tagged w/ Killing Fields
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Contrary to the throbbing drama of “The Killing Fields,” Roland Joffe’s 1984 feature on the unfathomably brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, “Enemies of the People” is a decidedly still and reflective record of the period. This is not to suggest that it is any less powerful.Contrary to the throbbing drama of “The Killing Fields,” Roland... more
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writa
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added this
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1 year ago
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"Cheap meat has become a way of life in much of Europe, but the full price is being paid across Latin America as vast soya plantations and their attendant chemicals lead to poisonings and violence. "
Excerpt:
"The film, Killing Fields: the battle to feed factory farms – produced by a coalition of pressure groups including Friends of the Earth, Food and Water Watch and with European coordination by Via Campesina, – documents the experiences of some of those caught up in Paraguay's growing conflict over soy farming and reveals, for the first time, how intensive animal farming across the EU, including the UK, is fuelling the problem.
Campaigners plan to use the film to highlight the 'unsustainable' nature of modern food production, and to spearhead efforts to raise awareness of the largely hidden cost of the factory farming systems supplying much of Europe's cheap meat and dairy produce."
More:
"Industrial scale soy production, particularly for genetically modified (GM) crops – some 90 per cent of Paraguay's soy is now thought to be GM – is dependent on the frequent application of powerful pesticides and other agri-chemicals which have been linked to environmental degradation and a host of negative health impacts on people living near to soy farms.
Crop spraying has polluted important water sources in many rural regions, say campaigners, poisoning both domestic and wild animals, threatening plant life, and resulting in a number of health problems in people, including diarrhoea, vomiting, genetic malformations, headaches, loss of sight and even death.
The film contains harrowing testimony from Petrona Villaboa, who lives in Pirapey, whose son Silvano died after being sprayed with toxic chemicals on a soy plantation.
Statistics compiled by pressure groups suggest that as much as 23 million litres of pesticides and herbicides are sprayed in Paraguay each year, including several that have been classified by the World Health Organisation as being 'extremely hazardous'."
This is so sad and scary.
What is the world doing about this?
The meat consumption in America as in Europe is devastating our Nature at an alarming rate.
The whole world has to rethink the consumption of meat as it causes deforestation, hunger, poverty, desertification, water contamination, water scarcity, species extinction and the subjugation of the indigenous people.
Join Organic:
http://current.com/groups/organicgreen/"Cheap meat has become a way of life in much of Europe, but the full price is... more
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Curtain raises again on Jacques Verges
By Stephen Kurczy
PHNOM PENH - He requests French wine - which can cost up to US$162 a bottle at the Raffles Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh - but the legendary and controversial French attorney Jacques Verges has to settle for $8 glasses of house red when he stays at impoverished Cambodia's swankiest hotel.
He's a celebrity lawyer whose fame now equals that of some of his most notorious clients; and he gained it by defending the indefensible. His abysmal win rate might embarrass a lesser personality - before France abolished the death penalty in 1981, he had earned the nickname "Monsieur Guillotine" - but not Verges.
Verges claims he can't defend his client and fellow Sorbonne student, former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan, until all evidence against is translated into French. But Verges' membership in the Paris Bar states he is comfortable working in French and English. Critics have called this, and other legal maneuvers, blatant efforts to stall the court.
The 83-year-old denies that genocide occurred in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge's rule from 1975 to 1979, when approximately 1.7 million perished, arguing that most died of starvation and disease as a result of an American embargo. But Verges has refused to visit the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), an archive of the crimes committed by the ultra-Maoist regime in 200 prisons and 20,000 mass graves across Cambodia.
He has befriended terrorists and mass murderers across the globe, but so far has avoided victims of the Khmer Rouge.
"He's afraid of me," Youk Chhang, director of the DC-Cam, says of Verges. "He's afraid that my reaction would damage his argument."
Excluding Verges, every defense attorney at the ECCC has met with Chhang and utilized DC-Cam, the world's largest repository of documents on the Khmer Rouge with more than 650,000 papers and 6,000 photographs from the Khmer Rouge's rule between 1975 and 1979.
Chhang witnessed his sister's disembowelment after she was accused of stealing rice. He says Verges is reticent to face someone like himself, who has come to terms with his family members' murder and can calmly and convincingly discuss the regime's atrocities.Curtain raises again on Jacques Verges
By Stephen Kurczy
PHNOM PENH - He requests... more
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The area near Angkor Wat, the world’s largest religious structure and one of the most spectacular architectural wonders, was used as one of 300 “killing fields” by Cambodia’s genocidal dictator Pol Pot.
On January 7, monks chanted at Angkor Wat, other temples and “killing fields” throughout Cambodia to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of Pol Pot’s horrific regime – one of history’s worst.
Pol Pot's infamous Khmer Rouge regime killed an estimated 1.7 million people – more than one-fifth of Cambodia’s population -- in the late 1970’s. They were either murdered outright, or died from forced labor and starvation.
“Massacres occurred in the vicinity of Angkor Wat, many in its Siem Reap province,” Ben Kiernan, Founding Director of Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program told me. "The precise total number of 'killing fields' across Cambodia is unknown, but probably up to three hundred."The area near Angkor Wat, the world’s largest religious structure and one of the... more
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Thousands of Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" marked 30 years on Wednesday since the fall of Pol Pot's ultra-Maoist regime, blamed for the deaths of 1.7 million people. A handful of aging and infirm leaders from the movement are being tried at a joint Cambodian-United Nations tribunal three decades after their disastrous attempt to create an agrarian utopia ended.Thousands of Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" marked... more
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