3 May 2013 (mongabay.com) – On Thursday roughly 200 indigenous people launched an occupation of a key construction site for the controversial Belo Monte dam in the Brazilian Amazon. The protestors, who represent communities that will be affected by the massive dam, are demanding immediate suspension of all work on hydroelectric projects on the Xingu, […]
By Ian Johnston26 April 2013 (NBC News) – An “extensive” slaughter of elephants appears to be underway in the Central African Republic with reports of their meat being sold openly in markets, according to activists. Rebel fighters pushed into Bangui, the capital of the impoverished but mineral-rich country, in March and ousted President Francois Bozize. […]
By Paulo Padilha and Felipe Milanez 15 April 2013 (VICE) – The city of Marabá was founded on 6 April 1913, in the southeastern edge of the Amazon rainforest on a narrow strip of land where the rivers Tocantins and Itacaiunas meet. For the first several decades of its existence, the city’s economy was dependent […]
By Jonathan Watts3 April 2013 Rio de Janeiro (guardian.co.uk) – An Amazonian community has threatened to “go to war” with the Brazilian government after what they say is a military incursion into their land by dam builders. The Munduruku indigenous group in Para state say they have been betrayed by the authorities, who are pushing […]
By FELICITY BARRINGER26 March 2013 CARLSBAD, NEW MEXICO (The New York Times) – Just after the local water board announced this month that its farmers would get only one-tenth of their normal water allotment this year, Ronnie Walterscheid, 53, stood up and called on his elected representatives to declare a water war on their upstream […]
By Jonathan Kaiman26 March 2013 BEIJING (guardian.co.uk) – Ecuador plans to auction off more than three million hectares of pristine Amazonian rainforest to Chinese oil companies, angering indigenous groups and underlining the global environmental toll of China’s insatiable thirst for energy. On Monday morning a group of Ecuadorean politicians pitched bidding contracts to representatives of […]
By Tasneem Raja19 March 2013 (Mother Jones) – Ten years later, the Bush administration’s projected price tag for the war in Iraq seems downright cute. According to the first-ever comprehensive count of the true toll of the combined wars, the estimate the administration used to sell the invasion in 2003 was about 100 times too […]
[Desdemona can think of another reason why the invasion and occupation were disastrous: If the U.S. had instead poured trillions of dollars into upgrading its energy-production infrastructure to renewables, we wouldn’t need to invade oil-producing nations ever again.] By Richard Sanders19 March 2013 (Daily Telegraph) – The lead unit of the US Marine Corps arrived […]
By Bryan Bender9 March 2013 CAMBRIDGE (Boston Globe) – America’s top military officer in charge of monitoring hostile actions by North Korea, escalating tensions between China and Japan, and a spike in computer attacks traced to China provides an unexpected answer when asked what is the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region: climate […]
By Michael Smith12 February 2013 (Bloomberg Markets Magazine) – People streamed into the central square in Celendin, a small city in the Peruvian Andes, the morning of July 3, 2012. They were protesting the government’s support for Newmont Mining Corp.’s plan to take control of four lakes to make way for a new gold and […]
