Environmental activists based at the Climate Camp in London blockaded the local headquarters of Royal Bank of Scotland today, supergluing themselves together on the bank's trading floor as part of a series of direct-action protests around the City.
In a stunning blow to mountaintop removal blasting operations in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia this morning, two fearless protesters scaled massive trees and unfurled banners from their 80-foot-high platforms. Within 300 feet of the Massey Energy's Edwight mountaintop removal blasting site, above Pettry Bottom and Peachtree in Raleigh County, West Virginia, the protesters called on the federal agencies to crack down on the scandal-ridden West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WV DEP) and the stop the unsafe and reckless blasting in the area.
At noon tomorrow thousands of activists will swoop on London for this summer's
Climate Camp.
On Friday, Latin America scholars
sent an urgent
letter to Human Rights Watch, urging HRW to speak out on
violations of human rights under the coup regime in Honduras and to
conduct its own investigation. HRW hasn't made any statement about
Honduras since July 8.
One of the things Human Rights Watch should be investigating is
allegations by Honduran feminists and human rights groups that
Honduran police are using rape and other sexual violence as weapons of
intimidation against Hondurans nonviolently protesting the coup
regime.
Percentage change since 2002 in average premiums paid to large US health-insurance companies: +87%
Percentage change in the profits of the top ten insurance companies: +428%
Chances that an American bankrupted by medical bills has health insurance: 7 in 10
—Harper’s Index, September 2009
A coalition of groups opposed to the G-20 met last night to plan
what appears to be shaping up as a 21st Century battle for Fort Pitt --
saying the city has blocked plans to protest.
Some hinted at civil disobedience, others at civil litigation.
"I've always had it in the back of my mind about civil disobedience
and being arrested," said Kathy Cunningham, a Sharpsburg woman who said
she has long experience marching in the streets, but none to date
waiting in a jail cell.
Disruption of the health care town hall meetings has triggered some rich debate about free speech in the U.S. In these discussions, CODEPINK has been referenced several times as the group that has most often tested the boundaries of free speech. Over the years, we've been chided and insulted by the media, Members of Congress, former Press Secretaries, and even President Bush himself. However, when Nancy Pelosi weighed in recently on the town hall "mobs," saying that "drowning out opposing views is un-American," I was compelled to respond.
John Mackey is a right wing libertarian.
He’s a union buster.
He believes that corporations should not be criminally prosecuted for their crimes.
He has just launched a campaign to defeat a single payer national health insurance system.
And he’s the CEO of Whole Foods.
Primo hangout of liberal Democratic yuppies.
In the early morning of October 8, 2007, a small group of British Greenpeace activists slipped inside a hulking smokestack that towers more than 600 feet above a coal-fired power plant in Kent, England. While other activists cut electricity on the plant's grounds, they prepared to climb the interior of the structure to its top, rappel down its outside, and paint in block letters a demand that Prime Minister Gordon Brown put an end to plants like the Kingsnorth facility, which releases nearly 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each day.
This might be a first in the country: The failed West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection is emerging as such an embarrassingly pro-coal anti-mountain public relations nightmare for Gov. Joe Manchin that even retired coal miners have taken to the streets against the state's environmental regulators, calling on the federal EPA and Office of Surface Mining to take over the key duties of the dysfunctional state agency.
