info
The People’s Record coming to Portland the 20th, leaving the 23rd!
Need recommendations for groups, activists, community leaders etc who would make good interviews that we can reach out to ASAP.
Also need housing offer. We may or may not having something worked out…waiting to hear back. If not, then we have a pretty narrow period of time to find housing for the nights of the 20th, 21st and 22nd. If you can house us for any/all nights, please don’t hesitate to reach out. There are two of us, friendly, easy-going, not-too-weird! Pets are fine, 420 friendly, etc. Really, we’re not fussy at all. The closer to transit the better.
Also looking for recommendations for Seattle interviews!
Email: thepeoplesrec@gmail.com
Enough is enough! Hundreds of thousands flood streets in cities across Brazil
June 18, 2013
In some of the biggest protests since the end of Brazil’s 1964-85 dictatorship, demonstrations have spread across this continent-sized country and united people from all walks of life behind frustrations over poor transportation, health services, education and security despite a heavy tax burden.
More than 100,000 people were in the streets Monday for largely peaceful protests in at least eight big cities. They were in large part motivated by widespread images of Sao Paulo police last week beating demonstrators and firing rubber bullets into groups during a march that drew 5,000.
There was some violence, with police and protesters clashing in Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte. The newspaper O Globo, citing Rio state security officials, said at least 20 officers and 10 protesters were injured there.
Monday’s protests come after the opening matches of soccer’s Confederations Cup over the weekend, just one month before a papal visit, a year before the World Cup and three years ahead of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The unrest is raising some security concerns, especially after the earlier protests produced injury-causing clashes with police.
In Sao Paulo, Brazil’s economic hub, at least 65,000 protesters gathered Monday at a small, treeless plaza then broke into three directions in a Carnival atmosphere, with drummers beating out samba rhythms as people chanted anti-corruption jingles. They also railed against the matter that sparked the first protests last week — a 10-cent hike in bus and subway fares.
Thousands of protesters in the capital, Brasilia, peacefully marched on Congress. Dozens scrambled up a ramp to a low-lying roof, clasping hands and raising their arms, the light from below sending their elongated shadows onto the structure’s large, hallmark upward-turned bowl designed by famed architect Oscar Niemeyer. Some congressional windows were broken, but police did not use force to contain the damage.
“This is a communal cry saying: ‘We’re not satisfied,’” Maria Claudia Cardoso said on a Sao Paulo avenue, taking turns waving a sign reading “#revolution” with her 16-year-old son, Fernando, as protesters streamed by.
“We’re massacred by the government’s taxes — yet when we leave home in the morning to go to work, we don’t know if we’ll make it home alive because of the violence,” she added. “We don’t have good schools for our kids. Our hospitals are in awful shape. Corruption is rife. These protests will make history and wake our politicians up to the fact that we’re not taking it anymore!”
Protest leaders went to pains to tell marchers that damaging public or private property would only hurt their cause. In Sao Paulo, sentiments were at first against the protests last week after windows were broken and buildings spray painted during the demonstrations.
Source (Article & Photos)
![NSA Prism monitoring activists: Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate & energy shocksJune 15, 2013
Top secret US National Security Agency (NSA) documents disclosed by the Guardian have shocked the world with revelations of a comprehensive US-based surveillance system with direct access to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants. New Zealand court records suggest that data harvested by the NSA’s Prism system has been fed into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance whose members also include the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
But why have Western security agencies developed such an unprecedented capacity to spy on their own domestic populations? Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of US defence planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis - or all three.
Just last month, unilateral changes to US military laws formally granted the Pentagon extraordinary powers to intervene in a domestic “emergency” or “civil disturbance”:
“Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances.”
Other documents show that the “extraordinary emergencies” the Pentagon is worried about include a range of environmental and related disasters.
In 2006, the US National Security Strategy warned that:
“Environmental destruction, whether caused by human behavior or cataclysmic mega-disasters such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, or tsunamis. Problems of this scope may overwhelm the capacity of local authorities to respond, and may even overtax national militaries, requiring a larger international response.”
Two years later, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Army Modernisation Strategy described the arrival of a new “era of persistent conflict” due to competition for “depleting natural resources and overseas markets” fuelling “future resource wars over water, food and energy.” The report predicted a resurgence of:
“… anti-government and radical ideologies that potentially threaten government stability.”
In the same year, a report by the US Army’s Strategic Studies Institute warned that a series of domestic crises could provoke large-scale civil unrest. The path to “disruptive domestic shock” could include traditional threats such as deployment of WMDs, alongside “catastrophic natural and human disasters” or “pervasive public health emergencies” coinciding with “unforeseen economic collapse.” Such crises could lead to “loss of functioning political and legal order” leading to “purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency…
“DoD might be forced by circumstances to put its broad resources at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquility. Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance.”
That year, the Pentagon had begun developing a 20,000 strong troop force who would be on-hand to respond to “domestic catastrophes” and civil unrest - the programme was reportedly based on a 2005 homeland security strategy which emphasised “preparing for multiple, simultaneous mass casualty incidents.”
The following year, a US Army-funded RAND Corp study called for a US force presence specifically to deal with civil unrest.
Such fears were further solidified in a detailed 2010 study by the US Joint Forces Command - designed to inform “joint concept development and experimentation throughout the Department of Defense” - setting out the US military’s definitive vision for future trends and potential global threats. Climate change, the study said, would lead to increased risk of:
“… tsunamis, typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and other natural catastrophes… Furthermore, if such a catastrophe occurs within the United States itself - particularly when the nation’s economy is in a fragile state or where US military bases or key civilian infrastructure are broadly affected - the damage to US security could be considerable.”
The study also warned of a possible shortfall in global oil output by 2015:
“A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity. While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions.”
That year the DoD’s Quadrennial Defense Review seconded such concerns, while recognising that “climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked.”
Also in 2010, the Pentagon ran war games to explore the implications of “large scale economic breakdown” in the US impacting on food supplies and other essential services, as well as how to maintain “domestic order amid civil unrest.”
Speaking about the group’s conclusions at giant US defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton’s conference facility in Virginia, Lt Col. Mark Elfendahl - then chief of the Joint and Army Concepts Division - highlighted homeland operations as a way to legitimise the US military budget:
“An increased focus on domestic activities might be a way of justifying whatever Army force structure the country can still afford.”
Two months earlier, Elfendahl explained in a DoD roundtable that future planning was needed:
“Because technology is changing so rapidly, because there’s so much uncertainty in the world, both economically and politically, and because the threats are so adaptive and networked, because they live within the populations in many cases.”
The 2010 exercises were part of the US Army’s annual Unified Quest programme which more recently, based on expert input from across the Pentagon, has explored the prospect that “ecological disasters and a weak economy” (as the “recovery won’t take root until 2020”) will fuel migration to urban areas, ramping up social tensions in the US homeland as well as within and between “resource-starved nations.”
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was a computer systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton, where he directly handled the NSA’s IT systems, including the Prism surveillance system. According toBooz Allen’s 2011 Annual Report, the corporation has overseen Unified Quest “for more than a decade” to help “military and civilian leaders envision the future.”
The latest war games, the report reveals, focused on “detailed, realistic scenarios with hypothetical ‘roads to crisis’”, including “homeland operations” resulting from “a high-magnitude natural disaster” among other scenarios, in the context of:
“… converging global trends [which] may change the current security landscape and future operating environment… At the end of the two-day event, senior leaders were better prepared to understand new required capabilities and force design requirements to make homeland operations more effective.”
It is therefore not surprising that the increasing privatisation of intelligence has coincided with the proliferation of domestic surveillance operations against political activists, particularly those linked to environmental and social justice protest groups.
Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a “systematic effort” by the agency “to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations” linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).
Similarly, FBI documents confirmed “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector” designed to produce intelligence on behalf of “the corporate security community.” A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show “federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”
In particular, domestic surveillance has systematically targeted peaceful environment activists including anti-fracking activists across the US, such as the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition, Rising Tide North America, the People’s Oil & Gas Collaborative, and Greenpeace. Similar trends are at play in the UK, where the case of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy revealed the extent of the state’s involvement in monitoring the environmental direct action movement.
A University of Bath study citing the Kennedy case, and based on confidential sources, found that a whole range of corporations - such as McDonald’s, Nestle and the oil major Shell, “use covert methods to gather intelligence on activist groups, counter criticism of their strategies and practices, and evade accountability.”
Indeed, Kennedy’s case was just the tip of the iceberg - internal police documents obtained by the Guardian in 2009 revealed that environment activists had been routinely categorised as “domestic extremists” targeting “national infrastructure” as part of a wider strategy tracking protest groups and protestors.
Superintendent Steve Pearl, then head of the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (Nectu), confirmed at that time how his unit worked with thousands of companies in the private sector. Nectu, according to Pearl, was set up by the Home Office because it was “getting really pressured by big business - pharmaceuticals in particular, and the banks.” He added that environmental protestors were being brought “more on the radar.” The programme continues today, despite police acknowledgements that environmentalists have not been involved in “violent acts.”
The Pentagon knows that environmental, economic and other crises could provoke widespread public anger toward government and corporations in coming years. The revelations on the NSA’s global surveillance programmes are just the latest indication that as business as usual creates instability at home and abroad, and as disillusionment with the status quo escalates, Western publics are being increasingly viewed as potential enemies that must be policed by the state.
Source](http://25.media.tumblr.com/f665ec9e9e39e0076daaa7b664362f99/tumblr_moh18udf9X1r6m2leo1_500.jpg)
NSA Prism monitoring activists: Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate & energy shocks
June 15, 2013
Top secret US National Security Agency (NSA) documents disclosed by the Guardian have shocked the world with revelations of a comprehensive US-based surveillance system with direct access to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants. New Zealand court records suggest that data harvested by the NSA’s Prism system has been fed into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance whose members also include the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
But why have Western security agencies developed such an unprecedented capacity to spy on their own domestic populations? Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of US defence planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis - or all three.
Just last month, unilateral changes to US military laws formally granted the Pentagon extraordinary powers to intervene in a domestic “emergency” or “civil disturbance”:
“Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances.”
Other documents show that the “extraordinary emergencies” the Pentagon is worried about include a range of environmental and related disasters.
In 2006, the US National Security Strategy warned that:
“Environmental destruction, whether caused by human behavior or cataclysmic mega-disasters such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, or tsunamis. Problems of this scope may overwhelm the capacity of local authorities to respond, and may even overtax national militaries, requiring a larger international response.”
Two years later, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Army Modernisation Strategy described the arrival of a new “era of persistent conflict” due to competition for “depleting natural resources and overseas markets” fuelling “future resource wars over water, food and energy.” The report predicted a resurgence of:
“… anti-government and radical ideologies that potentially threaten government stability.”
In the same year, a report by the US Army’s Strategic Studies Institute warned that a series of domestic crises could provoke large-scale civil unrest. The path to “disruptive domestic shock” could include traditional threats such as deployment of WMDs, alongside “catastrophic natural and human disasters” or “pervasive public health emergencies” coinciding with “unforeseen economic collapse.” Such crises could lead to “loss of functioning political and legal order” leading to “purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency…
“DoD might be forced by circumstances to put its broad resources at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquility. Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance.”
That year, the Pentagon had begun developing a 20,000 strong troop force who would be on-hand to respond to “domestic catastrophes” and civil unrest - the programme was reportedly based on a 2005 homeland security strategy which emphasised “preparing for multiple, simultaneous mass casualty incidents.”
The following year, a US Army-funded RAND Corp study called for a US force presence specifically to deal with civil unrest.
Such fears were further solidified in a detailed 2010 study by the US Joint Forces Command - designed to inform “joint concept development and experimentation throughout the Department of Defense” - setting out the US military’s definitive vision for future trends and potential global threats. Climate change, the study said, would lead to increased risk of:
“… tsunamis, typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and other natural catastrophes… Furthermore, if such a catastrophe occurs within the United States itself - particularly when the nation’s economy is in a fragile state or where US military bases or key civilian infrastructure are broadly affected - the damage to US security could be considerable.”
The study also warned of a possible shortfall in global oil output by 2015:
“A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity. While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions.”
That year the DoD’s Quadrennial Defense Review seconded such concerns, while recognising that “climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked.”
Also in 2010, the Pentagon ran war games to explore the implications of “large scale economic breakdown” in the US impacting on food supplies and other essential services, as well as how to maintain “domestic order amid civil unrest.”
Speaking about the group’s conclusions at giant US defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton’s conference facility in Virginia, Lt Col. Mark Elfendahl - then chief of the Joint and Army Concepts Division - highlighted homeland operations as a way to legitimise the US military budget:
“An increased focus on domestic activities might be a way of justifying whatever Army force structure the country can still afford.”
Two months earlier, Elfendahl explained in a DoD roundtable that future planning was needed:
“Because technology is changing so rapidly, because there’s so much uncertainty in the world, both economically and politically, and because the threats are so adaptive and networked, because they live within the populations in many cases.”
The 2010 exercises were part of the US Army’s annual Unified Quest programme which more recently, based on expert input from across the Pentagon, has explored the prospect that “ecological disasters and a weak economy” (as the “recovery won’t take root until 2020”) will fuel migration to urban areas, ramping up social tensions in the US homeland as well as within and between “resource-starved nations.”
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was a computer systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton, where he directly handled the NSA’s IT systems, including the Prism surveillance system. According toBooz Allen’s 2011 Annual Report, the corporation has overseen Unified Quest “for more than a decade” to help “military and civilian leaders envision the future.”
The latest war games, the report reveals, focused on “detailed, realistic scenarios with hypothetical ‘roads to crisis’”, including “homeland operations” resulting from “a high-magnitude natural disaster” among other scenarios, in the context of:
“… converging global trends [which] may change the current security landscape and future operating environment… At the end of the two-day event, senior leaders were better prepared to understand new required capabilities and force design requirements to make homeland operations more effective.”
It is therefore not surprising that the increasing privatisation of intelligence has coincided with the proliferation of domestic surveillance operations against political activists, particularly those linked to environmental and social justice protest groups.
Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a “systematic effort” by the agency “to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations” linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).
Similarly, FBI documents confirmed “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector” designed to produce intelligence on behalf of “the corporate security community.” A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show “federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”
In particular, domestic surveillance has systematically targeted peaceful environment activists including anti-fracking activists across the US, such as the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition, Rising Tide North America, the People’s Oil & Gas Collaborative, and Greenpeace. Similar trends are at play in the UK, where the case of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy revealed the extent of the state’s involvement in monitoring the environmental direct action movement.
A University of Bath study citing the Kennedy case, and based on confidential sources, found that a whole range of corporations - such as McDonald’s, Nestle and the oil major Shell, “use covert methods to gather intelligence on activist groups, counter criticism of their strategies and practices, and evade accountability.”
Indeed, Kennedy’s case was just the tip of the iceberg - internal police documents obtained by the Guardian in 2009 revealed that environment activists had been routinely categorised as “domestic extremists” targeting “national infrastructure” as part of a wider strategy tracking protest groups and protestors.
Superintendent Steve Pearl, then head of the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (Nectu), confirmed at that time how his unit worked with thousands of companies in the private sector. Nectu, according to Pearl, was set up by the Home Office because it was “getting really pressured by big business - pharmaceuticals in particular, and the banks.” He added that environmental protestors were being brought “more on the radar.” The programme continues today, despite police acknowledgements that environmentalists have not been involved in “violent acts.”
The Pentagon knows that environmental, economic and other crises could provoke widespread public anger toward government and corporations in coming years. The revelations on the NSA’s global surveillance programmes are just the latest indication that as business as usual creates instability at home and abroad, and as disillusionment with the status quo escalates, Western publics are being increasingly viewed as potential enemies that must be policed by the state.
The fight to save San Francisco’s Gezi Gardens
June 15, 2013
In all the cities we’ve traveled to for our project, we’ve seen so much resistance against the gentrification of low-income communities. But we’ve most recently immersed ourselves in the fight to save San Francisco’s Gezi Gardens, which was once known as Hayes Valley Farm, a three-year permaculture project recently renamed in solidarity with our friends in Turkey.
Gezi Gardens was an autonomous open green space for providing food for the surrounding neighborhood & was recently sold by the city to a private developer, Avalon, to create 180 luxury condominiums. Although the developer has mentioned building low-income housing, investors usually put that money toward shanty housing in other parts of the city to further gentrify neighborhoods & kick out poor people of color to make way for things like trendy beer gardens & upscale boutiques.
Since June 1, dozens of activists occupied Gezi Gardens to fight the privatization of the land & gentrification in San Francisco. Six tree-sitters set up platforms up in the eucalyptus trees as occupiers rebuilt raised beds, set up a library, a free kitchen and a free store. Political ideas & strategies were exchanged throughout the days of the occupation to figure out a way to keep the land that is also home to native birds & hummingbirds, as well as the site of an indigenous sacred burial ground.
The gardens were supposed to host a Liberate our Land festival this weekend, complete with hydroponic workshops, basic gardening teach-ins, local music & food. But in the early hours of Thursday morning, more than a 100 riot cops stormed the farm with batons & guns drawn. Citizen journalists (including us) were threatened with arrest for filming the raid as four occupiers were arrested. The three tree-sitters holding the land after everyone was evacuated were all arrested as well; one even fell from his platform as an officer cut his rope he was holding onto & was later hospitalized. Another activist is still in jail on a lynching charge with a $54,000 bail.
But the resistance continued. Yesterday, Gezi Gardens organizers & supporters marched around the farm, shutting down two intersections during rush hour. The National Park Service was also called to the space after hummingbird carcasses were found, as well as nesting crows in the eucalyptus trees, so the construction & demolishing has been halted (for now)! An archaeologist has also been called to go into the land to confirm that it is a sacred indigenous burial ground.
The struggle to save Gezi Gardens is something many cities are familiar with. As green space in urban areas becomes more & more endangered & low-income communities of color get pushed farther out of cities, resistance becomes necessary. We wanted to share this story with our readers in hopes that this resistance can spread to other cities being threatened with devastating gentrification. Together, we can organize to create a sense of community & a pushback against the capitalist measures that threaten to destroy our neighborhoods.
We’ll continue to update our Facebook & Twitter with times/dates for meetings & the next steps organizers will take. You can also stay updated by visiting HumanBeIn.org. Also keep an eye on our YouTube channel for bunch of videos from the last few days.
Here are more photos of the uprising going on in Brazil. There have been four days of direct action in opposition to an increase in public transportation fares. Thousands of people have been on the streets each day & the next action on Monday already has more than 150,000 attending.
TW: Gore, police brutality for these two photos:
Folha reporter Guiliana Vallone, who was shot in the face by police.
Another woman who was brutalized during a police action
From Turkey to Brazil & beyond, we resist!
(Source: policymic.com)
Kenyan people victoriously pressure legislators to agree to lower pay after outcry against unfair self-promoting politicians
June 12, 2013
Kenyan legislators have agreed to lower salaries, a government commission said Wednesday, after weeks of demanding higher pay which sparked off public outcry and protests. The Salaries and Remuneration Commission said they have agreed with parliament that its members will get around $75,000 and not the around $120,000 a year salary that legislators of the previous parliament earned.
The legislators also will get a one-off $59,000 car grant to buy a vehicle of their choice and can claim mileage under the local Automobile Association rates. According to a statement from the salaries commission, the agreement was reached Monday.
Average income in Kenya is about $1,800 a year, which has fueled rage over the legislators’ salaries.
On Tuesday, activists spilled cow blood outside parliament buildings, calling members of parliament or MPs, MPigs and branding parliament “a piggy bank.”
Activists celebrated the agreement between parliament and the salaries commission.
“It’s people power. The people have won,” said activist Boniface Mwangi who has organized protests over the pay dispute. “This battle was a fight between the 349 legislators and the 42 million Kenyans and the Kenyans won,” Mwangi said. “I don’t think they are going to try and raise their salaries again.”
The legislators, who were elected on March 4, had threatened in April to disband the salaries commission for reducing their salaries. Last month, MPs voted to overturn a directive that reduced their pay, hoping it would force the government to pay the higher salaries earned by the previous parliament whose term ended in January.
But the salaries commission warned government officials not to pay the higher salaries saying it was illegal, and that anyone who authorized the payment could be charged with abuse of office.
Kenya adopted a new constitution in 2010 that intended to remove parliament’s powers to set their own pay, instead giving the remuneration commission the power to determine salaries for all public servants. Earlier this year, the commission cut the president’s annual pay from around $340,000 to $185,000.
The Salaries and Remuneration Commission has argued that although Kenya was among the world’s poorer economies, its legislators were earning more than those in France.
Many Kenyans see their legislators as lazy and greedy in a country where hundreds of thousands live in slums. Legislators often argue that they need high salaries to give hand-outs to poor constituents for school fees and hospital bills.
The efforts by the members of parliament to raise their salaries sparked public protests including one last month in which pigs were released outside parliament.
In January, Mwangi organized the burning of 221 coffins outside parliament to protest the attempt by the MPs to give themselves a bonus at the end of their term.
The decision to reduce the pay for legislators came after a public outcry when the previous parliament attempted to raise their salaries to $175,000 annually and award themselves a $110,000 bonus at the end of their terms.
The salaries commission says Kenya can’t afford the bill for government salaries, especially since parliament expanded from 222 to 349 members in March, and new positions of 67 senators and 47 governors and their staff were created.
When newly elected President Uhuru Kenyatta opened parliament in mid-April, he told legislators that the bill for government salaries came to 12 percent of GDP, above the internationally accepted level of 7 percent. Kenyatta said 50 percent of revenue collected by government went to pay government salaries.
Kenyatta urged the MPs to grow the economy before they demand higher salaries.
Bosnian protest takes hold after a failure of MPs to agree new law on citizen ID numbers leaves newborns without access to medical care, passports & services
June 12, 2013
About 5,000 Bosnians have protested against a legal void which has left all babies born since February without identity numbers, meaning they cannot be issued passports or medical cards. Demonstrations entered a sixth day on Tuesday, with people from around the country filling the square in front of the parliament building in Sarajevo.
The so-called baby revolution began on Thursday when about 1,000 parents staged a sit-in in front of government buildings in the capital, demanding a law on identification numbers for children. The following day, thousands of protesters, both parents and non-parents, formed a human ring around parliament, trapping inside 1,500 MPs, civil servants and others.
In the pre-dawn hours of Friday, special forces formed their own human cordon, freeing those inside the building. Bosnians from the country’s three main ethnicities - Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats - have joined the protests, which were sparked by the case of a three-month-old girl who could not be sent to Germany for medical treatment as her parents were unable to obtain a passport for her.
The anti-government demonstrations appear to be transcending ethnic boundaries and creating a sense of harmony rarely seen in a country where hatreds have endured since the end of a bloody war in the 1990s.
Banners reading “We want changes” and “This is the beginning of your end,” were visible among the protesters, many of whom were pushing prams.
The newborns have fallen victim to an ongoing dispute between Muslim, Croat and Serb MPs of Bosnia’s central parliament who for more than two years have been bickering over a draft law on the personal identification numbers.
Bosnia’s constitutional court ordered a halt to the registration of newborns until the dispute is settled.
Bosniak and Croat legislators are rejecting the demand of their Serb colleagues, who want people from the Bosnian Serb part of the country to have different identification numbers than people in the rest of the country.
The third action against the increase on public transport fares brought together more than 13,000 people to the streets in São Paulo, Brazil.
Protesters were brutally repressed by the military police and 20 people were arrested; initially, the authorities asked for a bail of $20,000 (USD $10,000). The protesters built burning barricades and destroyed buses and bank windows.
A new action was already called for 06/14.
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An orthodox Jewish rally took place in Foley Square in New York City today to denounce the Israeli military & its latest efforts to draft orthodox Jewish men into the Israeli Defense Forces.
“The evil rulers in the Holy Land want to incite and seduce young men and teenagers to acquiesce to idol worship and to participate in the impure army,” reads one poster, a digital copy of which was obtained and translated by the Forward. Yiddish language posters not only denounced the new draft policy, but the Israeli government & the military itself.
Swedish train operators wear skirts as protest to needless work uniform
June 9, 2013
Commuters on a train line in northern Stockholm were met with an unusual sight this week: male train drivers and conductors wearing skirts to work.
Train driver Martin Akersten says he and more than a dozen others at the Roslagsbanan line have started wearing skirts in the summer as a protest against the train company’s uniform policy, which doesn’t allow shorts.
The 30-year-old Akersten said Sunday the response from customers has been only positive.
Arriva, the company that runs the train line, hasn’t stopped the drivers. Arriva spokesman Tomas Hedenius says the company wants its staff to look “nice and proper,” but can’t stop men from wearing “women’s clothes” if that’s what they want because it would be discrimination.
He didn’t rule out a change of the company’s uniform policy.
Naked cyclists in Mexico protest environmental destruction from cars & socially conservative attitudes toward dress
June 9, 2013
Naked and minimally dressed cyclists in Mexico braved saddle sores to protest against a number of bugbears – including aggressive drivers, C02 emissions from cars and conservative attitudes to dressing. An estimated 3,000 demonstrators, some of whom were fully naked, cycled 12 miles in a protest that ended in Guadalajara, the largest city in the state of Jalisco, as part of World Naked Bike Ride.
A further 2,000 streamed through Mexico City. Some slapped “fragile” stickers on their bodies or painted messages on their skin: “More bicycles, less pollution,” and “the city is for everyone, let bikes pass.”
By stripping bare, the cyclists aimed to highlight the fragility of riders, and the risks they face, on busy roads. But for the protesters in Guadalajara, it was also a chance to take a swipe at the conservative climate in that state.
“It’s a very conservative city, and I believe that daring to [cycle with ] pushes beyond the limits of the Catholic sense of morality,” said Lucia Escalante, 27, who was dressed in a bathing suit. “That’s why it’s more important to show here that we are free.”
The World Naked Bike Ride movement began on June 12, 2004, in Vancouver, Canada, and has been held every year in 29 cities around the world since then.
This is what Taksim Square in Istanbul looks like right now.
Singapore bloggers protest licensing rules for news websites
June 8, 2013
More than 1,000 Singaporeans gathered at a downtown park to protest a regulation requiring websites that regularly publish news on the city state to be licensed.
The demonstration organized by representatives of social and political websites was held today at Speakers’ Corner at Hong Lim Park, at the edge of the financial district. About 1,450 people have turned up so far, said Howard Lee, deputy chief editor of the Online Citizen, a Singapore social and political blog, and one of the organizers. Some waved placards calling on the government not to “tell me what to read,” while another said “our silence is not for sale.”
The Southeast Asian nation has seen at least two protests against government policies this year. The regulation introduced June 1 requiring news sites get a license has drawn criticism from opposition groups, while the government has said the rule doesn’t limit individuals’ freedom of expression online.
“Our purpose today is simply to ask the government to withdraw the Internet regulation they announced 11 days ago,” said Andrew Loh, editor of publichouse.sg, the first speaker at the event. “Citizen journalism has a place in Singapore.”
More than 150 Singapore websites and blogs blacked out their content in protest the licensing rules, the Straits Times reported yesterday. Some sites replaced their home pages with a black screen saying “Free My Internet;” others included information about today’s protest.
The new rules undercut Singapore’s status as a financial hub, Human Rights Watch said, urging the city to withdraw regulations it says discourage independent comment.
The regulations cast a chill over the city’s “robust and free-wheeling” online communities and limit Singaporeans’ access to independent media, Cynthia Wong, senior Internet researcher at the New York-based HRW, said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
Singapore dropped 14 places in a 2013 press-freedom index published by Reporters Without Borders, ranking 149th out of 179 countries. It’s ranked one spot behind Russia, and just ahead of Iraq and Myanmar.
Today’s demonstration is the third incident where Singaporeans expressed unhappiness against government policies this year. Thousands of Singaporeans demonstrated in February and May against a government plan to increase the island’s population through immigration.
“The key to this is to make our voices heard to scrap this ruling, which goes against the right to information,” Lee said. “Through this gathering today, we also want to let people know how these regulations are going to affect them.”
Singapore’s Media Development Authority said last month certain websites must get a license and pay a $50,000 bond to be forfeited upon publication of “prohibited content” such as that which “undermines racial or religious harmony.” Yahoo! Inc.’s Singapore news website is among an initial list of 10 that will be subject to the rules.
News sites must have individual licenses if they post an average of at least one weekly article on the island’s news and current affairs over a period of two months, and have at least 50,000 unique visitors from Singapore each month over that period, according to the MDA.
The authority said operators of news sites are expected to comply within 24 hours with the government agency’s directions to remove content that is found to be in breach of standards.
Images of the protest against the increase of public transport fares in São Paulo, Brazil - 06/06/2013
The demonstration was brutally suppressed by military police-tactical force that repressed protests for about 3,5km. The protesters responded by erecting burning barricades, throwing stones, preying a bus and corporate patrimonies.
