Standing Rock Protest: Indigenous campaigners celebrate 'historic decision' to deny permission to pipeline
Some believe the project is now in a 'state of limbo' until Donald Trump assumes office.Andrew Buncombe New York
Indigenous protesters and their supporters celebrated a dramatic victory after an agency of the US Department of Defence announced it had turned down permission for a controversial pipeline passing close to a Sioux reservation.
After the Army Corps of Engineers said on Sunday afternoon it would not permit the North Dakota Access Pipeline to pass under Lake Oahe, a reservoir formed by a dam on the Missouri River, activists said the decision was a stunning win for grassroots activism that had captured the imagination of people across the country.
“It was the sheer determination that was shown, the sheer numbers of people who have come to the site, including the veterans, who came today,” Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, told The Independent.
Philippines vice-president resigns from cabinet over 'differences' with Rodrigo Duterte
Former human rights lawyer Leni Robredo condemns president’s bloody war on drug and plans to reimpose death penalty
The vice-president of the Philippine resigned from a cabinet post on Monday, citing “major differences in principles and values” with President Rodrigo Duterte and an unspecified plot to remove her from the vice presidency.
Leni Robredo, a human rights lawyer and respected political newcomer, tendered her resignation as housing secretary in a letter to the president but will stay on in her elected post as vice-president.
In the Philippines, presidents and vice-presidents are elected separately and have often come from rival political parties, as is the case with Duterte and Robredo.
Desperation is rife among Australia's indigenous peoples
Indigenous peoples are still doing poorly in wealthy Australia, as a new government report shows. And suicide and self-harm are becoming more and more prevalent.
Almost one-third of indigenous Australians suffer serious psychological problems. Instances of self-inflicted wounds have increased by 56 percent over the last 10 to 15 years, arrests by 77 percent. Suicides among male Aboriginal people between the ages of 25 and 29 number 90.8 for every 100,000 residents - the highest rate in the world. Just recently, reports of a wave of some 19 suicides within three months in northern Western Australia shocked the nation; the youngest victim was a 10-year-old girl.
These high suicide and self-mutilation rates are viewed by experts as a symptom of the discrimination that Aboriginal people face: Australia's 520,000 indigenous people, who make up 2.5 percent of the country's total population of 21 million (according to the 2011 census), are far less likely to finish school, have above-average chances of becoming addicted to alcohol or drugs and live an average of 10 years less than the rest of the population.
05 December 2016 - 08H25
Sea Shepherd ships leave to battle Japanese whaling fleet
SYDNEY (AFP) -
Two ships have left Australia bound for the freezing Southern Ocean to confront the Japanese whaling fleet in an annual high-seas battle, environmental activist group Sea Shepherd said Monday.
The organisation's flagship Steve Irwin departed for Antarctic waters along with fast new patrol vessel Ocean Warrior, built with financial support from the Dutch, British and Swedish lotteries.
It has a powerful water cannon and is capable of outrunning the whalers, which an official at Japan's Fisheries Agency said would be protected by a fleet of patrol boats.
"Sea Shepherd has engaged in repeated acts of sabotage over the years. Those actions threaten the lives of Japanese crew members and we cannot tolerate it," said the official, who declined to give his name.
Aleppo: 7-year-old girl's Twitter account goes silent
Updated 0650 GMT (1450 HKT) December 5, 2016
Bana Alabed, a 7-year-old Syrian girl who captured the world's attention with heartbreaking Twitter posts about the bombing of Aleppo, disappeared from social media on Sunday.
The last message sent on the Twitter account Bana shares with her mother, Fatemah, was foreboding: "We are sure the army is capturing us now. We will see each other another day dear world. Bye.- Fatemah #Aleppo"
Her Twitter account was deleted and nobody knows why.
Bana, who had more than 100,000 followers, has tweeted dire messages before, as when she said on November 27: "Tonight we have no house, it's bombed and I got in rubble. I saw deaths and I almost died."
Pizzagate: Man opens fire in Washington restaurant
Man fires shots inside popular DC restaurant after arriving to self-investigate the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory.
A man who said he was investigating a conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of a pizza place has fired an assault rifle inside a Washington, DC, restaurant injuring no one, police and news reports said.
Metropolitan Police Department spokeswoman Aquita Brown said police received a call on Sunday afternoon about a male with a weapon on Connecticut Avenue.
Edgar Maddison Welch, 28, of Salisbury, North Carolina, walked into Comet Ping Pong and pointed a firearm in the direction of a restaurant employee, the Washington Post reported.
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