The Free

They are charged “simply for helping refugees and migrants in danger of drowning at sea,” says Amnesty. The story of the Syrian Mardini has reached the cinema.

Sarah Mardini and Seán Binder, two of the defendants. INTERNATIONAL AMNESTY

from thefreeonline The HuffPost / EFE Agency | Jan 13 2023

The trial against Syrian refugee and activist Sarah Mardini, whose odyssey to escape the war in Syria and reach Europe in 2015 has been turned into a film, and against 23 other members of a migrant rescue and rescue NGO, formally begins this Friday before the Court of Appeals for the North Aegean, on the Greek island of Lesbos.

A woman holds a baby at Karatepe refugee camp, on the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos, Greece, Monday, March 29, 2021. The European Union’s home affairs commissioner is visiting asylum-seeker facilities on the eastern Greek islands of Samos and Lesbos amid continuing accusations against Greece of illegal summary deportations. (AP Photo/Panagiotis Balaskas)

Mardini, German trained salvage diver Sean Binder and 22 others are charged by the Greek judicial authorities for allegedly committing a series of offences, including espionage and forgery, and could face up to a prison sentence. eight years if convicted.

During the first session held on Tuesday, later delayed, the defendants’ defense lawyers testified and it was decided that the trial would continue on Friday.

The accusations against Mardini and the other members of the NGO Emergency Response Center International (ERCI), active in Lesbos between 2016 and 2018, have generated harsh reactions from international human rights organizations.

Son acusados “simplemente por ayudar personas refugiadas y migrantes en peligro de ahogarse en el mar”, dice Amnistía. La historia de la siria Mardini ha llegado al cine.

from thefreeonline via El HuffPost / Agencia EFE | 13 ene. 2023

El juicio contra la refugiada y activista siria Sarah Mardini, cuya odisea para escapar de la guerra en Siria y llegar a Europa en 2015 se ha convertido en una película, y contra otros 23 miembros de una ONG de rescate y salvamento de migrantes, empieza formalmente este viernes ante la Corte de Apelaciones del Egeo Norte, en la isla griega de Lesbos.

Mardini, el buceador alemán con formación en salvamento Sean Binder y otras 22 personas son acusadas por las autoridades judiciales griegas por la presunta comisión de una serie de delitos, entre los cuales figuran el espionaje y la falsificación y podrían afrontar una pena de prisión de hasta ocho años en caso de que sean condenados.

Durante la primera sesión celebrada el martes, retrasada luego, prestaron declaración los abogados de defensa de los imputados y se decidió que el juicio continuará el viernes.

Las acusaciones en contra de Mardini y los otros miembros de la ONG Emergency Response Centre International (ERCI), activa en Lesbos entre 2016 y 2018, han generado duras reacciones por parte de organizaciones internacionales de derechos humanos.

Amnistía Internacional emitió el lunes un comunicado en el que califica los cargos de “injustos” e “infundados” y señala que los 24 miembros de ERCI son acusados “simplemente por ayudar personas refugiadas y migrantes en peligro de ahogarse en el mar”.

Según otro comunicado emitido por la ONG Human Rights Watch (HRW) los cargos se basan en un informe de la Policía griega que contiene flagrantes errores, “incluidas afirmaciones de que algunos de los acusados participaron en misiones de rescate en varias fechas cuando no estaban en Grecia”.

“We Need Negotiations, Not More War”: CodePink Disrupts Defense Policy Talk 

by thefreeonline on 13th Jan 2023 from Democracy Now

Just checking in to see if anti Armageddon riots are sweeping the USA.?. no NOTHING..NIX…. Oh yes! 2 Peace Women INTERRUPTED a War Promotion Event to politely ask for negotiations! Good for Code Pink!.. And yes wow! 20 democrats signed a letter asking for TALKS!.. But no.. withdrew the letter a day later.

So where are the protests? The Code Pink two did well, getting a video on You Tube (see below). But only a few marginal agencies even shared the news on Gobshite-Google. So I tried searching DuckDuckGo.. no protests. How about the Russian, Yandex.. nothing at all.

Seems that he US “Defense” Dept with its $ TRILLION budget is deeply embedded over generations in US society and industry. Not squeamish about splurging the odd billion on community events, scouts, scholorships, festivals, worthy causes and God knows what.

And of course nearly 100% of politicians, investors, CEO’s and maybe just middle class people have portfolio’s in the soaring shares of the Arms Industry and all its spinoffs and backhanders.

Every year the Pentagon fails to audit the multi trillions that have GONE MISSING! But it doesn’t really matter, as long as the US can still, just about, maintain economic hegemony, allowing it to just print money. Really!

So we’re happy enough it seems to sit tight and hold onto whatever privileges we still have left. At the Think -tank that Code Pink invaded, the eminent, despicable warmonger Adam Smith did in fact argue for cutting arms production! – Ah no… but only of obsolete armaments, and in favour of ginormous new, wonderful, shining massacre weapons.

It’s never been very hard for these profiteers to start a war in Europe. All it takes is to boost one petty rightwing State to NATO, then arm them and let them start killing any ethnic minority from a neighbouring nationalist rightwing State you don’t like… and bingo! Lovely War!

No protests… What a pity. It seems like declining capitalist states, especially settler states, are the WORST for blinding themselves in a spiral of hatred, ignorance, manipulated internal violence and the destruction of ‘enemies’, minorities and the planet.. in reality slowly destroying themselves.

And especially when living in a bubble of corrupt regime misinformation and led from behind by nuclear armed warmongers and psycopathic billionaire corporations.

Still, you never know, nobody expected Black Lives Matter, and US youth are in principle way ahead in experiencing total bullshit, and perhaps detonating a post capitalist rebellion.

*********

Code Pink activists urged talks with Russia during an event featuring a hawkish Democratic lawmaker

Code Pink activists urged talks with Russia during an event featuring a hawkish Democratic lawmaker

Seeing Is Believing: What the Data Reveal About Mass Deaths Following COVID Vaccine Rollouts Around the World

from thefreeonline on 01/12/23 by  Gavin de Becker at COVID Archives • Children’s Health Defense

Why would so many countries big and small, rich and poor, in different parts of the world, some with congested cities, some sparsely populated, cold weather or hot weather, tropical or desert, high altitude or low altitude, small islands or landlocked — why would they ALL see increases in COVID-19 deaths after mass vaccination?

I asked Ed Dowd if I could have space in his book, “‘Cause Unknown’: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022,” for an article about what we saw around the world as mass vaccination commenced.

In light of Dowd’s stunning analysis, it is particularly instructive to look at data for those countries that did not have high numbers of COVID-19 deaths prior to mass vaccination, because they afford the simplest comparison:

1. They had very low rates of death attributed to COVID-19.
2. Then they commenced mass vaccination.
3. Then they experienced huge increases in deaths attributed to COVID-19.

South Korea gives us a fast example among many: Prior to the country’s wide rollout of mRNA vaccines, Korea had almost no COVID-19 deaths. You see that nearly all their COVID-19 deaths occurred after mass vaccination.

Due to frequent supply problems, South Korea’s mass vaccination program really took off after the third quarter of 2021 when they borrowed hundreds of thousands of Pfizer doses from Israel. Their COVID-19 deaths soon followed. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

In November 2021, President Moon began a massive campaign to push boosters: “The vaccination can be completed only after receiving the third jab.”

His citizens complied, reaching more than 90% of adults fully vaccinated — the chart shows the COVID-19 deaths that followed.

The same pattern repeats all over the world, and since seeing is believing, I’ll pause here and resume in more detail after some quick sample charts …

from thefreeonline on 12th Jan 2023 at libertame ILLustraTIONS AddEd by Paul Goodman

Some unconventional ideas for a sane and revolutionary approach to education…. Excerpt from Compulsory Education by Paul Goodman

There are thinkable alternatives. Throughout this little book, as the occasion arises, I will offer alternative proposals that I, as an individual, have heard of or thought of.

Here are half a dozen directly relevant to the topic we’ve been discussing, the system as mandatory cheating.

In principle, when a law begins to do more harm than good, the

best policy is to mitigate it or try to do without it.

1. Not having school at all for some classes. These children must be selected from tolerable, though not necessarily educated, homes. They must be neighbors and numerous enough to form a partnership for each other, so that they don’t just feel different.” Will they learn the rudiments anyway? This experiment cannot harm children academically, since there is strong evidence that normal children will make up for the first seven years of school work with four to seven months of good teaching.
2. Bypassing the school building for some classes; provide teachers and use the city itself as a school: its streets, cafeterias, shops, cinemas, museums, parks and factories. Whenever possible, it makes more sense to teach using the actual subject than to
3. bring an abstraction of the subject into the school
4. building as ‘curriculum’. Such a class should probably not exceed ten children for a single pedagogue. The idea – it is the model of Athenian education – is not unlike the work of youth gangs, but not applied to criminals and not playing with the ideology of gangs.
5. Along the same lines, but both outside and inside the school building, use the appropriate adults in the unlicensed community—the pharmacist, the grocer, the mechanic—as the appropriate educators of youth in the adult world. In this way, we can try to overcome the separation of young people from the adult world, so characteristic of modern urban life, and diminish the omnivorous authority of school professionals.
   It would certainly be a useful and encouraging experience for adults.
6. Make class attendance non-compulsory, à la Summerhill by A. S. Neill. If the teachers are good, the absence would tend to be eliminated; if they are bad, let them know. Compulsory law is helpful in alienating children from parents, but it should not result in entrapment for children. A good modification of this suggestion is the rule used by Frank Brown in Florida: allow children to be away for a week or a month to pursue any worthwhile enterprise or visit some new environment.
7. Decentralize an urban school (or not build a large new building) into small units, twenty to fifty, in storefronts or available clubs. These small schools, equipped with jukeboxes and a pinball machine, could combine play, socialization, discussion, and formal teaching. For special events, the small units can meet in a common auditorium or gymnasium, to give the feeling of a larger community.
   Consequently, I think it would be worthwhile to take a look at the Little Red Schoolhouse in modern urban conditions, and see how it works: that is, to combine all the ages in a small room for twenty-five or thirty, rather than sort by age.
8. Use a prorated share of the school money to send kids to economically marginal farms for a couple of months out of the year, maybe six kids from mixed backgrounds to one farmer. The only requirement is that the farmer feed them and not hit them; better, of course, if they participate in agricultural tasks. In this way, the farmer will have cash available, as part of the generally desirable program to correct the ratio between the country and the city, which approaches 70% and 30%. (Currently, less than 8% of families are rural.) It is possible that some of the children in the cities will adapt to the other way of life and that we can generate a new type of rural culture.

I often suggest these and similar proposals in teachers’ colleges, and they look at me strangely: do I really intend to reduce the state subsidy for each day of class? But most of the time the goal is that such proposals entail intolerable administrative difficulties.

18/05/22 PF confirmed in this quarter-feira (18) that the area near the Ka’aeté village was invaded by the Federal Police //PF confirmou nesta quarta-feira (18) que área perto da aldeia Ka’aeté foi invadida Polícia Federal//

 by Alexandre Muller, special for Correio da Cidadania
 12/22/2022

Photo: Personal Archive/Alexandre Muller

We are in the Apyterewa village, mother village of the Indigenous Land of the same name, located on the banks of the Xingu River, in southwest Pará.

Indígenas Parakanã implementam Plano de Gestão Territorial e Ambiental

In a context of invasion of territory, the annual assembly of the Parakanã people of the Apyterewa Indigenous Land took place between the 27th and 29th of November.

The event, which was held sometimes in Portuguese, sometimes in Parakanã, a Tupi-Guarani language, was attended by, in addition to the Parakanã people and their leaders, representatives of the Federal Public Ministry, NGOs, public bodies and the association that represents them.

Apyterewa

This event was especially important because the TI Apyterewa set a record for deforestation and invasions in 2021 and the Parakanã people expect a new wave of mobilization with the change of government.

Aerial phopto of illegal Cattle farm in indigenous resrve..Cattle have invaded the deforested jungle to supply voracious western meat consumption.

“The struggle for our free land is current, but it is also millenary. This land is our mother, from which we take our food, make our handicrafts and weave our hammocks. We have to be a priority for the next government because we are people of recent contact, Lula owes that to us”, exclaimed during the assembly Winatoa Parakanã, the first woman elected president of the Tato’a association, which represents the Parakanã people and communities of the Indigenous Land (IT) Apyterewa.

Throughout the assembly, the president-elect, Lula, was mentioned a lot by the participants who showed great expectations about his mandate. Winatoa recalled that Lula, who ran a very clear campaign in relation to the defense of indigenous territories and the protection of the environment, was also elected thanks to their votes and that it was he who in 2007 ratified the Apyterewa TI.

Área desmatada na região amazônica do estado do Pará

https://globoplay.globo.com/v/10582387/

In addition, Parakanã leaders recalled that during COP27, Lula promised a “non-stop” war against deforestation, the creation of the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and disintrusion, that is, the removal and punishment of invaders from Indigenous Lands. Lula will need a lot of support from the indigenous peoples to face the challenges that lie ahead, as they are essential in the fight for the forest.

Representing less than 5% of the world’s population, indigenous peoples protect 80% of global biodiversity and, if it depends on the Parakanã people, they will continue to mobilize to protect their territory and the Amazon rainforest. This agenda is even more important in a context of climate crisis and close proximity to the ‘point of no return’, a state of irreversible imbalance capable of transforming the Amazon into a savannah in just a few decades.

from thefreeonline Jan 12th 2023 by enough14 Original by Lützerath Leb shared with thanks!

Defend Lützerath! Now occupied by Resisters as Police prepare. Defend ZADrheinland!

Late News Update.11 Jan.. German coal mine standoff escalates as police attack

On Wednesday morning, officers in riot gear moved into Luetzerath, where hundreds of activists have been holed up trying to stop the expansion of the nearby Garzweiler coal mine run by energy firm RWE. The protesters formed human chains, made a makeshift barricade out of old containers, and chanted “We are here, we are loud, because you are stealing our future”. Some protesters threw beer bottles at the police. Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen, reporting from Luetzerath, said protesters were “holding firm”.

Lützerath. Germany. After the long struggle to save the Hambacher forest, the focus of many activists changed to Lützerath, a small village which is to be demolished for a brown coal open pit mine: Grazweiler.

Many villages and major parts of the Hambacher forest (only the last minor part was saved in 2018) were already destoyed by RWE‘s open pit mines.

Lützerath is completely occupied by brave resisters, but the interior minister of the German state North Rhine-Westphalia, Herbert Reul, announced that a huge police force will evict Lützerath in January. Defend Lützerath! Defend ZADrheinland! Enough 14. Originally published by Lützerath Lebt.

Big alliance demo on January 14th, 2023 Together with our allies, we call for the 14.01. everyone to come to Lützerath and protest against the eviction and for climate justice! The demonstration is registered and there will be shuttle buses from the train stations in Erkelenz and Hochneukirch. More on that soon! alle-doerfer-wandern.de/demo

Click on the Menu in the videoplayer got automated english subtitles. Video by Unser Aller Wald / #ZADrheinland

Defend Lützerath

Lützerath is a village in the Rhineland region that is to be destroyed for the profits of a major international corporation, RWE. 650 million tons of brown coal are to be burned still. This would massively fuel the climate catastrophe!

Right here we stand up for climate justice, we rebel against a neocolonial, destructive system that destroys the foundations of life worldwide.

Come to ZADRheinland and defend Lützerath with us!

What you can do

• Come to Luetzerath for the planned dates and stay here for the next few months.
• Order Mobimaterial via mobi@luetzerathlebt.info and spread the message
• From now on you can also get the mobilisation material via the boxes below for self or home printing. Feel free to distribute it in your favourite cafés, autonomous centres, universities, working place, among your friends and wherever else you might feel like.