SchNEWS
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BOMBS 'R' US | Crap Arrest of the Week | Inside SchNEWS | Own Up Dow | Information and Entertainment | Help! SchNEWS needs you | Pumping Lies | SchNEWS in Brief | Unsatis-Factory | Mutants | ...and finally...

BOMBS 'R' US

Crap Arrest of the Week

For barking at a dog!
A barman from California, faces up to a year in jail and a $1000 fine for the highly serious crime of barking at a police dog! Walking in down town San Jose during the Mardi Gras street party he came across an agitated dog in police and a friendly ‘woof’ back to the caged animal, then he was promptly nicked by over zealous cops. He plans to plead innocent saying “Its ridiculous that someone could be charged for barking... And what about the First Amendment rights? Is there no freedom to bark?”

Inside SchNEWS

Ulla Roder is still on remand after causing £25 million damage to a Tornado jet at RAF Leuchars in March. If found guilty she could face up to 15 years in prison. Ulla is one of the ‘Trident three’ who were famously acquitted at Greenock in 1999 after smashing up jets bound for Indonesia. Write to: Ulla Roder, Cornton Vale, Cornton Rd, Stirling Scotland FK9 5NY. For advice on writing to prisoners and a list of other Trident Ploughshares prisoners go to www.tridentploughshares.org

Long-term prisoner Keith Pringle is still serving time despite his sentence being up at the beginning of the year. After being in Full Sutton at the 1997 mutiny he has spent the last 5 years in high security segregation units. He went on dirty protest against conditions in Frankland segregation unit and to help a cell-mate get fair treatment. It is for this prisoner solidarity as much as open defiance of the system that prison authorities consider him subversive. Keith’s prolonged stay is due to threatening behaviour towards a ‘bully’ prison officer, the most recent news is that following an attack on him by prison officers at Durham, he is on a dirty protest in the segregation unit of that prison. To send messages of solidarity to Keith Pringle (CD0078) – HMP Durham, Old Elvet, Durham DH15YD

Own Up Dow

Survivors and supporters of the 1984 Bhopal poison gas disaster are still desperate for justice and on Mayday launched a hunger strike in the financial district of New York to highlight the liabilities of Dow Chemical’s, who own Union Carbide, the company charged with “culpable homicide” after poisonous gas from its pesticide factory killed 8000 and poisoned over 200,000 in Bhopal, India (see SchNEWS 238). When Union Carbide fled India it left thousands of tons of toxic waste. Dow stockholders are twitchy about their share prices falling when a future disaster blights the lives of a few hundred thousand people. www.bhopal.net

Information and Entertainment

Apart from SchNEWS there are a load of resources to keep you informed and entertained…

* Guilfin’s Something For the Weekend – a weekly info-burst, keeping you up to date with the latest festival, party, gigs dates, and all the upcoming campaigns. www.guilfin.net

* Eroding Empire: monthly DIY punky bulletin listing gigs, actions and events for the London-ish area. Send stamps to receive copies c/o 56A Crampton St., London, SE17 5AE.

* London Free List free and cheap events around London at www.londonfreelist.com

* Free parties: check out www.partyvibe.com/freeparties.htm

* www.protest.net reports actions around the world

* For the Animal Rights Calendar see www.veggies.org.uk/calendar, or in ARCNEWS, 0845 458 0146

* Urban75 features bulletin boards, games, photos, protest, rave, drugs & more. www.urban75.com

* See Indymedia for latest reports of protest and news you won’t see on TV. www.uk.indymedia.org

Help! SchNEWS Needs You!

Owing to job, family and holiday commitments SchNEWS has lost lots of volunteers. Writers are always welcome, but at the moment we are desperate for locally based people to help for a few hours on a Friday to help with the mail out and distributing around Brighton. Neither of these happened last week because of a lack of people. Call the office NOW! on 01273 685913.

Pumping Lies

Sneaky BP this week admitted unprecedented profits for the first quarter of this year just a week after its AGM where Chairman P. Sutherland denied that the war in Iraq was about Oil! Guzzling a whopping $41m PER DAY - double what it slurped down in the same period last year – BP’s ‘windfall quarter’ has been directly attributed by analysts to the war in Iraq which sent oil prices rocketing.

This will come as no surprise to hundreds of activists who disrupted the AGM last week with a Carnival Against Oil Wars and Climate Change. Outnumbered by police and BP’s own private army of ‘security guards’, shouting protestors with whistles, drums and a Samba band kept up the noise level so that those inside could hear the voice of dissent. True there was not much attempt at the kind of direct action which might have invaded and obstructed the meeting, but the activists did come up with one fantastic master stroke: Ordinary shareholders attending the AGM were handed a spoof Annual report which so closely resembled BP’s own in design that indignant shareholders, believing it was the real thing, challenged the BP Chairman on its contents: “What’s all this?” blustered one elderly gent, rediscovering his conscience, “We are reaping the rewards from the latest in a long line of oil wars? That’s simply not on.” P. (for Pinocchio) Sutherland assured shareholders that the war in Iraq had nothing to do with oil and that BP had no plans to work in Iraq. Yeah, like BP are gonna miss out on the world’s second biggest oil reserves!

Meanwhile, environmental organisations last week submitted complaints about the consortium to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) meeting in Paris. It’s controversial Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline through Georgia openly flouts OECD guidelines by damaging the environment, failing to take the rights of nearby communities into consideration and by ignoring existing legislation in the countries the pipeline passes through. Who cares? Not BP, whose legal team has been openly boasting about creating new laws in Azerbaijan, presumably to get around such minor problems.

* UK Firm AMEC who are plugging for one of the largest contracts in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, are having their AGM next Thursday (8th). Meet 9am At speakers’ corner, Hyde Park for a briefing 10 am outside the Radisson Hotel, Portman Square, London to build a GIANT pipeline. 01865 200550 baku@gn.apc.org

* Meanwhile in a bizarre example of corporate disingenuity Transocean Inc., the world’s largest offshore drilling company, managed to keep the fact that dozens of US and British oil workers have been held hostage for the last 14 days on a rig in Nigeria totally secret! A labour dispute among Nigerian workers escalated into insurrection on April 19th and the ex-pats were taken hostage. There are reports that they have been incarcerated in metal containers and dangled overboard and that at least 2 have had nervous breakdowns. But Transocean - whose motto is “we’re never out of our depth” - don’t care about the welfare of a handful of their workers. By keeping it secret they were clearly hoping that the Nigerian navy would sort it out in their own (very bloody) way.

* For copies of the spoof BP report send an A4 SAE to London Rising Tide c/o 62 Fieldgate St., London, E1 1ES london@risingtide.org.uk

SchNEWS in Brief

• Last week peace activist Lindis Percy was arrested at Menwith Hill spy base for the 150th time (!) whilst testing the enforcement of military land bylaws. She was charged with aggravated trespass www.caab.org.uk
• To find out what’s happening in North East England email northeastcampaignevent-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
• The Botswana government has banned materials from Survival International being in the country’s schools, as part of ongoing attempts to silence criticism of the treatment of the Gana and Gwi ‘Bushmen’. www.survival-international.org/bushman.htm
• A GCSE student from Braintree, Essex is taking her school’s Board of Governers to the high court after they upheld the decision to exclude her from school for a month after she took part in anti-war demonstrations. Her case has been taken up by Liberty www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/

Unsatis-Factory

Behind the televised occupation of Iraq, the Argentinian state is waging a peculiarly brutal war against the blossoming Argentinian social movement. The Argentinian state is focusing all its repression on the ‘okupas’, the many squatted social centres and factories that have become a vital part of Argentinian communities as they attempt to take control of their lives in the midst of a shattered economy. Unfortunately for the Argentinian social movement it’s election time and all five presidential candidates are promising a return to neo-liberal economics and a good ol’ crack-down on squatted property. The man likely to win in the second round of the elections is Carlos Menem, the former president who sold off the Argentinian economy in the early 90’s and who has promised to send the military onto the streets if he comes into power.

Argentinians got a taste of things to come two weeks ago, when 200 police officers evicted Brukman, a suit factory, which had been under worker control since December 2001. Police evicted the workers and turned the entire block into a military zone guarded by machine guns and attack dogs. Within hours thousands of supporters were on the streets to condemn the eviction and to support the factory remaining under workers’ control. When the workers attempted to re-enter the factory police began shooting: tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, then lead. 30 demonstrators were injured and there were over 100 arrests.

So why such violent repression of a factory? Well Brukman isn’t just a factory; it’s a fabrica ocupada, one of 200 factories across the country that have been taken over and run by their workers in the past 18 months. For many, the factories, employing more than 10,000 nationwide and producing everything from tractors to ice cream, are seen not just as an economic alternative, but as a political one as well. “They are afraid of us because we have shown that, if we can manage a factory, we can also manage a country,” Brukman worker Celia Martinez said, “That’s why this government decided to repress us.” This poses a threat to the government as across the country a social movement network composed of hundreds of self-managed factories, squatted social centres and unemployed workers’ groups struggling for dignity and power over their own lives. But for some reason the powers-that-shouldn’t-be don’t see it like that. Evictions are increasing with Indymedia Argentina evicted just weeks ago followed by various squatted community centres. As the federal judge wrote in Brukman’s eviction order, “Life and physical integrity have no supremacy over economic interests.” So it’s not about your lives it’s about the economy, stupid! www.argentina.indymedia.org

Mutants

Things haven’t been going too well this year for those involved in trying to flog us genetically modified (GM) crops, lucky for them western governments are on the side of their mutated chums…

* Cargill, the world’s biggest grain exporters and big fans of trade liberalisation and GM crops, have become the latest corporate criminals to get their foot in the door of the newly ‘liberated’ Iraq. Ex-Cargill senior executive, Dan Amstutz, has been put in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq, no doubt he’ll ship in all their surplus GM grain no on else wants. As Kevin Watkins from Oxfam said “Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission”. For the low down on Cargill check out www.corporatewatch.org.uk

* The UK government is due to make a decision, soon, on the commercialisation of 18 GM crop applications. There’s a public consultation period, but it’s suspected that they won’t wait until this is over, before giving the GM companies the green light. Despite this anti-GM groups are still urging people to join in the ‘GM Public Debate’, which begins this month, to show that the opposition to hasn’t gone away. Regional meetings are taking place in Birmingham, Swansea, Taunton, Belfast, Glasgow and Harrogate from 3-13 June. Info 020 7261 8528. www.gmpublicdebate.org, you can also organise your own meeting. For background information on the evils of GM crops check out www.genewatch.org

* Monsanto had their AGM last week where not only did they announce a 15 percent slump in their profits, but also faced a shareholder resolution urging them to rethink the safety of genetically engineered seeds. But rather than worrying that their stance on GM is denting their wallets they’ve instead produced a new position paper adopting a positive stance on genetic seed sterilisation (so called ‘terminator technology’) - which makes seeds produced by plants infertile, thus increasing farmers dependence on seed companies- even though they pledged in 1999 not to develop the technology. www.etcgroup.org

* Last Friday it was the turn of Bayer CropScience, Europe’s top GM pushers, to have their AGM. As well as protests outside the AGM in Germany, their UK headquarters in Cambridge were simultaneously blockaded. Eight people were arrested. For the low down on Bayer check out www.bayerhazard.com

* This is the last year of the GM farm scale trials in the UK. If you’re fed up of not being listened to why not take some direct action out in the fields. For tips on decontamination www.geneticsaction.org.uk

...and finally...

In a pre-emptive strike against capitalism, a group calling themselves the Trade Regulation Organization (TRO) have issued their own version of the “55 most wanted” playing card deck. The cards feature those jokers whose existence are “no longer consistent with world peace or prosperity” including George W as the 4 of clubs and Rupert Murdoch as the King of Hearts. The TRO reckon that the cards might lead the way to regime change and eventual large-scale war crimes proceedings. But their spokeswoman Hedwig Ixtabal-Mono has issued a word of caution “If one day the people on these cards are indeed brought to justice, ‘just following orders’ or ‘supporting our troops’ will be no excuse for the rest of us”. Check if your favourite boardroom terrorist has got their own card at www.gatt.org/regime

Disclaimer
SchNEWS warns all Mayday revellers not to get hit about the Heed otherwise you might get Locked up. Honest.

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