LET VENEZUELANS DECIDE !
A general referendum based on the constitution to decide if Venezuelans want elections and for which govermental body is the best way forward to escape from the U.S. imposed stalemate that pushes Venezuela into a downward spiral of death imposed by the USA.
In situations of war, collective violence or atrocity there is no such thing as a neutral stance. Passive by-standing is aiding and abetting evil. Don’t be complicit. "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor!" - Desmond Tutu
We received many requests from students and scholars, who want to use our Venezuela Files compilation for their project and also e.g. compare the events per timeline with the happenings in their own countries and to strategize. All are permitted and encouraged to do so. If you feel an important piece in the puzzle of this timeline is missing, please send it to info[AT]ecoterra[DOT]info or send your comments to the editor of this segment: Venatrix Fulmen <>
Update MON 24. June 2019 (vf):Venezuela detains six military, police officials: family members, activists
CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan authorities have arrested six members of the country’s military and police forces over the weekend, according to relatives of the detainees and human rights activists, as President Nicolas Maduro seeks to weed out dissent.
Air Force Brigade General Miguel Sisco Mora was arrested Friday afternoon in a parking lot in Guatire, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of the capital Caracas, his daughter Stephanie Sisco said. Navy Corvette Captain Rafael Costa was detained on Friday in nearby Guarenas, according to his wife Waleska Perez.
“We demand that the government provide us with information about his whereabouts,” Stephanie Sisco wrote on Twitter on Saturday.
The arrests come nearly two months after a failed uprising against Maduro called by opposition leader Juan Guaido, the head of the opposition-controlled National Assembly who in January invoked the constitution to assume a rival interim presidency and has called on the armed forces to join his cause.
They also come on the heels of a visit to Venezuela by U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet, who on Friday called on Maduro to release prisoners arrested for peacefully protesting. Maduro, whose 2018 re-election has been widely denounced as illegitimate, said he would take the U.N.’s concerns seriously.
Human rights group Penal Forum had previously said that two retired Air Force colonels had been arrested in Caracas on Friday afternoon while two high ranking officials from Venezuela’s CICPC forensic police unit were arrested in Guatire, according to human rights lawyer Tamara Suju.
Neither Venezuela’s Information Ministry nor the Chief Prosecutor’s office responded to requests for comment on the six detentions on Sunday.
According to Penal Forum, some 700 people are detained for political reasons in Venezuela, including about 100 members of the military.
Maduro’s government has denied it holds political prisoners, and frequently accuses the opposition of fomenting violence. Maduro refers to Guaido as a puppet of the United States seeking to oust him in a coup.
Also according to REUTERS, Venezuelans lodged some 18,400 asylum applications from January through May, roughly twice as many as during the same period in 2018, making them the nationality with the second highest number of applications in Europe after Syrians.
Announcement: The public hearing for the #FOIA appeal launched by stefania maurizi@SMaurizi at the #UpperTribunal to defend the right of the Press to obtain the full documents on the @wikileaks founder, journalist and publisher Julian Assange will be held in #London, 1st July 10.30 am, Field House, 15 Breams Building, EC4A 1DZ. If you want to attend it, you're very welcome.
Michelle Bechelet has now officially installed human-rights observers in Venezuela.
Update SAT 22. June 2019 (vf):U.N. rights chief Bachelet urges Venezuela to release prisoners
MAIQUETIA, Venezuela, 22 Jun (Reuters - Corina Pons, Shaylim Castro) - U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet on Friday urged Venezuela’s government to release prisoners who were arrested for peacefully protesting, and confirmed that a delegation would remain in the country to monitor the human rights situation.
Bachelet, a former Chilean president who arrived in Caracas on Wednesday for a three-day visit, met with President Nicolas Maduro and opposition leader Juan Guaido, as well as activists and victims of human rights violations.
“It was deeply painful to hear the desire of the victims, of their families, to obtain justice in the face of serious human rights violations,” said Bachelet in a press conference at the Maiquetia international airport before leaving Venezuela.
“I hope that our evaluation, our cooperation, and our assistance will help reinforce the prevention of torture and access to justice in Venezuela.”
Bachelet’s visit, at the government’s invitation, came ahead of the opening on Monday of a three-week session of the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Western nations are expected to use the session to heap criticism on Maduro, amid the economic meltdown in his nation that has triggered the flight of some 4 million refugees.
Bachelet, in a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council in March, said Venezuelan security forces, backed by pro-government militias, had quashed peaceful protests with excessive use of force, killings and torture.
Guaido, head of the opposition-controlled legislature, assumed a rival interim presidency in January, denouncing Maduro as an usurper who had secured re-election last year in a vote widely considered fraudulent.
Earlier on Friday, Guaido told reporters that two members of Bachelet’s team would remain in Venezuela to investigate issues relating to chronic shortages of food and medicine, along with allegations the Maduro administration has violated human rights while cracking down on the opposition.
Maduro, a socialist who says he is the victim of an attempted U.S.-led coup, retains the support of the armed forces and controls state functions.
An impressive double from striker Darwin Machis helped Venezuela book their place in the Copa America quarter-finals with a comfortable 3-1 win over Bolivia on Saturday, qualifying as runners-up in Group A behind Brazil
#Chile offers 'democratic responsibility visa' to Venezuelan migrants.The visa can be requested as of Monday. It will allow Venezuelans fleeing their crisis-hit country to stay in #Chile for one year, and can be extended for an additional 12 months.
The genocide directed against indigenus people in the USA continues and leads also to a steeply rising rate of suicides.By YDN - 23. June 2019
The U.S. suicide rate is up 33% since 1999, but for Native American women and men, the increase is even greater: 139% and 71%, respectively, according to an analysis out this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.
Experts who study Native American suicide blame higher rates of poverty, substance abuse and unemployment as well as geographical isolation, which can make it difficult for people to access mental health care.
Update 23. 06. 2019: Ethiopia Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the former spy-chief of the country who was installed by an US-led soft coup, says country's armed forces chief of staff, General Seare Mekonnen, has been shot following unrest in the northern Amhara region. READ
Update 22. 06. 2019: Breaking: An attack against officials in Bahir Dar / Amhara started at 16:00 local time and the news had already reached Finfinnee 20 minutes later. The attack against the Chief of Staff of the Army was then conducted at 21:00 local time.
Confirmed 4 senior officials killed in an attempted coup
• General Seare Mekonnen - Army Chief
• General Gezai Abera - Senior Military General
• Ambachew Mekonnen(PhD) - President, Amhara Regional State
• Ezez Wasie - Senior adviser of the president
High time that peaceful Oromiya kicks out all these warmongers and establishes it own state independently.
Update 22. 06.2019: Despite all the horrors for the Oromo people, Ethiopia has been named as the world's most welcoming country. While it is true that especially the Oromo are very hospitable and friendly people, the governance makes sure that tourists don't venture into Oromiya or the Ogaden. Tourism under total surveillance. WATCH OUT
The horrors just got worse for the Oromo people, who struggle for their independence but do not even receive their constitutionally guaranteed autonomy.
Oromia includes the capital Finfinne (Addis Ababa) and that poses a specific problem to the freedom struggle of the Oromo people.
By OSG - 1. July 2019
When Abiy Ahmed was brought to power in an US-led soft-coup, the trained and actively operating spy-chief sold himself to the international community and their mainstream media as an ethnic Oromo, making many believe the previous dictatorship and the crisis for the century-long oppressed Oromo people would have come with his selection finally to an end. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The extra-judicial killing and arbitrary arrest of alleged Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) supporters since December 2018 has created a situation in Oromia very similar to that in 1991-2 when thousands of OLF supporters were killed and scores of thousands detained and tortured.
The good will and support for Ethiopia from the international community helped to maintain the abusive regime of previous prime minister Meles Zenawi, then in power. The current silence about the killings and widespread imprisonment is eerily reminiscent of that time.
Many reports have been sent to the Oromia Support Group Australia (OSG) since December 2018 and this report is a summary of the information received by OSG, the Oromo organization that recently received UN special consultative status and is able to separate propaganda from facts.
This report includes information on about 163 extra-judicial killings and the arbitrary detention of at least 933 persons - all due to their alleged support for the Oromo Liberation Front, which officially returned to Ethiopia in September 2018.
Catastrophic breaking news: 537 vultures found poisoned in dark day for Botswana conservation
It also shows that wildlife protection in Botswana can't be trusted and Elephant sport-hunting as well as culling must be banned again. Only the San and other aboriginal hunters must retain their ancient rights to hunt within their traditional culture for their sustainance.
Botswana’s Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) has announced only today that they had recently identified a poisoning site with 537 dead vultures (comprising 5 species) and also found two tawny eagles killed by the strong poison.
The site of the mass poisoning was identified as Wildlife Management Area CT 1 in the Central District. This former trophy hunting area is close to the Botwana and Zimbabwe border, near Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. Three poached elephant carcasses were laced with poison, which led to the vulture deaths.
If the ocean was an economy, it would be the seventh largest in the world.
But instead of fostering it as a resource, humans are jeopardising its future – using it as a garbage dump and fishing it dry.
Broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough has warned our waters are facing the biggest threat in their history, with industrial overfishing putting the entire ecosystem at risk. Seafood is a key source of protein for people around the world, but nearly 90% of the world’s marine fish stocks are now fully exploited, overexploited or depleted, according to Friends of Ocean Action, a group of more than 50 global leaders, convened by the World Economic Forum and World Resources Institute.
Elephant Holocaust: Africa’s giants are losing ground faster than ever
N.B.: It also shows that the previous wildlife protection and especially the "conservation" schemes didn't work and can't be trusted. Elephant sport-hunting as well as culling must be banned again. Only the San and other aboriginal hunters must retain their ancient rights to hunt within their traditional culture for their sustainance.
Elephant populations continue to decline alarmingly due to rampant poaching, the continuation of the ivory trade and unregulated trophy hunting
In 2016, a continent-wide census revealed that in just seven years one third of Africa’s elephants had been wiped out. This was largely due to rampant poaching driven by the global desire for ivory, habitat loss as human encroachment into natural wilderness expanded, the trade in live elephants for global zoos and circuses, and the continuation of unregulated trophy hunting. Left unchecked it could be less than a decade before African elephants are extinct in the wild.
A Titan II missile in a silo at the Titan Missile Museum in Green Valley, Ariz. Photo | Department of Defense
Israel is one of only five nations in the world that refuse to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, an international treaty aimed at ending the proliferation of nuclear weapons and achieving global nuclear disarmament.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) — an international watchdog organization focusing on conflicts, the arms trade and nuclear proliferation — released a new report on Monday that claimed that Israel has nearly a hundred nuclear warheads, more than previously thought.
The SIPRI report described Israel’s nuclear arsenal as follows: 30 gravity bombs capable of delivering nuclear weapons by fighter jets; an additional 50 warheads that can be delivered by land-based ballistic missiles; and an unknown number of nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missiles that would grant Israel a sea-based second-strike capability.
LONDON—On Friday morning I was in a small courtroom at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London. Julian Assange, held in Belmarsh Prison and dressed in a pale-blue prison shirt, appeared on a video screen directly in front of me. Assange, his gray hair and beard neatly trimmed, slipped on heavy, dark-frame glasses at the start of the proceedings. He listened intently as Ben Brandon, the prosecutor, seated at a narrow wooden table, listed the crimes he allegedly had committed and called for his extradition to the United States to face charges that could result in a sentence of 175 years. The charges include the release of unredacted classified material that posed a “grave” threat to “human intelligence sources” and “the largest compromises of confidential information in the history of the United States.” After the prosecutor’s presentation, Assange’s attorney, Mark Summers, seated at the same table, called the charges “an outrageous and full-frontal assault on journalistic rights.”
Most of us who have followed the long persecution of Assange expected this moment, but it was nevertheless deeply unsettling, the opening of the final act in a Greek tragedy where the hero, cursed by fortuna, or fate, confronts the dark forces from which there is no escape.
Simultaneously, as awareness over its horrific health and privacy impacts is rising, many places are issuing moratoriums on it or banning it, such as the entire nation of Belgium, the city of Vaud (Switzerland) and San Francisco (USA).
Radiofrequency radiation (RF or RFR) and electromagnetic fields (EMF) are being increasingly recognized as new types of pollution – environmental pollution.
Here are 13 reasons exposing the 5G dangers, which could turn into an unmitigated health and privacy catastrophe if enough people don’t rise up to stop it.
Comprising one-fifth of the earth’s population, China consumes more than a third of the fish pulled from the planet’s waters. With its demand outpacing supply, fisheries from China have joined other nations and set their eyes and their nets on African waters without concern for sovereignty or law.
Africans struggling to emerge from poverty are paying the price for these predations. Mozambique alone has lost 300,000 badly-needed jobs and as much as $3.3 billion in revenue – 10 times the amount East African nations make in legally licensing fishing by foreign vessels, according to the non-profit Stop Illegal Fishing.
Newly published aerial surveys—out just weeks after the country lifted its hunting ban—indicate that poaching is on the rise in Botswana.
Botswana, which has a strong history of wildlife conservation, is home to about a third of Africa’s savanna elephants. Photograph by Beverly Joubert, Nat Geo Image Collection AnimalsWildlife Watch
By Dina Fine Maron (*) - NatGeo - 13. June 2019
Botswana—widely considered a safe haven for elephants in Africa—appears to be suffering from its own surge in poaching, according to aerial survey work published today in the journal Current Biology.“We have a significant poaching problem—let’s deal with it,” says Mike Chase, who, as the director of the Botswana-based nonprofit Elephants Without Borders, led the latest aerial survey study as well as earlier elephant counts, including the 18-country Great Elephant Census.“We were warned by conservationists in other countries that the poachers would eventually come down to Botswana, and now they’re here,” he says.Botswana is estimated to be home to more than 130,000 savanna elephants—about a third of Africa’s remaining population. Until recently, the southern African country had largely escaped the scourge of elephant killings for ivory, still in high demand in China and elsewhere. (Read about how elephants fleeing poaching hotspots went to Botswana.
Study investigates how much climate change affects the risk of armed conflict
Climate-related hazards, such as droughts, can cause economic shocks to agricultural communities, which may heighten the risk of armed conflict, according to a new Stanford-led study. Credit: Pablo Tosco/Oxfam
Intensifying climate change will increase the future risk of violent armed conflict within countries, according to a study published today in the journal Nature. Synthesizing views across experts, the study estimates climate has influenced between 3% and 20% of armed conflict risk over the last century and that the influence will likely increase dramatically.
In a scenario with 4 degrees Celsius of warming (approximately the path we're on if societies do not substantially reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases), the influence of climate on conflicts would increase more than five times, leaping to a 26% chance of a substantial increase in conflict risk, according to the study. Even in a scenario of 2 degrees Celsius of warming beyond preindustrial levels—the stated goal of the Paris Climate Agreement¬ - the influence of climate on conflicts would more than double, rising to a 13% chance.
The Pentagon is the “single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world,” according to a new study about climate change that accuses the Trump administration of being in “various modes of denial” about it.
The report, from Brown University’s ‘Costs of War’ project, focuses specifically on "post-9/11 wars" and their impact on emissions. It estimates the US military has been responsible for 1,212 million metric tons of greenhouse gases between 2001 and 2017. Emissions from “overseas contingency operations” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria accounted for more than 400 million metric tons of CO2. In 2017 alone, the report says, “the Pentagon's emissions were greater than all emissions from Sweden or Denmark.”
Zimbabwe May Withdraw From Endangered-Species Deal to Sell $300 Million of Ivory
A Zimbabwe National Parks game ranger holds an elephant ivory tusk in the country's ivory vault in Harare, on June 2, 2016.Photographer: Jekesai Njikizana /AFP via Getty Images
By Ray Ndlovu
Frustration is growing over sales ban, wildlife chief says
Japan has shown interest in buying country’s stockpile
Zimbabwe may consider withdrawing from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) because the organization won’t allow it to sell its ivory stockpile.
The southern African nation with the world second-largest population of elephants has a stockpile of tusks worth an estimated $300 million and needs the revenue, Fulton Mangwanya, director-general of the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, told lawmakers in the capital, Harare on Monday.
While CITES has banned international ivory sales to curb poaching, frustration is growing over the fact that “other countries are prescribing how we should handle our animals,” Mangwanya told a parliamentary committee on environment and tourism. Withdrawing from CITES would have the support of neighbors Botswana, Zambia and Namibia, which all have large elephant populations of their own, he said.
President Jair Bolsonaro appears intent on decriminalizing Amazon deforestation, ending most fines, straitjacketing law enforcement, and gutting environmental agencies with mass firings. by Sue Branford and Thais Borges on 10 June 2019
The Bolsonaro administration has launched policies that undermine IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, and ICMBio (The Chico Mendes Institute) which protects the nation’s federal conservation units, by effectively dismantling environmental law enforcement and allowing deforestation to proceed unchecked.
Fines imposed for illegal deforestation between Jan. 1 and May 15 this year were down 34 percent from the same period in 2018, the largest percentage drop ever recorded. It was also smallest number of fines ever imposed (850), compared to 1,290 in the same period last year.
Government seizures of illegally harvested timber fell even more precipitously, with just 40 cubic meters (1,410 cubic feet), equal to 10 large trees, confiscated in the first four months of 2019. By contrast, 25,000 cubic meters (883,000 cubic feet) of illegal timber were seized in 2018. IBAMA is now required to announce in advance the time and location of all its planned raids on illegal loggers.
Bolsonaro has defanged deforestation enforcement further by firing or not replacing top environmental officials. This includes 21 out of 27 IBAMA state superintendents responsible for imposing most of the deforestation fines. Also, 47 of Brazil’s conservation units now lack directors, leaving a combined area greater than the size of England without conservation leadership.
Terrestrial wildlife is being hunted for consumption by humans in the tropics at an unprecedented rate, and the often unsustainable nature of this harvest has profound implications not only for biodiversity and ecosystem function, but also for human livelihoods. Whilst the nature and impacts of this practice have been studied in numerous contexts and localities, a comprehensive treatment of the social, economic, and environmental determinants of both hunter decision-making and hunting outcomes has been lacking. In this review we discuss influences of hunting methods and effort on the types of animals caught, the efficiency of harvest, and the implications of these factors for sustainability. We highlight gaps in current understanding, and identify the most important data requirements. Our approach provides a framework for the design of future studies into wild meat hunting and its impacts, promoting the efficient targeting of priority areas of research.
