apart. But even more is at stake. The government spent millions of taxpayer dollars on the informant’s salary, perks, luxury cars, surveillance equipment, fake weaponry, helicopters, and the dramatic trial. Lawyers, rights groups, and the media have poured resources into covering the case. And the benefits? I may be biased, but I haven’t met many people who can say with a straight face that our nation is safer from terrorism as a result of all this.

I also sometimes wonder, what good might those resources have done if they’d been invested in our communities instead? Perhaps job-training for parolees, or education for young Newburgh residents, or programs for getting guns of the street. Maybe re-entry programs for parolees with mental health problems, like Laguerre, who is schizophrenic. Of course, many might consider spending money on these communities to be a preposterous waste of money, these days especially. I don’t agree, but I can at least understand.

What I can’t understand is spending millions of dollars to set David and the others up, and then to put them in prison for life, which will also cost millions of dollars. Just so the government can have another notch on its belt in the “war on terror”? Or maybe I can understand. The informant needed to keep getting paid, and the government needed a few victories.

But at what cost?

By Alicia McWilliams

indigenous activists labeled as terrorists in order to strip them of rights

from al-jazeera: Indigenous resistance is the new ‘terrorism’

It’s becoming tricky to identify “terrorists”, at least in Ecuador. They are not members of criminal organisations, they don’t spread fear or target civilians, nor have a politically motivated agenda. According to President Correa, “terrorists” are those opposing Ecuador’s development. So today’s “terrorism” might just look like indigenous peoples peacefully taking over the streets, with their ancestral knowledge and values, to demand environmental and social rights.

In Ecuador, “terrorists” are indigenous peoples from the Amazon and the Andean highlands fighting to preserve access to water in their communities. Old penal codes written in times of dictatorship are being revived by leftist presidents to repress indigenous activists. As “terrorists”, they are labelled as enemies of the state, and arrested – by the very president that claimed leftist credentials and staged his inauguration in overtly ethnic style.

When the Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala gathered delegations from the entire hemisphere in Ecuador last month, the focus was on the criminalisation of environmental protest.

Abya Yala, which means “continent of life” in the language of the Panamanian Kuna peoples, refers to the Americas. The summit has consolidated ethnic organising capacity across borders since it first organised in 1990, maintaining a diversity of indigenous voices from Canada and the US all the way to Honduras, Guatemala, Argentina and Chile.

This fifth meeting was symbolically held in Cuenca, where the last Inca died of smallpox – brought from Europe – years before the Spaniards themselves made it to the Andes. This year’s topic was water – yakumama in Quechua, and the earth – pachamama, echoing the growing environmental pressures on rural communities.

But the week’s true highlight was the establishment of an independent, transnational Ethics Tribunal.

Modelled on a “truth commission”, the Ethics Tribunal was designed as a public court to bring visibility to injustices and foster government accountability towards international human and indigenous rights. It was specifically established to address cases of criminalisation of indigenous protest for environmental justice.

On June 22, a four-judge tribunal heard multiple expert reports – as well as 17 personal testimonies – taking more than four hours on the issue.

According to Ecuador’s Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities, there are currently 189 cases of people accused of sabotage and terrorism by the Ecuadorian government, for protesting the privatisation of natural resources. The situation is so critical that Amnesty International issued a statement denouncing it as an attempt to silence opposition to government policies.

Cases vary in context, but not in substance. In Cochapata, community members were condemned to eight years in jail on charges of terrorism for opposing mining – the government has so far ignored the amnesty granted by the constitutional assembly. A radio station in the Amazon province of Morona Santiago, Radio Canela, was shut down in April for fueling opposition.

Silencing the opposition

The most prominent cases relate to the accusation and illegal arrest of some of the most visible indigenous leaders in Ecuador – Pepe Acacho, Marlon Santi, Delfin Tenesaca and Marco Guatemal. The four heads of national indigenous organisations were accused of sabotage for participating in marches against laws to privatise water during a 2010 summit of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas in the indigenous town of Otavalo, where leftist presidents discussed continental multiculturalism without inviting indigenous organisations.

All cases reveal a state-led effort to silence indigenous protest to protect access to clean water.

Using so-called “anti-terror” laws to silence indigenous struggles over natural resources is not a new strategy. Chile, for instance, has extensively used anti-terror laws created under the Pinochet regime to criminalise Mapuche protests over lumber. Canada has also responded to opposition against resource extraction on native land in Ontario by incarcerating the protesters.

What is news is that a leftist president – who has repeatedly fallen back on ethno-politics to increase his legitimacy – is using forms of martial law inherited from past military regimes to destroy indigenous calls for environmental justice.

The irony is that President Correa, a political ally of Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez against North American hegemony, maintains a strong discourse of environmental justice for the Global South. Not only has his administration pioneered international norms by granting new rights to nature in the 2008 Constitution, but it strongly supported the World’s People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in Bolivia in 2010.

Yet President Correa started using laws codified in the 1920s and 1970s, including the Doctrine of National Security designed by the military dictatorship, to persecute indigenous opposition. He created a state of emergency, calling upon the armed forces to intervene when internal security might be threatened, and he has already shown a willingness to use them.

Proposed legislation to increase jail time for stopping traffic is a direct attempt to disrupt traditional forms of indigenous protest, which often rely on marches and road-blocks.

Correa’s government, which was elected under a mantle of social justice, has also silenced his opposition through legal and military violence and manipulating judicial mechanisms to repress dissidents. The most recent referendum expanded the executive grasp on the judicial apparatus, making it even more dangerous to oppose his neoliberal stance on natural resources.

Ecuador’s indigenous movement, often described as the strongest in Latin America, has been strongly targeted as the main opposition to Correa’s neoliberal agenda with regards to water.

Last year’s proposed Water and Mining Laws to further privatise access to water and expand mining concessions was stopped only by indigenous mobilisation. Extractive policies are at a peak, with close to two thousand mining concessions, according to the Ministry of Energy and Mines.

Despite Correa’s best efforts to silence indigenous claims, one cannot but recall Bolivia’s water wars a decade ago. Multinational participation in the privatisation of water led to widespread street protests, and the more the government repressed protest the more tensions escalated until Cochabamba exploded in conflict.

Indigenous peoples have been struggling for survival on their lands for centuries – they are not about to let water go. Instead, the confrontation seems to be worsening.

As things intensify, the indigenous peoples of Ecuador will continue to take their protest to the streets. They will also focus on organising international pressure on their government. The Ethics Tribunal will not run out of work anytime soon.

spot the terrorists in this photo! just kidding - they're all terrorists.

 

Manuela Picq has just completed her time as a visiting professor and research fellow at Amherst College. She is returning to the Amazon this autumn to continue her research on indigenous peoples’ rights.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

WiFi FBI Surveillance?

from portland indymedia:

I just witnessed something creepy!

Hi,

I know you folks don’t like Starbucks, but they have good wifi and coffee.

However, I am in in Starbucks right now. When I clicked to see the various wifi networks in the area, one of them was called “FBI Surveillance Van #32″ It disappeared about fifteen minutes later. Isn’t that weird? Do you think it’s someone who just named their nearby home network that in order to deter people using their wifi? Are those real names for FBI surveillance van networks?

I also just noticed a dude in a black t-shirt and jeans walking around Starbucks. He’s outside right now. He has a gun attached to his pants, and handcuffs hanging out of his pocket. Yet, he is wearing a t-shirt and jeans. What the fuck?

unrelated image, from epic fail

 

california prison strike continues to gain momentum

from al-jazeera:

Hungry for Californian prison reform: After gang interrogations and harsh prison conditions, inmates have been on hunger strike since July 1. 

Thousands of prisoners in the US state of California have refused meals for more than a week as part of a hunger strike against the use of “group punishments” and for authorities to follow legal requirements for maintaining their mental and physical health.

Prisoners housed in the notorious Security Housing Unit of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison started the strike on June 1, but it has since spread to at least a third of the state’s 33 prisons.

“]

Manuel LaFontaine spent time imprisoned in California, and now works for All of Us or None, an organisation led by former prisoners who advocate for the human and civil rights of prisoners [Isaac Ontineros/Al Jazeera

Their demands include an end to the interrogation process which is used to claim prisoners’ gang affiliation, an end to long-term isolation along the recommendations of a US Commission on Safety and Abuse in Prisons report, and access to healthy food, programmes and privileges.

“The basis for this protest has come about after over 25 years, some of us 30, some up to 40 years, of being subjected to these conditions. Of our 602 appeals, numerous court challenges have gotten nowhere,” Pelican Bay hunger strike leader Todd Ashker said, in a statement released by lawyers of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition.

“A lot of us are older now, we have serious medical issues coming on … And there’s a core group of us who are committed to taking this all the way to the death, if necessary.”

Utilising their right to refuse food and medical care, many of the strikers have declined meeting with doctors.

Inmates can issue a directive which stops prison doctors from force-feeding them at any point. If there is no directive, the doctors are expected to use their best judgment.

The California Department of Corrections (CDCR), the administrator of the state’s prison system, said that in the first weekend of July, 6,500 prisoners in ten prisons participated in the strike.

CDCR spokesperson Terry Thornton told Al Jazeera that the number has since decreased, as “intelligence now shows 2,100 [strikers] in nine prisons”.

But advocates working in solidarity with the prisoners say CDCR is downplaying the numbers, and that thousands of prisoners are participating in the hunger strike, and have been for different periods of time, depending on their health concerns.

“What’s important to note,” Molly Porzig of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition told Al Jazeera, “is that whatever their participation, these prisoners are in solidarity with each other across hundreds of miles, in situations where basic communication is denied, and across racial lines often used to divide prisoners.”

The SHU

Pelican Bay State Prison was opened in 1989 and included more than 1000 cells in a Security Housing Unit or “SHU” (pronounced “shoe”).

Cells in the SHU are eight feet by ten feet, made of smooth concrete and have no windows. Often, fluorescent lights are kept on 24 hours per day. Armed guards control entrances and exits electronically and are strategically located to be able to fire on prisoners at any time.

“Each prisoner is afforded 90 minutes on the [recreation] yard,” hunger striker James Crawford told Al Jazeera through a lawyer. “The concrete yard is 26 by 10 feet, with 20-foot high walls and a security camera to watch you. We get no trees to see, hardly no sun. If you’re lucky you’ll see it five times a year.”

Conditions inside Security Housing Units have come under criticism and condemnation from US and international organisations.

A US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons (CSAAP), headed by a former US attorney general and a former chief judge of the US court of appeals stated:People who pose no real threat to anyone and also those who are mentally ill are languishing for months or years in high-security units … In some places, the environment is so severe that people end up completely isolated, confined in constantly bright or constantly dim spaces without any meaningful human contact – torturous conditions that are proven to cause mental deterioration. Prisoners often are released directly from solitary confinement and other high-security units directly to the streets, despite the clear dangers of doing so.

The Commission went on to point out the disturbing growth of “high-security” facilities, noting that, “between 1995 and 2000, the growth rate in the number of people housed in segregation far outpaced the growth rate of the prison population overall: 40 per cent compared [with] 28 per cent”.

Demands not met

One of the five hunger strike demands is an end to Pelican Bay’s “debriefing process”.

Prisoners claim that the prison administration uses the debriefing policy to force them to name themselves or others as gang members or leaders – using access to food, or further isolation in the SHU as a threat. Their “validation” as a gang member then follows them throughout their sentence, as well as into their parole – if they are released.

“They literally say that those of you in the [SHU] will die in the [SHU] unless you debrief and ‘tell us what we want to know’ … The debriefer is encouraged to fabricate lies against the non-debriefer, which is what allows the [prison gang investigators] to retain prisoners in SHU indefinitely,” said hunger striker James Crawford.

But Thornton defended the practice, saying: “Debriefing is just the name of a process by which an inmate decides to walk away from a gang,” and that SHU confinement “doesn’t have to be permanent, if the inmate doesn’t want to be there”.

Of the prisoner’s other demands, the CDCR claims various prisoner and outside concerns have been dealt with through various legal channels and oversight mechanisms within its own mechanisms.

Thornton says: “SHU is not solitary confinement. There is a great deal of scrutiny over Pelican Bay and all of the conditions of their confinement have been litigated numerous times.”

‘The worst of the worst’

Manuel LaFontaine spent time imprisoned in California, and now works for All of Us or None, an organisation led by former prisoners who advocate for the human and civil rights of prisoners, former prisoners and their families. He is also an organiser of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition.

“The CDCR spends a lot of time and money trying to convince us that prisoners in the SHU – or even prisoners in the general population – are subhuman, the ‘worst of the worst’. Fear mongering around gangs and gang violence is part of this,” he told Al Jazeera.

“What they are keeping from us is that many people locked in SHUs are there because of their political activities inside and outside prisons, and if we look at the rapidly deteriorating conditions across the entire California prison system, we will see more and more prisoners organising in stronger and stronger ways to change their conditions.”

Indeed, in May of this year the US supreme court upheld a lower court’s decision saying that a sentence in California’s prison system is, in itself, cruel and unusual and therefore against the US constitution.

When that case, Brown v Plata [PDF], went to court, California’s prisons were filled to 200 per cent of design capacity, which is a risk to the physical and mental health of all prisoners.

The ruling requires the state’s prison population to be reduced by at least 33,000, lowering the overcrowding to 137.5 per cent of design capacity, according to Rebekah Evenson of the Prison Law Project, one of the two co-counsels to Plata.

In an earlier interview with Al Jazeera, she explained that the case was about protecting prisoners’ health “so you’re not essentially charging them with death”.

US, Pakistan relations sour – moving closer to war?

from AP:

Tough Line: US Suspends Military Aid To Pakistan

The Obama administration’s decision to suspend $800 million in aid to the Pakistan’s military signals a tougher U.S. line with a critical but sometimes unreliable partner in the fight against terrorism.

President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, William Daley, said in a broadcast interview Sunday that the estranged relationship between the United States and Pakistan must be made “to work over time,” but until it does, “we’ll hold back some of the money that the American taxpayers are committed to give” to the country’s powerful military forces.

The suspension of U.S. aid, first reported by the New York Times, followed a statement last week by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, that Pakistan’s security services may have sanctioned the killing of Pakistani journalist Saleem Shahzad who wrote about infiltration of the military by extremists. His battered body was found in June.

The allegation was rejected by Pakistan’s powerful military establishment, including the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, which has historic ties to the Taliban and other militant groups and which many Western analysts regard as a state-within-a-state.

George Perkovich, an expert on Pakistan with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said Mullen’s comments and the suspension of aid represent “the end of happy talk,” where the U.S. tries to paper over differences between the two nations.

Daley, interviewed on ABC’s “This Week,” suggested the decision to suspend military aid resulted from the increasing estrangement between the U.S. and Pakistan. “Obviously there’s still a lot of pain that the political system in Pakistan is feeling by virtue of the raid that we did to get Osama bin Laden,” Daley said.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters traveling with him to Afghanistan on Saturday that the U.S. would continue to press Pakistan in the fight against extremists, including al-Qaida’s new leader, Ayman al-Zawahri.

“We have to continue to emphasize with the Pakistanis that in the end it’s in their interest to be able to go after these targets as well,” Panetta said. “And in the discussions I’ve had with them, I have to say that, you know, they’re giving us cooperation in going after some of these targets. We’ve got to continue to push them to do that. That’s key.”

The U.S. has long been unhappy with Pakistan’s evident lack of enthusiasm for carrying the fight against terrorists to its tribal areas, as well as its covert support for the Taliban and anti-Indian extremist groups.

some background:

April 22, 2011

Deadly Drone Strike by U.S. May Fuel Anger in Pakistan

By JANE PERLEZ and ISMAIL KHAN
New York Times

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An American drone attack killed 23 people in North Waziristan on Friday, Pakistani military officials said, in a strike against militants that appeared to signify unyielding pressure by the United States on Pakistan’s military amid increasing opposition to such strikes.

The strike came a day after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, met with the Pakistani military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and asked that Pakistan do more to fight militants who use North Waziristan as a base from which to attack United States and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The assault was the second show of the United States’ determination to continue drone attacks since the head of Pakistan’s spy agency, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, met this month in Washington with Director Leon E. Panetta of the Central Intelligence Agency to request a halt to the strikes.

Friday’s attack could further fuel anti-drone sentiment among the Pakistani public. A government official in North Waziristan told Pakistani reporters that five children and four women were among the 23 who were killed.

Demand your FBI File Today!

from the civil liberties defense center:

The CLDC is encouraging activists and organizations to utilize the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act to request documents and materials that the FBI may have accumulated about you or the group you are active in. Not only will this information assist activist communities in learning about and preventing unlawful government spying, but it will also shed light on the extent of surveillance that has been undertaken in your community. Shine a light on FBI activities by exercising your lawful right to these documents and information.

There have been several high profile activists who have recently received thousands of pages of invaluable information regarding FBI surveillance and spying activities used to violate their privacy rights. Check out the New York Times article about Austin, TX activist Scott Crow and his successful attempt at finding out whether he was paranoid or spied upon by the FBI.

Read the information and directions we’ve put together so that you and your friends can sit around and read your FBI files. Fun for the whole family!

We have provided FBI request templates to assist you in making your request correctly (they are bureaucrats after all)–one template is used to request your personal file and we included some language in case you also want to request records about an organization you are affiliated with (i.e. Lauren Regan and Civil Liberties Defense Center). The other template can be used if you only want to request records pertaining to an organization or event, but do not want personal records. Finally, if you want your FBI rap sheet, there is an entirely different process to undertake, and we’ve given you directions and the FBI website where you will need to download their application form.

Good luck, happy reading, and please let us know about your experience!

FOIA- Privacy Instructions

FBI FOIA request for group info

General FOIA-Privacy FBI File Template

from the ny times article referenced above:

For Anarchist, Details of Life as F.B.I. Target 

A fat sheaf of F.B.I. reports meticulously details the surveillance that counterterrorism agents directed at the one-story house in East Austin. For at least three years, they traced the license plates of cars parked out front, recorded the comings and goings of residents and guests and, in one case, speculated about a suspicious flat object spread out across the driveway.

“The content could not be determined from the street,” an agent observing from his car reported one day in 2005. “It had a large number of multi-colored blocks, with figures and/or lettering,” the report said, and “may be a sign that is to be used in an upcoming protest.”

Actually, the item in question was more mundane.

Mr. Crow and an F.B.I. document he received under the Freedom of Information Act.

“It was a quilt,” said Scott Crow, marveling over the papers at the dining table of his ramshackle home, where he lives with his wife, a housemate and a backyard menagerie that includes two goats, a dozen chickens and a turkey. “For a kids’ after-school program.”

Mr. Crow, 44, a self-described anarchist and veteran organizer of anticorporate demonstrations, is among dozens of political activists across the country known to have come under scrutiny from the F.B.I.’s increased counterterrorism operations since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Other targets of bureau surveillance, which has been criticized by civil liberties groups and mildly faulted by the Justice Department’s inspector general, have included antiwar activists in Pittsburgh, animal rights advocates in Virginia and liberal Roman Catholics in Nebraska. When such investigations produce no criminal charges, their methods rarely come to light publicly.

bp says gulf residents need no compensation for ruined lives

The economy in the Gulf region is strong and “there is no basis to assume that claimants, with very limited exceptions, will incur a future loss related to the oil spill”, the oil giant said in a paper filed with the Gulf Coast Claims Facility (GCCF) , which is handling compensation claims. The letter was sent to Kenneth Feinberg, administrator of the GCCF fund, which was set up at the behest of President Barack Obama.

BP

The tourism industry is booming, all federal fishing grounds have reopened and the shrimp catch has been plentiful, BP added.

“The current economic data do not suggest that individual and business claimants face a material risk of future loss caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill,” BP said in the 29-page letter.

However, the oil company conceded that future payments may be appropriate for oystermen, where their beds had been destroyed in the crude spill, which started in April last year.

“The GCCF welcomes any and all input from any interested sources, including BP,” Mr Feinberg said. “We take all of the submissions ‘under advisement’.

from the telegraph,  BP wants to stop ‘future losses’ payouts from $20bn Gulf of Mexico oil spill fund

With Friends Like Feinberg, Who Needs Enemies?

Kenneth Feinberg, the point man in charge of BP’s $20 billion compensation fund, is commencing to wind down BP’s compensation operations in the Gulf Coast with only 20% of the total fund having been paid out [19]. Do you remember Part One’s memorable Feinberg exchange with Elmer Rogers, et al [20]? This should cause all who want justice to be carried out, to have extreme reservations about who is in charge of carrying out the compensation efforts. Ken Feinberg is the same man who denied 911 First Responder’s claims of impaired lung functioning leading to an inability to work (see Michael Moore’s portrayal in the movie Sicko). This is the same Ken Feinberg who “sentenced “ several homeless Katrina survivors to be forcibly evacuated by Blackwater and forced to live in Formaldehyde infested FEMA trailers resulting in severe lung impairments.

“I’ve used just over $4 billion,” said Mr. Feinberg, who also processed payments for families of victims of the 9/11 terror attacks and Hurricane Katrina. “I don’t envision a flood of new claims [19].” This begs the question for Mr. Feinberg, why then isn’t BP paying the existing claims?

Feinberg has stated “I’m not prepared to commit to or predict how much of that $20 billion will be used [19].” What about the BP-caused declining real estate values? What about the catastrophic pandemic of chemical agent induced illnesses which are beginning to emerge in horrific numbers in the Gulf? Why not do the right thing, Mr. Feinberg, and use the entire $20 billion dollar compensation fund? And when the money runs out, the Gulf Coast residents should go back to President Obama and press BP for even more money. It should be noted that Feinberg is paid by BP. Where is the government oversight and who is protecting the interest of the people? Does the phrase, “The Fox is watching the hen house” come to mind? Feinberg adds “But I continue to believe that BP’s financial commitment is sufficient to pay the claims.” With the BP paid Ken Feinberg at the helm of the compensation fund, his last statement is no doubt his most accurate in this whole compensation debacle.

Rules for Thee but Not for Me

Seems like everyone in the Gulf is losing money except for BP and its corporate Gulf Coast partners consisting of Goldman Sachs [21], former BP CEO Tony Hayward [22], TransOcean [23] and of course the infamous Halliburton [24] have all experienced major gains in corporate profits as a result of the spill in this unconscionable act of profiteering off of the misery of millions of people.

from news with views,  THE GREAT GULF COAST HOLOCAUST – PART 2

 

mexican drug cartel violence kills 40 in 24 hours

Battles between the vicious Zetas gang and other drug cartels killed more than 40 people in a 24-hour span, a government official said Saturday.

At least 20 people were killed when gunmen opened fire in a bar late Friday in the northern city of Monterrey, where the gang is fighting its former ally, the Gulf Cartel, said federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire.

Eleven bodies shot with high-powered rifles were found earlier Friday, piled near a water well on the outskirts of Mexico City, where the gang is fighting the Knights Templar, Poire said. That is an offshoot of the La Familia gang that has terrorized its home state of Michoacan.

He said another 10 people were found dead early Saturday in various parts of the northern city of Torreon, where the gang is fighting the Sinaloa cartel headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

“The violence is a product of this criminal rivalry … surrounding the intent to control illegal activities in a community, and not the only the earnings that come with it, but also with transporting drugs to the United States,” Poire said in a news conference.

He repeated the government insistence that the criminals, not the government’s crackdown on organized crime, are causing the violence. More than 35,000 people have died since President Felipe Calderon stepped up the attack on organized crime in 2006, according to official figures. Some groups put the number at more than 40,000.

“The violence won’t stop if we stop battling criminals,” Poire said. “The violence will diminish as we accelerate our capacity to debilitate the gangs that produce it.”

Federal authorities apprehended La Familia’s alleged leader in late June, claiming the arrest was a debilitating blow to the gang. Jose de Jesus Mendez Vargas was alleged to be the last remaining head of the cartel, whose splinter group, the Knights Templar, continues to fight for control of areas La Familia once dominated.

Mexican authorities also arrested Jesus Enrique Rejon Aguilar, a co-founder of the Zetas drug cartel who is suspected of involvement in the February killing of a U.S. customs agent.

Poire provided no more details on the killings in Torreon in the border state of Coahuila.

In Monterrey, 16 people died at the Sabino Gordo bar in the worst mass killing in memory in the northern industrial city, where violence has spiked since the Gulf and Zetas broke their alliance early last year. Four others died later at the hospital and five were injured, said Jorge Domene, security spokesman for the state of Nuevo Leon, where Monterrey is located.

Other downtown businesses closed earlier than usual after news of the massacre broke.

In Valle de Chalco, a working class suburb southeast of Mexico City, a man was found alive among the dumped bodies and was taken to a hospital, said Antonio Ortega, a spokesman for the Mexico State police.

He said some of the bodies were blindfolded and had their hands tied.

State officials said police found another body nearby a few hours later but could not confirm it was related to the mass attack.

Ortega said he didn’t know if the victims were shot at the scene or were taken to site.

The capital region has been largely spared the widespread drug violence that grips parts of Mexico.

But some poorer areas of the sprawling metropolis of 20 million people have begun to see killings and decapitations committed by street gangs that are remnants of splintered drug cartels.

slave labor makes a comeback in wisconsin

While Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) law dismantling collective bargaining rights has harmed teachers, nurses, and other civil servants, it’s helping a different group in Wisconsinites — inmates. Prisoners are now taking up jobs that used to be held by unionized workers in some parts of the state.

As the Madison Capital Times reports, “Besides losing their right to negotiate over the percentage of their paycheck that will go toward health care and retirement, unions also lost the ability to claim work as a ‘union-only’ job, opening the door for private workers and evidently even inmates to step in and take their place.” Inmates are not paid for their work, but may receive time off of their sentences.

The law went into effect last week, and Racine County is already using inmates to do landscaping, painting, and another basic maintenance around the county that was previously done by county workers. The union had successfully sued to stop the country from using prison labor for these jobs last year, but with Walker’s new law, they have no recourse.

see Union Workers Replaced With Prison Labor Under Scott Walker’s Collective Bargaining Law 

israel uses facebook to track, detain activists

Aided by Facebook, Israel on Friday prevented scores of pro-Palestinian activists from boarding Tel Aviv-bound flights in Europe, questioned dozens more upon arrival at its main airport and denied entry to 69, disrupting their attempts to reach the West Bank on a solidarity mission with the Palestinians.

Israel had tracked the activists on social media sites, compiled a blacklist of more than 300 names and asked airlines to keep those on the list off flights to Israel. On Friday, 310 of the activists who managed to land in Tel Aviv were detained for questioning, said Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Hadad. Of those, four were immediately put on return flights and 65 were being held until flights home could be arranged for them, she said. The rest were permitted entry, she said.

At one point during the operation, two planes from Geneva and Rome were diverted to a secluded area of the airport upon landing and boarded by security.

Organizers of the “Welcome to Palestine” campaign accused Israel of overreacting to what they said is a peaceful mission to draw attention to life under Israeli occupation, including travel restrictions. Israel controls all access to the West Bank.

“This was never about demonstrations at airports. We are on a fact-finding mission. We want to understand what’s going on,” said Pippa Bartolotti, a 57-year-old British activist from Wales.

She said she was the only member of a 40-member group on a flight from Britain who managed to enter Israel. “Unfortunately everybody else is in a holding bay and expected to be deported,” she said. “There are people from Belgium, France and the U.K.”

Israel has been jittery about the arrival of foreign activists since a deadly naval raid on an international flotilla that tried to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip last year. The incident, in which nine Turkish activists died in clashes with naval commandos, drew heavy international criticism and forced Israel to ease the blockade.

Israel took a series of measures to prevent clashes this time, most notably by barring protesters from the country altogether. Hundreds of police were also deployed at the already heavily fortified Ben-Gurion International Airport.

Authorities forwarded a blacklist to foreign airlines, preventing scores from boarding their flights.

Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, said the list was compiled by following organizers’ preparations on social networks and websites. In all, about 300 people were identified as planning to create “provocations” upon arrival, he said.

“These people announced on their Internet sites that they planned to come here and cause disruptions, and told their friends. We were able to contact other foreign ministries and simply give them links,” Palmor said. Barring entrance in such cases is “accepted practice in any country,” he added.

Recent anti-Israel protests, including deadly clashes along the frontiers with Lebanon and Syria as well as another attempted flotilla last week, were organized on Facebook and other sites. Defence officials say Israel now closely follows organizer activities online.

Activists, meanwhile, were sending updates on their progress through Israeli border controls on Twitter.

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said some 200 people were prevented from boarding their flights at airports throughout Europe. “The companies did not allow them on the airplanes because we told them clearly they wouldn’t be able to enter Israel,” Rosenfeld said.

More arrivals were expected Saturday.

Anna De Palma, 44, a Portuguese citizen, said she passed border controls without problems, apparently because she didn’t identify herself as an activist. “I said I was coming to visit. That was it,” she said. “I am not a conspicuous person and we don’t have to be conspicuous about it.”

“I am going to participate in the mission on the call of civilian Palestinian society. To participate in specific demonstrations. To help the Palestinian people. To make a stand,” she said.

One of the organizers, French activist Olivia Zemor, said her group planned only nonviolent activities. “Welcome to Palestine” released a statement Friday calling the moves to prevent activists from reaching Israel “provocative, blackmailing and illegal.”

At Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, several would-be protesters were turned away from check-in counters, and protesters subsequently gathered in the terminal, shouting “Boycott Israel,” as French police stood by.

Cynthia Beatt, a British citizen living in Germany, told the Associated Press that she had been barred from boarding a Lufthansa plane Friday morning in Berlin. “Lufthansa called me last night and said I would not be allowed to board their plane because Israel denied me entry,” Beatt said.

In Geneva, dozens of activists were barred from boarding an easyJet flight to Tel Aviv. Aline Yazgi, a spokeswoman for Switzerland’s second biggest airport, said the passengers tried to pass through security without a boarding card and were turned back, closing part of the airport for about 40 minutes as a result.

An easyJet spokesman in Geneva, Adrian Fuhrer, said 40 people were prevented from boarding the plane at the request of Israeli authorities. “It was compulsory for easyJet not to let these people on board,” Fuhrer said.

Israel has not publicized its criteria for denying entry, but has said peaceful visitors will not be deported. The large numbers of people who were blocked indicated that Israel was giving few activists the benefit of the doubt.

The activists have placed Israel in an awkward position. Authorities are determined to keep out people they consider hostile agitators, but critics in Israel have said the government’s high-profile reaction has only drawn attention to the activists’ attempt to gain publicity.

Visitors can reach the West Bank only through Israeli-controlled crossings, either through international airports or the land border with Jordan. Citing security concerns, Israel bars most Palestinians from entering Israel or using its airport, meaning they must travel to neighbouring Jordan to fly out.

At any given time, hundreds of foreigners, including activists and aid workers, are in the West Bank.

Travel restrictions in the Gaza Strip, ruled by the militant Hamas group, are even more rigorous. Israel allows few people to cross its border with Gaza, and most Gazans can travel abroad only by crossing into Egypt through their shared border.

from the toronto star – Israel uses Facebook to blacklist, detain or deport Tel Aviv-bound travellers