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

• Policing U.S. Schools and Criminalizing Childhood
• Thai workers in near-slavery supplying Walmart with food
• Women’s benefits from the Affordable Care Act
• Abuse of youth in for-profit prisons
• National Nurses United wins Florida contract
• Female immigrant farm workers facing sexual violence and harassment
• Support grows for Wilmington 10 pardons
• Traveler forced to miss her flight because of her t-shirt
• Secret Services attempts to hide prostitution-related expenses
• Attack on women’s health organization in New Orleans

News release 

Citizens Action Coalition 

Citizens Action Coalition joined a network of consumer and environmental organizations from the Midwest today and launched a new website to track developments at the controversial and problem-plagued Prairie State Energy Campus (PSEC) coal-fired power plant, currently under construction in southern Illinois.

The website is located at www.prairiestatecoalplant.org.

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:

• Mercury from coal-fired power plans ruining Indiana’s waterways
• Sad state of recycling in Indiana
• Military burn pits threaten the environment and troops’ health
• KFC destroying Indonesia’s rainforest
• Chemical industry determined to undermine HHS listing of styrene as a potential carcinogen
• Impending risky schemes for 'dirty bombs on wheels'
• Malaysian “Penan Peace Park” combines forest protection with socioeconomic development
• Global climate change in mind
• Increase in plastic waste polluting the North Pacific
• Nanotechnology threatens firefighters

On an unremarkable day in July 2009 the residents of Scottsburg and surrounding Scott County, in southern Indiana, read an unusual notice in the Scott County Journal.

The notice announced a public hearing, only 10 days away, on a request for a zoning exception and development-plan approval for Liberty Green Renewables, LLC (LGR), which wanted to construct and operate a 32-megawatt incinerator in Scottsburg to convert biomass to electricity.

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.”

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

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.”

• 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.

• 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