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Activists

Busload Of Activist Nuns Log 5,600 Miles For Tax Justice

October 31, 2018 By Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org , ,
Look out Mar-A-Lago. The renowned activists known as the “Nuns on the Bus” are headed your way. And they’re just as ticked off about the Trump-Republican tax reform as they were when they launched their cross-country “Tax Justice Truth Tour” in California over three weeks ago. President Trump will most likely be out on the hustings when the nuns roll up to his Palm Beach playland just days before the mid-term election. But by picking his members-only Florida resort as their final stop, they’ll make a powerful point about the new tax law’s big winners. In their words, Mar-A-Lago is “the pinnacle of economic inequality and hoarding of wealth.”

Berta Caceres Trial Begins, Eight Suspects Stand Trial

October 22, 2018 Staff, Telesurtv.net , , ,
The long-awaited trial against eight people accused of killing the Honduran feminist, and environmental activist Berta Caceres in 2016, started at 9 a.m. on Saturday after being postponed several times and without her family’s private attorneys, as informed by the Public Ministry (MP). The oral hearing was programmed for Friday but it was delayed as Caceres’s family filed another appeal against three of the participant judges, whom they accuse of refusing to demand pertinent evidence from the MP. The plaintiff team claims the MP is withholding key evidence, such as digital documents they got from the raids on the accused homes, in order to protect high level staff from the Energetic Development (DESA) company.

Anti-Terrorism Laws Increasingly Used to Target Indigenous Activists

October 13, 2018 Sandra Cuffe, Truthout.org , , , ,
The images flew around the world. The teepees. The tear gas. The Indigenous water protectors’ camps. The boots advancing in unison as security forces cracked down on protests at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access pipeline. The defiance. The hundreds of arrests. “While Sioux leaders advocated for protests to remain peaceful, State law enforcement officials, private security companies and the North Dakota National Guard employed a militarized response to protests,” Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the UN Special Rapporteur for Indigenous Peoples, wrote in a recent report. A mercenary firm had been surveilling the pipeline opposition movement and engaged in military-style counterterrorism measures, according to an investigative report published by The Intercept.

The Israeli Activists Helping Protect The Palestinian Olive Harvest

October 8, 2018 By Orly Noy, 972mag.com , , ,
It had become like the opening ceremony of the olive harvest season: last Wednesday, Israeli settlers uprooted 40 olive trees in Turmusaya, a small Palestinian village north of Ramallah. Palestinian farmers face settler violence throughout the year, but it is during the olive harvest that the attacks increase dramatically. For the past 16 years, a group of left-wing organizations have banded together to try and stop the attacks. The Harvest Coalition, made up of groups such as Ta’ayush, Rabbis for Human Rights, Coalition of Women for Peace, and Combatants for Peace, among others, has enlisted Israeli volunteers to join Palestinian farmers in areas that are more prone to violence. The very presence of Israeli activists can provide the farmers with the bare minimum of protection in the occupied territories.

How Grassroots Activists Made Peace With North Korea Possible

September 22, 2018 Sarah Freeman-Woolpert, Wagingnonviolence.org , ,
The leaders of North and South Korea are meeting in Pyongyang this week to discuss the possibility of a peace treaty to end the decades-long conflict dividing the Korean Peninsula. This marks the third meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in since April, when the leaders famously shook hands across the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, separating the two countries. After a swell of global optimism at warming relations between Kim and Moon, attention shifted to Donald Trump’s June meeting with Kim in Singapore. Despite the peace community’s hope for increased diplomacy following the summit’s vague yet optimistic outcome, many voices on both sides of the aisle in Congress, as well as within Trump’s own administration, have since disparaged the possibility for peace.

Meet The Peacemakers

September 22, 2018 Hazel Healy, Newint.org ,
After 39 years of war in his home country, it perplexed artist Omaid Sharifi that all those held up as heroes in Afghanistan were men with guns. He had a different idea about who should be celebrated. Along with fellow artists, Sharifi co-founded the Artlords collective to start projecting a nonviolent, hopeful message for their battle-scarred country. The Everyday Heroes project was one of their first pieces of street art, depicting Kabul’s municipal workers ‘who get up at 5am to sweep the streets of our city’ and then the ‘good nurses, good teachers, good independent journalists – people who are peaceful, hardworking, and not corrupt’. The Artlords use the ‘blast’ walls that criss-cross Kabul as their canvas.

Ferguson Activist Says: “We Need More Than Change, We Need Revolution”

September 1, 2018 Lamont Lilly, Truthout.org , , ,
“When the cameras left, everybody forgot,” says Missouri-based Black radical organizer Tory Russell, talking about how quickly national attention turned away from Ferguson following the murder of Michael Brown by a police officer four years ago. But, he adds, activists in St. Louis and Ferguson “sure as hell haven’t forgotten” and have continued to push for justice and accountability since the murder. In this exclusive interview, Russell, co-founder of the St. Louis-based grassroots organization Hands Up United and co-creator of its community service initiative Books and Breakfast, offers an update on the ongoing efforts of Michael Brown’s family and other racial justice activists in the Ferguson/St. Louis area.

Activists Retrace 1968 Protests In Chicago: ‘It’s Hard To Imagine That We Are Still Doing This 50 Years Later’

August 30, 2018 Elvia Malagon, Chicagotribune.com , , ,
Dickelle Fonda was a college student in New York in 1968 protesting the Vietnam War when chaos erupted in Chicago as like-minded activists descended on the Democratic National Convention. On Saturday, she and more than 100 other activists retraced the steps of those protesters while drawing attention to war, racism and poverty that is still taking place abroad and in Chicago. The rally to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of the contentious protests started at Daley Plaza, snaked around City Hall and ended in front of the Gen. John Alexander Logan Monument at Grant Park, which was one of the sites of the 1968 protests. “It’s hard to imagine that we are still doing this 50 years later,” said Fonda, who now lives in Evanston.

‘It’s Definitely Intimidation’: Police Accused Over Raids On Activist’s Family

August 27, 2018 By Jamiles Lartey, Theguardian.com , ,
The peace and quiet of a south Memphis neighborhood gave way to chaos on Monday, as more than two dozen police cars, most unmarked, blocked off the street before officers raided two homes. Witnesses described more than 50 heavily armed officers: local police, sheriff’s deputies, some from other agencies. Many shielded their identity with black ski masks. The score from this elaborate, multi-agency gang taskforce effort? A single “roach” from an ashtray, containing a quantity of marijuana too small to trigger an arrest. The homeowner was given a written citation. Minutes away, at a downtown courthouse, the police department was entering its first day on trial.

Honduran Prosecutors Withhold Evidence In Berta Cáceres Murder Case

August 23, 2018 Sandra Cuffe, Truthout.org , , , ,
The trial of eight men charged with the murder of Honduran activist Berta Cáceres is right around the corner, but prosecutors may be heading to trial without important evidence. More than two dozen electronic devices seized in related raids as far back as 2016 were never subjected to analysis, according to an official response to Cáceres’s relatives from the Office of the Prosecutor for Crimes Against Life, a document that has not yet been made public. Cáceres’s daughter Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres does not believe it was an oversight or lack of professionalism. Now serving as the general coordinator of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), the organization her mother co-founded and led at the time of her murder, Zúñiga Cáceres views the revelations about the gaps in evidence as part of a strategy.

Saudi Arabia Threatens To Behead Female Human RIghts Activist

August 22, 2018 By Sondos Asem, Middleeasteye.net , , ,
Saudi human rights activists have warned against the possible beheading of detained female human rights activist Israa al-Ghomgham, who has been provisionally sentenced to death by a Riyadh court. On 6 August, in a first hearing before the Specialised Criminal Court in the capital, the public prosecutor recommended the death penalty for six defendants, including Ghomgham and her husband, Moussa al-Hashem, who have been jailed for nearly three years on charges of anti-government protests, incitement to disobedience of the ruler, and providing moral support to participants in anti-government protests in the Shia-majority eastern region of Qatif. Ghomgham, 29, and Hashem were arrested on 8 December 2015 in a house raid by Saudi security forces.

Activists Have A New Strategy To Block Gas Pipelines: State’s Rights

August 22, 2018 Jeff Brady, Npr.org , , ,
Environmental activists are using a new strategy to block construction of oil and gas pipelines. It already has worked in New York where construction on the Constitution Pipeline has stalled. Now activists are trying the strategy in Oregon. The proposed Jordan Cove project includes a pipeline that would transport natural gas across the Cascades mountain range to the Oregon coast. There it would be turned into liquefied natural gas (LNG) for export. At a recent protest rally supporters of the No LNG Exports campaign submitted more than 25,000 comments to encourage Gov. Kate Brown and her Department of Environmental Quality to reject the project.

Veteran Left-Wing Journalist And Peace Activist Uri Avnery Dies At 94

August 21, 2018 Staff, Lobelog.com , ,
Uri Avnery, one of Israel’s most prominent journalists and a seminal peace activist who was among the first Israelis to advocate for a sovereign Palestinian state, died in Tel Aviv on Monday morning. He was 94 years old. Born Helmut Ostermann to a bourgeois family in Beckum, Germany in 1923, Avnery’s family moved to Palestine in 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power. They settled in Tel Aviv. Just a few years after their arrival, Avnery joined the Irgun, the pre-state right-wing Zionist militia. Too young to take part in its militant actions, which included attacks against British soldiers and Arab civilians, Avnery distributed leaflets and edited the Revisionist journal Ba-Ma’avak (“In the Struggle”).

Israeli Authorities Still Feel The Sting From Ahed Tamimi’s Slap

August 18, 2018 By Miko Peled, Mintpressnews.com , , ,
NABI SALEH, PALESTINE  — “All Palestine’s Children are Ahed Tamimi,” Nariman Tamimi said in an interview after the much-publicized mother and daughter were released from an Israeli prison on July 29. Ahed Tamimi’s mother said this in response to the tremendous amount of coverage that her daughter’s arrest and subsequent release received. Nariman said that, unlike with the arrests of other Palestinian children, Ahed received so much support and attention from the West perhaps because “she looks like their children.” She also did not hide the fact that she thought there was an element of racism in the support for Ahed, who has a distinct “European” look — whereas there are so many thousands of stories just like hers, of children who face the occupation each day, and the world takes no interest in their stories.

How Facebook’s Political AD Verification Policy Stifles Immigration Activists

August 10, 2018 Massoud Hayoun, Psmag.com , , , , ,
The social media company says it's working to resolve concerns that the policy will silence countless activists, particularly undocumented people decrying the Trump administration. Immigrant rights groups are demanding that Facebook rethink a new policy requiring political advertisers to submit their Social Security numbers, federal government identification, and addresses. The groups say the policy will inevitably block many from accessing the platform, particularly undocumented activists decrying the Trump administration's immigration practices. On Friday, a coalition of rights organizations lambasted Facebook's policies, which the company enacted in May in response to growing outcry over Russian interference in the 2016 election. "All the while Facebook clamps down on legitimate and non-political advocacy by immigrants and non-profit organizations, it has featured paid advertising by the Customs and Border Patrol agency for the past few months," the coalition's statement reads.
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