“We don’t want Walmart to be a greener, corporate citizen,” Tim DeChristopher said on Moyers & Company. “We want Walmart to be subservient to human interests. We don’t think corporations should be masters of men. And you know, that’s really, that’s the difference between the climate justice movement and the environmental movement, in my opinion.”

While environmentalists urged people to rethink their consumer habits, DeChristopher said, his school of activism pushes people to think of themselves as members of their communities.

“I think in the past few years, especially for the younger generation, there’s been more of the reminders that we are citizens,” said DeChristopher, the co-founder of the group Peaceful Uprising. “That we can shape our society. And there’s been this resurgence of people power which I think will have big reverberations.”

DeChristopher was convicted in 2009 for submitting nearly $2 million in bids during a federal Bureau of Land Management auction, an action federal prosecutors called an obstruction of “lawful government proceedings,” even though Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar determined that the December 2008 auction was null and void.

The prosecution, DeChristopher said, “flipped out” during the jury selection process, after finding that prospective jurors were given a handout outlining their rights and responsibilities. The judge subsequently called the jury pool in and made them promise only to rule on whether he had broken a law.

“The judge would say, ‘You understand it’s not your job to decide what’s right or wrong here,’” DeChristopher recounted to Moyers. “‘Your job is to listen to what I say the law says, and you have to enforce it, even if you think it’s morally wrong. Can you do that? Can you follow my instructions, even if you think they’re morally wrong? And unless they said yes, they weren’t on the jury.’”

DeChristopher’s experiences are chronicled in the film Bidder 70, which has won awards at 20 film festivals, and was also screened in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he staged his original protest.

“Not everyone has to go to prison. But I think everyone has to feel empowered to take strong actions,” he said to Moyers. “And, you know, no one can say, ‘This is the kind of action that we need right now,’ because nobody knows. Nobody has the answers. You know, nobody has ever stopped a climate crisis before.”

Watch Moyers’ interview with DeChristopher, posted online on Friday, below.

A picture is slowly emerging of the 28-year-old, one of two men of Nigerian descent who were shot by police shortly after soldier Lee Rigby was hacked to death on a London street on Wednesday.

Born in the British capital to devoutly Christian parents from Nigeria, Adebolajo is believed to have converted to Islam in his late teens before becoming increasingly radical.

Much less is known about the other suspect, 22-year-old Michael Adebowale, who like Adebolajo remains in hospital under armed guard. But he too is believed to be the London-born son of a Nigerian family.

Childhood friends were among those most appalled by amateur footage of a bloody-handed Adebolajo in the minutes after the murder, in which he tells a passer-by that he killed Rigby because British soldiers killed Muslims every day.

They remember him as a classroom joker with the same interests as any other British teenager — football, chasing girls, playing video games, and listening to rap music.

“He wasn’t naughty but liked a joke,” one schoolfriend told The Times. “He got in trouble every now and again but only with the teachers — like we all did.”

Acquaintances recalled that Adebolajo’s mother had strong Christian beliefs, but he himself was not particularly interested in religion.

“She raised him as a Christian with good manners and respect,” a family friend told The Sun.

It appears that Adebolajo converted to Islam around 2003, but his friends and family watched with concern as he became increasingly radical.

He is believed to have attempted to travel to Somalia to join the Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab insurgents, but had to turn back.

Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary, one of the leaders of the radical Al-Muhajiroun group, said he was well-acquainted with Adebolajo, who regularly attended sermons by banned radical cleric Omar Bakri in London.

“He used to attend some of our activities over the years,” Choudary told AFP. “Very peaceful chap actually, not violent at all, very pleasant.”

Choudary said Adebolajo had changed his name to Mujahid, meaning “holy fighter”, and was a familiar face at meetings of Al-Muhajiroun, which is now banned in Britain under anti-terror laws.

“We lost any kind of contact with him about three years ago,” Choudary added.

A photograph has emerged of Adebolajo scuffling with police at an Islamist protest in 2006 outside London’s Old Bailey court, where an extremist was on trial for urging the killing of British soldiers.

The protesters had called for people to “behead those who insult Islam”.

The Times said Adebolajo had been frequently spotted in recent weeks preaching on the main shopping street of Woolwich, the south London district where Rigby was murdered not far from his army barracks.

A fellow Muslim, identified only as Abdullah, told The Times he had been concerned at Adebolajo’s extreme stance at a recent prayer meeting.

“He was saying some things that I believed were way out,” he said.

In the now infamous video taken in the aftermath of the attack, Adebolajo makes a series of political statements including a demand for Prime Minister David Cameron to “bring our troops back”.

“The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers and this British soldier is one,” he says, holding a blood-covered kitchen knife and a meat cleaver.

“It is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

He later adds: “I apologise that women have had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government, they don’t care about you.”

Reports suggest that Adebolajo fell in with a bad crowd in his late teens, despite his parents’ efforts to steer him back on track, with some acquaintances saying he had dabbled in drug-dealing.

The family moved to Lincolnshire in eastern England in 2002. A house in the county believed to be owned by Adebolajo’s father, who works as a mental health nurse, was among several addresses raided by counter-terror police on Wednesday.

Adebolajo appears to have returned to London a year later — coinciding with his conversion to Islam — to start a degree at Greenwich University, just a few miles from the murder scene.

The online video service Hulu is at the centre of a frenzied bidding war, according to US media reports, with the tech giant Yahoo rumoured to have made an offer for the second time in its history.

With the ink is barely dry on its $1.1bn deal to buy the lite-blogging platform Tumblr, Yahoo made a formal proposal to buy Hulu on Friday morning, according to the tech news websiteAllthingsD.com and the news agency Reuters.

Yahoo told the Guardian it “would not comment on rumour or speculation” in regards to the reported offer.

A deal would confirm Yahoo’s fresh drive into “native” advertising – branded or sponsored editorial content – led by chief executive Marissa Meyer. Yahoo made an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to buy the French video site Daily Motion; the move was vetoed by the French government in April.

Yahoo faces some hefty competition for Hulu, which is co-owned by Disney, News Corp and Comcast. Offers are reported to have been made by Time Warner, News Corp executive Peter Chernin, satellite operator DirecTV, talent agency William Morris and two investment firms, Guggenheim Digital Media and KKR.

Yahoo first approached Hulu in 2011 under Carol Bartz, when Hulu had recruited Morgan Stanley to find a buyer – without success.

© Guardian News and Media 2013

Officials here said the fine was levied after a four-month investigation into practices by Nevada Mining Company SpA, a subsidiary of Barrick Gold, which is developing the unfinished Pascua Lama mine, which would have been one of the world’s biggest gold mines.

Environmental officials here also confirmed the suspension of the mining project order last month by a Chilean court.

The penalty was imposed for “grave breaches” of permits granted in 2006 by environmental officials, including infractions of guidelines on digging and water management, and failure to provide authorities accurate information about the project.

Local residents have long complained about possible environmental damage to waterways from the massive open pit mining project.

A Chilean court last month suspended construction at the Pascua Lama site, accepting a complaint filed by indigenous groups on environmental grounds.

The Pascua Lama project was launched in 2009 by Barrick Gold, the world’s largest gold producer, after an initial $8 billion investment.

The company had planned to spend another $8.5 billion on the mine, and hoped to start production there next year.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow said in his ruling that evidence showed Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office “aggressively protected its right to engage in immigration and immigration–related enforcement operations even when it had no accurate legal basis for doing so.”

Snow issued an injunction barring Arpaio and his deputies from, among other things, using “race or Latino ancestry” to determine whether to pull over vehicles with Latinos inside; subjecting Latinos to prolonged traffic stops without evidence they were violating federal or state laws; and arresting Latinos without proof that they were undocumented immigrants.

The ruling concluded a class-action civil suit brought against Arpaio and his office by the American Civil Liberties Unionn (ACLU) that grew to represent every Latino driver pulled over in Maricopa County since 2007. Instead of seeking monetary damages, though, the plaintiffs called for those practices to be legally curtailed.

The plaintiffs’ case hinged on a combination of statistical data pointing to a higher likelihood for Latino drivers to be stopped by the department, as well as past statements by both Arpaio and his constituents regarding undocumented immigrants.

According to the ACLU, one witness for the plaintiffs, Temple University researcher Ralph Taylor, found that officers were 46 to 53 percent more likely to stop Latinos during “crime suppression sweeps” ordered by Arpaio compared to regular operations. Traffic stops involving Latinos were also 21 to 25 percent longer than regular stops.

“Facts are facts, statistics are statistics, and they can be interpreted,” Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox told KPHO-TV. “But I thought they were very telling.”

Nearly a week of unrest across the Swedish capital has raised questions about the assimilation of immigrants, who dominate low-income neighbourhoods in the main cities and make up about 15 percent of the total population.

Husby’s brightly coloured concrete apartment blocks look much like they did when they were built in the mid-seventies, albeit a tad more grimy and with satellite dishes now dotting the facades.

There are other clues times have changed since the first tenants moved in almost 40 years ago: window grilles and safety gates have come up, here and there graffiti have yet to be washed away by the area’s many maintenance workers.

In one of the world’s most expensive cities, local hairdresser Salon Abdu charges just 60 kronor (seven euros, nine dollars) for a men’s haircut.

“I only work here sometimes in the morning,” says Saron Haile at Symba Afro Caribbean Cosmetics. After three years in Sweden, she prefers to speak English.

At the “Jambo clothes store” a few shops away, the two Somali women behind the counter speak neither Swedish nor English.

Husby has followed a trajectory similar to many other large-scale developments of Sweden’s controversial “million homes programme”, named after the number of affordable dwellings it aimed to produce in just 10 years.

Although the social democratic government did succeed in creating more affordable housing by the mid-seventies, little else went to plan.

Almost immediately after they were completed, the homogenous, often high-rise developments were marred by crime and social alienation, and were accused of exacerbating the very problems they were meant to solve.

Middle-class Swedes moved out, and when the country in the past decade welcomed hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, among others, the apartments they were allocated were often in areas like Husby.

Housing segregation is often named as one of the reasons it takes the average immigrant to Sweden years, not months, to find work. Even among the second generation, many say they rarely make it to a job interview.

“We want jobs,” said Jamil, a 22-year-old resident of Iraqi origin working as a gardener.

Sweden’s government has earned praise for its handling of the economy, but the country is plagued by one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe.

Even cleaning jobs are hard to get, Jamil noted. He added that being found in possession of marijuana is deemed a “minor drug offence” and severely reduces chances in the job market.

“It is very common here in Husby and that stays with you for 10 years, even though they say it’s minor,” he said.

The rioters “felt they had to take these actions to get the press here, to get the big police bosses here, to turn the situation around. Suddenly, the past three days have been really interesting. Husby is on the world map,” he said.

Daniel, 24-year-old social worker from Husby, said finding a job after graduating from high school turned out to be harder then he thought, and that the suburb’s bad reputation may have been an impediment for him.

“Unfortunately I’ve only gotten jobs when I said I lived in (nearby and less notorious suburbs) Akalla and Kista. I don’t know if it’s got anything to do with that but it’s a funny coincidence,” he said.

“There is a lot of anger towards the police and there’s a lot of anger towards the politicians. A lot of things are in the air,” he said.

Ileana Lukacs, who came to Sweden from Romania 40 years ago, also blamed the area’s troubles on unemployment.

Although she was only staying temporarily in Husby, many of the problems were the same in Kista.

“I have a 23-year-old who’s been applying for jobs. He’s gone to university, and he’s very ambitious, but he still hasn’t gotten any work,” said Lukacs.

Since her arrival four decades ago, Sweden had in some ways changed for the worse.

“Finding a job was extremely easy in the eighties. I once went to the job centre in the morning and had work in the afternoon,” she said.

“I’ve never been without a job. This is a nightmare scenario for my children.”

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

Russia evacuates 'drifting' Arctic research station as ice floe melts (via The Christian Science Monitor)

Copyright ImageClick to View A Russian deep-diving miniature submarine is lowered from the research vessel Akademik Fyodorov moments before performing a dive in the Arctic Ocean beneath the ice at the North Pole in August 2007. As the Arctic’s ice sheets melt, Russia’s research efforts have become…

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

“We might as well rename this organization,” Fischer said on his radio show. “BSA no longer stands for the Boy Scouts of America. It now stands for the Boy Sodomizers of America.”

On Thursday, the delegates of the Scouts’ National Council voted to repeal the organization’s ban on gay members, while continuing to bar gay men and atheists from serving in leadership positions, a move that Fischer said normalized a “crime against nature.”

Fischer then read a passage from the Book of Luke from the Bible warning that these were “the words of Jesus himself to the Scouts.”

Watch Fischer’s remarks, posted Friday by Right Wing Watch, below.

The site had featured a banner image of a city skyline… from Pittsburgh.

The mistake did not go unnoticed, prompting mockery from bloggers and journalists, and it was quickly replaced. By Friday, the site banner featured five new photos — this time of New York.

Weiner’s announcement he was running for mayor, two years after the scandal that forced the Democrat to resign his congressional seat, was received coolly by fellow New Yorkers, many of whom said he should have stayed home.

The Democratic governor of the state, Andrew Cuomo, appeared to share this opinion.

If New Yorkers elect him to run the city, “shame on us,” he said, answering a question from the Syracuse Media Group on Wednesday. Several hours later, Cuomo’s office clarified the governor’s words were meant in “jest.”

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

WJLA-TV reported that 20-year-old Claude Alexander Allen III was arrested after police responded to reports of a break-in early Friday morning at a Gaithersburg, Maryland home owned by his parents.

But authorities told the station that story did not hold up after they began talking to Allen, who phoned in the initial report. In a release, police said the victim, 25-year-old Michael Phillip Harvey, was found “in a wooded area behind the residence.”

“Because we did not have a forced entry here we believe that the two parties did know each other, Montgomery County Police Captain Jim Daly said to WJLA.

Allen’s father, Claude A. Allen, was Bush’s domestic policy adviser from 2005 to 2006, when he was arrested and charged with shoplifting from a department store in Gaithersburg.

According to the Washington Post, the elder Allen’s wife, Jannese Allen, said at his sentencing in August 2006 that he was overwhelmed after working 14 hours a day in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and that they lived “out of storage boxes in a friend’s basement.”

Watch WJLA’s report on the younger Allen’s arrest, aired Friday, below.

[Image via Montgomery County Police Department]