Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalColombias latest disinformation jewel: Norway was bribed to grant Nobel Peace Prize to Santos
Colombia’s latest disinformation jewel: Norway was bribed to grant Nobel Peace Prize to Santos
written by Adriaan Alsema December 11, 2016
The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Juan Manuel Santos on Saturday spurred his country’s latest disinformation wave, this time alleging Norway didn’t honor Colombia’s president for ending the hemisphere’s longest-running armed conflict, but because the Nobel commission was bribed.
Supporters of hard-line former President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010) on Saturday spun the hashtag “#NobelComprado” (BoughtNobel), which quickly became a trending topic on Twitter, much to the embarrassment of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Uribe allies again promoting disinformation
The hashtag was subsequently promoted by prominent political opposition figures like Uribe ally and former Democratic Center presidential candidate Oscar Ivan Zuluaga, the son of former governor Luis Alfredo Ramos (investigated over alleged ties to death squads) and the son of former President Andres Pastrana (1998-2002), who led failed peace talks with the FARC between 1999 and 2002.
At a press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, Santos responded that “they have said … I am a communist, that I am an ally and business partner of Fidel Castro to introduce a subtle revolution in my country, but the most absurd I have heard this group say is the claim this award was bought.”
More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombias-latest-disinformation-jewel-norway-bribed-grant-nobel-peace-prize-santos/
What tool decided we'd all better start calling lies "DISINFORMATION", instead? Would the the fascists call lies by human beings "disinformation"? Probably not.
94 peasant leaders assassinated in Colombia so far this year
’94 peasant leaders assassinated in Colombia so far this year’
written by Adriaan Alsema December 12, 2016
One of Colombia’s largest peasant organizations said Sunday that 94 of its regional leaders have been assassinated so far this year, a 49% increase compared to the same period last year.
The Cumbre Agraria that reported the staggering increase is a syndicate of dozens of small, regional peasant organizations.
The United Nations last week already expressed its concern over the spike in killings of rights and community leaders, with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights claiming 57 social leaders were killed and 35 survived assassination attempts.
The Marcha Patriotica, a conglomeration of mainly leftist social organization, said late last month that 70 of its members have been murdered this year, while another 232 received death threats.
More:
http://colombiareports.com/94-peasant-leaders-assassinated-colombia-far-year/
Amnesty International campaign takes aim at Canadas Site C dam
Amnesty International campaign takes aim at Canada’s Site C dam
The Write for Rights campaign, which sends letters urging action on human-rights causes, targeted the B.C. project
The Canadian Press
December 11, 2016
VANCOUVER – An annual Amnesty International human-rights campaign is taking aim at a Canadian project for the first time — the Site C dam.
The $8.8-billion hydroelectric dam project in northeast British Columbia was one of 10 global issues targeted by the Write for Rights campaign on Saturday.
The campaign involves events held across the world where people write letters petitioning leaders for action on human-rights causes.
Letter-writers are demanding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau revoke approvals for the project, which would flood First Nations spiritual, burial and archeological sites and affect hunting and fishing areas in the Peace Valley.
More:
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/amnesty-international-campaign-takes-aim-at-canadas-site-c-dam/
Trump's Election Represents an Evolutionary Clash Between Eras in Human History
Trump's Election Represents an Evolutionary Clash Between Eras in Human History
By Jacob Weindling | December 6, 2016 | 10:58am
If you do not believe in evolution (and a reported 42% of you don’t), well, studies have shown that any amount of evidence I give you will only harden your position, so I’ll just leave it at: I may not be right, but my side has millions of years of tangible evidence while yours has a book translated through several dictionaries whose words may not have initially come from humans, but whose text was handled and taught by them for centuries. If you haven’t noticed lately, we’re not the most trustworthy species. But can you really blame us? We used to live in trees.
Australopithecus descended from the forests between 3.5 and 4.2 million years ago. We know this because its wrist bones became less adapted to swinging from trees and instead became geared towards a multitude of tasks. Essentially, this is proof of when we began to really walk, which lead to a new home for humans: caves. Thirty million people in China still live in caves, and not in the prehistoric vein that is typically portrayed. Others around the world are even available to rent on Airbnb. We are transitioning from a life dominated by the “cave” to one situated in the cloud. This is a major shock that is one of the primary drivers behind the election of Trump.
As soon as Neanderthals established their permanent home inside pieces of the earth, this dramatically changed our habits from when we would spend our days dangling close to the heavens. For example, we had to warm the cave during the winter, so we discovered fire. Having a home to retreat to enabled us to create a more tactical relationship with nature.
Around 700,000 to 200,000 years ago, we began to build our own homes. The reason for the wide range is that this evolution did not transition seamlessly across mankind. Those of us in harsher climates had a more difficult task at hand than people living in future San Diego. Around 170,000 years ago, humans began wearing clothes (we know this thanks to lice found with human remains – isn’t science neat?). This advancement accelerated our evolution, as we could now travel to exponentially more places, while winter was not the death sentence it used to be. As humans explored more of the land, they understood how to tame it, and agriculture set us on a firm evolutionary track that we are just now transitioning away from.
More:
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/12/trumps-election-represents-an-evolutionary-clash-b.html
War on drugs perhaps more harmful than all the wars in the world combined: Santos
Source: Colombia Reports
written by Adriaan Alsema December 11, 2016
Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos took an unexpected jab at a the United States-led war on drugs when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on Saturday, calling it “perhaps more harmful than all the wars in the world … combined.”
Santos has long been a critic of global counter-narcotics policies and has persistently called to “rethink” the United States-led war on drugs for years, going as far as proposing the legalization of cocaine as an option as far back as 2011.
While domestically taking a more public health oriented approach, the administration of President Barack Obama has so far refused to change its controversial international strategy, spurring the Colombian president to use his acceptance speech and newly
acquired status as Nobel Peace Prize laureate to step up his criticism.
. . .
The human cost of the criminalized drug trade in Latin America, the main supplier of cocaine to the consumer countries in the US and Canada, is impossible to calculate, but has likely cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Latinos from Argentina to Mexico.
Read more: http://colombiareports.com/us-led-war-drugs-perhaps-harmful-wars-world-santos/
UN Praises Bolivia and Evo Morales' Record on Human Rights
UN Praises Bolivia and Evo Morales' Record on Human Rights
Bolivia's President Evo Morales. | Photo: ABI
Published 7 December 2016
The organization praised Evo Morales' administration for reopening investigations on crimes committed during the dictatorship.
United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights Denis Racicot acknowledged Wednesday the Bolivian government's efforts to comply with international humanitarian law, contradicting claims made repeatedly by the U.S. against the socialist country.
The organization praised Evo Morales' administration for reopening investigations on crimes committed during the dictatorship.
United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights Denis Racicot acknowledged Wednesday the Bolivian government's efforts to comply with international humanitarian law, contradicting claims made repeatedly by the U.S. against the socialist country.
More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/UN-Praises-Bolivia-and-Evo-Morales-Record-on-Human-Rights-20161207-0024.html
Capuchin monkeys produce sharp stone flakes similar to tools
Capuchin monkeys produce sharp stone flakes similar to tools
Date: December 9, 2016
Source:Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo
Summary:Researchers describe that rock fragments produced unintentionally today by primates in Serra da Capivara National Park in Brazil resemble tools made deliberately 2.6 million years ago by ancestors of humans.
In addition to using rocks for various purposes, such as cracking open a seed or fruit to extract the edible part, the Bearded or Black-Striped Capuchin (Sapajus libidinosus), a species of wild monkey found in Serra da Capivara National Park in Piauí State, Brazil, makes sharp stone flakes by strongly and repeatedly hammering one rock against another embedded in an outcrop with a clear intent to smash it. Monkeys observed performing this activity then lick and sniff the quartz dust resulting from the fragmentation of the rock.
This behavior by S. libidinosus frequently produces sharp-edged conchoidal flakes with smooth rounded facets resembling the shape of a scallop shell. The flakes resulting from multiple percussions are left where they fall and are not used as tools by the monkeys.
Researchers at the University of São Paulo's Psychology Institute (IP-USP) in Brazil, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Oxford's Archeology School and University College London's Archeology Institute in the UK, analyzed the flakes inadvertently produced by S. libidinosus and found many that were similar to the lithic tools carved from rocks by hominins (human ancestors) during the Paleolithic era.
The research was conducted as part of the Thematic Project "Tool use by wild bearded capuchin monkeys (Sapajus libidinosus)," for which Eduardo Ottoni is principal investigator. The findings were published in the online version of the journal Nature.
More:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161209184859.htm
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Argentina's March of Resistance Continues Protest Against Macri
Source: Telesur
Argentina's March of Resistance Continues Protest Against Macri
Activists join another "March of Resistance" against the government of Macri in Argentina.
| Photo: Mothers of Plaza de Mayo
Published 9 December 2016
The march has brought together various social movements as President Macri's administration prepares to celebrate its first year in office.
Argentina’s human rights activists Mothers of Plaza de Mayo continued to participate Friday in the 24-hour March of Resistance that began on Thursday in the center of Buenos Aires to protest the government of President Mauricio Macri and its neoliberal measures in the South American country.
The march ended at 7 p.m. local time, as hundreds of supporters joined the 36th march, also remembering the 30,000 people disappeared and killed during the country's dictatorship.
Nora Cortiñas, from the organization, said they have “thirty thousand reasons to continue resistance. Every Thursday over the past 36 years were of resistance and we will continue to do so.”
Read more: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Argentinas-March-of-Resistance-Continues-Protest-Against-Macri-20161208-0020.html
US Border Patrol uses desert as weapon to kill thousands of migrants, report says
US Border Patrol uses desert as ‘weapon’ to kill thousands of migrants, report says
Arizona advocacy group says agents chase border crossers from Mexico into hostile terrain in a strategy that leaves many injured, dead or lost
Rory Carroll in Nogales, Sonora@rorycarroll72
Wednesday 7 December 2016 14.10 EST
The US Border Patrol agency has engineered the death and disappearance of tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants by using the desert wilderness as a “weapon”, according to an advocacy group.
Agents chase and scatter border crossers across hostile terrain in a strategy that leaves many people injured, dead or lost, turning the US’s south-western frontier into a “vast graveyard of the missing”, the Arizona-based group No More Deaths said on Wednesday.
“The known disappearance of thousands of people in the remote wilderness of the US–Mexico border zone marks one of the great historical crimes of our day,” the group said in a blistering report, the first of three reports documenting alleged abuses by Border Patrol.
In addition to deadly apprehension methods it accused the federal agency, which deploys about 18,000 agents on the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, of sabotaging humanitarian aid efforts and discriminating against undocumented people in emergency responses.
No More Deaths, a ministry of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson, worked with volunteers from another group, La Coalición de Derechos Humanos, on the 34-page report. It drew on a survey of 58 border crossers and 544 cases from the Missing Migrant Crisis Line. Tens of thousands have gone missing since the 1990s, including 1,200 last year, it said.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/07/report-us-border-patrol-desert-weapon-immigrants-mexico
Fidel and the Good People
December 9, 2016
by Nelson Valdes
We are born, we grow up, and we live. This happens within a given historical context. We are products of the social, economic, political, cultural-emotional environments. We are also our history; but most people are not even aware of their surroundings and the conditions that influence and affect them. Fidel Castro was shaped by all these circumstances; and he seemed to be very much aware of his context and place. This is not, at all, surprising – his Jesuit education played a very important formative influence in his primary and secondary education. Moreover, he was a student who had to live at the school’s facilities because in the town of Biran, where he was born, there were no schools that could meet the children and teenagers’ needs. Fidel went to the best private and Jesuit schools in the country (Colegio Dolores in Santiago de Cuba and Belen in Havana). In fact, most of the political and economic leaders of Cuba in the first half of the 20th century attended those two schools.
As a child, Fidel had the singularity of being physically athletic, intelligent and with a strong determination. He was a thinking child who did not show signs of fear. He was also –usually– taller than the rest of the boys of his age. His memory and daring also stood out.
From a young age, Fidel was a good student with a prodigious memory. He like to read about history, literature, and geography, among other subjects. He also had the gift of remembering the names of people as well as facts. He paid attention to details and from his Jesuit teachers learned to be analytical. He was not known to be a dancer –something so Cuban– but he made up for that by being a baseball and basketball player, an explorer and a swimmer. He loved the outdoors, walking and hiking. He was born with the gift of wanting to learn everything and of being able to express his ideas, and to draw conclusions on the basis of what he observed–and also take action. He had a sense of himself, his environment, the moment and its possibilities. That he learned at school. He liked sports, books, adventure, exploring nature but also learning philosophy, letters, the law, history, sciences and, of course, politics. This was also part of his schooling. He was a militant in the Ortodoxo Youth and became an influential voice in the Cuban People’s Party (Ortodoxo) – which had the motto of “dignity against money” [verguenza contra dinero]. In fact, by an odd coincidence, Fidel followed the same educational path as Eduardo Chibás, who also went to the Dolores school in Santiago as well as Belen in Havana and the University of Havana. Many of Fidel’s teachers had been Chibás’ instructors as well. It is from Chibás that Fidel learned the style of public speaking that made both famous. But Chibás lacked the athletic side. Strangely, Fidel was born on August 13, 1926, while Chibás was 19 years older (born on August 15, 1907).
Money did not attract Fidel’s attention. And from a young age he had the gift of the spoken word. Like many young people, he read José Martí and that influence followed him forever (Most Cuban politicians mentioned Marti in their public speaking, including Fulgencio Batista, but Fidel became an authentic Martí disciple). In the 1940s – while in high school – when the Cuban parliament was discussing the secularization of public schools, Fidel spoke against it on behalf of his school.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/09/fidel-and-the-good-people/
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