– A clash between neo-Nazis and members of an antiracist organization Friday evening left four Nazis in the hospital and prompted two arrests, according to the New Jersey State Police.The fight involved about 50 people and took place on the eve of a neo-Nazi rally Saturday in Trenton.
Syria: ‘Thousands occupy Homs after funerals’
Thousands of anti-government protesters have occupied the centre of Syria’s third largest city, Homs, according to opposition activists.
Video footage uploaded onto the internet appears to show people sitting on the ground in the main square.
Earlier, funerals were held for some of those killed in Sunday’s violence in the city, with crowds calling for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad.
Syria’s interior ministry has said the unrest amounts to armed insurrection.
an armed insurrection by armed groups belonging to Salafist organisations, especially in the cities of Homs and Banias”
Interior ministry statement
Eight people died in Homs on Sunday after soldiers fired on crowds protesting at the death of a tribal leader in state custody
via BBC News – Syria protests: ‘Thousands occupy Homs after funerals’.
dc rising tide: Action at the Department of Interior!
Sit-in at Dept. of Interior Demanding Phase Out of Fossil Fuels
Residents from Gulf Coast, Appalachia and interior West join students and climate justice activists in calling for more action on extractive industry.
Washington D.C.—Hundreds of climate activists marched to the Department of the Interior’s headquarters today, with twenty people committing civil disobedience inside, calling for the abolition of offshore oil drilling, coal mining and tar sands extraction. Reclaim Power led hundreds from Lafayette Park to the agency’s headquarters in Washington D.C. the same day after Powershift, a mass youth climate conference, ended and 2 days before the one year anniversary of the BP Gulf Oil Disaster.
Isn’t This How Hitler Started?
by L. S. Carbonell On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. Hitler quickly pushed Hindenburg aside and eliminated the non-Nazis in his coalition government. The regime used excessive military spending to ease unemployment and create prosperity……….
……..Governor Scott Walker is planning to introduce a bill into his highly co-operative legislature to give him virtually unlimited power to take over a local government. Michigan’s Gov. Rick Snyder already has that power. The trigger for the take-over would be Walker’s personal opinion that a locality is financially unfit. Since his budget cuts over $1 billion from local governments and forbids the raising of local taxes, he has created the circumstances by which he could seize every locality in the state, dismiss the local…………. continued
via The Woman Rebel “No Gods, No Masters”: Isn’t This How Hitler Started?.
McDonald’s: Taxing Americans for 56 Years – Infoshop News
McDonald’s: Taxing Americans for 56 Years
by Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D., Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest
April 15, 2011
“April 15” fills many Americans with anxiety as tax returns become due (though this year Uncle Sam has given us until April 18). I recently remembered that April 15 has another grim association: the opening, 56 years ago, of Ray Kroc’s first McDonald’s franchise in Des Plaines, Ill. (Now is as good a time as any to disclose that my organization has hauled Ronald McDonald to court to try to stop the predatory practice of using toys to lure children to disease-promoting Happy Meals.)
With the possible exception of Coca-Cola (itself a McDonald’s menu mainstay), I can’t think of another food company that has had such an enormous impact on the way we eat and the way we farm. Yes, thanks to McDonald’s, one can eat out quite cheaply. And it’s hard to be dismissive of that achievement in a time of high unemployment and high income disparity. But that low price obscures the financial toll exacted on Americans by McDonald’s and McDonald’s imitators in terms of the costs associated with treating obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions. So in that way, fast food restaurants have been taxing us for the past half-century-plus: We now spend more than $270 billion each year on heart disease alone.
via McDonald’s: Taxing Americans for 56 Years – Infoshop News.
Guatemala Indians evicted by agribusiness
GUATEMALA CITY, Mar 29, 2011 (IPS) – “We have nowhere to plant our corn, we have nothing,” Jorge Chocoj told IPS while waiting with his wife and three children for the police to evict them from the land they farmed in northwestern Guatemala.
The police evictions had started nine days before. In the early hours of the morning on Mar. 15, more than 1,000 police and soldiers showed up in the Polochic Valley in the northern province of Alta Verapaz to evict more than 3,000 Q’eqchi Maya Indians living on land claimed by an agribusiness firm.
The security forces burnt or bulldozed their humble shacks and destroyed their subsistence crops with machetes and tractors. Nearly a dozen farmers were injured in the fray and one farm worker, 30-year-old Juan Antonio Beb Ac, was killed,
via GUATEMALA: Evictions of Native Families Add Fuel to Fire Over Land Access – IPS ipsnews.net.
FRACKING ‘worse than coal’ for climate
The new kid on the energy block, shale gas, may be worse in climate change terms than coal, a study concludes.
Drawn from rock through a controversial “fracking” process, some hail the gas as a “stepping stone” to a low-carbon future and a route to energy security.
But US researchers found that shale gas wells leak substantial amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
This makes its climate impact worse than conventional gas, they say – and probably worse than coal as well.
The Free 