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Sunday 20 May 2012

Hundreds of Protesters Head to Chicago Mayor's House to Oppose Health Clinic Closures
Allison Kilkenny, Truthout: "As hundreds of protesters slowly marched to Mayor Rahm Emanuel's neighborhood in Chicago ... the marching protesters were angry and disappointed. Some feared the media's attention would focus solely on the act of three young men [the NATO 3] instead of the acts of hundreds who were marching to oppose the closings of six mental health facilities all across the city. Hosting NATO will likely cost the city $55 million, and health advocates claim only $2-3 million is needed to keep these facilities open."
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Who Is Killing the Journalists in Mexico?
Mark Karlin, Truthout: "Mexico is undergoing an ongoing assault on journalists, including the killing in the last few years of at least 45 reporters and photographers. However ... figures might be on the low side because the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has rigorous standards for identifying who constitutes a working journalist. Furthermore, due to the lack of police investigations in the vast majority of murder cases, it is not clear how many journalists are killed for what they have revealed in print or just for knowing too much information."
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"Terrorism Plot" or Entrapment? The Case of the NATO 3
Yana Kunichoff and Steve Horn, Truthout: "NATO 3 has become the moniker for three activists who arrived in Chicago to protest the NATO Summit. They now face charges of 'conspiring to commit domestic terrorism during the NATO summit.' Michael Deutsch of the National Lawyers Guild has alleged entrapment and possibly more as the activists charged with terrorism see their first day in court on May 22."
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Occupying Different Worlds: NATO and Its Citizens
J.A. Myerson, Truthout: "[Author] Michael Hastings [said]: 'We're spending $700 billion a year on defense ... We spent $120 billion in 2011 in Afghanistan. The takeaway I got from the protesters was that this money could be better spent at home than on these different foreign policy adventures. The adventures have turned out not to be very beneficial for most Americans or most Afghans either.'"
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Thousands March Against Austerity in Frankfurt
Melissa Eddy, The New York Times News Service: "Thousands of people on Saturday marched through the heart of Frankfurt, Germany's financial capital and the home of the European Central Bank, to protest against unchecked capitalism and Chancellor Angela Merkel's insistence on austerity measures for much of Europe. The peaceful event, called Blockupy, in a nod to the Occupy movement, was the culmination of four days of demonstrations and drew about 20,000 protesters to Frankfurt, the police and organizers said."
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Kivalina: A Climate Change Story
Christine Shearer, Haymarket Books: "Climate change was already affecting life in Alaska Native villages. In December 2003, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) went on to report that most of Alaska's more than two hundred native villages were affected to some degree by flooding and erosion, with thirty-one facing imminent threats 'due in part to rising temperatures that cause protective shore ice to form later in the year, leaving the villages vulnerable to storms.'"
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Whose Firebombs? Inside the Alleged "Conspiracy"
Curtis Black, NewsTips.org: "Chicago police have a long history of infiltrating peaceful protest groups and fomenting violence and infiltration of protest groups seems to be standard operating procedure for 'national security events.' That seems to have been the case - in just the past month ... Sometimes you wonder whether such efforts are directed at keeping us safe or 'putting points on the board' - or, when big protests are planned, generating scare headlines."
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Ending the Mindset That Gets Us Into War
David Swanson, War Is a Crime: "Next month in Baltimore they're going to celebrate the War of 1812. That's what we do with wars. We claim to wage only wars we have been forced into despite all possible effort to find a better way. And then we celebrate the wars.... But there's no celebration of the times we avoided war. We claim to prefer peace to war, but we don't make heroes of those presidents or Congresses who most avoided war. In fact, we erase them."
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Marijuana Advocates Spend Big and Defeat Drug War Proponent in Oregon
Zaid Jilani, Republic Report: "One of the reasons why marijuana remains illegal and the drug war continues to rage is because special interest groups like police unions and the alcohol industry spend a lot of money to lobby for the drug war. In Oregon, advocates of medical marijuana and other anti-drug war activists decided that they'd use a similar tactic to fight the crackdown on state medical marijuana laws."
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The Big Fix: Documentary Exposes BP, US Government on Gulf Disaster
Jan Lundberg, Culture Change: "One of the world's biggest environmental crimes has been more or less forgotten. This is part of our collective guilt as the world's ecosystem continues its accelerated collapse. But the new documentary film 'The Big Fix' takes a detailed, daring look at what happened in the Gulf of Mexico with BP's Macondo offshore oil drilling rig. The story and facts that emerge are more than disturbing."
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The BuzzFlash commentary for Truthout will return Monday, May 21st.

NATO Reality Check: Protestors in Chicago Can Fatally Fracture NATO
Read the Article at Socialist Project

Chicago Police Accused of Planting Evidence in "Molotov Cocktail" Plot
Read the Article at the Guardian UK

US Veterans to Return Medals as NATO Protesters March
Read the Article at MSNBC

NAACP Endorses Same-Sex Marriage
Read the Article at the Washington Post

RNC Chairman Says Republican Proposal for $10 Million of Race-Baiting Anti-Obama Attack Ads Is Obama's Fault
Read the Article at ThinkProgress

The 5 Most Offensive Sexist and Homophobic Moves by Conservatives: This Month Alone!
Read the Article at AlterNet

"The Whole System Relies on These Arrests": The NYPD's Racist Marijuana Arrest Crusade and Its National Implications
Read the Article at The American Independent

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