Indonesia Police Destroy Indigenous Village

On December 18 Indonesian police forces violently evicted 400 indigenous people from their land in the province of Riau on the eastern coast of Sumatra.

According to Amnesty International, approximately 700 local security forces entered the village of Suluk Bongka, firing bullets and tear gas.

“As the villagers fled into the forest, two helicopters then dropped what was thought to be a fire accelerant on the village of Suluk Bongkal, Bengkalis, burning to the ground around 300 homes. Bulldozers then went in and flattened the area completely,” says Amnesty.

Receiving assistance from Satpol PP (Municipal Administrative Police Unit), Pamswakarsa (civilian security groups) and civilians to carry out the eviction, the police also arrested 200 people from the village, 142 of which have since been released.

Local sources also reported that a two-year-old died after falling down a well during the aggression, and a two-month-old baby died from burn injuries. Two other people suffered gunshot wounds.

“The villagers have been engaged in a land dispute with the pulpwood supply company PT Arara Abadi since 1996, when the Indonesian forestry ministry gave the company management rights for industrial farming,” explains Amnesty. “Since then, the company has tried to evict the villagers but official letters from the Ministry of Forestry and the Riau Governor in 2007 stated clearly that the company could not start operations until the dispute had been settled.”

It would seem that the government decided to take matters into their own hands.

Amnesty says the police are also preventing human rights groups from entering the area, nonetheless, Komnas HAM, the national human rights commission, says it will try to send an investigation team in to the area and provide protection for the villagers.

Amnesty International urgently calls on:

• the police to release those currently detained, or charge them with recognizably criminal offences;
• the police to allow access to the area to Komnas HAM and human rights groups;
• the Indonesian government to ensure the safety of villagers still in the forest, and provide essential shelter, water and food for those villagers made homeless;
• the Indonesian government to order an immediate investigation into the use of excessive lethal force by the police and into the deaths of the two children, with those found responsible brought to justice;
• the Indonesian government to provide reparation for those who have lost their homes.

http://intercontinentalcry.org/indonesia-police-destroy-indigenous-village/

When the woolly mammoth ran out, early man turned to roasted vegetables

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Long before early humans in North America grew corn and beans, they were harvesting and cooking the bulbs of lilies, wild onions and other plants, roasting them for days over hot rocks, according to a Texas archaeologist.

The evidence for this practice has long been known of in fire-cracked rock piles found throughout the continent, but archaeologists have tended to ignore it “because a new pyramid or a Clovis arrow point is much sexier,” said archaeologist Alston V. Thoms of Texas A&M University.In two reports published online this week in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology and the Journal of Archaeological Science, Thoms reported that cooking on hot rocks first became a substitute for cooking on hot coals about 9,000 to 10,500 years ago, then had a sudden jump in popularity about 4,000 years ago.

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-earlyfoods27-2008dec27,0,6385869.story

NKorea may stage nuke test to tame Obama team: study

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North Korea might stage a second atomic test to raise the stakes in nuclear disarmament negotiations next year but the new US administration is unlikely to yield, a South Korean think-tank said Monday.It warned it could not rule out the possibility the North may threaten to suspend denuclearisation, boycott six-party disarmament talks and fire missiles or even a nuclear weapon “to tame the new Obama administration or increase its leverage in the nuclear negotiations.”

“North Korea may become less reasonable in the face of growing challenges from instability of its regime and rumours of leader Kim Jong-Il’s ill health,” said the report from the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, which is under the foreign ministry.

http://www.spacewar.com/reports/NKorea_may_stage_nuke_test_to_tame_Obama_team_study_999.html

A Call to Young Warriors, to All Young People

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Young American Indians today suffer from many problems of the modern world.  Alcohol and drug abuse, early pregnancies, gangs, and psychological disorders are everywhere on the Reservations.  However, a lot of the development of these issues can be historically traced back to World War II or shortly before.

The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act created a special kind of dual citizenship which made American Indians into citizens of the United States (for the first time) as well as citizens of their own sovereign nations.  Finally, Indians could vote.  But also, for the first time, they could be drafted into the military.

The young Lakota Warriors looked at the military as a way to prove themselves as warriors.  They believed it was an honorable extension of the traditional warrior ways.

http://silvrdrach.homestead.com/schwartz_2008_dec_27.html

Dugway’s secret tests: Vets link health problems to chemical exposure

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Dwight Bunn easily becomes breathless and says he has lung scarring from exposure during chemical tests conducted in secrecy on troops while he was stationed at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Tooele County from 1962 to 1963.

David W. Davidson tried to hold his breath while being gassed at Dugway back in 1961. But he now has a laundry list of health maladies, any one of which may be connected to that day 47 years ago.

A doctor told Samuel Waller Anderson Jr. that the peripheral neuropathy in his feet and numbness in his hands was caused by some kind of exposure to chemicals. Anderson was stationed at Dugway from 1952 to 1956 and also was a guinea pig during tests at the isolated 1,300-square-mile Army base.

http://deseretnews.com/article/content/mobile/1,5620,705273187,00.html?printView=true

Nuclear ‘Peace Boat’ docks in Sydney

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For more than 25 years a ship known as the peace boat has sailed around the world, promoting the cause of nuclear disarmament. Today it docked in Sydney, with some special passengers on board – survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of the Second World War.

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2008/s2456305.htm

Current Missouri law thwarts nuclear expansion

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The 2009 legislative session will address the need for more base-load electricity generation in Missouri. Ameren Corp. serves 1.2 million Missouri electric customers representing nearly 50% of Missouri’s total consumption. They expect demand to increase 30% by 2020. Ameren is seeking the necessary licenses and funding to construct a second nuclear unit at their existing Callaway nuclear facility near Fulton, MO. Some changes to Missouri laws regulating electric utilities may be needed in order for Ameren or any utility to finance new base-load plants.

Some important facts about nuclear generation include:

• Nuclear power provides 20% of U.S. electricity, uses no fossil fuel, and represents 71% of our emission-free generation. Another 25.4% comes from hydro-electric and 3.7% from other renewables.
• The amount of “greenhouse gas” emissions prevented at the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants nearly equals that of all the passenger cars on American highways.

http://www.joplinindependent.com/display_article.php/e-emery1230434552

New Energy Secretary will kill Yucca dump

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It appears that President-elect Obama will keep his promise to Nevada to kill the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump because his Energy Secretary nominee, Dr. Steven Chu, is firmly opposed to the storage of at least 77,000 tons of highly toxic nuclear waste in the Silver State.

We well remember how President Bush betrayed Nevada early in his presidency by approving the Yucca Mountain site despite elec­toral promises to base his decision on “sound sci­ence.” By contrast, Energy Secretary in-waiting Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, recog­nizes that Yucca Mountain falls short of federal safety standards and that it’s dangerous to store all of the nation’s nuclear waste at one site.

In a 2005 interview, Chu said that the Southern Nevada site would be filled up with waste from all existing civilian and military nuclear waste as soon as it opens its doors. “So we need three or four Yucca Mountains,” he said on a UC-Berkeley Web site. “The other thing is that storing the fuel at Yucca Mountain is supposed to be safe for 10,000 years… (but) the metal casings will proba­bly fail on a scale of 5,000 years.” So much for safety and “sound science

http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news2008/nn12245.htm

The Threat of Nuclear War Grows

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In this Kafkaesque age everything is stood on its head–the champion violator of international law and sovereignty and the territorial integrity of states is gung ho for respecting state sovereignty and territorial integrity (of Georgia, but not Pakistan); primary terrorist and ethnic cleansing states (the United States and Israel) invade, bomb, and torture, but wax indignant at retail terrorism that flows largely in response to their wholesale terror; and these same two states, brimming over with nuclear arms and increasingly threatening to use them, are aghast that Iran might want and someday be able to make a nuclear weapon.

These two states are mainly responsible for the steadily rising probability that nuclear weapons will again be used in the not too distant future. Both have a stock of nuclear weapons and up-to-date delivery systems: that of the United States is of course gigantic, but Israel’s is substantial (estimated as between 60 and 200 ready bombs). Israel has developed its nuclear capability outside the authority of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, with the collusion of the Western powers, which have been so aggressive in denying any similar rights to Iran (except during the period of the rule of the Western-imposed dictator, the Shah). This weapons accumulation and refusal to accept the NPT has entailed no penalty for Israel–no threats, no sanctions, no refusal to assist its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Israel has threatened to use its nuclear weapons, earlier against the Soviet Union, today against Iran. Its threat of an attack on Iran, which is in itself a violation of the UN Charter, has not been treated at all critically in the West–in contrast with the horror at Ahmadinejad’s fuzzy condemnations of Israel, which have never included any expressed threat to literally attack Israel.

The United States has also steadily violated both the letter and spirit of the NPT. It had agreed in signing on to this treaty in 1968 to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. Not only has it not done this, it has made them officially a core part of national defense strategy and in recent years has worked steadily to make them more usable in warfare. It has also withdrawn its NPT promise not to use nuclear weapons against any state that signs on to the NPT and promises not to develop nuclear weapons. The United States has also violated the spirit of the NPT by helping and supporting Israel’s development of a nuclear weapons capability, of turning a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear development during years when it was serving as a useful client, and now recently agreeing to assist India’s nuclear program despite that country’s refusal to join the NPT. Pakistan and China of course resent this U.S. support of a nuclear India, clearly based on political expediency and weakening further any control over nuclear weapons proliferation.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10813

Can Indigenous Peoples Teach Us to Survive?

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As I write, I am looking at a web picture of two dark-skinned men with paint on their cheeks and feathered head bands. These “primitive” indigenous members of a South American tribe look curious to me. They are not like us-their lifestyle has been sustainable for thousands of years. Everything they use and need is renewable. Were it not for our excesses, they and their kids could go on living as they always have for millennia to come.

To survive, they need for us to change. The immediate threat is the logging and mining that decimates the jungle forest that has sustained them from the beginnings of their people’s history. But the degradation of the environment that threatens us all, also threatens them, though they have done nothing to contribute to it.

This paradox – that our unsustainable consumption threatens their completely sustainable primitivism – served as inspiration for a group of people to bring together the wisdom of our cultures. The relationship has grown in many directions, but the one that is of most immediate interest is a grass roots movement to motivate people to take action in their daily lives. This is not a political movement to influence the seats of power, but an educational effort to package accurate information, without spin or sensationalism, in a presentation that is interesting and participatory. Through participation in this program, people are offered a new point of view in looking at their world and their lives, and are encouraged to formulate daily practices that reinforce new attitudes about sustainability.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Can-Indigenous-Peoples-Tea-by-Richmond-Shreve-081227-827.html