Ibrahim Gökçek, bassist of the socialist band Grup Yorum, led a death fast protest for 323 days in protest at the state repression against his group. With the protest, the 39-year-old musician demanded the lifting of the concert ban of Grup Yorum, an end to the police raids against the Idil cultural centre, the release of all imprisoned band members and the cessation of all legal proceedings.
The musician ended his death fast on the 323rd day, on May 5, after Turkish officials agreed for a talk with the band for permission to make concerts.
After ending the fast, Gökçek was taken under treatment in the intensive care unit of Reyap Istanbul Hospital in the Esenyurt district. Gökçek was connected to respirator after a deterioration of his condition last night. His heart has stopped at around 1 pm today.
There is strong evidence to suggest that both Juan Guaidó and the U.S. government were intimately involved in a botched weekend insurrection.
Who else would pay millions to yet again attack this innocent country it has decimated with sanctions, killing tens of thousands another evil war crime and a blatantly criminal attempt to steal it’s resources.?
Sunday, May 3, 2020. Interior Minister Nestor Reverol said on state televisionthat security forces overcame an armed maritime incursion with speedboats from neighboring Colombia. Eight attackers were killed and others detained. [Source: AP Photo/Matias Delacroix]
UPDATED: Trump Bodyguard Arrested By Venezuelan Authorities
UPDATE: One of the people arrested by Venezuelan authorities was Luke Denman, a mercenaries with American citizenship. Footage shows that Denman, along with his boss and former colleague Jordan Goodro ensured the safety of US President Donald Trump at a political event.
Later Denman claimed on TV that the aim of the invasion was to kidnap President Maduro and take him to the US.
After the photos began to appear in the media of SilverCorp PMC’s Director Jordan Goodro and his activities to ensure the safety of US President Donald Trump, the ambiguous photos disappeared from the company’s accounts on social networks.
On May 4th, the Venezuelan authorities foiled a second “terrorist infiltration” attempt, capturing 8 suspects.
The Gulf coast 0f Louisiana and Texas has the world’s greatest concentration of fossil fuel plants, built and operated as National priority with scant attention to human or environmental health.
Now, even as grass roots victims are fighting back, the monstrous industries are doubling in size, with dozens of new fracking and liquid gas pipelines being laid, gigantic LNG export plants built, and a huge new plastics industry underway as the dirt cheap fuels from the West Texas field and elsewhere arrive.
from Grist, shared with thanks (illustrations added)
by Rachel Ramire
Four years ago, Sharon Lavigne was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis. Blood tests revealed that she had aluminum inside her body.
Lavigne has lived all her life in St. James Parish, which sits on an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that connects New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Since the 1980s, it’s been known as “cancer alley.”
According to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data, seven out of 10 U.S. census tracts with the nation’s highest cancer risks are located in this corridor, which is already home to more than 150 chemical plants and refineries. When she got her diagnosis, Lavigne didn’t think any of this might be related to her failing health, or that of so many of her friends and neighbors.
“That should’ve been my wake-up call,” Lavigne, 67, told Grist. “But I was teaching in school, uninterested with what’s going on. I was only interested in my job, going home, resting, and taking care of my children and grandchildren. That all changed when I found out that a new plant was coming.”
It is increasingly unlikely that Ireland will develop new infrastructure to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) produced from fracked wells in the US, after the plans suffered a series of potentially fatal legal and political setbacks.
First, the European Court of Justice advocate general, Juliane Kokott, ruled that An Bord Pleanála, Ireland’s planning appeals body, erred in not requesting an up-to-date environmental impact study for the proposed Shannon LNG terminal before extending planning permission for a planned project. The decision means the case would have to be referred back to Ireland’s High Court.
Meanwhile, the political climate regarding the project has turned distinctly hostile, with the two major centrist parties Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil this week signing a joint letter that appears to signal the death knell for the LNG project.
Dr Lisa McKenzie ..via rt.com.. shared with thanks
Dr Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic. She grew up in a coal-mining town in Notts and became politicized through the 1984 miners’ strike with her family. Dr McKenzie lectures in sociology at the University of Durham and is the author of ‘Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain.’ She’s a political activist, writer and thinker. .on Twitter @redrumlisa.
The coronavirus is killing poor people at twice the rate of better-off people, and exposing the appalling inequalities and injustice of our broken system. We need a new revolt, to bring about real change.
“Things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all goods are held in common, and until there will be neither serfs nor gentlemen, and we shall be equal” said the Priest John Ball, during his speech before marching into London with Watt Tyler during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the first great popular rebellion in UK history.
By SIGC-FAGC on May 2, 2020 translation @thefreeonline
Preamble
The coronavirus lockdown has stopped tourism in the Canaries, and left tens of thousands of famies with zero income and high rents overdue.(Canarias Semanal) Below is a Report by an anarchist union on ongoing rent strikes and survival struggles.
“The rent strike is a historic milestone, which has not been going on with this force for almost a century. It is the first time since then that a large group of people simultaneously questions a modern taboo’s: the capitalist institution of income”.
Rent Strike: We are all Precarious workers.. Renters Union of Gran Canaria.. ‘We dont get paid so we WONT PAY’
In Gran Canaria, we must start from the idea that a rent strike was not strange to us in certain militant spaces. Since the Anarchist Federation of Gran Canaria (FAGC) went into housing (2012), it did so looking for and nourishing itself on references from the past, and those references almost always spoke of tenant strikes: Baracaldo (1905), Buenos Aires (1907), Glasgow (1915), New York (1918), Seville (1919), Veracruz (1922), Santiago de Chile and Valparaíso (1925), Barcelona (1931) Santa Cruz de Tenerife (1933), and this to mention only the best known of the first half of the 20th century
In 2015 and 2016, the FAGC participated in two sets of rent strikes in the capital of Gran Canaria in two blocks of vertically owned houses, in order to obtain a reduction in rent. The first was won instantly when declaring itself and the second only the next day. We were thus shown, empirically, that the rent strike is a formidable weapon, requiring almost no resources and allowing strikers, if they wanted to win, to endow what they previously took for a “personal problem” with a collective meaning.
The rent strike also had another advantage: in a situation of involuntary non-payment, the strike could turn insolvency into an act of political demand and social struggle. The idea was also brought to us indirectly by the experience of a colleague who, without any recourse, decided to go on a hunger strike: since she was not going to eat anyway, she could at least give political content to her difficult situation.
The same logic articulated throughout history the aforementioned tenant strikes: when you cannot pay and there is little to lose, the possibility of organizing with others and coordinating non-payment becomes a reality even when there is not the slightest politicization previously.
[Admin: The Sexta Grietas Network circulated this statement and asked for signatures. We reproduce it below with the signatures obtained.] Statement of Solidarity with the Struggle against the Maya Train, a Megaproject of Death Traducción en español Traduction française April 15, 2020 We salute the efforts of the Indigenous and Popular Council of Xpujil (CRIPX […]
The Free 