New Mexico’s long history of uranium mining on Native American lands provides fuel for the front end of the nuclear industry and stores much of the mine tailings and radioactive waste from nuclear weapons and power plants. DemocracyNow! looks at the devastating impact uranium mining continues to have on Native lands with Leona Morgan of Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining, a group dedicated to protecting the water, air, land and health of communities in areas impacted by uranium mines.Also joining the discussion is Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico and former Los Alamos National Laboratory investigator Chuck Montaño.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Los Alamos, New Mexico, the state home to the Navajo Nation. For decades, they’ve fought uranium mining on their land. Despite a mining moratorium on tribal property, the company Hydro Resources, Inc., is seeking approval to mine near the towns of Crown Point and Church Rock. Uranium has been mined here for more than 50 years, and the impact is still felt. The land is dotted with contaminated tailings, hundreds of abandoned mines that are still not cleaned up. Meanwhile, Navajos have suffered from high cancer rates and respiratory problems.

For more, we’re joined by Leona Morgan, a coordinator with the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining—their mission: to protect the water, air, land and health of communities in areas impacted by uranium mines.

Leona, welcome to Democracy Now! We’re talking about the dawn of the Nuclear Age. We’re broadcasting from Fuller Lodge. It’s where the scientists first came in 1943, part of the secret Manhattan Project, to develop an atomic bomb. Talk about where you come from and how that, in 1943, relates to you.

Full transcript here.

Anonymous is bringing an alleged injustice to light in the Philadephia area:

Hello Citizens of the world, We are Anonymous. Dear brothers and sisters: Now is the time to open your eyes and expose the truth!

Recently it has come to the attention of Anonymous that Ori Feibush, a business developer, in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Point Breeze, is facing legal action after voluntarily cleaning up more than forty tons of trash from a vacant lot neighboring his local business. Mr. Feibush spent more than twenty thousand dollars of his own money to not only remove the trash but also to level the soil; add cherry trees, fencing and park benches; and repave the sidewalk.

As a result of this man's benevolent contribution, the city agencies demanding that Mr. Feibush return the vacant lot to its previous condition have said they are considering legal action against him. City officials are currently calling him a "trespasser."

Ori Feibush tried to purchase the lot and even visited the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority to present his plan. But the city told him to stop, warning he was "endangering the public."

If the city did the same project it would have cost about one million five hundred thousand dollars. Another intensive might have been to dive down property value then develop it for a profit.

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Via OccupyWallSt:

(un)Occupy Albuquerque and allies are organizing a civil disobedience action on Hiroshima Day, August 6th, in Los Alamos as part of the wider three-day events planned by the Occupy Santa Fe Nuke Free Now Coalition. See here for a full events list for August 3-6 in Santa Fe and Los Alamos.

There is no single institution on earth that undermines the well-being of the world more than the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Northern New Mexico.

NUCLEAR WAR
As a tool of the U.S. empire, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) developed the only nuclear bombs to be used as weapons of war—in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and three days later in Nagasaki. At least 225,000 civilians were killed. Hundreds of thousands died later of cancers, and thousands more inherited birth defects. Today, the U.S. nuclear stockpile contains enough warheads to destroy 159,000 Hiroshimas. With threats of a U.S. strike against Iran and Israel’s U.S.-backed hegemony in the Middle East, it is time to shut down the war machine.

TOXIC EARTH
The development and maintenance of nuclear weapons displaces indigenous people, pollutes air, water, and land & degrades the health of all life on Earth. The U. S. has exploded over 1100 nuclear weapons in tests above and underground and in the ocean, exposing millions of unsuspecting humans and animals to damaging radiation. LANL is built on and is contaminating indigenous land “borrowed” by the U.S. government and never returned.

CORPORATE GREED
Los Alamos is NO LONGER operated by the U.S. government. In an egregious breach of world security, U.S. nuclear weapons industry operations have been managed by private, for-profit corporations since 2007. Among the largest of these, Bechtel Corporation—the engineering firm that built almost half of the nuclear plants in the world as well as the oil infrastructure of Saudi Arabia—now runs daily operations at LANL, and last year was awarded more than $55 million in pure profit for LANL management alone.

LOST EXPERTISE
The resources and scientific expertise devoted to nuclear bombs are critically needed to address such pressing issues as global warming, declining fossil fuel supply, overpopulation, species extinction, and poverty.

Join us in Los Alamos, NM Aug. 6, 2012 to put the Empire on notice:
No more nuclear weapons!
No more corporate greed! No more war!
!Ya Basta U.S. global domination!

Some facts on the U.S. nuclear weapons system, via the Environmental Solidarity Working Group at Occupy Wall Street:

* The U.S. maintains more than 10,000 nuclear warheads.
* Obama's FY 2012 budget request designates over $7.6 billion to programs directly related to nuclear warheads. This is an 8.9% increase from the previous year. The increase will be sustained and then increased further "in the later out years."
* Accord to a White House fact sheet: "The plan includes investments of $80 billion to sustain and modernize the nuclear weapons complex" ... and "well over $100 billion in nuclear delivery systems to sustain existing capabilities and modernize some strategic systems" by the year 2020.
*Federal spending for nuclear weapons between 1940 and 2007 was about $7.2 trillion, exceeding "the combined total federal spending for education; training, employment, and social services; agriculture; natural resources and the environment; general science, space, and technology; community and regional development, including disaster relief; law enforcement; and energy production and regulation."
*Nuclear weapons' relationship to human security was put on display in Japan 67 years ago. We know what they do.

For even more facts about nuclear weapons, see NukeFreeNow.org:

Every facet of the nuclear industry poisons our planet. The nuclear business is wildly profitable, yet it collects billions in taxpayer subsidies.

Nuclear subsides go beyond mere money. The biosphere and creatures who depend on a living planet pay the largest subsidy through illness and premature death.

Nuclear weapons manufacturing and testing has poisoned millions, but secrecy has keep us misinformed. Secrecy has blocked accurate measures of how much radiation we have been exposed to. Misinformation has allowed downwinders, uranium miners, defense workers and the subjects of secret tests to suffer and die without medical attention or compensation. The lack of medical care given to nuclear victims has impeded scientific study of the long-term effects of weapons development and testing.

In spite of this neglect, scientists do know that exposure to the fallout from nuclear weapons testing causes cancers, tumors, genetic damage, infertility, birth defects and death.

Plutonium is so poisonous that one inhaled microscopic particle can cause lung cancer.

A few reap billions in profits, while we, the 99%, have diminished futures. There is always money for more bombs and new wars, but we’re told there isn’t enough for healthcare, education, housing, pensions. Sustainable-energy projects languish. We live with the nightmare of nuclear war.

A major nuclear war — between the US and Russia —would leave Earth virtually uninhabitable. A regional war — limited to India and Pakistan would cause a global famine that would kill one billion people, according to Alan Robock and Brian Toon, two of the foremost experts on the climatic impact of nuclear war.

It’s time. We must make this end. Read the rest at NukeFreeNow.org

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At the weekly demonstration in Nabi Salih, two Palestinian women stand their ground in the face of the infamous "skunk truck." The skunk truck is a mounted water cannon that sprays a foul smelling liquid at high pressures.

The village of Nabi Salih, home to over 500 Palestinians, holds weekly demonstrations protesting the illegal confiscation of their lands by Israelis in the settlement Halamish. The Israeli Occupation Forces respond frequently with excesses of force, as the video here demonstrates.

[Via]