4.23.2005
Sovereignty and Common Sense
WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. (AP) - The Navajo Nation has outlawed uranium mining and processing on its reservation, which sprawls across parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah and contains one of the world's largest deposits of uranium ore.
Tribal President Joe Shirley Jr. must give the bill final approval. His spokesman said Thursday that Shirley ``strongly'' supports it.
Mining companies began blasting holes on the reservation, which covers 27,000 square miles, in the 1940s and continued for nearly 40 years until decreased demand closed the operations.
By then, the Navajos were left with radiation sickness, contaminated tailings and abandoned mines. To avoid repeating the past, Navajo leaders and grassroots organizations have been working for years to keep mining from starting again.
The Dine People are familiar with the historic toxic effects of uranium mining. This move to forbid uranium processing on their territory will also protect their aquifer from in situ leach mining, a process described in the May 2003 New York Times article about the health effects of uranium mining on the people of this area.
Hydro Resources Inc., a subsidiary of Uranium Resources Inc. of Dallas, wants to begin a new mining effort in Crownpoint and nearby Church Rock using a process called in situ leach mining. In the process, a mixture of water, dissolved oxygen and sodium bicarbonate is pumped deep into underground uranium beds. The mixture dissolves uranium, and when the liquid is pumped back to the surface, the uranium can be removed, dried and processed.
Uranium in solution as safe? In the ground? Yeah, right...
Nuclearfiles.org is a comprehensive resource for informing yourself about nuclear energy, weapons, waste- ethics and history, in a human context.
An interesting aside about the traditional beliefs of the Dine` People:
The Diné (pronounced dee-NAY) or ''the People,'' as the Navajo call themselves, have many stories about their origins. One says that as they emerged from the fourth world into the fifth and present world, they were given the choice of two yellow powders. One yellow powder was corn pollen, and that was the one they chose.
The other was the color of the dust that seems to give this land its golden hue, dust the color of yellowcake, the uranium oxide that fueled the nuclear age. So much yellowcake lies below the surface that a mining executive called this place the Saudi Arabia of uranium.
The Spirits said it had to be left alone.
4/23/2005
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4.22.2005
The fine blog Seeing the Forest has a new URL.
Please give the post "They Mean It" a look over- it deals with Christian Dominionism, offering many valuable links.
A quick quote:
Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ – to have dominion in the civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness. But it is dominion that we are after. Not just a voice. It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after.
The quoted piece originates at corrente, as you'll see if you follow the link contained in it. The information is vitally important these days as religion is used to mobilize social conservatives, using religion as a smokescreen to hide actions/policies that would make Jesus weep. These folks seem to have missed The Sermon on The Mount...
The Open Center is hosting a two day conference "Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right" in Manhattan Friday the 29 and Saturday the 30th of April. There is an fantastic roster of speakers...
Theocracy Watch can be really helpful in learning about this anti-Democratic vein of religiousity that is suddenly mainstream, Christianity in name that, sadly, lacks the teachings of Jesus Christ.
I posted the following at American Samizdat and offer it here as well:
Cardinal Ratzinger handed Bush the presidency by tipping the Catholic vote. Can American democracy survive their shared medieval vision?
The new pope's burning passion is to resurrect medieval authority. He equates the Western liberal tradition, that is, the Enlightenment, with Nazism, and denigrates it as "moral relativism." He suppresses all dissent, discussion and debate within the church and concentrates power within the Vatican bureaucracy. His abhorrence of change runs past 1968 (an abhorrence he shares with George W. Bush) to the revolutions of 1848, the "springtime of nations," and 1789, the French Revolution. But, even more momentously, the alignment of the pope's Kulturkampf with the U.S. president's culture war has also set up a conflict with the American Revolution.
For the first time, an American president is politically allied with the Vatican in its doctrinal mission (except, of course, on capital punishment). In the messages and papers of the presidents from George Washington until well into those of the 20th century, there was not a single mention of the pope, except in one minor footnote. Bush's lobbying trip last year to the Vatican reflects an utterly novel turn, and Ratzinger's direct political intervention in American electoral politics ratified it.
Read the article by Sidney Blumenthal. Share what you learn.
Thank You to Cyndy for the heads up on the Dominionist piece at Seeing the Forest.
4/22/2005
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4.21.2005
Safeguarding Citizen bin Ladin's Privacy
Is Osama bin Ladin a "U.S. Person"?
(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch, the public interest group that fights government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) has invoked privacy right protections on behalf of al Qaeda terror leader Osama bin Laden. In a September 24, 2003 declassified “Secret” FBI report obtained by Judicial Watch, the FBI invoked Exemption 6 under FOIA law on behalf of bin Laden, which permits the government to withhold all information about U.S. persons in “personnel and medical files and similar files” when the disclosure of such information “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” (5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(6) (2000))
Remember, he really spells his name USAma.
4/21/2005
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