Skouries

First published in German on hambacherforst.blogsport.de on February 7th, 2015. This translation wasn’t yet revised by the author or a native speaker. Guess, it’ll work anyway…

Gold mining in Greece

With my backpack shouldered I slowly drag myself up the street. A police patrol drives past me, then a car from a security firm. Then the patrol comes back. And yet another security car. This is how it’s been going on all the time, since I took the way up the Kakavos mountain in Greece.

It didn’t take me two hours by bus and hitchhiking from Thessaloniki to the 3,000-strong village Megali Panagia, which is located in the east of the Halkidiki peninsula. But from there on there was no alternative to walking. What fuels me? Maybe the beautiful nature, the forest, the mountains, the rivers, the ocean? – In a way, yes. However, in a rather less beautiful way: What brings me here is the clear-cutting of forests, blowing up of the mountain, the poisoning of oceans, rivers and groundwater. On the Kakavos Mountain one of the many planned gold mines in northern Greece is being developed: Skouries. The catastrophic impacts of this project are going to be beyond imagination, and it is already way further than the starting blocks.

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Please help translating

Help in translating the blog into English, French and Spanish is always needed.
You don’t neccessarily need to understand a lot of German for that: You can use translation machines such as translate.google.de or www.abacho.de/uebersetzer-main – after that most of what still needs to be done is copy/pasting sentences into a sensible order and correcting mistranslations of single words (for which you might use online dictionaries like leo.org or pons.de or also wikipedia and then in an article switch languages). This work is also a great practice for learning a language or improve your skills…
In case of interest, mail this list. If you feel insecure whether your language-knowledge is sufficient, maybe just give it a try and someone else has lass work correcting your output than that of the machine.

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European police congress in berlin

Today and tomorrow (24th/ 25th February) once again representatives from a variety of police structures, from the companies arming them and from politics will meet in order to optimize the European police work. Press is strongly resricted (source in German). Some of the topics of this police state’s meeting are going to be the cooperation of public and private security agencies, standards for foreign assignments, armament, data evaluation, expansion of CCTV in public spaces, preventive policing and counterinsurgency (congress programme).

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Activities against occupants of the Hambach Forest

First published in German on 11th February.

In several incidents during the last week, defendors of the lignite open cast mine damaged or destroyed material of the occupations. Among others, several climbing ropes were cut, the tires of a car owned by a person living in the occupation were stabbed and a tent in the new inhabitalbe barricade (“the Hedgehog”) was slit.

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