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

• 2012 likely to be journalists’ deadliest year so far
• Protestors charged with third-degree riot for defending house from foreclosure
• Aid for Haitian earthquake victims goes to build hotels
• Facts about inequality in the U.S.
• Community-labor alliance spurs unionization effort
• War Resister confined to sanctuary of Canadian church
• Military recruiting troops through motorsports marketing
• Texas Wal-Mart becomes nation’s largest single-story library
• Chinese Apple workers undergoing superexploitation
• Torture in CIA 'black site' secret prison in Poland

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

• 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.

Last November's pepper-spray attack on nonviolent University of California Davis (UCD) students resulted from poor leadership and lack of communication among campus police authorities and university leaders, according to a University of California task force report released on April 11. The report condemned the actions of the campus police officers and their use of excessive force against student demonstrators.

According to an April 11 KTVU article, Lt. John Pike and other campus police authorities who doused a line of seated student protesters with pepper spray used canisters larger than campus police officers were authorized and trained to utilize. The incident drew widespread public condemnation, and many called for UCD Chancellor Linda Katehi's resignation. The report provided findings about the incident along with a set of recommendations to prevent future clashes.

"Our overriding conclusion can be stated briefly and explicitly," wrote former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso and the report's co-authors, according to an April 11 Chicago Tribune article. "The pepper-spraying incident that took place on Nov. 18, 2011, should and could have been prevented."

Occupy Wall Street groups across the nation are joining forces for a Spring of Discontent despite skeptics’ expectations that the cold winter months would diminish the movement’s passion and momentum. Occupy Chicago organized a day of action on April 7, the official kickoff of Chicago Spring, including rallies, marches and other events intended to educate, inspire, unite and mobilize the 99 percent.

Despite persistent pressure from the city and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s efforts to impose tighter fines and restrictions to scatter Occupy Chicago protesters from the downtown area, the movement has only grown stronger, Calumet College of St. Joseph Assistant Professor of English Mark Cassello wrote in an April 5 Huffington Post article. In fact, he said the mayor’s actions have “helped forge a highly organized and nimble agent of social protest.”

"It's important to let the 1 percent know we have gone nowhere and gotten stronger (since) the winter," Occupy Chicago protester Mike Ehenreich said in a April 7 ABC7 article.

News Release
Anonymous IU Students

Early Monday morning, several anonymous IU students concerned about the climate-related death toll of their campus’ coal-fired heating plant dropped a massive 30-foot-x20-foot banner over the two-story bridge of the Kelley School of Business on Fee Lane. The banner, which was dropped intentionally within eyeshot of the campus’ coal plant, read as follows: “CLIMATE CHANGE KILLED 315,000 PEOPLE LAST YEAR ALONE. IU HAS BLOOD ON ITS HANDS.”

The students responsible for the banner cited this alarming figure from a study released in 2009 by the Global Humanitarian Forum, a non-profit foundation presided over by former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. This landmark publication, entitled “The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis,” found that every year approximately 315,000 people die prematurely due to weather-related disasters and environmental degradation (such as deterioration of arable land) associated with anthropogenic climate change and that by the year 2030, “the lives of 660 million people are expected to be seriously affected.”

Anyone whom Glenn Beck considers an anarchist radical, a black liberation theologian, a black nationalist and an avowed communist is clearly someone with a story worth hearing. And former Barack Obama advisor Van Jones, whom Beck drove from the White House with relentless, racist, red-baiting attacks in 2009, is telling his now.

Obama's former "green jobs czar" has written a new book titled Rebuild the Dream and took his message to MoveOn and Democracy Now! audiences on April 3, the day before the book's release, the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

"Ultimately, this book is just the prologue to what comes next," he wrote in an email to MoveOn members. "… America is not broke. We are a rich nation, and we can do much better than we are doing. We need a game plan for victories now and in the years to come."

• Environmental movement losing due to strategic failings
• Westinghouse pushes nukes, despite acknowledged hurdles
• Monsanto voted biggest 'Corporate Fool'
• Pesticides responsible for killing bees
• Salmon dying off in Lake Huron, Lake Michigan
• 1,000 antinuclear activists march in Vermont
• Six finalists vie for Indianapolis Prize
• Indiana Recycling Coalition holds 23rd annual meeting
• Former treatment plant operator plea bargains for polluting
• EPA administrator in Paris for OECD meeting

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  Read The Greene Report archive on The Bloomington Alternative.

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On a sunny and unseasonably warm Wednesday afternoon, March 21, some 100 people gathered at the Bloomington Courthouse Square to honor Iraq on the ninth anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation and to express their demand for diplomacy, not war, with Iran.

The rally was sponsored by the Bloomington Peace Action Coalition, the Just Peace Task Force of Bloomington's Unitarian Universalist Church and the Bloomington chapter of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.