About 30 demonstrators gathered outside the Russian consulate in the southern French city on Friday to protest against the trial of members of the feminist group famous for wearing bright dresses and colourful balaclavas.
But police swooped on about seven wearing multicoloured face-masks in solidarity with the band, reported La Provence. Asked why the police had stopped the demonstrators who had been standing peacefully behind a banner about the power of poetry, a senior officer told the newspaper: “They are wearing balaclavas in a public space. It’s illegal.” He said the demonstrators would be questioned and a report written.
In April 2011, Nicolas Sarkozy’s government introduced a law banning women from wearing the niqab, or full face-veil, in public places. To circumvent accusations that the law singled out Muslims, the bill was officially called the law against covering one’s face in public places.
Special exemptions were created for motorcycle helmets or sports equipment such as fencing masks. There are also exemptions for people appearing in parades, celebrations or places of worship.
The Marseille protesters – including poets, a book editor, and a former culture official – who had removed their masks at police request, were put in a riot van and driven to the nearest police station amid cries of “Absurd!” and “Ridiculous!”. They were released that afternoon. Under the law, the case can be referred to a local judge who can hand down a €150 fine, a citizenship course or both.
“We came here to defend freedom of expression in Russia and we find ourselves stopped by French police,” one pensioner at the rally told the paper.
When three members of Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for hooliganism on Friday, France said the sentence was “disproportionate”.
Police persecution of Pussy Riot supporters in Cologne, Germany: here.
The brief speech marked his first public appearance since taking refuge there over two months ago after exhausting legal efforts to appeal an extradition order to Sweden, where authorities want to question him about alleged sex crimes.
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa granted him “diplomatic asylum” earlier this month but Foreign Secretary William Hague vowed last week to arrest Mr Assange should he leave the embassy.
But Mr Assange was defiant, demanding the US government end its persecution of WikiLeaks and its associates.
He said that was driving Britain’s zealous pursuit of him.
“As WikiLeaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of all of our societies,” he said.
“I ask President Obama to do the right thing – the United States must renounce its witch-hunt against WikiLeaks.”
He also paid tribute to US political prisoner Bradley Manning, a US army private and allegedly the source of a huge cache of US diplomatic cables and military files on Afghanistan and Iraq.
“If Bradley Manning did what he is accused of he is a hero and an example to all of us,” he said.
Pvt Manning has been held for two years in military brigs under appalling conditions and now faces a court martial on 22 charges, including “aiding the enemy.”
Earlier Mr Assange’s newly appointed lawyer Baltasar Garzon told reporters his client had never shied away from questioning by Swedish investigators.
But he insisted on “reasonable assurance” that Sweden would not extradite him in turn to the US, where he is believed to be the subject of a sealed indictment.
Ecuador Comes Out Winner as UK Overreaches with Assange Threats on Likely Behalf of US: here.
South Africa’s president has announced an official inquiry into the shooting dead of 34 mine workers by police officers.
Having cut short an official trip to Mozambique to visit the scene of the killings at the Marikana mine, President Jacob Zuma told a news conference he was “saddened and dismayed” by what happened on Thursday.
He said the whole country was mourning and promised a full investigation into the incident, for which the mine workers and police have blamed each other.
Mr Zuma said: “We have to uncover the truth about what happened here. In this regard, I’ve decided to institute a commission of inquiry.
“The inquiry will enable us to get to the real cause of the incident and to derive the necessary lessons too. This is a shocking thing.”
Brazen Lonmin bosses at the tragedy-hit Marikana platinum mine ordered employees to return to work or face dismissal today: here.
There can never be justification for a massacre of striking workers and it is essential that the committee of inquiry set up by Jacob Zuma to examine the tragic events at Marikana makes this a central conclusion.
Nor should the committee concern itself solely with the most recent events – the murder early in the week of police, security guards and National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) members and the subsequent massacre of strikers by police.
The South African Police Service must explain why its officers were armed with automatic weapons when an order was issued last year banning the use even of rubber bullets during public protests.
Inadequate police training to deal with potentially violent situations, combined with officers’ anger at the butchery of two of their colleagues, was always likely to provide a combustible mix.
But the committee must also examine the wider picture of the platinum industry, the conduct of mining employers, the living conditions of miners and their families and the role of trade unionism.
Platinum mines have delivered tens of millions of pounds of dividends for shareholders, but, despite promises made in company annual reports, workers and their families still live in corrugated iron shacks without running water or electricity.
The most recent investigation of the industry by the faith-based Bench Marks Foundation is scathing in its description of routine death toll of miners underground – usually through rock falls.
It lays bare the penny-pinching attitude of the mining corporations, using poorly paid and inadequately trained subcontracted labour, which compromises the health and safety of workers.
The Bench Marks Foundation was emphatic that the introduction of labour subcontracting, to which the trade union movement has demanded an immediate end, was designed specifically to “break the power of NUM” and weaken the bargaining rights won over decades of struggle.
It is therefore unsurprising that British-based transnational corporation Lonmin, which owns the mine, has cast oil on the flames by ordering strikers back to work on pain of the sack.
Grieving families have not yet buried their menfolk. Some have not even traced which hospital their wounded relatives are in. It is unacceptable that Lonmin bosses should risk an escalation of tension by telling 3,000 workers to get back or ship out.
The divide-and-rule tactics within the industry dominated by an oligopoly of powerful houses are well documented.
The NUM, South Africa’s largest union and a prime target for corporate hostility, has seen the oligopoly use every underhand trick in the book to undermine collective bargaining agreements and to divide the workforce. It accuses one company, BHP Billiton, of initially funding the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, led by Vuzimusi Joseph Mathunjwa, whose recruitment efforts across the platinum industry have common features.
These include systematic violence, extravagant demands – such as a near trebling of pay at Marikana – and collaboration from the mining companies.
One of the NUM members killed early last week was a shop steward and the union insists that its key personnel were on a hit list drawn up by the AMCU leadership.
None of this excuses police commanders of their responsibility for arming their officers to the hilt and ordering them to open fire with automatic rifles.
But it should give some people pause for thought before they repeat erroneous allegations that NUM is a sellout union or that President Zuma ordered the slaughter.
SOUTH African platinum miners were yesterday continuing their strike, and their wives are occupying the entrance to the British-owned Lonmin Marikana mine: here.
No striking miners will be fired in the week that South Africa officially mourns the killings of 44 men at the Marikana platinum mine, including 34 strikers shot by police, a South African government spokesman said yesterday: here. And here.
Grieving South African families attended memorial services today for 34 striking miners killed by police: here.
South Africa’s day of mourning fails to stem anger over Marikana massacre: here.
More join South African strike as autopsies show miners were shot in the back; here.
Fewer than 7 per cent of Lonmin’s 28,000-strong South African workforce reported for duty at the strife-torn Marikana mine today as the company held talks with trade unions: here.
PLATINUM miners arrested at South Africa’s Marikana mine were yesterday charged with the murder of 34 colleagues shot by police: here.
In an act of naked class justice, South Africa is using an apartheid-era law to lay bogus murder charges against striking miners targeted by police in the Marikana massacre: here.
Leader Of Anti-Semitic Party In Hungary Discovers He’s Jewish
by Eyder Peralta
August 14, 2012
There’s a story out of Hungary that has received quite a bit of play from the religious press but hadn’t quite risen to the mainstream until the AP ran a piece about it today.
It’s quite dramatic with an incredible plot twist: One of the leaders of Hungary‘s Jobbik Party, which the Anti-Defamation League says is one of the few political parties in Europe to overtly campaign with anti-Semitic materials, has discovered that he is himself a Jew.
As the AP says, Csanad Szegedi had in the past railed about the “Jewishness” of the political class. According to the ADL, his party’s presidential candidate referred to Israeli Jews as “lice-infested, dirty murderers.”
For Szegedi all of this came to a screeching halt, when in 2010 a prisoner confronted him with evidence that he had Jewish roots. According to the AP, Szegedi tried to bribe the prisoner to keep him quiet, but rumors and innuendo reached a fever pitch by late last year and in June, Szegedi conceded that his mother was a Jew. According to Jewish law, that makes Szegedi Jewish, too.
Not only that, but Szegedi’s grandmother survived Auschwitz and his grandfather survived labor camps. The AP adds:
“Under pressure, Szegedi resigned last month from all party positions and gave up his Jobbik membership. That wasn’t good enough for the party: Last week it asked him to give up his seat in the European Parliament as well. …
“Szegedi came to prominence in 2007 as a founding member of the Hungarian Guard, a group whose black uniforms and striped flags recalled the Arrow Cross, a pro-Nazi party which briefly governed Hungary at the end of World War II and killed thousands of Jews. In all, 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed during the Holocaust, most of them after being sent in trains to death camps like Auschwitz. The Hungarian Guard was banned by the courts in 2009.
“By then, Szegedi had already joined the Jobbik Party, which was launched in 2003 to become the country’s biggest far-right political force. He soon became one of its most vocal and visible members, and a pillar of the party leadership. Since 2009, he has served in the European Parliament in Brussels as one of the party’s three EU lawmakers, a position he says he wants to keep.”
Repelling house cats from outdoor bird feeders involves placing it where cats cannot reach it, such as high on a pole or off of an extended tree branch, and sprinkling cayenne, cinnamon or chili pepper around the area. Keep domestic cats away from a bird feeder with advice from a sustainable gardener in this free video on gardening.
Camera fitted to domestic cats reveals extent of hunting
August 2012. A new study of house cats allowed to roam outdoors finds that nearly one-third succeeded in capturing and killing animals. The cats, which wore special video cameras around their necks that recorded their outdoor activities, killed an average of 2.1 animals every week they were outside, but brought less than one of every four of their kills home. Of particular interest, bird kills constituted about 13 percent of the total wildlife kills. Based on these results, American Bird Conservancy and The Wildlife Society estimate that house cats kill far more than the previous estimate of a billion birds and other animals each year.
30% of cats killed prey
“The results were certainly surprising, if not startling,” said Kerrie Anne Loyd of the University of Georgia, who was the lead author of the study. “In Athens-Clarke County, we found that about 30 percent of the sampled cats were successful in capturing and killing prey, and that those cats averaged about one kill for every 17 hours outdoors or 2.1 kills per week. It was also surprising to learn that cats only brought 23 percent of their kills back to a residence. We found that house cats will kill a wide variety of animals, including: lizards, voles, chipmunks, birds, frogs, and small snakes.”
60 cats fitted with cameras
Loyd and her colleagues attached small video cameras (dubbed Crittercams or KittyCams) to 60 outdoor house cats in the city of Athens Georgia, and recorded their outdoor activities during all four seasons. Loyd said the cats were outside for an average of 5-6 hours every day.
4 billion animals killed every year
“If we extrapolate the results of this study across the country and include feral cats, we find that cats are likely killing more than 4 billion animals per year, including at least 500 million birds. Cat predation is one of the reasons why one in three American bird species are in decline,” said Dr. George Fenwick, President of American Bird Conservancy, the only organization exclusively conserving birds throughout the Americas.
“I think it will be impossible to deny the ongoing slaughter of wildlife by outdoor cats given the videotape documentation and the scientific credibility that this study brings,” said Michael Hutchins, Executive Director/CEO of The Wildlife Society, the leading organization for wildlife professionals in the United States.
“There is a huge environmental price that we are paying every single day that we turn our backs on our native wildlife in favour of protecting non-native predatory cats at all cost while ignoring the inconvenient truth about the mortality they inflict.”
Volunteer cat owners were recruited through advertisements in local newspapers, and all selected cats were given a free health screening. Each cat owner downloaded the footage from the camera at the end of each recording day.
Feral cats not studied
The new study does not include the animals killed by feral cats that have no owners.
A University of Nebraska study released last year found that feral cats were responsible for the extinction of 33 species of birds worldwide, that even well fed cats in so-called “managed” cat colonies will kill, that feral cats prey more on native wildlife than on other invasive creatures, and that most feral cats (between 62 and 80 percent) tested positive for toxoplasmosis (a disease with serious implications for pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems).
This study was collaboration between Kerrie Anne Loyd and Dr. Sonia Hernandez from the University of Georgia, and Greg Marshall, Kyler Abernathy, and Barrett Foster of National Geographic’s Remote Imaging Department and was funded in part by the Kenneth Scott Charitable Foundation.
If only all cat owners would take simple measures liking tying bells around their pets’ necks, then that might sive save millions of birds’ and other animals’ lives.
New Zealand: If domestic cats wore bell collars in urban areas the numbers of native birds caught and killed could be reduced by as much as half, a new University of Otago study shows: here.
September 2012. A new study in the USA has found that free-roaming cats pose a threat from “serious public health diseases” to humans, domestic animals, and wildlife: here.
Jordan- NEPCO workers threaten to strike in September
15/08/2012
The Electricity Workers Union (EWU) said on Tuesday that National Electric Power Company (NEPCO) workers would start an open-ended strike on September 10, after the company’s administration refused to meet their demands, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, reported.
The union decided that employees working all shifts at NEPCO would take part in the strike, EWU President Ali Hadid said in a statement.
According to Hadid, the decision was in response to the administration’s rejection of the EWU’s demands for higher salaries on May 17.
There has been no positive response from NEPCO, he added, holding the company responsible for the consequences of this decision.
Hadid said the workers’ demands included a JD50 basic salary raise and other financial benefits. Employees were supposed to receive the raises at the beginning of July under a previous agreement with the board of directors, he noted.
As of June, NEPCO’s budget deficit was expected to top JD1.5 billion by the end of the year – one of several factors cited in a government decision to raise electricity prices that month.
The threatened strike comes just months after workers at two of the Kingdom’s other major electricity companies held lengthy work stoppages to press for better pay and benefits.
Jordanian Electric Power Company workers went on strike for 17 days in April and held demonstrations around the capital to demand improved financial benefits, including four months bonus salary each year, end-of-service allowances, better health insurance and transportation services for all workers.
Employees of the Central Electricity Generating Company also went on strike that month, refusing to work for two weeks before the EWU hammered out a deal with the labour and energy ministries.
This is a clip of Women Of the Wall’s Rosh Hodesh service in which WOW chairwoman Anat Hoffman is arrested. Women Of the Wall’s central mission is to achieve the social and legal recognition of our right, as women, to wear prayer shawls, pray and read from the Torah collectively and out loud at the Western Wall. Currently in the state of Israel this is illegal.
On August 19, 2012, police arrested and detained four participants of Women of the Wall during the monthly service at the Western Wall (Kotel). The women are being accused of two offenses, “behavior that endangers the public peace” and “wearing a prayer shawl (Tallit).” The women will be forbidden from entering the Western Wall for 50 days.
On the Muslim holiday of Eid Al Fitr and the Jewish new month of Elul while Jerusalem’s Old City and its holy sites were busy and chaotic, Israeli Police chose to become “fashion police”, by arresting four women who wore tradition Jewish prayer shawls (white with black or blue stripes, commonly and traditionally associated as male). The Women of the Wall were arrested mid-prayer and stood amongst dozens of women who wore colorful prayer shawls and were left alone by police.
This morning’s arrests serve as an escalation and continuation of the wave of women’s exclusion with in the public sphere, a struggle which started at the Western Wall and has spread all over Israel. Anat Hoffman, Women of the Wall Chairwoman said, “The time has come to reclaim and liberate the Kotel from the grasp of a handful of Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) extremists who, with the cooperation of the Israeli authorities, exclude the majority of Israelis and Jews from the Western Wall.”
Police arrest woman for wearing prayer shawl at Western Wall
Police: Woman arrested for violating High Court ruling obligating visitors to abide by dress code.
By Nir Hasson and Liel Kyzer
Nov.18, 2009 | 10:26 AM
Police on Wednesday arrested a woman who was praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, due to the fact that she was wrapped in a prayer shawl (tallit).
The woman was visiting the site with the religious women’s group “Women of the Wall” to take part in the monthly Rosh Hodesh prayer.
Police were called to the area after the group asked to read aloud from a Torah scroll.
Police said they arrested the women in the wake of a High Court ruling, which states that the public visiting the Western Wall is obligated to dress in accordance with the site’s dress code.
…
Chairman of the women’s group, Anat Hoffman, said that this is the first time in the history of Israel that a woman has been arrested because she wrapped herself in a tallit and read from the Torah.
Rabbi Gilad Kariv, associate director of Israel’s reform movement, said that all over the world women are entitled to wear the tallit, and only in the land of the Jews are they excluded from the social custom and even arrested for praying.
“Israeli police should be ashamed of themselves,” Kariv said.
Last week Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Shas party’s spiritual leader, said during his weekly sermon that the women in the feminist movement are “stupid” and act the way they do out of a selfish desire for equality, not “for heavens’ sake.”
Rabbi Ovadia also said about the groups’ custom to pray at the Western Wall that “there are stupid women who come to the Western Wall, put on a tallit (prayer shawl), and pray,” and added that they should be condemned.
Jerusalem police arrested the leader of a Jewish women’s group fighting for the right to read from the Torah at the Western Wall on Tuesday evening, with members of the Women of the Wall group claiming that she was detained for singing at the holy site: here.
Israeli Vice PM Ya’alon: Settler attacks against Arabs in West Bank, Jerusalem are ‘terrorist acts’: here.
