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Barcelona. 26/5/2011 Day 12.
Today I have heard of at least four new squares being occupied in different barrios (districts) of the city, with street assemblies of up to 800 people in Santa Coloma. There have also been outbreaks of ‘pot banging’ in inner city areas with people of all ages joining in. The central square of Plaza Catalunya is becoming a tent city, well organised with every imaginable activity and incredible adrenalin. When 3000 demonstrating students arrived this afternoon they couldn´t physically fit in and the whole thing began ballooning out, while being photographed by stacks of tourists.
This is a real post not a cut and paste.
A giant screen for the Wembley European Cup Final has been moved from Plaza Catalunya to nearby Arc de Triomf to avoid any conflict as the square is still full of revolutionaries, and getting even fuller.
T
CEL·LEBREM LA VICTÒRIA DEL BARÇA
AMB INDIGNACIÓ!!
Estem fent història.
Mai més els barcelonins tornarem a veure la plaça Catalunya com era.
A partir d’ara tothom quan passi per plaça Catalunya veurà la plaça de #acmpadabcn, la plaça de les indignades.
Una plaça al cor de la bèstia que ens hem fet nostra, tant pel procés d’empoderament col·lectiu que s’està generant a través de les assemblees multitudinàries com per tot allò que dia a dia es va construint a través de la feina voluntària de milers de persones coordinades en comisions. Mai s’havia vist a Barcelona tanta solidaritat i suport mutu. Hem deixat de ser persones aïllades en les nostres vides individuals per prendre les places com a espais de trobada. S’està tornant a discutir de política en petites àgores creades espontàniament a diferents racons de la plaça, així com als bars, botigues, centres mèdics, escoles… Tot això és quelcom del que ens hauriem de sentir orgulloses i que hauriem de defensar.
LA INDIGNACIÓ HA VINGUT PER QUEDAR-S’HI!
 [Revoltosa] data límit pel desallotjament
The occupied self managed social center ‘La Revoltosa’ is overdue for eviction and calls for a massive demo when the police appear |
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| 26 mai 2011 | ||||
Dark Day for Brazil’s Amazon Jungle
By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 25, 2011 (IPS) – The same day that the lower house of the Brazilian Congress approved a reform of the forestry code that would make it easier to clear land in the Amazon jungle for agriculture, a husband and wife team of activists who spent years fighting illegal deforestation in the rainforest were murdered.
After several delays, the revised forest code was approved by the Chamber of Deputies late Tuesday, by a vote of 410 to 63, with one abstention.
Introduced by Communist Party lawmaker Aldo Rebelo, the reform of the 1965 forestry code is, in the view of environmentalists, the first major defeat for President Dilma Rousseff, as the parties allied with her left-wing Workers’ Party did not vote in a bloc with it on this question.
“This vote represents the biggest setback to Brazil’s environmental legislation in decades,” Raul Silva Telles do Valle, assistant coordinator of the Socioenvironmental Institute, told IPS.
“It’s a law that looks to the past, not the future,” WWF-Brazil’s conservation director Carlos Alberto de Mattos Scaramuzza told IPS.
conrtinued
”there’s a mini revolution going on in the square! they’ve been there ten days or more, I helped plant tomatoes, had a free haircut, free food.. it’s all money free, and slept with 700 people Tuesday under the stars…….”
May 25, 2011 at 4:16am With this mail we want to animate others to organize more sit-ins outside of Barcelona, around the world, which will be organized by you. We propose not to target on the Spanish embassies in your countries, also because the Spanish press practically does not cover those actions.
Our proposal is that you join in with your local struggle, to occupy the central places of your city while following the model of organization used during the Arab revolutions (and Spaniards), which means connecting with groups and local organizations and organize a sit-in in the main squares, to work in commissions and to write up your own documents (manifest, calls, proposals, minutes of meetings, etc). To make it public, spread it, use the internet networks to expand your message and to self-manage.
What is happening in different Spanish cities is not accidental nor specific of our society, we fight to recover our dignity, our freedom and our social rights, for direct democracy where we can participate in the course of our lives. We are a spontaneous and independent network, we don’t need leaders thus we offer that you will organize independently, according to what is possible and relevant in your area. We would like that everywhere people will take the streets, but in each place people will think themselves on the local alternatives to the capitalist and cruel world to which our governments are ‘leading’ us and the whole planet.
For us the borders do not exist, the network is ours and the street also! Another world is possible now! More concretely, we propose to you that you squat in your city during the next days of THURSDAY AND FRIDAY 26 AND 27 OF MAY to take advantage of the international days of mobilization against the G8 against the world-wide oligarchy, we invite you to take the street and to establish si-ins in sufficiently big places which will receive a consequent infrastructure that allow you to work and to mobilize in the best conditions.
These two days and their nights could be the beginning of a long global struggle of the Indignados, please add your sit-in to the world-wide map of: http://www.thetechnoant.info/campmap/ We use the social networks to coordinate and to maintain informed. We encourage you to create an international commission to communicate with us, to share materials and strategies of organization in the Web n-1.cc to look for the group https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/104127/take-the-square-international and open a space with your location.
In that link you will find a guide. In the chat (http://ur1.ca/48ogs) you can contact with us and others sit-ins simultaneously or to contact us by e-mail comisiointernacional@gmail.com. Our content commissions is working on a document which formulate the very elaborated agreements which are agreed on in the general assembly.
The document is available on web http://acampadabcn.wordpress.com/ Take the street! Real Democracy Now! Hugs, International Networks of the International Commission of the Barcelona Camp Barcelona Information: #acampadabcn http://acampadabcn.wordpress.com/ e-mail general: acampadabcn@yahoo.es Internacional commission – Barcelona Camp: https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/103405/akbcn_int/ e-mail international commission: comisiointernacional@gmail.com Internacional coordination: http://www.thetechnoant.info/campmap/ e-lists: https://lists.takethesquare.net/mailman/listinfo/cominterm https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/104127/take-the-square-international/ Chat irc.freenode.net # takethesquare http://ur1.ca/48ogs
Câmara aprova Código FlorestalMÁRCIO FALCÃO
LARISSA GUIMARÃES
DE BRASÍLIA
Após semanas de embate, negociações e troca de acusações, a Câmara dos Deputados aprovou ontem o texto da reforma do Código Florestal com alterações que significaram uma derrota para o governo.
Uma emenda aprovada por 273 votos a 182 rachou a base do governo levando os principais partidos governistas, PT e PMDB, para lados opostos. O texto da emenda consolida a manutenção de atividades agrícolas nas APPs (áreas de preservação permanente), autoriza os Estados a 
participarem da regularização ambiental e deixa claro a anistia para os desmates ocorridos até junho de 2008.
O líder do governo, Cândido Vaccarezza (PT-SP), chegou a falar, em nome da presidente Dilma Rousseff, que a aprovação da emenda seria “uma vergonha”.
Dilma recebe ex-ministros que são contra texto de lei florestal
Relator do Código Florestal critica ex-ministros de Meio Ambiente
Impasse regimental impede votação do Código Florestal, diz Rebelo
Governo cede para votar nova lei florestal
read more here
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ambiente/920514-camara-aprova-texto-do-novo-codigo-florestal.shtml
foto. José and Maria. ‘They gunned them down and cut off their ears”
An Amazon environmental activist and his wife were killed late on Monday and the crime is being investigated as a possible assassination to silence the outspoken forest defender, according to police.
José Claudio Ribeiro da Silva, also known by his nickname of “Ze Claudio,” was shot and killed along with his wife, Maria do Espírito Santo da Silva, in Nova Ipixuna, a rural town of 15,000 people in the northeast Brazilian Amazon state of Para, about 40km from the nearest city, Maraba.
Exact details and circumstances of the death are not yet clear. However, Felicio Pontes a federal prosecutor in Para state, as well as Marcos Augusto Cruz, the local civil police investigator, told Al Jazeera by phone late on Tuesday that the killings have all the signs of a cold-blooded murder for hire.
“We are working on a hypothesis that this was an execution because the shooters cut off one ear of each of the victims,” Cruz told Al Jazeera.
“Usually this is done as proof to give back to whoever ordered the killings,” Cruz told Al Jazeera, before adding that is was likely he was killed in retaliation for speaking out against illegal loggers.
Ribeiro was a community leader of a rural Amazon sustainable reserve that produces nuts and natural oils native to the forest.
But as loggers moved into Para state, Ribeiro increased his candid denouncements of illegal clear cutting in the region, which earned him praise from environmentalists but allegedly scorn from logging and business interests who hold enormous influence in the heavily deforested region.
Death threats
Ribeiro received many death threats.
He told an audience at a TED summit last November that before the loggers moved in, the region where he lived had 85 per cent native Amazon vegetation.
“Today with the arrival of loggers… there is only 20 per cent of the native negotiation left,” Ribeiro said at the TED Summit. “It’s a disaster for people like me who live off of the forest.
“I protect the forest in any way I can. That is why I live at gunpoint all the time, because I don’t just sit down, I stand up and denounce loggers, and coal burners and that is why they think I shouldn’t exist.”
In another video interview posted on YouTube last November, Ribeiro looks off camera and says to the interviewer: “I have received death threats by businessmen who work with loggers, who don’t want the forest standing.”
The news of the killing of Ribeiro and his wife came on the same day the Brazilian congress debated a controversial set of new laws called “Forest Code” which, according to environmentalists, would be harmful to the Amazon, reducing the amount of land preserved from clear cutting.
At the time of writing, the law was still being debated in congress.
In Brazil, Ribeiro’s killing has quickly been compared to that of Dorothy Stang, the American born Roman Catholic sister who was brutally shot and killed – also in a rural area of Para state – by two men after her vocal defense of the Amazon angered local loggers. (Four men in total have gone to trial for that murder and are serving jail time).
For environmentalists, rural parts of Para state are often known as the “land without law”, because of its reputation as a place where powerful loggers exact revenge on anybody who dares cross them.
State of impunity
“Para state is a place with a lot of impunity; there are over 400 murder cases unsolved involving people in rural areas,” Pontes, the state federal prosecutor told Al Jazeera.
President Dilma Rousseff reportedly ordered Federal Police to oversee the investigation on Tuesday.
While details of the killing are still unclear, more details have started to emerge.
| Maria do Espirito Santo Silva and José Claudio Ribeiro da Silva, were killed in the northeast Brazilian Amazon state of Para [Conselho Nacional das Populacoes Extrativistas] |
Ribeiro’s niece, Clara Santos, told Al Jazeera by phone: “He left (Monday night) from the house to go to Maraba on his motorcycle with Maria. About eight kilometers from the house there were other men on motorbikes with their faces covered, waiting for them. The men shot Maria first. She fell from the motorcycle and right after they shot him.”
Ribeiro’s sister, Claudelice Silva dos Santos, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday her family is devastated.
“They have practically destroyed our family,” dos Santos said. “We want justice. We want the people that ordered this killing, as well as the shooters to be brought to justice. We don’t want this to end in impunity. We don’t want him to be just one more environmentalists killed.”
Despite the threats against him, Ribeiro reportedly never asked for protection.
Ribeiro is survived by two children from a previous marriage, and one adopted son, age 16.
The funeral services could be as early as Wednesday in Maraba, Brazil.
Gabriel Elizondo is an Al Jazeera correspondent based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Follow him on Twitter: @elizondogabriel
Português · Brasil: Defensor da Floresta é Morto
Français · Brésil : Un défenseur de la forêt assassiné
bahasa Indonesia · Brazil: Forest Defender Shot Dead
English · Brazil: Forest Defender Shot Dead
Brasil
Mientras el congreso brasileño debate un nuevo Código Forestal, y el Ministerio del Medio Ambiente lanza nuevas acciones [ing] sobre la tala ilegal en Brasil, el defensor de los bosques José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva fue asesinado a tiros [pt]. Él había anunciado [pt] que su vida estaba amenazada en la conferencia TEDxAmazonia, el pasado noviembre.
via Brasil: Asesinan a tiros a defensor de los bosques · Global Voices en Español.
The Free 