Thousands of protesters await G8 leaders in Genoa

By Steve Pagani

Rome, Italy, July 15— When eight of the world’s most powerful leaders gather in Genoa for their annual summit this week, thousands of protesters will be waiting for them.

Group of Eight leaders, with President George W. Bush making his G8 debut, will for the first time face the now familiar sight of mass protests marking summits across the globe.

Anti-globalization demonstrations took off with a vengeance at a World Trade Organization summit in Seattle in December 1999. Not even Greenpeace could get near last year’s G8 meeting on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa.

This year will be very different.

Host nation Italy is mounting one of the biggest security operations the country has seen for years, pouring in 15,000 armed police and troops to ensure leaders from the United States, Russia, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Canada can discuss global issues in safety on July 20-22.

It will be impossible for the rich nations club not to react to the presence of the expected 120,000 protesters purporting to speak for the “have-nots” around the world.

Organizations representing the environment or animal and plant preservation, or fighting debt relief, poverty, hunger, the spread of AIDS, cultural and sexual equality, have been making preparations for months to make their voice heard.

“The concerns of quite a lot of these people are serious,” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who will attend the summit, told Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung daily. “The politicians must explain globalisation better.”

But as at other summits since Seattle – in Prague, Nice, Quebec City and Gothenburg — police are expecting a hard core of activists to light the tinderbox. Past protests have seen clashes with police, the destruction of property and injury.

As witnessed at the European Union summit in Gothenburg, Sweden, last month, violence can almost totally overshadow the main event, shifting the media focus and grabbing the headlines.

Will it matter? Critics argue over whether annual summits of the top industrialized nations can spur any change anyway.

“They are reactive on the political level, but pro-active on the economic and financial level,” said Franco Pavoncello, professor of political science at John Cabot University in Rome. “Any system where all the major currencies and economies can get together to discuss coordination is extremely important.”

According to the Japanese government, talks on the global economic slowdown and how to boost growth will figure large on the first day of the summit on Friday.

The seven major economic powers were expected to exchange views on a new round of global trade talks to start at a WTO meeting in Qatar in November, and review progress on reducing Third World debt, a Japanese official said.

The 1997 Kyoto protocol has assumed center stage at key encounters since Bush rejected it, a decision which has added fuel to environmentalist fires.

“Japan will try to come up with some kind of effort not to kill the Kyoto accord,” Japanese Professor of Political Science Kuniko Inoguchi told Reuters Television in Tokyo.

Unauthorized protests will go ahead — the biggest planned for Friday, when some groups will try to breach the top security “Red Zone” around the historic port, which includes the main summit venue, the 13th century Palazzo Ducale.

Italy has hired a luxury liner to accommodate all the leaders apart from Bush, so they can be kept under tight guard in one spot when they rest, and far away from any street battles. No details of where Bush is staying have yet been released.

To safeguard against any demonstrations, the steel cordon around the city has been reinforced with surface-to-air missiles, air force surveillance of the skies and navy monitoring of the waters.

One Italian activist said the authorities were creating a climate of fear to try to keep protesters away.

“After Gothenburg the situation has changed. Police shot protesters. We are getting ready to defend ourselves,” Riccardo Germani told Reuters Television.

Source: Reuters

International activists charged with conspiracy in missile protest

Los Angeles, California, July 17 (ENS)— Fifteen Greenpeace activists and two journalists have been charged with conspiracy after they delayed a test of the U.S. missile defense system at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base July 14.

In Los Angeles late last night, Magistrate Carol Worley charged the 16 men and one woman with conspiracy to violate a military safety zone and violating an order. If convicted, they could be jailed for up to 10 years and fined $250,000 each.

Those charged come from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, Sweden, Australia, Spain and Canada.

The activists were protesting the launch of an unarmed Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missile in support of what the Air Force is now calling the Ground-based Midcourse Defense Segment, formerly the National Missile Defense Program.

Although the activists delayed the test for 40 minutes, the Air Force was pleased with its successful launch. “This success is a great example of the tremendous teamwork that is characteristic of Team Vandenberg,” said Col. Robert M. Worley II, 30th Space Wing commander.

The 15 members of the boat crews and two members of the press were below the flight path of the missile. Swimmers on boogie boards went ashore at the base, while three boats and a press boat, chased by the Coast Guard and a helicopter entered the exclusion zone. Two divers went down underwater in the zone. All were arrested and taken to the Lerdo Maxmed Security Facility in Bakersfield, California. The Americans have been released.

“That’s a law enforcement issue, and the Department of Defense has no further comment,” Major Cynthia Colin said from the Department of Defense press office in Washington, DC.

At Vandenberg Air Force Base, Staff Sgt. Rebecca Bonilla said the protesters endangered themselves by their actions. “They put themselves in danger. The water is very cold. Two displayed signs of hypothermia and had to be taken by base helicopter to Marian Medical in Santa Maria,” Bonilla said.

“We encourage peaceful protests, and we’re here to defend people’s right to protest,” Bonilla said. “We have certainly made every effort to facilitate their protest at the main gate and encourage them to do it in a safe manner, but we take it very seriously when people actually tresspass on the base.”

The missile launched from Vandenberg was one of two Lockheed Martin rockets launched on the 14th, 4,800 miles apart. The other lifted off from the Kwajalein Missile Range, Republic of the Marshall Islands, in the Pacific about 21 minutes later carrying an Exo-Atmospheric Kill Vehicle that found, tracked and discriminated between the targets and then destroyed the primary target.

Greenpeace believes that the U.S. missile defense program, dubbed Star Wars, “poses one of the single greatest threats to the world and will lead to a new nuclear arms race.”

“Our activists acted with honor and integrity in a courageous, selfless and non-violent protest against a dangerous program,” said Gerd Leipold, executive director of Greenpeace International. “They’re from across the world and reflect a growing global opposition to Star Wars.”

This latest action is one in a series of protests in the Greenpeace campaign against tests of the U.S. missile defense system.

In the Marshall Islands, the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior has just left the Kwajalein Missile Range, where it spent several months protesing the missile test. Two activists were arrested there during a protest action on May 7. They served 30 days in jail.

On July 3 and 4, more than 100 Greenpeace activists from the United States, Denmark and the UK invaded the American Menwith Hill base, near Harrogate, North Yorkshire to reveal the base’s role in President Bush’s plan for a national missile defense system.

US military aid to Latin America linked to human rights abuses

By The International Consortium
of Investigative Journalists

Few Americans know it, but the United States is currently embroiled in the biggest guerrilla war since Vietnam. Hundreds of American troops, spies and civilian contract employees are on the ground in Colombia and neighboring lands, helping to coordinate a $1.3 billion counterdrug program that will probably continue for many years. It is a bigger US commitment—in personnel, cash and risk—than the previous leading post-Vietnam counterinsurgency campaign, the 1980s war in El Salvador.

In light of the growing US military involvement in Latin America—building even as a 1999 truth commission report concluded that the United States had given money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed “acts of genocide” during that country’s 36-year civil war—the Center for Public Integrity set out to examine US military aid to Latin America in the 1990s. The yearlong investigation by the Center’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found, among other things, that in three of the four Latin American countries examined, US military and intelligence aid was implicated in human rights abuses.

In Colombia, as in El Salvador, the United States has found its moral flanks exposed by alliances with corrupt and brutal military institutions. In El Salvador, the purpose of that questionable alliance was at least well-defined: to contain a Marxist rebel army. In Colombia, a nominally Marxist rebel army is again the main target of US aid, but Washington’s motivations are multiple and, at times, murky. In Peru, the CIA paid millions of dollars to a shadowy government official, Vladimiro Montesinos, who allegedly used his influence to arrange an arms deal with the left-wing Colombian guerrillas, in an affront to his patrons reminiscent of Panama’s Manuel Noriega.

The US-backed assistance program called Plan Colombia, which is one year old on July 13, 2001, ostensibly is a “drug war” aimed at eradicating Colombian drug lords’ ability to continue supplying three-quarters of the cocaine and 65 percent of the heroin entering the United States. But, as the ICIJ’s two-continent investigation shows, US funding for Plan Colombia isn’t aimed solely at limiting the supply and raising the price of cocaine and heroin on the streets of Baltimore and Seattle or at eliminating “narcoterrorism”—the drug-trafficking operations that left-wing guerrillas employ to fund their war in Colombia.

The protection of US oil and trade interests is also a key factor in the plan, and historic links to drug-trafficking right-wing guerrillas by US allies belie an exclusive commitment to extirpating drug traffic. The United States imports more oil from Latin America than from the Persian Gulf. And while oil has long been significant to US policy-makers (and especially to the current Bush administration, with its emphasis on increasing energy production in the United States and other zones of influence), until recently hemispheric oil supplies have been viewed as much more secure than the petroleum lying under the Middle East.

But the nationalistic talk coming from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a former army colonel who has dallied with Colombian guerrillas, has alarmed some US officials. Major US oil companies have lobbied Congress intensely to promote additional military aid to Colombia, in order to secure their investments in that country and create a better climate for future exploration of Colombia’s vast potential reserves. Additionally, Latin America is the fastest-growing market for US exports. In fact, large U.S. corporations with Latin American interests spent more than $92 million lobbying Congress in the latter half of the 1990s, in part to affect US policy in the region. These companies and their employees contributed an additional $18.9 million to federal election campaigns during the same period. Business leaders with interests in the region are worried about economic instability and lawlessness engendered by guerrilla violence—not, particularly, by drug smuggling.

The constellation of violence in Colombia, where both leftist rebels and rightist paramilitaries build their armies with drug money, will make it extremely difficult for the United States to focus simultaneously on cutting drug supplies while strengthening stability and rule of law in the region. Although the bulk of US aid to Colombia has been directed at territory controlled by leftist guerrillas, the US government has been aware for years of links between drug smugglers and the right-wing militia movement, the investigation found.

Reporting on the ground in southern Colombia, where the US-funded eradication of coca plantations has wiped out thousands of acres of coca as well as legitimate plantings in the past year, showed a continuing hand-in-glove relationship between drug-trafficking paramilitaries and the Colombian army that US officials could hardly be unaware of. In the early 1990s, the United States helped Colombia set up intelligence networks that employed right-wing hit squads against unionists and human rights workers. Recently, under US pressure, the Colombian government has begun a military campaign against some of these same paramilitaries. But it is difficult to know how far the army will go to open a new front against the now-formidable rightists. In much of the country, the government and paramilitaries—and the United States—share the same targets.

The perils of picking the wrong bedfellow in such a fight are nowhere more apparent than in Peru, where a government that worked closely with U.S. intelligence for a decade collapsed in scandal in 2000. The ICIJ investigation found evidence that the CIA, after years of working closely with Montesinos, the lead figure in the scandal, might have intentionally undermined him after discovering in 2000 that he was the middleman in an arms deal that sent 10,000 East German-made assault rifles from Jordan to the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC. When news of this deal was publicized, Peru’s Congress ousted President Alberto Fujimori, who then fled to Japan. Montesinos, after eight months in hiding, has recently been returned to Peru to face an array of charges, including murder and drug and arms trafficking. But the implications for US policy were remarkable. The United States’ main Peruvian asset in the drug war was revealed to be arming the FARC—its main enemy in Colombia.

Source: The Public I: www.public-i.org

Rightist rampage in Colombia kills at least 10, sends thousands fleeing

Colombians in the small town of Peque carry the coffin of one of at least 11 people killed by far-right paramilitaries who attacked last week, on July 10 2001.

By Juan Pablo Toro

Bogota, Colombia, July 9— Troops headed to an embattled northern township on Monday where local officials say rightist paramilitaries killed at least 10 villagers last week and forced as many as 6,000 people from their homes.

Details are only now emerging of last Wednesday’s attack on Peque, in a remote area of northwest Antioquia state, but it could be one of the largest paramilitary massacres in months, officials said.

"At the moment we have confirmed that 10 people are dead and we have about 15 others reported missing. There is chaos,’’ Peque mayor Jose Luis Usaga told The Associated Press by telephone from Medellin, the nearest major city, where he was making an appeal for government aid.

Usaga said the main part of the town was overrun with as many as 6,000 people from outlying areas. Six tons of aid already flown in by helicopter would not be enough, he said.

The army, so far, has confirmed only seven deaths around the town, located about 200 miles northwest of the capital, Bogota. Troops were trying to gain control of the town amid reported rebel-paramilitary clashes.

Peque has a population of about 11,000, including the outlying areas. It is located in a mountain corridor contested between the rightist United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, and the country’s largest guerrilla faction, the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Usaga said about 300 AUC militiamen stormed into town on Wednesday and began taking away young men, saying they were needed as cattle hands. The men were later found dead.

In another case, the Attorney General’s office on Friday opened an official inquiry into whether Rear Adm. Rodrigo Quinones and seven lower-ranking officials were derelict in their duties for failing to prevent an AUC massacre of 27 people in the northern town of Chengue in January.

The officials all naval personnel except one police lieutenant could be discharged from the military. All criminal prosecutions in Colombia are handled by the public prosecutor’s office.

The Chengue massacre, in which some of the dead villagers were killed with stones and machetes, was preceded by warnings by local officials that an AUC attack was imminent.

The 8,000-strong AUC’s rapid rise is sharply escalating the bloodshed in Colombia’s 37-year conflict and drawing concerns about US aid to the South American country’s military.

Source: Associated Press

Mexico ratifies rights law over Indian objections

By Lorraine Orlandi

Mexico City, Mexico, July 12— Mexico ratified landmark constitutional reforms on Thursday to strengthen Indian rights, though indigenous communities that inspired the bill dismissed it as useless in saving the Chiapas peace process.

State legislatures in Michoacan and Nayarit ratified the set of amendments known as the indigenous rights law, bringing the number of states approving it to 17. That was more than the majority of Mexico’s 31 states required to change the Constitution.

But ratification came over rejection by states with large Indian populations and opposition from indigenous leaders.

“This reform will be born dead,” the governors and leading lawmakers in heavily indigenous Chiapas and Oaxaca states said in a letter published in the Milenio newspaper on Thursday.

Only months ago the reforms were seen as crucial to ending an impasse with the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas, who rose up in arms in 1994 to defend Indian rights.

But the rebel leadership and Indian supporters denounced the final version as a mockery of their demands and an obstacle to peace, arguing it gutted the original proposal for greater self-determination by Indian communities.

Chiapas, where more than 35 percent of the population is Indian, rejected the bill that was specifically designed to answer the Zapatista uprising.

Oaxaca, where more than half the residents are Indians, also rejected it. Together, the nine states that rejected the bill are home to more than half of Mexico’s nearly 10 million indigenous citizens. The remaining states had yet to vote.

“We have always said this was an aborted law that did not meet the expectations of the indigenous,” said federal deputy Hector Sanchez, head of the congressional Indigenous Affairs Committee and a Zapoteca Indian from Oaxaca.

Reforms illegitimate

Community opposition renders the reforms illegitimate and should prompt the federal government to consider new, farther-reaching guarantees of Indian rights, activists said.

“The fact that the communities and state legislatures are rejecting this is a very solid argument to sensitize the federal Congress,” said Chiapas Gov. Pablo Salazar.

The constitutional reforms take effect once the states notify the national Congress of ratification. The executive branch then certifies the amendments.

Since taking office last December, President Vicente Fox has seen his hopes dashed for a return to peace talks in Chiapas, stalled since 1996, despite key government concessions to the Zapatistas and a historic cross-country tour by the rebel leadership to rally support for Indian rights. The rebels rejected the rights bill passed by the national Congress in April and returned to their Chiapas stronghold.

Supporters of the final bill, including leaders of Fox’s National Action Party, said it met indigenous demands for greater autonomy while preserving national sovereignty and individual rights under the Constitution.

Fox initially hailed the Congress’s passage of the bill as a major step toward peace, but his government later backed away from the final version, calling it a good faith step rather than a full answer to Indian demands.

Source: Reuters

IMF, World Bank assailed for rejecting debt forgiveness

By Tim Shorrock

Washington, DC, July 12 (IPS)— Champions of debt forgiveness are attacking the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for rejecting calls to cancel their claims against the world’s poorest countries.

The two institutions released a statement on Tuesday saying that celebrities Bono, Bob Geldof, and the Jubilee 2000 campaign to forgive global debt have their hearts in the right place but misunderstand the realities of developmental finance.

“Supporters of 100 percent debt cancellation must be honest about the costs,” the two institutions argued. With total public external debt for low-income countries standing at some 460 billion dollars, the world’s poorest debtors are increasingly dependent on funding from bilateral and multilateral lending agencies “on concessional terms,” they said.

“Total cancellation” of their debt, they concluded, “could imperil these funds. It would also undermine the confidence of existing and potential investors whose funds are vital for the long-term development of the low-income countries.”

Hogwash, said champions of debt forgiveness.

“That’s just the opposite of what happens in capital markets,” said Tim Atwater, a national coordinator for Jubilee 2000/USA, an umbrella group of religious, civic and labor organizations that supports debt relief. “Any time debt is canceled, the private sector is more, not less, willing to repay loans.”

“The IMF and the World Bank don’t want to cancel the debt because they don’t want to give up any control of Third World economies,” he added, referring to the infamous structural adjustment programs - now known as “poverty reduction” programs - that developing countries must follow as a price for help from the IMF or its companion bank. These usually affect the poorest sectors of a country through user fees on such important social provisions as education and health care.

“Overall, the basic assumption here is that the assistance delivered by the IMF and World Bank is a good thing,” said Soren Ambrose, an analyst with Fifty Years is Enough, a Washington-based organization opposed to the postwar institutions. “There’s absolutely no (attention) to the attachments to the assistance, which is really the crux of the problem. Their motivation is never addressed.”

The debate between the unpopular lending institutions and their critics is being played out as leaders of the Group of Seven (G-7) industrial powers plan to discuss debt relief and other issues at a summit in Genoa, Italy, from July 20 to 22.

Not much is expected from US President George W. Bush and other G- 7 leaders, however. With the exception of Canada, the largest economic powers have rejected 100 percent debt cancellation and instead support a joint IMF-World Bank Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, aimed at reducing debt to levels at which the poorest developing countries could be expected to keep up repayments.

Under HIPC, the two institutions have set up two separate funds to alleviate the debt of 41 countries, most of them in Africa.

Proponents of debt forgiveness see the program as a poor substitute for cancellation, however, because the poorest countries are getting an average cut of just 27 percent in their annual debt service payments.

G-7 finance ministers meeting in Rome last week issued a statement supporting HIPC and said the G-7 heads of state would issue a broader statement on debt after their gathering in Genoa. Opponents of the IMF and World Bank programs are planning demonstrations in the Italian city to protest the lack of action.

The IMF-World Bank report challenges the assumptions behind the debt cancellation movement and defends HIPC as the only legitimate alternative.

Finance ministers from countries involved in the HIPC initiative met in London in early June and called on the IMF and World Bank to address its flaws, specifically pointing to the need for “maximum flexibility” on conditions attached to debt relief. Countries represented in London included Chad, Congo, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Sao Tome & Principe, Sierra Leone, Togo, Uganda and Zambia.

Atwater of Jubilee 2000/USA said it is hypocritical of the United States and the European Union to reject debt cancellation. During the 1800s, the US government defaulted on many loans from England, while Europe never repaid US loans extended during World War II. “Some of those loans are still on the book,” he said.

South Korean students burn US Flag

By Soo-Jeong Lee

Seoul, South Korea, July 14— Student activists in South Korea burned a US flag and confronted police Saturday to protest Washington’s missile program. About 100 chanting demonstrators gathered in front of the main US military base in the Yongsan district of central Seoul, yelling their opposition to the Bush administration’s plan for a missile-shield system.

Shoving matches erupted when police tried to take away an American flag a student intended to burn. Students kicked and threw punches at police, who fought back with plastic shields. There were no serious injuries.

’’Yankee go home!’’ students chanted as the flag went up in flames. The protesters carried dozens of anti-US banners and signs, saying that Washington’s plan to build a missile defense system is hurting stability on the divided Korean peninsula.

Source: Associated Press

Prozac makers told to warn of side-effects

By Lois Rogers and Rosie Waterhouse

United Kingdom, July 8— Manufacturers of Prozac and other top-selling antidepressants have been asked to include stronger warnings in their packaging because of fears that the drugs could trigger violent behavior.

The Committee on Safety of Medicines (CSM) has also asked to see unpublished data from early trials that tested their safety in healthy volunteers, after claims that some individuals became violently depressed while taking them.

Prozac, which was launched by Eli Lilly as a wonder cure for depression eight years ago, was the first of a generation of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which were meant to be free of side-effects.

Up to one in 10 of the population experiences depression at some time and the market for such drugs is worth billions. More than 10 million prescriptions for SSRIs are written every year, 3 million of them for Prozac.

Ramo Kabbani, of the Prozac Survivors Support Group, a patients’ organization, said it had received more than 2,300 calls in the past two years about side-effects, half from people who said they had become suicidal or violent.

David Healy, director of the North Wales Psychological Medicine service in Bangor, is one of a number of specialists who has published research demonstrating that SSRIs can induce suicidal feelings in healthy volunteers.

Recently Prozac and Seroxat, the other market leader manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) have been the subject of high-profile legal cases after claims that people had become unstable or violent while taking them.

Last month GSK paid out several million dollars after Seroxat, marketed as Paxil in America, was blamed for the behavior of Donald Schell, who killed his wife, daughter, and nine- month-old granddaughter and then killed himself after he was prescribed the drug. In Britain, Reginald Payne, 63, suffocated his wife Sally and threw himself off a cliff in Cornwall, less than two weeks after he was prescribed Prozac.

Source: Sunday Times (UK): www.sunday-times.co.uk

Chavez says region’s governments unwilling to reduce poverty

By Alexandra Olson

Caracas, Venezuela, July 11-- President Hugo Chavez kicked off a Latin American summit on poverty by warning that the region’s governments lack the will to reduce a yawning gap between rich and poor.

The Venezuelan president said late Tuesday he worried there was no plan to reduce poverty by 50 percent in the Western Hemisphere by 2015 -- a goal set during the Summit of the Americas in April in Quebec City, Canada.

“How are we going to meet that goal?” Chavez said to a three-day congress of politicians, social leaders and others. “I don’t see the political will to solve that problem.”

Some 224 million Latin Americans — or 36 percent of the region’s people — live in poverty, according to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

According to the Inter-American Development Bank, the richest 10 percent of Latin America’s 500 million people receive 40 percent of the income, while the poorest 30 percent get only 7.5 percent. The rest goes to the middle classes.

Chavez — alone among hemispheric leaders in not enthusiastically endorsing a Free Trade Area of the Americas by 2005 — said the FTAA was being hammered out by political elites without considering the needs of the hemisphere’s disenfranchised.

Beatriz Paredes Rangel, president of the Latin American Parliament, complained that decisions by such elite groups as the G-8 industrialized nations “have more weight than the national congresses of the world.”

Source: Associated Press

Man dies after being pepper sprayed by police

Edmonton, Canada, July 12— The medical examiner says he didn’t find anything to account for the death of Kasim Cakmak. The 37-year-old man died shortly after being handcuffed and pepper-sprayed by police.

The incident happened at the Edmonton office of the Alberta Mental Health Board.

“I don’t want this to happen to any other family,” says Sefika Ciplak, the man’s sister.

Ciplak wants more information about why her mentally ill brother was pepper-sprayed. She says Cakmak didn’t understand English and was intimidated by people who wore uniforms. She wants to know if there was another way the situation could have been handled.

“There has to be something done right here so another family doesn’t go through this all over again. It’s a very, very sad way to die,” says Ciplak.

Police say the board asked them to help restrain a patient who was headed to Alberta Hospital. Police spokesperson Annette Bidniak described the patient as being in a violent rage. She says he was handcuffed and pepper-sprayed by two police officers. Bidniak says that’s when they noticed the man had stopped breathing, the handcuffs were taken off and he was rushed to a hospital, but was dead on arrival.

The medical examiner has ordered toxicology tests which will take about six weeks to complete.

The province will also conduct a fatality inquiry. Edmonton Police homicide investigators have determined that the officers acted appropriately.

Source: CBC

Six arrested in GM crops protest

July 15— Six people were arrested Saturday, July 14, after protesters allegedly broke into a field of genetically modified (GM) crops.

North Wales Police arrested the six on suspicion of aggravated trespass after the protest at Birchenfields Farm, near Sealand, England.

They were part of a group of 150 people who marched to the GM field, the only one in Wales. The protesters wanted to persuade the farmer not to grow a second field of the crops. The protesters had been holding an all-day rally in the latest bid to end Wales’s only GM trial. The event, part of a GM ‘Action Day,’ was chaired by Welsh official Jill Evans.

Evans, a member of the environment and public health committee of the European Parliament, had earlier addressed the demonstrators. She said one man had been injured after being thrown against a metal gate by security guards, and noted that there was widespread support for the demonstration.

The arrestees were released on bail on Sunday, July 15, following police questioning.

Sources: Ananova: www.ananova.com; BBC