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Peace & Justice News is a collection of news items collected by Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene. Today's edition includes:

• Sham Violence Against Women Act guts protections
• U.S. trade representative receives Corporate Power Tool Award
• Voter sues Pennsylvania over voter ID law
• Counting and naming all drone strike victims
• Lockout at Sotheby’s enters its 10th month
• House votes to slash food aid but fund the Pentagon more
• Former Citigroup executive receives honorary doctorate
• Feds designate “martial law red zone” around Chicago’s Loop
• Lawsuit targets NYPD stop-and-frisk practices
• Florida’s color- and gender-coded justice system

Occupy Chicago and other social justice groups have developed a coalition-built People’s Summit that will be held in the city the week before the May 19-21 NATO meeting. The summit is organized to educate the public about the NATO and Group of Eight (G8) summits, develop workshops for actions of dissent for the weekend and mobilize a mass march and rally on May 19.

“The People’s Summit is an opportunity to participate in education, democracy and debate that is missing from our political system and from NATO,” said Coalition Against NATO/G8 (CANG8) spokesperson Jesse McAdoo. “… While NATO meets behind closed doors, surrounded by riot police, the People’s Summit will be open to everyone.”

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The Greene Report is a compilation of environmental stories written by Linda Greene for the Alternative and WFHB Community Radio's EcoReport. This week's edition includes:

• Carcinogens in Monroe County’s environment
• ALA’s pollution rankings of Indiana’s cities
• Clean-energy advocates are the U.S. majority
• Silica dust a newly revealed health risk from fracking
• EPA ignores the science of the carcinogen atrazine
• Why Fukushima is a greater disaster than Chernobyl
• Two grocery chains earn top grades for seafood sustainability
• Fetal exposure to the pesticide chloropyrifos lowers intelligence
• Monsanto buys company that blames it for bee deaths
• United States draws up plans for nuclear-powered drones

• Read The Greene Report archive on The Bloomington Alternative.

Dr. William Sammons, an expert on the health and environmental effects of biomass combustion, has traveled to southern Indiana from the East Coast numerous times to testify at public hearings against burning biomass for energy.

Biomass includes everything biological in origin: crops, trees, animals, manure, sewage sludge, and construction and demolition debris, which unavoidably contain heavy metals and fungicides. Burning it produces significant threats to the environmental and human health.

“Biomass is dirtier than coal," Sammons once told citizens fighting proposed biomass combustors in southern Indiana. "Forget it.”

Lewis F. Powell's 1971 memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce --- "Attack on American Free Enterprise System" -- may or may not have been the first shot fired in the nation's late-20th-century right-wing revolution. But from the document's title to its ominous conclusion -- "Business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late" -- it was a literal call to the political arms that have subsequently driven the nation's devolution from democracy to oligarchy.

While the then-Richmond, Va., lawyer couched his message in noble-sounding calls for openness, balance, truth and fairness, his overall tone was doomsday and militant. Referring to the enemies that Powell said were arrayed against the Chamber -- largely on campuses, in the media and in the courts -- he used the term attack 18 times; revolt/revolution/revolutionaries five; war/warfare four; assault four; hostility two; destruction two; and shotgun attack and rifle shot one each. The stakes, he said, were tantamount to life and death.

"The overriding first need is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival -- survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people," he wrote just two months before being nominated to the Supreme Court by President Richard M. Nixon.

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Peace & Justice News is a collection of news items collected by Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene. Today's edition includes:

• How CEO pay compares with yours
• Profits from the prison-industrial complex
• Suicide rates soar in the West
• Student strike in Quebec: 178,390 participate over 73 days
• Putting politics in birth control
• Human rights at risk in Bahrain
• Connecticut joins 16 other states in abolishing the death penalty
• Restaurant worker fired for standing up for her rights

News Release
Citizens Action Coalition, Sierra Club, Valley Watch, Save the Valley

The settlement filed April 30 at the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission between Duke Energy, the Indiana Office of the Utility Consumer Counselor (OUCC), Nucor Steel and the Duke Energy Indiana Industrial Group falls well short of what the captive ratepayers of Duke Energy deserve.

Kerwin Olson, executive director of Citizens Action Coalition (CAC) stated, "We maintain our position that this is an illegitimate power plant that never should have been approved in the first place. This proposed settlement amounts to nothing more than a massive bailout for Duke Energy."

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The Greene Report is a compilation of environmental stories written by Linda Greene for the Alternative and WFHB Community Radio's EcoReport. This week's edition includes:

• Indiana leads the country in pollution discharges
• Trial begins on ALCOA’s toxic waste dump at Indiana’s Squaw Creek coal mine
• IU-Bloomington named one of top “green” colleges and universities
• Westinghouse gets the okay to supply nuclear reactors to India
• No second term for Krinstine Svinicki, NRC commissioner
• Gatica wins the Goldman Environmental Prize
• Nine low-tech steps to community resilience under global warming
• Coming to your supermarket: dioxin-laced corn
• Let’s eliminate carcinogens in our everyday products
• Prescribed burns and managed wildfires are deadly

• Read The Greene Report archive on The Bloomington Alternative.

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Peace & Justice News is a collection of news items collected by Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene. Today's edition includes:

• Living well without God
• Animal rights activist plaintiff in First Amendment case
• Military spending, taxes unending
• Help end 21 years of solitary confinement for prisoner
• Single-payer health care can save $570 billion
• Mali union activist Tiecoura Traore visits the U.S.
• If you have a large student loan debt, it’s your fault
• 43rd Venceremos Brigade to leave for Cuba
• Corporations profiteering on women’s health
• Rio Tinto supports Olympic Summer Games, locks out workers

The Kinsey Institute chose not to dignify minister Douglas Wilson with a protest when he gave a talk in Bloomington described as a two-part lecture called "Sexual by Design," the first half Creation Sexuality and the second Redemption Sexuality. His April 13 speech in IU's Woodburn Hall included a commentary on Alfred Kinsey's ideas and activities.

Though the Kinsey Institute chose silence as the appropriate response to Wilson's presence in Bloomington, IU students and members of the larger community thought Wilson's views were too repulsive and dangerous to ignore. About 75 people gathered outside Woodburn Hall with signs lauding diversity and condemning hate, with some wearing "Out and Proud" buttons and either carrying or wearing rainbow flags, the symbols of LGBTQ liberation. The group walked over to nearby Ballantine Hall, where Wilson spoke.