2020 – Page 18 – The Free

Riots against the curfew: dozens of arrests and injured police in Spanish cities

The Spanish Constitution guarantees the freedom of movement and right to demonstrate

The main incidents occurred in Barcelona, Burgos, Valencia and Santander.

”The mass pickets and protests against the curfew and the increase in restrictive measures to stop the coronavirus pandemic have resulted yesterday night with dozens of people arrested and police officers injured in cities such as Barcelona, Burgos , Sevilla, Bilbao, Santander. etc

Disturbios en Nápoles durante una manifestación contra el toque de queda - El Independiente

The most serious incidents took place in Barcelona, where 14 people were arrested -two of them minors- and 30 were injured -20 Mossos d’Esquadra agents, three urban guards and seven citizens-, in the clashes that took place in the center of Barcelona at the end of a demonstration against the new restrictions of the Generalitat.

In the course of these altercations, two shops in the city center were looted, some fifty containers burned and several Mossos vans were affected, some badly damaged, Ferrer has specified.

The clashes took place in the Plaza de Sant Jaume and its surroundings after a denial demonstration called by social networks, when groups of people, many of them hooded and with their faces hidden, burned street furniture and threw flares and fences at the agents.

The director of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Pere Ferrer, has linked these incidents to groups around the extreme right, which take advantage of the “social unrest” due to the restrictions to “destabilize” with “extremely high levels of violence”: “This we are not going to tolerate , “he warned. But left wing, anarchist and independentist groups were visibly active.

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US Empire Building in China/ Sth Pacific.. watch Pilger’s ‘Coming War On China’

from The Most Revolutionary Act shared with thanks

The Coming War on China

Directed by John Pilger (2016) Film Review

People stand near the docked amphibious assault ship USS Essex at Subic Bay, Philippines.

They’re Baaack: US Navy Returns to Philippines’ Subic Bay Amid China Fears ….. The Real Secret of the South China Sea

Two things I’ve learned over the years about John Pilger films are 1) there’s virtually no link between the film’s title and its content 2) they all include include considerable hidden history not taught in public schools. .

The main focus of this documentary is US empire building in the Pacific and its disastrous effect on US-China relations.

A good third of the film concerns the US annexation of the Marshall islands following World War II, followed by the cynical US government decisions to use residents (referred to as “savages” in classified documents) as radiation guinea pigs in atmospheric nuclear tests. .

The Coming War On China” – Watch John Pilger's Powerfully Relevant Documentary – Caitlin Johnstone

After bombing some of the islands daily for 12 years, residents were forcibly returned to Rongelap despite dangerously high water and soil radiation levels. The US government then subjected them to repeated scans and blood tests to assess their response to the irradiated food they were eating.

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140 migrants to Europe die in sinking of boat in Senegal .. Factory fishing decimated local industry

“BARCELONA OR DIE”The EU subsidies which cause overfishing in West Africa’s waters also drive illegal migration

It is the deadliest shipwreck recorded so far this year, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Symbol picture of migrants sitting on board a boat (Salmeer Al-Doumy/AFP/Getty Images)

The ship caught fire just hours after setting sail and sank near Saint-Louis.

At least 140 migrants and refugees have lost their lives after the boat in which they were traveling sank off the coast of Senegal, in the deadliest shipwreck recorded so far in 2020, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM ).

The ship in question left Senegal on October 24, from the town of Mbour, bound for the Canary Islands. According to local leaders quoted by the IOM, the boat caught fire just hours after setting sail and sank near Saint-Louis, on the northwest coast of the African country.

Senegal okays Chinese boats with illegal fishing record ..October 9, 2020.Overfishing in Senegal has led to a food crisis, exacerbated by Asian and European fleets prowling the seas off West Africa This overfishing has led to a food crisis..Senegal’s fisheries ministry has issued fishing licenses to vessels of a Chinese industrial fleet involved in illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing activity in recent years, according to a new investigation by the environmental group, Greenpeace.

The wrecked boat was carrying about 200 people, but only 59 of them were rescued alive after the intervention of official ships from Senegal and Spain and fishing boats operating in the area. At least 20 bodies have been located.

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Scientists warn that Fracking increases radiation tens of kilometers from 100s of 1000s of wells .. Eng/Esp

Fracking can permanently poison groundwater, causes cancers and early death, and contributes badly to Climate change, through huge methane leakages and producing gas and oil for burning. Now we discover it also releases radioactivity.

Posted on October 29, 2020 by el comunista in ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT

Especially vulnerable are poor communities that are often found in affected areas.

A team of American scientists has discovered that people who live near the places where ‘fracking’ operations are carried out, or hydraulic fracturing, may be exposed to radioactive particles released by this oil extraction activity.

After analyzing the radiation in the vicinity of 157 sites where hydraulic fracturing is practiced, the researchers detected high levels of radiation in a radius of 19 kilometers around the wells, reaching the maximum level in the vicinity of the well.

“We found that, as the [sampling] sites get closer to these complexes, the radioactivity of the particles increases,” quoted a member of the team, Petros Koutrakis, in The Harvard Crimson.

Regarding the effects that high levels of radiation have on people living in areas near the ‘fracking’ sites, the researcher warned that, although it does not cause immediate diseases, it can increase the risk of chronic health problems , affecting the functioning of the lungs and the heart, in addition to increasing the rate of birth defects and mortality. Especially vulnerable are poor communities that are often found in affected areas.

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Mutual Aid is Essential to Our Survival…and its anti-capitalist!

Posted on October 29, 2020

After checking the food and essential items that were delivered to her, Sevonna Brown of Black Women's Blueprint looks at her son on May 11, 2020, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in the Brooklyn borough in New York City.

By Dean Spade, Verso Books

When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged as a crisis in the U.S. in early 2020, people all over the country started coordinating to deliver groceries and prescriptions to vulnerable people, making and distributing masks and hand sanitizer, and raising money for people who were losing jobs and ineligible for unemployment benefits.

By the time the uprising against anti-Black racism and police violence brought people into the streets in early summer, the concept of “mutual aid” had gained significant traction in the media, and it was visible on the streets as people operated street medic teams at protests, offered each other free food and water, and defended each other from cops and white supremacists.

New evidence shows human cooperation and empathy predominate See Also: https://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/capitalism-is-unnatural/ Kropotkin was Right: Cooperation beats Competition

COVID-19 mutual aid projects are ongoing, and as social movement groups prepare for the possibility of a contested election next week along with increasing strikes, street protests and occupations of public space, activists are gearing up to support each other.

“Mutual aid” is one term used to describe collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually stemming from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them.

Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse. We see examples of mutual aid in every single social movement, whether it’s people raising money for workers on strike, setting up a car pooling system during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, putting drinking water in the desert for migrants crossing the border, training each other in emergency medicine because ambulance response time in poor neighborhoods is too slow, raising money to pay for abortions for those who can’t afford them, or coordinating letter-writing to prisoners.

These are mutual aid projects. They directly meet people’s survival needs, and are based on a shared understanding that the conditions in which we are made to live are unjust […]

There is nothing new about mutual aid — people have worked together to survive for all of human history. But and shared everything they needed to survive. As people were forced into systems of wage labor and private property, and wealth became increasingly concentrated, our ways of caring for each other have become more and more tenuous.

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