A 10-Year-Old May Be Deported Because His Mom Was Scared To Tell U.S. Officials He’s Gay

A 10-Year-Old May Be Deported Because His Mom Was Scared To Tell U.S. Officials He’s Gay
by Esther Yu-Hsi Lee Nov 10, 2015 9:13am

Maria and her 10-year-old son Jose fled El Salvador in early October to seek asylum in the United States, hoping they may finally be able to leave gang violence behind. For the three months up until they left, MS-13 gang members targeted Jose every day for being gay, calling him homophobic names and beating him up in school. The pair ultimately decided to cross the border to reunite with Maria’s brother in Maryland. But now, they may be sent back as soon as Wednesday.

After Maria and Jose — whose names have been changed for their protection — crossed the southern U.S. border last month, they were sent to Karnes County Residential Center in Texas, which is one of three major immigrant family detention centers used to hold people before they can go before an immigration judge at their court hearing. In order to qualify for asylum in this country, Maria and Jose needed to prove to the judge they have “credible fear” that prevents them from feeling safe in their home country.

They didn’t meet the criteria. Since homosexuality is not accepted in El Salvador and their family is deeply religious, Maria felt too “ashamed” to discuss her son’s sexuality and the homophobic slurs he has encountered with the asylum officer during her credible fear interview. She did not have legal counsel during her interview nor when her case was reviewed by an immigration judge. And her son was not given the chance to explain his circumstances.

Maria and Jose’s case was taken up by Emily Puhl, an Immigrant Justice Corps Fellow and pro bono attorney at the advocacy group RAICES, who initially asked for a “reinterview” and a stay of removal. That request was denied on Tuesday. The Salvadoran consulate informed the mother and son that they would be deported this week.

More:
http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2015/11/10/3720872/mother-child-gay-el-salvador-deportation/

Peru's Ancient City Caral Inspires Modern Architects

Peru's Ancient City Caral Inspires Modern Architects
World | Agence France-Presse | Updated: November 11, 2015 11:41 IST

Caral, Peru: Architects seeking solutions for sustainable living in the 21st century are taking notes from the ancient city of Caral in Peru, an engineering marvel built some 5,000 years ago.

Caral's builders created a city of pyramids, sunken amphitheaters, seismically resilient buildings and underground ducts that channeled the wind to keep their fires burning all with basic tools.

It was the site of the oldest known civilization in the Americas, the Caral or Norte Chico civilization, which developed from 3000 to 1800 BC almost as old as Ancient Egypt.

Today, architects from around the world have convened in Caral to seek inspiration in its sandy brown ruins and discuss the challenges facing humankind five millennia later.

More:
http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/perus-ancient-city-caral-inspires-modern-architects-1242381

Anthropology:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12292399

Giant Radio Telescope Peels Away Magnetic Field Shrouding Black Hole

Giant Radio Telescope Peels Away Magnetic Field Shrouding Black Hole

by Shannon Hall, Staff Writer | April 16, 2015 02:01pm ET


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An artist's impression shows a black hole's surroundings, including its accretion disk, jet and magnetic field.
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
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Astronomers have peeled away most of the gas and dust enshrouding a monster black hole, taking a close look at the giant that lies some 68 thousand light-years away.

A team of scientists has used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) — a huge radio telescope in Chile — to unmask a supermassive black hole's extremely powerful magnetic field. The team, led by Ivan Marti-Vidal from the Onsala Space Observatory and Chalmers University of Technology, was therefore able to peer deep into the heart of the distant galaxy where the black hole lies, and see the region just light-days away from the behemoth.

"Our discovery is a giant leap in terms of observing frequency, thanks to the use of ALMA, and in terms of distance to the black hole where the magnetic field has been probed," said co--author Sebastien Muller, also from Onsala Space Observatory and Chalmers University of Technology, in a statement.

Supermassive black holes loom in the centers of the majority of massive galaxies. Some of these black holes, like the one in the Milky Way's center, lie dormant. Others (so-called quasars) actively chow down on gas, causing them to radiate like brilliant beacons of light. They can therefore be seen from across the universe.

More:
http://www.space.com/29122-black-hole-magnetic-field-alma-telescope.html?li_source=LI&li_medium=more-from-space

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Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)[/center]

Mexico: Police officers who tortured innocent woman into confessing to a crime must face justice

Source: Amnesty International

November 10, 2015


Mexico: Police officers who tortured innocent woman into confessing to a crime must face justice


The acquittal of a young woman who was tortured into confessing to the crime of extortion is long awaited good news but Mexico must ensure those responsible for the abuse she suffered face justice and that she receives reparation, said Amnesty International.

“The fact that a young woman has been forced to spend two years in prison after being tortured to confess to a crime speaks volumes about the state of the Mexican judicial system,” said Erika-Guevara Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International.

“While we welcome Cristel’s acquittal, justice will not be done until those who sexually tortured her into confessing to a crime are put behind bars and a strong message is sent that torture is never acceptable.”

Cristel Fabiola Piña Jasso, a 25-year old mother of two, was today acquitted by a court in Chihuahua, northern Mexico after spending two years in prison. The judge found there was not sufficient evidence against her and ordered a federal investigation into the torture she suffered.


Read more: http://www.ijreview.com/2015/11/467644-stockbroker-murdered-wife-then-he-plotted-to-take-their-daughter-to-mexico-for-disgusting-reason/

I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night …

November 10, 2015
I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night …

by Lily Murphy



This years marks the centenary of the execution of trade union activist Joe Hill in Utah on November 19th 1915. For many people today he is perhaps best known as the subject of the folk ballad written by Alfred Hayes in 1936.

Hayes was born in London in 1911 but emigrated to the United States with his family as a three year old and grew up in New York City. After graduating from New York’s City College he worked for a number of newspapers in the city.

In 1928 Hayes joined the Young Communist League and rose within the left wing fold as a poet of the working class with his most celebrated piece being Joe Hill.

Hayes wrote it as a poem in upstate New York at a left wing retreat called Camp Unity during the Summer of 1936. Hayes met Earl Robinson there and upon hearing Hayes recite his poem Robinson instantly put the words to music as part of a campfire session celebrating the trade union icon. By that September the song had been published in The Daily Worker and became a popular song with members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting Franco’s fascists in Spain.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/10/i-dreamed-i-saw-joe-hill-last-night/

Between Slavery and Socialism in America Today

November 10, 2015
Between Slavery and Socialism in America Today

by Manuel García, Jr.

Unmitigated capitalism is the freedom from regulation for corporations that own an authoritarian government. Mitigated capitalism is the regulation of corporations by a publicly-owned popularly-elected government.

The Republican Party of the United States is the political organization of unmitigated capitalism in America. Since the Reagan Administration, it has been especially fervent in its agitation for the immediate gratification of unrestrained greed by the wealthy. The logical political terminus to this obsession would be a slave-owning plutocracy structured as a club of corporate members that own the government. For many people, this seems to have already come to pass.

That the Republican presidential candidates of 2015 all seem to be delusional, deranged, sociopaths, psychopaths, and completely out of touch with the realities of life for much of the pubic, is not of any concern to these candidates because they are entirely focussed on gaining the only votes that count in their quests for personal power, wealth and notoriety: the Citizens-United-sanctioned, money-is-no-object free-pass vote-endorsements of Big Capital. These candidates are not seeking to represent the interests of masses of working people, nor to lead mass movements for socio-economic improvements, they are seeking to be the glove decorations of the cold hard fist of Big Capital, whose only interest in humanity is to squeeze it dry of labor and squash flat all its aspirations.

The Democratic Party of the United States is the political organization of mitigated capitalism in America. Since the Roosevelt Administration it has based its popular appeal on mitigating capitalism’s natural tendency toward inhuman excess (ultimately chattel slavery), so that much of the public could experience a greater degree of prosperity and security than would otherwise be the case.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/10/between-slavery-and-socialism-in-america-today/

Henry Kissinger’s genocidal legacy: Vietnam, Cambodia and the birth of American militarism

Henry Kissinger’s genocidal legacy: Vietnam, Cambodia and the birth of American militarism

Nixon introduced us to permanent, extrajudicial war in Southeast Asia, and it continues today in the Middle East
Greg Grandin, TomDispatch.com


In April 2014, ESPN published a photograph of an unlikely duo: Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and former national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger at the Yankees-Red Sox season opener. In fleece jackets on a crisp spring day, they were visibly enjoying each other’s company, looking for all the world like a twenty-first-century geopolitical version of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The subtext of their banter, however, wasn’t about sex, but death.

As a journalist, Power had made her name as a defender of human rights, winning a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Having served on the National Security Council before moving on to the U.N., she was considered an influential “liberal hawk” of the Obama era. She was also a leading light among a set of policymakers and intellectuals who believe that American diplomacy should be driven not just by national security and economic concerns but by humanitarian ideals, especially the advancement of democracy and the defense of human rights.

The United States, Power long held, has a responsibility to protect the world’s most vulnerable people. In 2011 she played a crucial role in convincing President Obama to send in American air power to prevent troops loyal to Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi from massacring civilians. That campaign led to his death, the violent overthrow of his regime, and in the end, a failed state and growing stronghold for ISIS and other terror groups. In contrast, Kissinger is identified with a school of “political realism,” which holds that American power should service American interests, even if that means sacrificing the human rights of others.

According to ESPN, Power teasingly asked Kissinger if his allegiance to the Yankees was “in keeping with a realist’s perspective on the world.” Power, an avid Red Sox fan, had only recently failed to convince the United Nations to endorse a U.S. bombing campaign in Syria, so Kissinger couldn’t resist responding with a gibe of his own. “You might,” he said, “end up doing more realistic things.” It was his way of suggesting that she drop the Red Sox for the Yankees. “The human rights advocate,” Power retorted, referring to herself in the third person, “falls in love with the Red Sox, the downtrodden, the people who can’t win the World Series.”

More:
http://www.salon.com/2015/11/10/henry_kissingers_genocidal_legacy_partner/

Dancing with Dynamite in Latin America: Looking Back at Half a Decade of Political Struggle

Dancing with Dynamite in Latin America: Looking Back at Half a Decade of Political Struggle

Details
Written by Benjamin Dangl Published: 10 November 2015

This month marks five years since the publication of my book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America, (AK Press). Thanks to everyone who has read, borrowed, pirated, or stolen it. The dance with dynamite between social movements and states in Latin America that the book followed in 2010 continues today, but in a transformed political and economic landscape.

While the region’s leftist shift has continued with major gains in the fight against poverty, social exclusion, and imperialism, the death of Hugo Chavez has been a critical turning point for Venezuela and the rest of Latin America. The coup against Fernando Lugo in Paraguay continued the onslaught against democracy and peasants’ rights that was well-entrenched even during Lugo’s brief time in office. The divisions, alliances and co-optations in Bolivia between the MAS government and indigenous and social movements have become more complicated than perhaps ever in the country’s history. The fault lines between indigenous movements, governments and multinational corporations that developed around the question of extractive industries have cracked open social conflicts from Quito to Patagonia.

At the same time, the internationalization of movement strategies and struggles connected at the end of the book exploded on the world scene over this time, with the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the anti-austerity movements across Europe, to name a few.

I came up with the idea for Dancing with Dynamite one night in La Paz while reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This quote rings true now as much as it did then, reading it while a new Bolivian constitution was drafted in Sucre, land was being occupied by the MST in Brazil, the worker-run factories hummed along in Argentina, and millions of people across the Americas conspired for a better world:

"The causes lie deep and simply—the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times… The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first 'we' there grows a still more dangerous thing: 'I have a little food' plus 'I have none.' If from this problem the sum is 'we have little food,' the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours." - The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

Argentina Plaza de Mayo group locates founder's grandson

Argentina Plaza de Mayo group locates founder's grandson
6 November 2015


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AFP

Delia Giovanola de Califano (centre) is one of the 12 grandmothers who formed the group in 1977
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Argentine campaign group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo say they have identified the grandson of one of the group's co-founders.

Argentina's military junta snatched hundreds of babies from their opponents in the 1970s and gave them to sympathisers to bring up as their own.

The grandson of co-founder Delia Giovanola is named Martin.

But the discovery comes too late for his sister, Virginia, who took her own life in 2011.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo was formed to reunite families with their missing children, who had been stolen by the junta.

Martin is the 118th grandchild to be located by the group.

His parents, Jorge Oscar Ogando and Stella Maris Montesano, joined the ranks of Argentina's "disappeared". Their bodies have never been found.

More:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-34753088

Peru Victims Of Forced Sterilization Registry Is Not 'Political Calculation' Against Opposition, Gov

Peru Victims Of Forced Sterilization Registry Is Not 'Political Calculation' Against Opposition, Government Says

By Michelle Mark @michelleamark m.mark@ibtimes.com on November 09 2015 2:27 PM EST

Following the Peruvian government’s announcement Friday it would create a national registry for the victims of forced sterilization in the 1990s, President Ollanta Humala's administration sought to dispel accusations that the move was made for political gain, TeleSUR English reported. Humala is facing off in the 2016 elections against popular opponent Keiko Fujimori, whose father was president during the era in which the sterilizations took place.

Between 1996 and 2000, an estimated 350,000 people -- mostly impoverished indigenous women living in rural areas -- underwent forced sterilization under a program introduced by then-President Alberto Fujimori, who is now in prison for human rights abuses. Fujimori had argued for the sterilization program as a fix to eliminating poverty through lowering the country’s birthrate.

The Humala administration has said the new registry is meant to provide a legal framework to help implement services such as legal assistance, psychological treatment and holistic health for the victims. Both victims and political opponents in Peru’s Congress have said Humala used this issue in the country’s last election cycle to attack Keiko Fujimori during a presidential debate and then did little to pursue justice for the victims after winning the election.

. . .

Activists have called the forced sterilizations one of Peru’s biggest human rights scandals. Esperanza Huayama, a victim of forced sterilization, told Reuters that government health officials in the 1990s had gone door to door in her farming community, enticing women to come with them to a clinic for free medical treatment, where they were instead anesthetized and sterilized. Huayama was three months pregnant at the time. She said her baby was born dead weeks after the surgery.

http://www.ibtimes.com/peru-victims-forced-sterilization-registry-not-political-calculation-against-2176008