Back to the village: Russians Ditching Urban Life

The Sinegorye village is in the Krasnodar Region. It was founded by a group known as the “Anastasievtsy,” who believe in leading a simple rural life away from the big cities. Although they define themselves as a religious sect, the Anastasievtsy accept people of all religious orientations, and welcome Orthodox Christians, Hindus, Pagans and atheists; anyone, so long as they are sane and don’t drink. This is because if they were drunks, they might as well go to any village in Russia.

Valery himself came to sunny Krasnodar from the cold wastes of Primorye in the Far East, where watermelon seeds would definitely not grow so well. He doesn’t drink and he doesn’t eat meat, he cooks vegetarian Indian cuisine and bakes his own unleavened bread, and, as soon as he sits down at the table, he immediately wishes everyone happiness four times.

When the villagers are first starting out, they are usually able to live off savings scraped together in their former lives. But when these dry up they often face serious hardship – providing for 100 percent of your material needs without any form of stable income is not easy. Neither is it easy to do tough physical labor, day in day out. Valery is already building his second house – unfortunately the first one burned down. His neighbors decided to build a house of daub six years ago, but at the moment all to be seen of their new house is the framework, meaning they and their two small children are having to live in a hastily erected shelter made of polythene stretched over a makeshift frame – a structure that is more like a greenhouse than a home.

In the village next to Sinegorye live Nikolai and Galina from Sochi. They bought a small plot of land and in just one month they managed to build a two-storey house made of straw bales. On the outside, the bales are plastered in clay, and inside they are covered in plasterboard. The owners think the house will be warm in winter and shouldn’t get too damp. The main threat to the structure are mice, but, according to Galina: “if you use rice straw, the mice won’t eat it.”

The movement is still new, and it remains to be seen what consequences it will result in.

via Back to the village: When nature calls | Russia Beyond The Headlines.

Rekia Boyd wasn’t murdered by off-duty cop – she’s “collateral damage”

“Her death certificate says killed by police, but I feel like my sister was murdered,” says Martinez Sutton, whose 22-year-old little sister, Rekia Boyd, was shot in the head by an off-duty Chicago detective on Wednesday, March 21. She died the following day at Mount Sinai Hospital.

Boyd’s death comes less than a month after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, leaving many troubled by the regularity with which unarmed people of color are shot, particularly by individuals claiming self-defense. And for those left grieving, the failure of authorities to hold the shooter accountable is the greatest injustice of all.

In the case of Boyd, Chicago police almost immediately echoed the account of the off-duty detective responsible for her death. Police say the officer in question drove up to a group of people in Chicago’s Douglas Park around 1 AM on Wednesday, March 21, to investigate a disturbance near his home. He rolled down his window and asked them to quiet down at which point police say 39-year-old Antonio Cross pulled out a gun forcing the detective to open fire in self-defense, hitting Cross in the hand and striking Boyd in the head.

But neighbors, witnesses and Cross paint a vastly different picture. Cross told WGN News that he was unarmed and on his cell phone at the time of the shooting. When Cross asked why the officer shot him, he says the officer’s response was, “I thought your phone was a gun.” Cross has since been charged with a misdemeanor of aggravated assault.

Local news outlets initially reported that police failed to recover Cross’ alleged weapon. However, Police would not confirm or deny this to Truthout and referred all further questions to the Chicago Independent Police Review Authority (IRPA), the outside body tasked with handling the investigation. The IPRA’s Deputy Chief Administrator William Weeden declined to comment on any details as well, saying, “We cannot comment on an open and ongoing investigation.”

Rekia Boyd’s older brothers, Martinez Sutton and Darian Boyd, told Truthout that their family has received no explanation or even condolences from the Chicago Police Department. “We’ve made multiple attempts to contact them and even asked news stations to please contact them since they won’t talk to us,” said Darian Boyd, adding, “It just makes it that much harder to deal with the grief.”

Darian Boyd said it was both maddening and heartbreaking to hear Police Superintendent Gary McCarthy call the shooting “justified” in an interview with WGN without any mention of his sister on the very day she died in the hospital from a gunshot wound to the head.

via Unarmed Black Woman Shot and Killed by Chicago Police Officer Less Than a Month After Trayvon Martin Shooting.

Fukushima: like 20 Chernobyls

“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.

Japan’s 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.

Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.

“Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed,” he said, “You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively.”

TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water – as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.

“The problem is how to keep it cool,” says Gundersen. “They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?”

Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.

“The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor,” Gundersen added. “TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water.”

Independent scientists have been monitoring the locations of radioactive “hot spots” around Japan, and their findings are disconcerting.

“We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl,” said Gundersen. “The data I’m seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man’s-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can’t clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl.”

Covering up the danger, letting the public die

Japan’s Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant experienced full meltdowns.

TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.

Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station – an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan – is now likely uninhabitable.

In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.

The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster.

“There is and should be concern about younger people being exposed, and the Japanese government will be giving out radiation monitors to children,” Dr MV Ramana, a physicist with the Programme on Science and Global Security at Princeton University who specialises in issues of nuclear safety, told Al Jazeera.

Dr Ramana explained that he believes the primary radiation threat continues to be mostly for residents living within 50km of the plant, but added: “There are going to be areas outside of the Japanese government’s 20km mandatory evacuation zone where radiation is higher. So that could mean evacuation zones in those areas as well.”

via Fukushima: It’s much worse than you think – Features – Al Jazeera English.

U.S. Army training to attack unarmed american citizens

we have to ask ourselves at this point, “where is the army that will defend the american people?”

These photos are from March and February of this year and were taken at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington.  The first four photos from March depict riot control training for a “domestic quick reaction force” that would aid in civil disturbances.  The second set of photos from February depict the 67th Military Police Company that typically mans the area’s Regional Correctional Facility attempting to quell riots among “restless prison inmates” that have created a disturbance.  The photos are similar to a collection from May 2010 that depict several National Guard units from different parts of the

U.S. quelling protesters in mock communities holding signs that say “Food Now”. A description of one of the events was posted to Facebook by the U.S. Army’s 5th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment:

The Soldiers in a closed formation bang their batons in cadence against their shields as an angry mob approaches.

“When I initially picked up my shield, the thought of the movie 300 was the first thing that came to mind,” said Spc. Kyle Wilhelmi.

Teams of Soldiers assigned to 3rd Squadron, 38th Cavalry Regiment, 201st Battlefield Surveillance Brigade conducted civil disturbance training here March 13. The Soldiers, though not quite Spartans, are effectively training to hold their line and successfully control crowds if called upon for a civil disturbance.

Soldiers with shields, batons and rifles pushed through and maintained a dominant stance against a mob of about 40 civilians. The riot escalated as the crowd began throwing snowballs, slurred profanity and made offensive gestures at the Soldiers. The more forceful members of the mob charged the Soldiers but were easily pushed back, as many often fell to the icy surface.

see more photos, from  U.S. Army Domestic Quick Reaction Force Riot Control Training Photos | Public Intelligence.