Media hungry for “violence” – but anti uranium protest remains peaceful and colourful
from David Bradbury 8 p.m. 16 July So back from Day 3, demo at the Gates. Permission not granted for Uncle Kevin and us mob to push the Lizard vehicle symbolizing Kalta and the Dreamtime story to the mine entrance. Uncle Kev who was very tired from the argy bargy of yesterday stayed back at camp.
The demo which was very colorful then set off with police permission for the entrance gates to Olympic Dam. Singing, chanting Leave it in the ground etc characterized the march. Plus ‘outrageous’ costumes which makes it feel like Mardi Gras.
A bit of young male testosterone energy kicked in for a short while when six or seven younger men pushed the outside gate till the padlock broke. But there was another heavy duty steel gate behind that. And a line of police. The energy of the young men was exciting and palpable. The crowd energy started to lift. More police dressed in different uniform, in brown ran quickly forward from hiding inside the mine.
Then an alert woman stepped in and reminded them that the collective group decision was no violence. Let’s not give the tv cameras the ‘rioting protestors’ image they want desperately to get.
Most media are likely to pull out after today. But their cameras were rolling on the gate rocking. What they love. It will undo all the good publicity and peaceful, creative view to date in the media. (we are constantly being buzzed overhead by the police chopper back in camp now.)
Cameras on board spying on us down below. I dont know how true it is but several people have said the police have planted sophisticated listening mikes in our camp that can pick up whats said. Most of it very mundane conversation or music. Round and round it goes burning up thousands of dollars of taxpayers money and mega litres each pass of aviation fuel. What this exercise has cost the state, the mind boggles. Day ended with street theatre, dance and song. No arrests.
Police keep tight control over peaceful protestors at Olympic Dam
Elder Kevin Buzzacott, who had previously tried to stall the mine expansion through a legal challenge, said the uranium 
industry was “deadly”. “The sooner it stops the better. If people really knew what they were destroying they wouldn’t touch it.”
Police accused over Olympic Dam protest BY: SARAH MARTIN, The Australian July 16, 2012 PROTESTERS at BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine have accused police of heavy-handedness, as more than 400 people joined a “mutant zombie march” to the Roxby Downs site yesterday.
Organiser Nectaria Calan said police were harassing protesters and depriving the group of their civil liberties by demanding
identification and controlling access to and from their campsite. “They have barricaded us into camps . . . and you can’t get out with a two-wheel-drive,” she said.
“They are forcing us to go through the roadblock with an escort through the protected area, where police have increased powers. We feel like our civil liberties are being undermined.” Continue reading
Police block Roxby Downs protestors: police have extra powers in BHP’s “protected area”
The protestors intend to march again on Monday. Donna Jackson, from the Larrakia people – the traditional owners of
land around Darwin – says she travelled to the mine to protest against uranium being transported through the Northern Territory. “We don’t want uranium coming through our harbour. It’s too unsafe,” she said. “We have a big wet season every year, nearly two metres of rain and there’s been lots of spillage. (photo below from ABC)
(includes video} Anti-nuclear protesters disperse after police stand-off http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-15/anti-nuclear-protesters-disperse-after-police-standoff/4131790 July 16, 2012 Anti-nuclear demonstrators called off Sunday’s protest outside the Olympic Dam uranium mine in South Australia’s outback after a two-hour stand-off with police.
Organisers say about 450 people had just started their march from their campsite to the gate of the BHP Billiton mine, when their route was blocked by police officers. Continue reading
Australian uranium – “exporting cancer and nuclear weapons fuel” – Dr Helen Caldicott
Exporting uranium ‘worse than selling heroin’ABC News, July 16, 2012 Paediatrician and anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Helen Caldicott says her upcoming visit to Roxby Downs will not be part of an ongoing protest against the proposed Olympic Dam mine expansion…….
Dr Caldicott will speak to families in Roxby Downs on Wednesday about the health impacts of uranium mining.
She says living near the mine will greatly increase the risk of getting cancer, particularly among children.
“More than half the people in Roxby are children,” she said.
“We know that children are extremely radiosensitive. Foetuses are thousands of times more so. One x-ray to the pregnant abdomen doubles the incidence of leukaemia in that child…..
She says radioactive particles become airborne around uranium mines.
“In the dust is radium which is very, very carcinogenic, radon gas and the like so people can be exposed consistently to radon gas which is very nasty stuff… and lots of other isotopes that are all daughters of uranium.”
Dr Caldicott says her trip was not intended to coincide with the protests. “That’s serendipity. I was asked to go up there separately,” she said. “I’m going specifically to speak as a doctor.”….
‘Worse than heroin’ Dr Caldicott says Australian uranium was used in the Fukushima reactors that went into meltdown last year. “I think we need to take responsibility as Australians and much of the uranium in those Fukushima reactors that exposed millions of Japanese to radioactive fallout, that was our uranium,” she said.
“We’re exporting uranium that gets fission in reactors and becomes one billion times more radioactive. “Over time our uranium will induce epidemics of cancer. “It’s much worse than exporting heroin because heroin only affects the user whereas this is going to affect all future generations.
“Any country that buys our uranium can make nuclear weapons because 250 kilos of plutonium are made each year in a reactor. “We are in effect exporting cancer and nuclear weapons and that’s not what you would call moral. “The ACTU banned mining in the ’70s for five years on a moral basis.” http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-16/helen-caldicott-to-visit-roxby-downs/4132836
Eminent Australian lawyer calls for support for Julian Assange against USA’s unjust campaign
Public opinion can make a great difference in determining that such a prosecution not take place. Such a situation as not very different from what eventually happened in the case of David Hicks.
Think of the different amount of attention given by the Australian Government to Assange’s case, compared to that given to the case of the Australian woman solicitor in Libya by Bob Carr, our Foreign Minister.
It can’t be that Assange has a bad reputation. He is the recipient of many awards testifying as to his courage and excellence as a journalist and about him generally.
A Support Assange & WikiLeaks Coalition Statement by Mr Kep Enderby QC JULY 15, 2012 BY KELLIE TRANTER ” ….There is something terribly wrong going on in both the Assange and Manning cases, and we are being told very little about it.
Sweden’s sex laws are unrealistically repressive, the most repressive in the world! That was made clear in the recent ABC interview with Phillip Adams and in the recent book by Oscar Swartz “A History of Sex in Sweden”.
Bradley Manning has been in custody for long periods of solitary confinement on the ground that he might injure himself, despite psychiatric opinion to the contrary and despite public protest that it amounts to pre-trial punishment without being brought to trial. He was arrested more than 2 years ago.
America still uses the ancient archaic old English medieval grand jury system of determining whether a criminal trial should take place to determine whether a person has committed a serious crime or not, with all its scope for the manipulated injustice. During the hearing the target of grand jury, the person perhaps to be an accused,
cannot put on a defence.
In America, in Virginia, a federal grand jury has already commenced investigating WikiLeaks – which means Julian Assange – to determine whether an indictment should be served on him. Eminent commentators are claiming that the evidence is mounting that the WikiLeaks case is part of a much broader campaign by the Obama Administration to crack down on all leakers. Continue reading
150,000 anti nuclear protestors in Tokyo: police try to stop 16th anti nuclear rally
Tobiyama explained that her husband had come every Friday but that this week was her first time. Flipping open her phone, she showed off a picture of her ninth grandson.
“I’m here so that he won’t have to live in a world with nuclear power,” she said.
Barriers Fail to Stop Japan’s Anti-Nuclear Demonstrators WSJ, By Eleanor Warnock, July 13, 2012, Police cordons and closed subway exits didn’t stop Japanese protesters from carrying on a nearly four-month tradition of holding Friday-night anti-nuclear demonstrations in front of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s residence in Tokyo. The protesters turned up for the 16th such rally to protest the restart of the first nuclear reactors since the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and future restarts.
Since the first rally on March 29, the number of participants has grown from 300 to approximately 150,000 this week, according to the organizers. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department told JRT it doesn’t release its own estimate of the number of participants…..
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department ordered that only one of the access points to the nearby subway station be open to people exiting the station, leaving the other three as entrances for workers going home. Police also limited the areas where protesters could stand and didn’t allow protesters to spill from the sidewalk onto the streets. Continue reading
Anti nuclear protest at Taiwan’s rock festival
The [nuclear ] plant is only 8 kilometers away from watershed of Feitsui Resevoir, the major source of drinking water for Taipei residents.
About 7 million people could die as a result of a nuclear disaster at the plant
the plant ‘s safety has been constantly questioned by domestic nuclear experts… Like Japan, Taiwan is also prone to massive earthquakes.
Anti-nuclear activists protest reactor at rock festival http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/local/taipei/2012/07/16/347687/Anti-nuclear-activists.htm By Kathy Chu-–Only three kilometers away from the fourth nuclear power plant, the five-day Ho-Hai-Yan Gongliao Rock Festival kicked off on 7/11 in Gonliao, New Taipei City. According to the estimate, several hundred thousand people would have swarmed to this small seaside town by the end of 7/15. About two dozen young men and women among them, however, were not there for fun; calling themselves the “Anti-Nuclear Troop,” they were there to launch a no-nuke campaign in this annual beach party.
Promoting a nuclear-free nation in a creative manner, the Anti-Nuclear Troop invited partygoers to line up in the shape of
the Chinese character for “people” (人), as a protest to President Ma Ying-jeou. Continue reading
International culture of corruption between nuclear industry and nuclear regulators
“safety culture” is not undermined by Japanese culture so much as it is by the more international culture of corruption born of the incestuous relationship between industry and regulators.
Made in Japan? Fukushima Crisis Is Nuclear, Not Cultural TruthOut, 14 July 2012 By Gregg Levine, Capitoilette | News Analysis Since the release of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Committee’s official report last week, much has been made of how it implicates Japanese culture as one of the root causes of the crisis. ……..
…………What replaces the cultural critique in the Japanese edition and in the body of the English summary is a ringing indictment of the cozy relationship between the Japanese nuclear industry and the government agencies that were supposed to regulate it. This “regulatory capture,” as the report details, is certainly central to the committee’s findings and crucial to understanding how the Fukushima disaster is a manmade catastrophe, but it is not unique to the culture of Japan.
Indeed, observers of the United States will recognize this lax regulatory construct as part-and-parcel of problems that threaten the safety and health of its citizenry, be it in the nuclear sector, the energy sector as a whole, or across a wide variety of officially regulated industries.
No protection
The Japanese Diet’s Fukushima report includes a healthy dose of displeasure with the close ties between government regulators and the nuclear industry they were supposed to monitor. The closed, insular nature of nuclear oversight that might be attributed to Japanese culture by a superficial read is, in fact, a product of the universally familiar “revolving door” that sees industry insiders taking turns as government bureaucrats, and regulatory staff “graduating” to well-compensated positions in the private sector.
Mariko Oi, a reporter at the BBC’s Tokyo bureau, described the situation this way when discussing the Fukushima report on the World Service:
When there was a whistleblower, the first call that the government or the ministry made was to TEPCO, saying, “Hey, you’ve got a whistleblower,” instead of “Hey, you’ve got a problem at the nuclear reactor.” Continue reading
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