U.S. war resister and mother of three scheduled for deportation Tuesday
A U.S. war resister living in Toronto is scheduled to be deported Tuesday after losing a recent appeal to remain in Canada.
Kim Rivera served in Iraq with the American military in 2006 but moved to Canada the following year after she refused redeployment. She has been living in Ontario with her husband and three children, including a six-week-old girl who was born in Canada.
Rivera told her appeal hearing earlier this month that her experience in Iraq left her emotionally scarred and unable to face another tour of duty.
Last week, Christopher Teske - who had been living in British Columbia for two years -
exhausted his last appeal and was ordered to leave Canada.
War resisters sent back to the U.S. fear a fate like the one that awaited Robin Long, who was sentenced to 15 months in prison after being deported.
We at The Maoist Rebel News are disapointed in Canada for breaking its tradition of supporting war resisters. We here are just wondering if it has anyhting to do with the Conservative goverment and its history of blindly supporting Bush administration wishes. Canada is supposed to be haven for thse who resist violence and war. Now it appears that is no longer so.
Man, 93, Freezes to Death in Home
A 93-year-old man froze to death inside his home just days after the municipal power company restricted his use of electricity because of unpaid bills, officials said.
Marvin Schur died "a slow, painful death," said Kanu Virani, Oakland County's deputy chief medical examiner, who performed the autopsy.
Neighbours discovered Schur's body on Jan. 17. They said the indoor temperature was below zero Celsius at the time, the Bay City Times reported Monday.
"Hypothermia shuts the whole system down, slowly," Virani said. "It's not easy to die from hypothermia without first realizing your fingers and toes feel like they're burning."
Schur owed Bay City Electric Light & Power more than $1,000 in unpaid electric bills, Bay City manager Robert Belleman told The Associated Press on Monday.
A city utility worker had installed a "limiter" device to restrict the use of electricity at Schur's home on Jan. 13, Belleman said. The device limits power reaching a home and blows out like a fuse if consumption rises past a set level. Power is not restored until the device is reset.
The limiter was tripped sometime between the time of installation and the discovery of Schur's body, Belleman said. He didn't know if anyone had made personal contact with Schur to explain how the device works.
Schur's body was discovered by neighbour George Pauwels.
"His furnace was not running, the insides of his windows were full of ice the morning we found him," Pauwels told the newspaper.
Belleman said city workers keep the limiter on houses for 10 days, then shut off power entirely if the homeowner hasn't paid utility bills or arranged to do so.
He said Bay City Electric Light & Power's policies will be reviewed, but he didn't believe the city did anything wrong.
"I've said this before and some of my colleagues have said this: Neighbours need to keep an eye on neighbours," Belleman said. "When they think there's something wrong, they should contact the appropriate agency or city department."
Schur had no children and his wife had died several years ago.
Bay City is on Saginaw Bay, just north of the city of Saginaw in central Michigan.
This is disguesting, this is in human. To think a humanbeing died simply because they were unable to pay a bill. A god damned human life for a hydro bill. A human being who couldn't even work. You know I can hear the capitalist defenders now, "if we let this guy off the hook they will all start doing it."
This Bay City Electric Light & Power should burn in hell. Or freeze would be better.
Issue of Peguis First Nation accepting $118M settlement up in air
In Winnipeg A vote on whether to accept the largest land claim settlement in Canadian history was declared invalid Sunday because not enough ballots were cast.
The Peguis First Nation has 4,234 band members who were eligible to participate in the weekend referendum, but only 1,470 showed up. That represented 38 per cent of the population, and federal rules said that 51 per cent needed to vote.
Chief Glen Hudson said he was disappointed, though the results were overwhelmingly in support of accepting the treaty, 1368 votes in favour to 102 against.
"Now we have more time to talk to people and obviously to hear their concerns on the agreement itself," he said.
At issue was whether they wanted to accept a $127 million settlement with the government of Canada that included individual payments of $1,000 to eligible, adult band members.
The First Nation as a whole would receive $118 million in tightly controlled community trusts for education, business loans and community infrastructure projects.
But many band members said they deliberately chose not to vote - some because they felt they didn't have enough information and some because they believed children in the community should also get their cut of the individual payments.
"Don't Vote: Stand up for the Children," read one sign on the side of a house on the reserve, 220 km north of Winnipeg.
"It's forgetting about the children, the ones that are under 18," band member Stuart Stevenson told a national news agency. "I think it should be about the children - the younger generation."
But Darlene Bird, a band councillor, said she hopes the deal will eventually go through.
"It's an economic opportunity - we can address housing, we can address education," she said. "It's not just the children right now. It's the children of generations to come."
Grand Rapids Chief Ovide Mercredi, who is a lawyer, said he thinks the band members should hold out for a better deal.
"The value of the land is more than what the government is offering. This was prime property at the time that the treaty was made, and the value of the land has increased over the years."
Hudson said another vote will be scheduled for July, adding he hopes it will give people on the reserve more time to understand the deal.
He said each month that the deal goes unsigned, the band loses $500,000 in interest.
The Peguis territory was seized by Ottawa following unresolved land disputes between 1874 and 1906.
Band members were forced to leave the former St. Peter's reserve near Selkirk, Man., an area estimated to be 31,566 hectares.
NDF-EV: Waging revolution the best alternative to deteriorating conditions of calamities, corruption, foreign domination and war under Arroyo regime
The National Democratic Front-Eastern Visayas today expressed distress at the increasingly dire straits of the people this 2009 under the Arroyo regime and said that waging revolution is the best way for fundamental changes. Even in the first month of this year, the real plight of the people is glaringly clear,” said NDF-EV spokesperson Fr. Santiago Salas. The people of Northern Samar and Eastern Samar have been wallowing for two straight months in the misery of natural calamity, compounded by the ineptitude of the Arroyo regime. Such calamities were also in the first place made possible or at the very least worsened by unsound, pro-imperialist and anti-people policies being pushed by the regime.
The NDF-EV extends the deepest sympathies to the people of Northern and Eastern Samar who are suffering from widespread flooding. The revolutionary movement is helping those affected, especially within the scope of the people's democratic government. We go among the people to know their real conditions, help in organizing relief and rehabilitation efforts, and advise the people to struggle against the conditions that lead to and aggravate such natural calamities.
Fr. Salas added that recent pronouncements of the Arroyo government show that the people's ordeal is not over but could only turn for the worse. Natural calamities are made worse by man-made conditions, as well as add further grief to the people who are already suffering under a government that is corrupt, subservient to foreign interests and warlike. The Arroyo government's economic policies lead to social and environmental degradation. There is the push for widespread mining and logging, as well as an agricultural program promoting plantation farming of crops for export. These have long been criticized for leading to landlessness and the ransacking of the national patrimony, as well as environmental destruction that has led to thousands of deaths in the region in various natural disasters beginning with the 1991 Ormoc flashflood.
The NDF-EV spokesperson also assailed the Arroyo government's ineptitude as shown by the marked failure to prepare as well as respond to calamities. “Dozens of storms pass the region every year. Yet the reactionary government is woefully unprepared because it is more used to robbing and abusing the people rather than helping them. Such disasters worsen the people's poverty and misery, in a region that is materially rich but where the majority of the people are landless and jobless. The peak of the government's callousness is expressed in the military's recruitment drive to increase the paramilitary CAFGU for a bloody all-out war, even while the people in wide swathes of Samar are still struggling to recover from disaster.
The people's abject conditions further inflame them against the Arroyo regime, which they already want to end and bring to justice, as well as strengthen their desire to wage revolution and achieve genuine change.
Reference:Roy Santos, NDF-EV
Media OfficerContact: NDF-EV
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