Monthly Archive for October, 2010

REFLECTION FROM THE ATLANTIC LIFE COMMUNITY RETREAT

by Martha Hennessy

Earlier this fall the Atlantic Life Community held a Labor Day weekend retreat at the Romero Center of St. Joseph’s Parish in Camden, New Jersey. Camden, scorned among many other great, fallen American cities, struggles to regain it’s dignity and right means of livelihood after moving from a war economy of the shipyards in the 1960s to very little economic opportunity today. The state has taken over failed school systems and local government from the people here. Yet we were heartened by the attempts of both St. Joseph’s and Sacred Heart parishes in the rebuilding and reclaiming of their neighborhoods.

7 NUCLEAR PROTESTERS PLEAD “NOT GUILTY”, 1 PLEADS “NO CONTEST”

Seven nuclear abolitionists, arrested for trespass last August as they sat in front of the locked gate of a plutonium processing facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), will plead their case to a jury picked from residents of Los Alamos, New Mexico, where The Bomb was born.

At a pretrial hearing October 21 in Los Alamos Magistrates Court, Magistrate Pat Casados set a trial date of Tuesday, February 8, 2011 for seven of the eight people arrested last August 6, the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Defendant Elias Kohn, a student at the University of Southern California, pled no contest and was sentenced to 60 days probation and fined $500.

Joan Staples, Director of the Tahoma Indian Center, blesses the five Disarm Now Plowshares before their arraignment. Photo by Leonard Eiger.

Five nuclear abolitionists who entered the U.S. Navy’s nuclear weapons storage depot in Washington State in November 2009 were arraigned Friday, October 8 in federal court in Tacoma, Washington.

Sr. Anne Montgomery, 83, of Redwood City, California; Fr. Bill “Bix” Bichsel, 82, of Tacoma, Washington; Susan Crane, 65, of Baltimore, Maryland; Lynne M. Greenwald, 61, of Tacoma, Washington; and Fr. Steve Kelly, 61, of Oakland, California, were each approved to represent themselves at trial on December 7, 2010.  They face up to ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted on the government’s charges of “conspiracy, trespass, destruction of property on a naval installation, and depredation of government property.”  The charges were handed down by a grand jury in early September 2010, ten months after their November 2009 Plowshares action.   For more information, visit disarmnowplowshares.wordpress.com