Author Archive for Jack & Felice

UPDATE: GRADY FLORES RELEASED ON APPEAL ON JULY 17 (scroll below for details)

Base’s Order of Protection Begs Judgement

On July 10, Mary Anne Grady Flores, grandmother of three, was sentenced to one year in prison for being found guilty of violating an order of protection. A packed courtroom of over 100 supporters was stunned as she was led away, and vowed to continue the resistance.

These orders of protection, typically used in domestic violence situations or to protect a victim or witness to a crime, have been issued to people participating in nonviolent resistance actions at Hancock Air Base since late 2012. The base, near Syracuse, New York, pilots unmanned Reaper drones over Afghanistan, and trains drone pilots, sensor operators and maintenance technicians. The orders had been issued to “protect” Colonel Earl Evans, Hancock’s mission support commander, who wanted to keep protesters “out of his driveway.”

Priests, nuns and local residents form a human chain and refuse to leave the protest camp blocking the construction site of electronic transmission tower No. 129, June 11. (By Kim Bong-gyu, Hankyoreh staff photographer)

KEPCO says construction of power towers back on track

from The Korea Times  by Kim Se-jeong

Police on Wednesday (june 11) forcibly removed sit-in camps where some residents of Miryang, South Gyeongsang Province, have been protesting for years against a power transmission tower project.

The action prompted a violent clash with the protesters. Witnesses said 19 people sustained injuries during the clash. Fourteen were taken to a local hospital.

For the past few years, hundreds of villagers have set up makeshift houses on the tops of mountains in Milyang to stop the construction of high-voltage transmission towers by the state-run Korea Electric Power Corp., or KEPCO.

photo by Shane Franklin

by Jane Stoever and Ann Suellentrop

PeaceWorks – Kansas City held 4 actions over the May 31-June 1 weekend. On Saturday morning, May 31, we held two rallies in Leavenworth, Kansas. At one rally, we sought pardon for Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. She’s begun serving 35 years there for revealing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The second rally, two miles up the road at the Federal Penitentiary, called for pardon for Greg Boertje-Obed, now serving about 5 years in the pen for the Y-12 Transform Now Plowshares action against nuclear weapons at the uranium processing site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Saturday afternoon we went to the old Kansas City Plant for making parts for nuclear weapons, to demand comprehensive cleanup of about 900 known toxins there. The contaminants have poisoned workers at the Kansas City Plant and other federal agencies at the Bannister Federal Complex.

by Christine Legere, from the Cape Cod Times

May 12, 2014

PLYMOUTH – Four members of a Cape-based activist group were arrested Sunday, May 11 for trespassing onto the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station property to plant flowers.

Diane Turco, a Harwich resident and founder of the Cape Downwinders, and group members Sarah Thacher and Susan Carpenter of Dennis, and Mary Conathan of Chatham, were arraigned Monday in Plymouth District Court on charges of trespassing.