Feature Archives

Global UN Climate negotiations are proceeding in Copenhagen with over one hundred heads of state expected to attend in the next week. 2009 was the fifth hottest year on record, and scientists are saying a Climate Treaty is more urgent with global carbon emissions still increasing and acidification threatening marine biodiversity.

On December 12th, 100,000 people took to the streets of Copenhagen, but around 3pm police charged into the march and made arbitrary arrests of an estimated 1,000 people. Further protests are occurring over the next week inside the conference center and on the streets.

On December 1st 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan in the coming months, bringing the total number of American troops occupying Afghanistan to nearly 100,000. Describing the war as "not just America's war," Obama vowed to start bringing the troops back home by the middle of 2011.

On December 2nd, several hundred protesters gathered at 5pm at Powell and Market in San Francisco to voice their opposition for Obama's war plans.

On November 30th, the 10th anniversary of the global justice movement’s successful non-violent shut-down of the WTO in Seattle, activists exposed some of San Francisco’s worst climate criminals, demanding that they stop financing climate change and standing in the way of climate solutions. Protesters met at Justin Herman Plaza marched to a non-violent civil disobedience at the Bank of America where about two dozen people were arrested.

David Shulman writes: "I’ve been trying to explain in my talk why I keep going down to the South Hebron hills when, after all, our impact on the situation there is so minimal, so pointillist, the task so Sisyphean, the sense of futility so overwhelming. I claimed that despite all this, there is something good about being there, in those landscapes and with those people, and that it had something to do with the difference between truth and falsehood."

David Shulman, writes:"I’ve been trying to explain in my talk why I keep going down to the South Hebron hills when, after all, our impact on the situation there is so minimal, so pointillist, the task so Sisyphean, the sense of futility so overwhelming. I claimed that despite all this, there is something good about being there, in those landscapes and with those people, and that it had something to do with the difference between truth and falsehood."

On November 4, 2009, an Italian judge convicted 23 CIA agents and two Italian agents over their role in the 2003 kidnapping of a Muslim cleric. Milan judge Oscar Magi sentenced former Milan CIA station chief Bob Seldon Lady to 8 years and 22 other agents to 5 years in prison for their role in the abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Also convicted was Air Force Colonel Joseph Romano who was responsible for the CIA kidnapping team’s flight to Egypt from a U.S. air base in Italy.

From Dialogues Against Militarism, "On Saturday, November 7, About 25 of us trudged towards military prison 400, just outside of Tel Aviv, coils of razor wire and lookout towers looming above us, fields of mud and dry grass to our right. we began setting up the sound system and preparing for the day’s goal of reaching earshot of Or Ben-David, a young Israeli being held in prison for refusing the army draft."