Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Two members of the occupy movement disrupted the final press briefing of the United Nations Rio+20 Earth Summit on Sustainable Development, denouncing the final document as not representative of the voices in struggle against the degradation of the environment and oppression. Occupy Wall Street member Alexandre Carvalho and Ocupa Sampa Maryana Sant' Ana infiltrated the media conference room P3 - 7 with no press credentials, sat close to the panelists, and waited until the brief started, at 2pm.

When one of the speakers started his address, state that the cause of environmental degradation and the crash of the world economy wasn't due to banks but instead to the failure of governments to take action, the two activists took to the center of the room, grabbed two flowers that were decorating the front of the panel, and said: “They do not represent us! We want a real democracy! We are here to announce a new time; a time of imagination, poetry and no ecocide! NO GENERATIONAL GENOCIDE!” when they were seized and forced out of the room by UN personnel.

The Rio+20 final document was marked by general frustration, with many voices denouncing its lack of ambition, urgency, and real commitment to the environment. While leaders of nation-states paid lip service to the document, members of civil society and NGOs threatened to remove their support to the final statement.

“Corporate take over of the UN is undermining the real solutions coming from grassroots social movements” , said Sant'Ana. “The attempt to market green capitalism as the solution to the world's environmental problems is a farce – the solution is in international solidarity, open source technologies, and a new world consciousness.

A people's petition and the Open Source Imperative, foundational statements, can be found here: www.occupytheearth.net.

For more on Ocupa Rio and the Rio Earth Summit, see here.

Add Yourself to the National Do Not Kill List.

In response to the establishment of a national 'kill list' and the expansion of the United States' predator drone program, the National Agency for Ethical Drone-Human Interactions has launched the Do Not Kill Registry. Adding your name to the registry will assist us in avoiding accidental casualties in our mission to make the world a safe place for Democracy and Free Enterprise. You can read more about the agency and our mission by clicking here.

Wall Street recruits young, just out of college computer science majors and mathematicians to become “quants” whose skills are used among other things to predict when pension funds are going to make huge trades so that Wall Street can jump in ahead of them and do deals effectively raising the price the pension fund must pay or lowering the profit they might make.....

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via Occupy Our Homes. Actions in support of the Cruz family and other communities fighting foreclosures are underway in Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Washington, DC, and more. For more information, checkout this event page.

Since April 30, Occupy Homes MN has been working with the Cruz family, whose home went into foreclosure when PNC Bank mishandled an online payment. Although PNC executives have acknowledged their error and repeatedly told Cruz supporters that they are working on a solution, their actions have shown the opposite. They have refused to work with the family, instead working with Freddie Mac and the city of Minneapolis to launch a series of costly police raids against home, resulting in 23 arrests in less than a week. Despite ongoing protests, PNC still thinks we’ll go away if they ignore us long enough. It’s time to show them otherwise: on June 19, Alejandra and David Cruz will be travelling along with a team of supporters to PNC’s Pittsburgh headquarters to hand-deliver their modification documents and demand a meeting with CEO Jim Rohr! Occupy Homes MN is calling for a national day of action on PNC to coincide with the Cruz’s arrival on Thursday, June 21.

MORE ON THE CRUZ FAMILY:

The Cruz family home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, went into foreclosure in 2011 when PNC failed to withdraw an online mortgage payment and then demanded two months’ payment as punishment. Unable to pay more than the current month’s installment, the family home fell into foreclosure.

After their home fell into foreclosure, the Cruzes began working with a local nonprofit that was supposed to be working out a loan modification. In February, without warning an agent of the bank came to the house and told them they had 48 hours to leave the property, shocking the family and ignoring their right to a legal process.

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In commemoration of Juneteenth, the 19th of June, which annually marks the abolition of slavery in the United States of America, and in the interest of creating deeper ties with the communities that make up this amazing city, we are working alongside community organizers in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn to organize a pop-up educative event on Saturday, June 23rd 2012.

We believe that it is essential to work and learn in tandem with the communities that have been fighting the remnants of slavery for a very long time. Let us use education to help create the space for continued efforts towards full emancipation. We will be drawing on the experiences and knowledge of Bed-Stuy residents to bring the learning experience into the open air, and for communities to learn from communities. Bed-Stuy is an amazing neighborhood with a long dynamic history of activism and culture. Even so, several institutions are being closed in this neighborhood, including a community health clinic, a couple of schools, and the historic #1 Slave Theater.

We welcome interactive classes, facilitated discussions, and performances that include such topics as:

• Black/African American/Afro Caribbean/Africana histories
• oration, writing, music, art, dance, theater, and other cultural forms
• prison/mass incarceration
• decolonization and anti-racism
• know your rights workshops
• aims and lessons of community control
• love, relationships, and resolving interpersonal conflicts
• urban agriculture/gardening
• resisting foreclosure and gentrification
• economics - loan modification, debt and racism, subprime mortgage crisis, etc.

We write to invite you, especially those living in or near the area, to participate in this exciting community-initiated exercise in horizontal pedagogy. Please get in touch with us at maydayfreeu@gmail.com to share how you would like to support this project in creating vibrant, relevant, and responsive community education.

What: Free Bed-Stuy pop-up Free University
When: June 23rd, 12:00pm-5:00pm
Where : Herbert Von King Park on Tompkins Avenue

in summery solidarity, Free University NYC