Along the border between Venezuela and Brazil in the Amazon rainforest are a group of about 20,000 people called the Yanomami. There somewhere between 200 - 250 villages comprised of these indigenous people who have not had contact with the outside world. But illegally operated gold mining is bringing disease and death to the Yanomami. According to Care2.com they lost 20% of their population in a 7- year period.

Here's part of an article from CARE2.COM:
"Many tribal people who are today ‘uncontacted’ are in fact the survivors (or survivors’ descendants) of past atrocities. These acts – massacres, disease epidemics, terrifying violence – are seared into their collective memory, and contact with the outside world is now to be avoided at all costs.

Many of the isolated Indians of western Amazonia, for example, are the descendants of the few survivors of the rubber boom which swept through the region at the end of the 19th Century, wiping out 90% of the Indian population in a horrific wave of enslavement and appalling brutality.

Others are survivors of more recent killings. The Amazonian people known as the ‘Cinta Larga’ [‘wide belts’] suffered many vicious and gruesome attacks at the hands of Brazilian rubber tappers between the 1920s and the 1960s. One famous incident, the 1963 ‘massacre of the 11th parallel’, took place in the headwaters of the Aripuanã river where the firm of Arruda, Junqueira & Co was collecting rubber.

The head of the company, Antonio Mascarenhas Junqueira, planned the massacre, deeming the Cinta Larga Indians to be in the way of his commercial activities.

“These Indians are parasites, they are shameful. It’s time to finish them off, it’s time to eliminate these pests. Let’s liquidate these vagabonds,” he said.

He hired a small plane, from which sticks of dynamite were hurled into a Cinta Larga village below. Later, some of the killers returned on foot to finish off the survivors – finding a woman breastfeeding her child, they shot the baby’s head off, and then hung her upside down and sliced her in half.

Last week the Guarani leader Nísio Gomes was assassinated in southern Brazil.

His last words to his son Valmir were:

“Don’t leave this place. Take care of this land with courage. This is our land. Nobody will drag you from it. Look after my granddaughters and all the children well. I leave this land in your hands.”

Ways you can help.

• Writing a letter to the Brazilian government can make a real difference.
• Donate to the Yanomami campaign (and other Survival campaigns).
• Write to your MP or MEP (UK) or Senators and members of Congress (US).

Read more about uncontacted tribes and what you can do.

Read more at CARE2.COM

My 5 x 7 photo book with Chippy and the Crew called YOU'RE NOT ALONE is on sale through November 30th for $12.50! It's a story of love and support adoringly told through 25 pages of cute animal photos. Click the image for more pages in the book. These make wonderful gifts for all the people in your life you want to tell that you are there for them -- you've got their back -- and that you love them.

Straight from the website: http://rt.com/news/occupy-protests-mainstream-media-719/

"Social media is key in getting OWS protesters together as a lot of the mainstream media belong to the very 1 per cent of the wealthy and powerful that the OWS are protesting against, an activist for the action group has told RT.

Ricken Patel comes from an online citizen-action group that has been providing web support for Occupy campaigners. He told RT that their aim was helping establish the connection between different groups that were occupying different locations all around the world."

“One of the key tactics that authorities used was to de-legitimize this,” he noted.

As to why some of the mainstream media are not treating these massive rallies seriously, Patel spoke of varying reasons for that.

“You’ve got a powerful communications system that is driving other narratives – that these are marginal and fringe elements. A lot of media is corporate, it is part of the 1 per cent that these people are protesting against. But also I think there is a failure of the movement to articulate itself in a way that it would be understood.”


Please see video for full interview:

Straight from safelawns.org:
International Group to Put Pesticide Manufacturers on Trial

Wed, Nov 16, 2011

The Ecologist is reporting that the world’s six largest pesticide manufacturers will collectively be put on trial by a long-standing tribunal that will convene in India next month.

Though the group known as the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, created in 1979, has no legal standing, its hope is to bring worldwide exposure to what it refers to as atrocities committed by Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, Syngenta, DuPont and BASF.

An estimated 355,000 people are believed to die each year from unintentional pesticide poisoning, according the World Health Organization. Nick Mole from the Pesticide Action Network UK said the trial would give a voice to the otherwise voiceless victims of pesticides.

“The pesticide industry is massive and incredibly powerful. It is difficult to prove corporate manslaughter even when these products are killing hundreds of people a year,” he told the Ecologist. “We’ve spoken to people who have been abused and we are allowing them to give voice to their individual stories. We will be presenting the outcome of the Tribunal to the corporations and will be inviting their response.”

From the Coalition against Bayer Danger    http://www.cbgnetwork.org/4.html:

Bayer managers have known the risks of a pesticide class called neonicotinoids for the environment since the beginning of the 90ies. The company downplayed the risks, submitted deficient studies to authorities and accepted the loss of honey bees in many parts of the world. After huge bee deaths in Germany last year the Coalition against Bayer Dangers brought a charge against Bayer for knowingly endangering the environment. READ FULL ARTICLE

Also read an article from The Ecologist: Monsanto, Bayer and Dow face trial for 'systematic human rights abuses'

other information: 
=> The Guardian: Germany bans chemicals linked to bee devastation
=> Charge against Bayer Board
=> The News and Observer (USA): Bayer on defensive in bee deaths
=> April 25, 2011 Bayer ASM: Beekeepers to stage protests
=> Dec 9, 2010: EPA Asked to Pull Bayer Pesticide Linked to Bee Kills
=> Neonicotinoids and honey bee losses in India and in Japan
=> "A disaster in the making": New book on the massive decline of bees and birds
=> Bayer, BASF, Syngenta: Pesticide industry involvement in EU risk assessment puts survival of bees at stake
=> British Beekeepers Association to stop endorsing bee-killing pesticides
=> What a scientist didn't tell the NY Times about his study on bee deaths
=> New study (2010): Long-term risks of imidacloprid undervalued
=> Bulletin of Insectology (2010): The puzzle of honey bee losses
=> Charge against Bayer Board

This was sent to me via email from my friend, Angela. It deeply resonates with me. 
___________________________________________________________________________

Dear Reader,

My friend Steve Sjuggerud, Editor of True Wealth, used to call occasionally and ask if I'd read any good business or investment books.

Since both of us already had shelves groaning with them, it got tougher each year to find new ones that offered any fresh insights. That was before I read Eugene O'Kelly's Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life. Six years ago, O'Kelly, the Chairman and CEO of KPMG, one of the largest U.S. accounting firms, was diagnosed with inoperable, late-stage brain cancer. He was told he had three to six months to live. 

He was 53. 

Suddenly, the life of this rich, powerful and privileged man, whose days were filled with executive meetings and business appointments, became something very different. Chasing Daylight is his memoir, the story of his final journey.

"I'd always aspired to be a Renaissance Man. To know about wine and opera, to read books," he writes. "But after a quarter-century at my firm, I rose to the top position. My life changed. The balance in it faded. Spontaneity died... I was always distracted by work." 

Suddenly, he was left with less than 100 days to live. "I had so little time left to learn," he says, "yet - ironically - the first (and maybe the last) thing I needed to learn was how to slow down."

With dignified restraint, O'Kelly describes discovering the world around him - nature, family, friends, living in the moment - as if it were all brand new.

"No more living in the future. (Or the past, for that matter - a problem for many people, although a lesser one for me.) I needed to stop living two months, a week, even a few hours ahead. Even a few minutes ahead. Sixty seconds from now is, in its way, as elusive as sixty years from now, and always will be. It is - was - exhausting to live in a world that never exists. Also kind of silly, since we happen to be blessed with such a fascinating one right here, right now. I felt that if I could learn to stay in the present moment, to be fully conscious of my surroundings, I would buy myself lots of time that had never been available to me, not in all the years I was healthy... I would soon discover, though, that staying in the present and being genuinely conscious of my surroundings were just about the hardest things I'd ever attempted."

If you've ever tried to meditate - to still your mind for even a single minute - you know what he's talking about. It's difficult to embrace - and not take for granted - the fleeting moments of our lives. 

"Enjoy every sandwich," he writes.

With the clock counting down, O'Kelly makes a list of his closest friends and colleagues and plans a final encounter with each one. 

"I stopped at each name and made myself recall, in the closest detail possible, all the moments the two of us had enjoyed together. How we met. What made us become friends in the first place. The qualities in them I particularly appreciated. The lessons I learned by knowing them. The ways in which having met him or her had made me a better person."

His friends were touched - usually overwhelmed - to know how much they had meant to him. 

In the course of saying goodbye, he would sometimes invite a friend or acquaintance to take a stroll in the park. This "was sometimes not only the final time we would take such a walk together," he writes, "but also the first time."

O'Kelly saved his last goodbyes for his closest family and friends, finally succumbing on September 10, 2005. 

Most of us promise ourselves that one day - not too long from now - we'll slow down. We'll spend more time with our family. Enjoy a lazy day out with friends. Or just take a walk alone on the seashore. Some day... 

If - like me - you're one of the millions who has often deluded himself this way, O'Kelly offers three words of advice: "Move it up."

Carpe Diem,

Alex

Alexander Green is the Investment Director of The Oxford Club. The Oxford Club Communique, whose portfolio he directs, is ranked among the top investment letters in the nation for 10-year performance by the independent Hulbert Investment Digest. Alex is the author of three national best sellers including, most recently, Beyond Wealth: The Road Map to a Rich Life. He has been featured on Oprah & Friends, CNBC, National Public Radio (NPR), Fox News and "The O'Reilly Factor," and has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Forbes, and Kiplinger's Personal Finance, among others. He currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia and Winter Springs, Florida with his wife Karen and their children Hannah and David.