THE RETURN OF BLACK MESA

Restoring Natural and Cultural Resources in Navajo Country

by Sam Koplinka-Loehr, Waging Nonviolence

As the Arizona sun crests the ridge of Big Mountain, it casts a deep red hue on Peabody Energy’s Black Mesa coal mine. Less than a hundred yards away, in the shadow of the towering coal processing plant, the Benally family gets ready for a day of school, work and sheepherding.

Black Mesa Mine is one of two coal mines located in the middle of the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona—the other is Kayenta Mine, just five miles down the road. Both mines opened in the late 1960s, but the Benally family has lived there for generations.

Norman Benally has been a community activist almost his entire life and remembers herding sheep on this land before Peabody arrived.

“I’ve seen the landscape change, literally,” he said.

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POLICE IN THE PAY OF MINING COMPANIES

A Corporate Mineral-Security Complex in Peru

 

by Luis Manuel Claps, NACLA

Peru is a mining conflict country. In September of this year, the Defensoría del Pueblo (National Ombudsman Office) reported 223 social conflicts in September alone, with more than two thirds of them linked to minerals. The report also registers 196 dead and 2,369 injured in disputes over natural resources from 2006 to 2011. The database of the Latin American Observatory of Mining Conflicts (OCMAL) registers 34 cases across Peru. Even though the State has increased its presence in some mining areas and has its own Social Conflict Administration Office, the front line often becomes the ugliest side of corporate-community relations.

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THE VEIL: FLAG OF THE MUSLIM FAR RIGHT

An Interview with Marieme Helie Lucas

by Maryam Namazie, Fitnah

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NAGASAKI CALL FOR NUCLEAR ABOLITION

by Ramesh Jaura, IDN

NAGASAKI — More than 50,000 nuclear weapons have been eliminated since the historic Reykjavík Summit between the then-US President Ronald Reagan and his counterpart from the erstwhile Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, which culminated in the groundbreaking Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in December 1987. But 17,300 nukes remain, threatening many times over the very survival of human civilization and most life on earth, as the 2013 Nagasaki Appeal points out.

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MORE MARKET, MORE DICTATORSHIP

China’s Third Plenum Signals New ‘Paramount Leader’

from chinaworker.info

“More market, less freedom, and much more power to Xi Jinping”—this was the verdict of Beijing-based journalist Ola Wong, on the decisions of the recently concluded third plenary meeting of the CCP’s 18th Central Committee. Third Plenum meetings have a special status in China’s authoritarian system, because of the key 1978 meeting (11th Central Committee’s Third Plenum), which sealed the triumph of Deng Xiaoping over Mao Zedong’s designated heir Hua Guofeng and launched the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) onto the path of pro-capitalist “reform and opening.” Expectations among the capitalists in China and globally have accordingly been high.

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URANIUM MINING AND NATIVE RESISTANCE

For the Uranium Exploration and Mining Accountability Act

by Curtis Kline, Intercontinental Cry

Native Americans in the northern Great Plains have the highest cancer rates in the United States, particularly lung cancer. It’s a problem that the United States government has woefully ignored, much the horror of the men and women who must carry the painful, life-threatening burden. The cancer rates started increasing drastically a few decades after uranium mining began on their territory.

According to a report by Earthworks (PDF), “Mining not only exposes uranium to the atmosphere, where it becomes reactive, but releases other radioactive elements such as thorium and radium and toxic heavy metals including arsenic, selenium, mercury and cadmium. Exposure to these radioactive elements can cause lung cancer, skin cancer, bone cancer, leukemia, kidney damage and birth defects.”

Today, in the northern great plains states of Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, the memory of that uranium mining exists in the form of 2,885 abandoned open pit uranium mines. All of the abandoned mines can be found on land that is supposed to be for the absolute use of the Great Sioux Nation under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty with the United States.

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SYRIA: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

The Grassroots Civil Opposition Survives

by Leila Shrooms, Tahrir-ICN

The discourse on Syria has been dominated by discussions of militarization, Islamization, sectarianism and geopolitical concerns. Conversely there has been relatively little focus on Syria’s grass roots civil opposition. This has led to a lack of knowledge outside of Syria for activists who want to stand in solidarity with Syria’s revolutionaries but don’t know where to start. This article attempts to provide an introduction to some of the many civil resistance initiatives taking place on the ground and efforts at revolutionary self-organization.

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BURMA: OPEN FOR BUSINESS OF GENOCIDE

by Burkely Hermann, World War 4 Report

“It’s not ethnic cleansing. The world needs to understand that the fear is not just on the side of the Muslims, but on the side of the Buddhists as well.”

No high-ranking US State Department official spoke these words. It was Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, in an interview with BBC, dismissing credible claims of the genocide of Burma’s Muslim Rohingya people, put forward by Genocide Watch, Foreign Policy in Focus, UN Dispatch, Der Spiegel writer Jürgen Kremb, the Kassandra Project, Ramzy Baroud of the Pakistani publication The Nation, and many others. Suu Kyi continued, saying that she condemns “any movement that is based on hatred and extremism,” that “the reaction of Buddhists is also based on fear,” that the government should deal with these extremists so it isn’t her responsibility, and finally that “Burma now needs real change…a democratic society.” These comments are deeply disturbing coming from someone given the Nobel prize in 1991 for “her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.” Some have even asked if she should be stripped of her Peace Prize for statements such as this one.

The struggle of the two stateless peoples in Burma—the Rohingya and Shan—and broader geopolitical issues such as the race for dirty energy tie into one central question: is Burma really open for the business of exploitation and genocide?

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GLOBAL WARMING AND THE END OF GROWTH

by Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero, World War 4 Report

Two landmark scientific reports on climate change have just been published. File them under “H” for “horror.”

The first one is a digest of the most recent findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was formed in 1988 to advise the United Nations on all scientific information relevant to the implementation of the UN Climate Change Convention. The Panel periodically publishes a summary of the latest climate science for policymakers, which is subject to line-by-line approval by the 195 participating governments.

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