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Balcombe update days 18 – 19 & 20

Day 18

Day 18 (Sun 11th) Of Community Fracking Blockade In Balcombe Sussex
See The Great Gas Gala Website for upcoming events and how to get involved.

Day 18

Day 18 (Sun 11th) Of Community Fracking Blockade In Balcombe Sussex
See The Great Gas Gala Website for upcoming events and how to get involved.

Update (2pm): Day 18 of the community fracking blockade in Balcombe. Huge numbers of people coming down to the site to support the blockade and sing together.

Day 19

Update (4pm): 2 arrests today. Highlight of day was homemade pizza brought down to feed people at lunch time!

Update (11am): 2nd truck of day took 40mins to get onto site. Come down and help protect Sussex.

Update (9:10am): One woman arrested while protecting Sussex from fracking.

Update (9am): Day 19 of the community fracking blockade in Balcombe. Renewed efforts by Cuadrilla to force fracking trucks through the blockade. Come lend your support!

Day 20

Update (11am): Police have forced 3 fracking trucks through the blockade today

Update (10am): Today the blockade in Balcombe goes Dutch. A contingent of people from the Netherlands is on their way to support the fight against fracking. They are expected to arrive around 3pm. Arch-frackers, Cuadrilla Resources, are also active in the Netherlands.

Update (9am): Day 20 of the community fracking blockade in Balcombe. Renewed efforts by Cuadrilla to force fracking trucks through the blockade. Come lend your support!

Call out for support for forest occupation in Belgiu,

Since the first of Juli we (an action group from the Dutch Earth First!) have occupied a forest in Wilrijk, s

Since the first of Juli we (an action group from the Dutch Earth First!) have occupied a forest in Wilrijk, south of Antwerp in Belgium. So far there’s been no talk about eviction but this is about to change. The legal procedures keeping the owner from being allowed to cut are almost finished.

September 15th till Ocotber 15th are the only weeks they are allowed to cut the forest (this is to ‘protect’ the bats and birds in the forest), so we really need people to come and help us prepare for eviction! Lots of work to be done, both on the ground and in the trees.

We expect the chance of eviction will be the greatest from September 12th till September 20th. So the more people in the forest the better!

adress: fotografielaan 7, wilrijk

train to antwerp central

from rooseveltplaats bus 500 to boom

get off close to the pizzahut (ask busdriver)

walk to the pizzahut, go right, at the end of the road (cows) go right, first left, you’ll see the banners

you can contact us at: steungroep.groenoord@gmail.com

for more info: www.groenoord.be / www.facebook.com/steungroep.groenoord

0032485507274

The area has been mapped as a forest since 1771 and is an ecologically very valuable oak forest which is a habitat for lots of birds and endangered bat species. The forest is a so called wrongly zoned forest, it’s been zoned as an industrial area since 2005. Flanders (the dutch speaking part of Belgium) is the second poorest region in Europe when it comes to forests, only 8 % of the land if forest. About a third of those forests are wrongly zoned which means they are often threatened. Most of these forests are cut without anyone ever knowing. So we are not just fighting for this specific forest, we are fighting for a more just forest policy in Flanders.

The owner wants to cut the forest to build an office and storage space, but it is not clear if they have someone to rent it yet. Their old partner ended the contract because the plans were delayed.

There’s heaps of empty office buildings in Flanders. Within a minute’s walk from the forest there’s 4 empty buildings that could be renovated or broken down to make space for a new building. Yet they still want to cut the forest.

Because they have never done proper geological studies there’s big problems with the water in the area. The water can’t go anywhere so part of the forest is often under water, which has killed a lot of the trees. Measures need to be taken to ensure the survival of the forest.

Whenever cutting forests in Flanders, they talk about compensation. Which is bullshit. You can’t just cut a forest here and plant a new one somewhere else.

NO COMPROMISE IN DEFENSE OF MOTHER EARTH

Help us defend the trees!

Monday Montana Megaload Uprising!

11.8.13 – Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) offers its humble gratitude for all of the courageous Nez Perce tribal members and regional supporters who so successfully blockaded and scuttled the Omega Morgan plan to move a 644,000-pound evaporator to Alberta tar sands operations through the wild rivers, forests, and canyons of the Nez Perce homeland. After crossing Idaho over four nights and meeting the most passionate resistance ever witnessed by such an industrial convoy, the megaload reached Highway 12 milepost 4, just over Lolo Pass in Montana, at 5:30 am on Friday morning, August 8. Ideally, the Idaho Rivers United/Nez Perce injunction requested on Thursday may take effect this week for the Lochsa-Clearwater wild and scenic river corridor in Idaho. We have heard that another eight loads are now headed down the Washington coast toward the Port of Wilma, so we are calling on all West Coast/Columbia River activists to report their observations of these shipments.

According to the Montana Department of Transportation and its issued megaload permit, the module cannot travel in the state on Fridays or Saturdays and will move from its current location to the Bonner truck stop on Monday night, August 12. Northern Rockies Rising Tide (NRRT), No Shipments Network, All Against the Haul, and other anti-megaload activists sent an alert and are organizing a Monday night solidarity protest. They coordinated an action planning meeting on Saturday afternoon and are asking that, if you can help with organizing or participating in the Monday action, please contact NRRT as soon as possible by email at northernrockiesrisingtide@gmail.com or through the phone number posted in the contact section of the NRRT website .

Thanks to everyone in Idaho and Montana for your ongoing climate, tar sands, and indigenous rights activism. We urge brave, fellow activists in Montana to rise up against this escalating Big Oil invasion. WIRT will send you megaload issue updates as timely as possible from the road.

Wild Idaho Rising Tide

P.O. Box 9817, Moscow, Idaho 83843

WildIdahoRisingTide.org & on facebook and Twitter

208-301-8039

Arson at motorway construction site, Russia

August 10, 2013 – Russia

anonymous report, from From Russia With Love:

August 10, 2013 – Russia

anonymous report, from From Russia With Love:

"At the end of july 2013 near Maikop (resp. Adygeya) we carried out an ecotage action at the highway construction site. We chose a moonless night to reach the site of this horrendous rape of nature and chose our targets: personal belongings of slave-workers as well as corporate property. Having picked up a stone in the ditch nearby, we cracked open a window and poured some gasoline inside the mobile housing unit (we made sure no workers were inside before the attack). The rest of gasoline was poured on the wheels. In the next moment a flash of match send this shit to hell where it properly belongs. We wish the construction company to follow the vehicle there. Our withdrawal was lighted with flames (as usual). No guard turned up to stop us (as usual).

Do not wait for the optimal moment to present itself before you go on offensive. Only the state of permanent conflict will make your personality strong. If you follow the track of biding your time, hoarding money, buying some sophisticated stuff for the action – you’re subconsciously withdrawing from the struggle. No camouflage or fancy boots will carry out the action for you (though they do help). All things are mere tools. Go outside and fight now! Do not listen to those who murmur: 'now is not the time'! To hell with famous ideologists! To hell with 'inappropriate anarchy'! Anarchy is here and now! To hell with union struggle! Working class is dead just like the present day society. It’s rotten. It’s in decay. Yet we are supposed to communicate with it just like Russians are supposed to communicate with Lenin. Do what you want the way you want it to be done. Fight for your own freedom. Fight for yourselves. Fight for your brothers and sisters. Fight for the future of your children. Nobody will grant you freedom unless you take it by force for yourselves. If now is not the time for you to step over 'the law', to look beyond the templates of accepted 'resistance', then we bet you won’t find any courage inside when the civil war starts. We wish you luck.

CCF-Russia, 2013"

Filipino Farmers Destroy Genetically Modified ‘Golden Rice’ Crops

10th August 2013

A group of activist farmers in the Philippines stormed a government research facility and destroyed an area of genetically modified rice crops the size of 10 football fields. According to New Scientist, the farmers say that genetically modified organism (GMO) foods have not been established to be safe for consumption and that the real solution to world hunger isn’t biologically engineered plants, but a reduction in worldwide rates of poverty.

“The Golden Rice is a poison,” said Willy Marbella to New Scientist. Marbella is a farmer and deputy secretary general of a group of activists known as KMP — Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas or Peasant Movement of the Philippines.

The farmers attacked the fields at the research facility in Pili, Camarines Sur out of concern that their own crops could be pollinated and thereby contaminated by the GMO plants, possibly resulting in a boycott of their products like U.S. farmers of soft white wheat saw when a strain of Monsanto herbicide-resistant wheat abruptly appeared in an Oregon field. South Korea and Japan both halted imports of U.S. wheat in the wake of the discovery.

Golden Rice is a strain of rice that has been modified by scientists to contain beta carotene, a source of vitamin A. An estimated 2 million people die from vitamin A deficiency worldwide every year. Annually, about 500,000 children — mainly in the developing world — go blind from lack of the nutrient.

Golden Rice advocates claim that replacing half of a child’s rice intake with Golden Rice provides them with 60 percent of their daily requirement of vitamin A.

Representatives of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), a fervently pro-Golden Rice organization, say that even though the GMO has yet to be approved for human consumption, research trials suggest that it’s safe, and that scientists can’t find out anything more if people destroy the test plants.

Framing attacks on GMO crops as attacks on the effort to end world hunger, the IRRI issued a series of press releases since the action at Pili on Thursday decrying the farmers as ill-informed “vandals.”

Anti-GMO activists say that too many studies on the effects of GMOs are being undertaken by organizations that have a stake in their success. They also say that Golden Rice is being used as a seeming innocuous “poster boy” crop to sell GMOs to an overly credulous public.

Beau Baconguis of Greenpeace Southeast Asia told New Scientist, “There is not enough safety testing done on any GM crops.”

“I think that the farmers know what they want,” she said. “What they want is a safe environment that they can grow their crops in” without fear of contamination and a subsequent boycott…This is playing with the lives of people when you are using Golden Rice to promote more GMOs in our food.”

Watch a video statement about the incident from the International Rice Research Institute, www.youtube.com/embed/uxa76CHDH5Y

Third Night of Protests and Blockades in Nez Perce Country, USA

8.8.13

Protestors with the Nez Perce as well as Wild Idaho Rising Tide and Idle No More turned out for a third night of demonstrations against the illegal megaload’s passage through Nez Perce country.

8.8.13

Protestors with the Nez Perce as well as Wild Idaho Rising Tide and Idle No More turned out for a third night of demonstrations against the illegal megaload’s passage through Nez Perce country.

Yesterday’s police was the largest yet, taking the side of Omega Morgan rather than the law. According to Wild Idaho Rising Tide, the police were “more forceful this time. Using their cars and phalanx tactics they forced a way through the crowd and broke the blockade faster than on other nights. The megaload took off and fled, tail between its legs, and proceeded to break laws (AIDED by the cops!) and endanger people all the way to get itself off the Res. before stopping for the night, terrified of facing the Nimipu on yet another night.”

WIRT is calling on the US Forest Service to “step up to the plate with fed marshals, arrest the driver, and impound the rig,” which is traveling without a permit.

Other native activists have sent messages of solidarity to the Nez Perce, including members of the Tohono O’odham, Dine, and Mohawk. There is another blockade planned for this evening.

Video – www.youtube.com/embed/dx-1olN5O6I

Girona, Spain: Call for camping against the M.A.T. power line

WHAT IS THE M.A.T.?
The very high tension power line (M.A.T.) is an electric motorway which transports at least 400,000 volts. It is being constructed in order to connect European States to each other and also Europe with Africa. It is necessary in order to sell and distribute excess energy produced by nuclear power plants and the so-called alternative sources of energy. At the same time, it is the network which capitalism needs in order to supply the electricity necessary for other projects and infrastructures of death and destruction, such as high-speed railway lines. Those responsible for all this are always the same ones and the construction companies in question are directly involved in other projects which are destroying lands around the world; companies like Vinci standing out in Europe and Endesa in South America.

WHY THIS CAMP?
So that the last decisive section for the connection between France and Catalonia can not be constructed. So that the energy coming from 6 French nuclear power plants does not cross this land or any other. So as to treat the struggle against the M.A.T. as a starting point for questioning our way of living, which is mainly imposed by the domination of Progress. So as to create on the affected land a space for meeting, information, agitation and action.

WHY HERE AND WHY NOW?
After more than 10 years of struggle, we are at a decisive moment. In September expropriations are expected to begin, directed against owners who have refused to sign the sale of land needed for the construction of the M.A.T.’s last pylons in Girona.

It is because of all of this that we are inviting you to participate actively in the camp, in order to share, struggle and resist in a self-run space, without leaders and representatives. We want to create moments of exchange and connection between various struggles, because the M.A.T. affects us all and is not an isolated struggle.

AGAINST PROGRESS, ITS INFRASTRUCTURES AND ITS DEFENDERS:
LET’S TAKE OUR LIVES BACK!

SEE YOU ON THE 23rd OF AUGUST, 2013 ON THE LANDS AROUND GIRONA

Bring everything that you need for camping.
More information and updates: Torres más altas han caído

http://torresmasaltashancaido.espivblogs.net/

Multi-lingual printable fliers on 325 http://325.nostate.net/?p=8417

english flier http://torresmasaltashancaido.espivblogs.net/files/2013/08/mat-ing-imp.pdf

more: eco-/struggle here

http://325.nostate.net/?cat=7

http://en.contrainfo.espiv.net

Chaos on the Clearwater River: Second Night of Megaload Blockades

7.8.13

One day after a three-hour blockade involving upwards of 150-200 people from the Nez Perce Nation, Idle No More, and Wild Idaho Rising Tide, more than 50 activists once again dedicated themselves to stopping megaload shipments through Idaho.

Omega Morgan, the company responsible for the transport of the 200-ton megaload, has been warned by the Forest Service that the shipment is unauthorized, and the Nez Perce tribe is seeking an injunction. However, Omega Morgan is trying to sneak the megaload through against the law, so direct action must be taken.

The Nez Perce put out a call yesterday for activists to join them in renewed efforts to stop the tar sands equipment from moving through Highway 12. More than 50 protestors came out. They were met by a force of 40-50 police officers in a fleet of cars.

Police gave protesters 15 minutes to speak out as they blocked the roadway, before being forced to move to the shoulder. Some young activists decided to maintain the presence of the blockade by heaving boulders and large rocks into the streets, which held traffic up further.

Several Nez Perce tribe-members were arrested, adding to the 19 arrested on Monday night (including the entire executive committee).

Aerial Blockade Halts Enbridge’s Pipeline 6B, USA

7.8.13

UPDATE:
10:40 AM
Police had intended to tie life-line off to two backhoes. After some uncertainty, both pieces of equipment drove off without attempting it.

7.8.13

UPDATE:
10:40 AM
Police had intended to tie life-line off to two backhoes. After some uncertainty, both pieces of equipment drove off without attempting it.

UPDATE:
10:04 AM
Police have threatened to taze Felix and use dogs to attack folks on the ground supporting them. Please call the Cass County Sherieffs Department and let them know people are watching. (269) 445-8644

UPDATE:
9:28 AM
Police officer throws large log up at Felix.

UPDATE:
9:20 AM
After turning back workers and their equipment for the last several hours, police have arrived on scene and threatened to cut Felix’s life-line.

from MI-CATS

This morning, Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands (MI-CATS) is taking direct action in the Crane Pond State Game Area to halt expansion of Canadian corporation Enbridge Energy’s tar sands pipeline 6B. Enbridge’s claim that they have restored the Kalamazoo River after the 2010 spill holds no merit, nor does it justify expanding the pipeline. Tar sands cannot be cleaned up; this material is thick and heavy, it sinks in water, and clings to surfaces. Expanding the pipeline increases the risk of another disaster for all of life and future generations.

Felix of the unconfined Kalamazoo River basin climbed into the trees early this morning to halt the expansion of Enbridge’s tar sands pipeline 6B. A rope traverse, spanning a portion of where construction is taking place, is the sole line that holds the platform they are sitting on up in the air. If it were cut and/or tampered with by police or workers they could fall from the tree, resulting in serious injury, possibly even death.

Our friend, Felix, sitting high up in the canopy to halt the construction of Enbridge Line 6B

“Tar sands pipeline 6B is pumping a dangerous concoction which fuels global capitalism. This pipeline is Canada’s promise that industrialized capitalism will continue to exploit and oppress the people of the world and the environment. Capitalism guarantees the continued destruction of the natural world. It enables the ruling class to exploit the world’s resources and force the rest of the population to labor for the ruling classes profits. Additionally, we are way beyond the verge of climate crisis. It is of utmost importance that carbon emissions stop immediately. Tar sands infrastructure is one example of industries at the root of the oil addiction. By taking action at the root of the problem, we endeavor to stop the symptoms of the problem. If we halt all carbon emissions into the atmosphere and remember how to live in harmony with the earth, there might be hope for life as we humans have known it for a few hundred thousand years.”

MI CATS asserts that direct action tactics, including civil disobedience, are now necessary as Enbridge’s dominant presence in our bio-region has allowed no room for any constructive alternatives. After three long years of blatant lies and omissions, Enbridge has the audacity to triple the capacity of the same pipeline that poured an ecologically abrasive sludge into the Kalamazoo River. This catastrophe was the largest inland oil spill this continent has ever experienced. While the Kalamazoo spill was the largest, it is one of many devastations brought on by Enbridge. Enbridge’s insidious business practices caused more than 800 pipeline spills between 1999 and 2010; that is more than one tar sands spill a week.

All pipelines leak. All markets peak. Capitalism can rot in hell. Enbridge places profit before our families, the ecosystem, our grandmothers, our dogs (yo what up Smokey*?), our grandchildren and the future of life on this planet. The continuation of tar sands transportation through pipelines like Line 6B risk more than just our own backyards; everything in the industry’s wake is left defiled and in squalor. Our actions against Enbridge won’t stop until Enbridge stops participating in the resource extraction industry. We stand in solidarity with all first peoples’ whose lands were forcibly taken from them, Idle No More, Fearless Summer, those working to end corporate personhood, all the species going extinct, those sick and dying thanks to the extraction industry, and all folks fighting oppression in order to live full and happy lives.

*Smokey was a dog who died as a result of the 2010 spill.

This is the third action MI-CATS has taken to stop construction of Enbridge’s Pipeline 6B this summer. On July 22nd they locked down to construction equipment, and on June 24 an activist climbed deep inside a section of pipe, halting work for the day.

Balcombe update days 12 & 13

Update (11am): Day 12 and blockade still going strong. Cuadrilla need to get in a constant stream of trucks to keep drilling and the community are making it as difficult for them as possible.

Day 13

Update (9am): Day 13 and blockade still going strong. A lot of people stayed overnight. Some people also heading down to Crawley Magistrates Court for 9:30am to support two Balcombe Defenders charged as a result of blockade. Come show your support!