Source: Associated Press

October 31, 2017 5:49 PM
Associated Press

The Trump administration will defend America's decades-old economic embargo on Cuba in a United Nations vote this week, the State Department said Tuesday, in a reversal from the Obama administration that reflects deteriorating U.S.-Cuban relations.

Every year the U.N. votes to condemn the embargo, and for years the U.S. predictably voted "no." But last year, under President Barack Obama, the U.S. abstained for the first time, as Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro moved forward with the historic warming of relations.

A "no" vote Wednesday from U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley will return the United States to a place of extreme isolation within the global community over its policy toward Cuba, potentially undermining the Trump administration's broader goals for engagement with Latin America. The U.S. embargo on Cuba is almost universally opposed throughout the world.

. . .

The yearly vote condemning the U.S. embargo has reliably passed overwhelmingly. Voting "no" means the U.S. will once again be pitted against almost every other nation.


Read more: https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-administration-defend-cuba-embargo-un-reverse-obama-stance/4094439.html

Rob Gillies, Associated Press
 Updated 5:54 pm, Monday, October 30, 2017

TORONTO (AP) — Colleen Cardinal often wondered why her parents turned bright red in the sun but she grew dark along with her sisters. The puzzle was solved when she was a young teen, and the woman she had thought of as her mother disclosed that she had been picked out of a catalog of native children available for adoption.

Cardinal was one of thousands of indigenous children taken from their birth families from the 1960s to mid-1980s and sent to live with white families, who officials at the time insisted could give them better care. Many lost touch with their original culture and language.
 
It echoes the history of residential schools in Canada. Some 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children were taken from their families over much of the last century and put in government schools, where they were forced to convert to Christianity and not allowed to speak their native languages. Many were beaten and verbally abused, and up to 6,000 are said to have died.
 
The government has since apologized and offered compensation for the victims of residential schools, and now it's paying compensation for what is known as the "Sixties Scoop" in which children were essentially scooped up from reservations and their native families. But many say the settlement is too little, too late.

More:
http://www.chron.com/news/world/article/Canada-seeks-to-compensate-indigenous-taken-from-12316196.php

Two women file class action suit after Saskatoon authorities admit several others have made claims of undergoing process without proper consent

Ashifa Kassam
@ashifa_k
Friday 27 October 2017 05.00 EDT

Two indigenous women in Canada have filed a class action lawsuit over allegations that they were coerced into undergoing sterilisation at a Saskatchewan hospital. The suit was launched after health authorities in the province admitted that several women had come forward with similar claims.

The legal challenge, which still needs to be certified by a judge, centres on the idea of proper and informed consent – and whether this was obtained before the womenwere sterilised.

One of the complainants alleges that she explicitly refused to have her fallopian tubes tied when staff suggested the procedure after the birth of her son in 2001. Despite her objections, she was taken to the operating room in a wheelchair, still weak from delivery, and the procedure was carried out, she said.

The second woman alleges that a doctor suggested tubal ligation as she was being wheeled into the operation theatre for an emergency caesarean section – and had already been given an epidural to counter the deep pain she was in.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/27/canada-indigenous-women-sterilisation-lawsuit

October 31, 2017


The new round of documents on the Kennedy assassination shed light on the long-running U.S. government effort to overthrow Fidel Castro -- including discussions to stage attacks on U.S. soil and blame Cuba



AARON MATÉ: It's The Real News. I'm Aaron Maté. A new round of documents on the Kennedy assassination has been released. The docs don't shed new light on how Kennedy was killed, but they do shed light on the long-running US effort to overthrow the Castro government in Cuba. Joining me now is Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. He is co-author of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana. 

Welcome, Peter. What to you is significant about these now JFK documents and what they contain about Cuba? 

PETER KORNBLUH: What's significant is that almost none of them are new. There's only actually 52 new documents that we haven't seen before that have been released out of these 2,800 documents. All the other ones have been released as part of the JFK Act before and now are being released with less or no redactions. Many of the documents that you've looked at are actually ones that have been out and around for a while. Many of them do address the issue of US covert interventions, efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro and roll back the Cuban revolution. 

That's because the original JFK commission that was in charge of identifying relevant documents made a very appropriate and broad definition of what a JFK-related document was. Because of the whole issue of Kennedy trying to kill Castro, and rumors that Castro might have retaliated by killing Kennedy, because this became a conspiracy theory in the folklore of the Kennedy assassination, all the documents related to US covert operations, assassination plots, and the violent terrorist activities of Cuban exiles who once worked for the CIA, all of those documents have been released over the years. There's still some more to be released, but in this last release of documents, we did find those Cuba documents.

More:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=20337

written by Stephen Gill October 30, 2017

Former Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler survived World War II and resided in Colombia for several months in 1954, according to a recently declassified CIA document.

The declassified United States intelligence memo, released as part of a series of files on the murder of former President John F. Kennedy had a photograph attached showing an “Adolf Schrittelmayor” in Tunja in the Boyaca province of the South American country.

The memo, which was marked “secret”, was wired from the head of CIA’s bureau in Caracas, Venezuela, on October 3, 1955 and claimed that Hitler was alive and well.

. . .

One of the documents in the file is a letter sent to Washington by CIA agent David Brixnor in which he writes that Hitler is alive and was seen talking to a former German SS trooper named Phillip Citroen who was believed to be in contact with the former dictator once a month in Colombia.

More:
https://colombiareports.com/declassified-cia-document-claims-hitler-colombia-world-war-ii/

The 50-year civil war is over but, in the Cauca Valley, indigenous communities are on frontline of fight against drug gangs, riot police and deforestation
Jonathan Watts
Saturday 28 October 2017 19.05 EDT

A green-and-red flag flies over a cluster of bamboo and tarpaulin tents on the frontline of an increasingly deadly struggle for land and the environment in Colombia’s Cauca Valley.

It is the banner for what indigenous activists are calling the “liberation of Mother Earth”, a movement to reclaim ancestral land from sugar plantations, farms and tourist resorts that has gained momentum in the vacuum left by last year’s peace accord between the government and the paramilitaries who once dominated the region – ending, in turn, the world’s longest-running civil war.

The ragtag outpost in Corinto has been hacked out of a sugar plantation, destroyed by riot police, then reoccupied by the activists, who want to stop supplying coca (the main ingredient for cocaine) to drug traffickers in the mountains by cultivating vegetables on the plains instead.

Despite two deaths in the past year, the Nasa Indians – the biggest, most organised and most militant of the 20 indigenous groups in the valley – have staged waves of monoculture clearance and occupation operations. Almost every other week hundreds, sometimes thousands, of machete-bearing activists join these communal actions, known as minga, which involve burning and hacking down swaths of sugar cane, then erecting camps and planting traditional crops including maize and cassava.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/28/nasa-colombia-cauca-valley-battle-mother-land

By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | October 23, 2017 03:52pm ET

Earth's first trees had hundreds of tree-like structures within them, making them exceedingly more intricate than the insides of modern trees, a new study finds.

Researchers made the discovery after studying the fossils of 374-million-year-old trees found in northwest China. The fossils showed that these ancient trees had an interconnected mesh of woody strands, the researchers found.

"It's just bizarre," said study co-researcher Christopher Berry, a senior lecturer of paleobotany at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. [Nature's Giants: Photos of the Tallest Trees on Earth]

The two specimens were found in 2012 and 2015 in Xinjiang, China, by study lead researcher Hong-He Xu, of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The specimens belong to a group of trees known as cladoxylopsids, which are known to have existed from the Middle Devonian to the Early Carboniferous periods, from about 393 million to 320 million years ago, long before dinosaurs walked the Earth.

- click for image -

https://img.purch.com/h/1400/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5saXZlc2NpZW5jZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA5Ni8zMjAvb3JpZ2luYWwvQ2FsYW1vcGh5dG9uX0ZvcmVzdC5qcGc/MTUwODc4NzY2OQ==

More:
https://www.livescience.com/60746-earth-oldest-trees-had-complex-structure.html?utm_source=notification

written by Adriaan Alsema October 23, 2017



More:
https://colombiareports.com/sad-see-foreigners-know-colombians-countrys-reality/

Nicaragua has agreed to join the Paris climate agreement, leaving only the US and Syria outside the global pact. As the world gears up for the next climate talks in Bonn, questions surround Washington's plans.

24.10.2017

Nicaragua has already presented the relevant documents to join the global agreement at the United Nations, Vice President Rosario Murillo said on Monday.

"It is the only instrument we have in the world that allows the unity of intentions and efforts to face up to climate change and natural disasters," Murillo said. The move will leave only two countries outside the global pact: war-torn Syria and the US.

In September, President Daniel Ortega announced during a private meeting with World Bank directors that his country would join the agreement, although this information was later removed from the official government website.

Nicaragua was the only nation to reject the agreement in 2015 and has argued for far more drastic action to limit rising temperatures.

More:
http://www.dw.com/en/nicaragua-moves-to-join-paris-climate-accord-isolating-us-syria/a-41082833

written by Adriaan Alsema October 20, 2017



Ten people were arrested after authorities found out that mentally challenged children were tied down and drugged in a government-contracted private clinic, authorities said Thursday.

The ten worked in a mental healthcare center that had been contracted by the Colombian Institute for Child Welfare (ICBF) in the central city of Ibague, Tolima.

According to the prosecution, the suspects were charged with torture after finding out they had tied down and drugged children.

The caretakers additionally imposed “military doctrine” on the children for punishment.

More:
https://colombiareports.com/10-arrested-central-colombia-torturing-disabled-children/