Author Archive for Jack & Felice

Sara Beining and her daughter

A single mother and Iraq war veteran is in jail in Colorado Springs. Sara Beining went AWOL a second time last summer after a nearly year-long delay in resolving the original charge that resulted when she left her unit at Ft. Hood in January, 2007.

Just over one year ago, September 14, 2013, Beining was stopped for a traffic offense and held on an outstanding military warrant, more than six years after she and her newlywed husband had together walked away from war service. She was briefly jailed, then given a plane ticket and orders to report back to Fort Carson, Colorado, where, she said, “I tried for another year to play the game” and be quietly processed out of the army as many other recent military refusers have been.

But in her absence without leave, Beining had given birth to a daughter in September, 2008 and become an outspoken opponent of war.

photo by Sam Morris/Las Vegas Review-Journal

from Nevada Desert Experience

On Sunday morning, September 21 – the U.N.’s International Day of Peace – after an interfaith liturgy at ten o­clock a.m., 6 men and 4 women were arrested at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), which is 65 miles from Las Vegas. Prayer-­activists continue to visit the NNSS (formerly called the Nevada Test Site) annually in order to work on a spiritual level for the end of ongoing nuclear violence at this solitary U.S. nuclear weapons proving ground and site of weekly low­-level nuclear waste dumping. Since 1997, subcritical nuclear weapons testing has occurred regularly at the NNSS.

Action camps are a popular summer activity in Germany for families and activists young and old alike, and this summer saw arrests related to camps focused on nuclear weapons, uranium transport and combat training.

KIEL

The nuclear power industry is dying a slow death. Still its uranium lifeblood courses around the globe from the mines to the mills, on through a handful of commercial enrichment plants and then fabrication into fuel rods for reactors.

Participants in this summer’s anti-nuclear action camp in Kiel during the week of August 9-16 put the spotlight on this still-profitable global circulatory system by monitoring, inspecting and blockading shipments of yellowcake (uranium concentrates) en route to the French processing complex in Narbonne.

Fr. Louie Vitale OFM at Livermore Labs, August 6. Photo by Jim Stevens/Bay Area News Group.

LOCKHEED MARTIN, PENNSYLVANIA

from Brandywine Peace Community

People gathered on the sidewalk in front of the main driveway to the King of Prussia, Pennsylvania complex of Lockheed Martin on August 6, where they held signs next to large banners held by stakes planted in the ground. The underlying message of the day centered around the killing and slaughter of children, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to U.S. drones strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, and Israel’s slaughter of innocents in Gaza enabled by Lockheed Martin, the world’s #1 war profiteer and weapons supplier.

Next to large wooden sign with the Lockheed Martin logo and “we’re making a killing” which for years has accompanied demonstrations at Lockheed Martin, we put up A Memorial to the Innocents lined with a child’s stuffed animals and pictures of the Hiroshima Child.