It's nearly impossible for undocumented minors in Florida who have been “abused, abandoned, or neglected” to apply for the green cards that they are legally entitled to.

By Ashley Cleek YESTERDAY 1:07 PM

In October 2015, Lucia, 13, was raped and impregnated. When she told her parents, they called her a “cualquiera,” or “slut,” and tried to send her from their home in Florida back to Guatemala. A case worker had to inform Lucia’s parents that they couldn’t dispatch their daughter against her wishes to another country. Unable to discard her, Lucia’s parents forbade her from reporting her rape to the local police. Instead, they demanded that she extort her rapist. But ICE deported him before he could be blackmailed. Finally, when she was four or five months pregnant, Lucia’s parents told her she needed to pay her “debts,” so Lucia dropped out of high school and got a job at a plant nursery. At that time, her parents began to charge her $350 a month in rent.

To Lucia’s attorney, Rina Gil, her story was an obvious example of parental neglect and abuse, and Lucia, an undocumented minor, should therefore be eligible to apply for a green card under a program called Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS). (Because she is a minor and victim of abuse, Lucia’s name has been changed to protect her identity.)

In September 2017, Gil, a staff attorney at Catholic Legal Services in Miami, filed a private petition for dependency, asking the Miami juvenile court to declare Lucia dependent on the state of Florida and therefore not eligible for deportation. Gil knew that for the past few years juvenile judges in Florida had been skeptical of dependency petitions filed by immigrant minors, but she thought that, since the abuse happened in Florida, Judge Cindy Lederman would look compassionately at Lucia’s case. Gil had even heard that Lederman was more understanding than other Florida judges “when it comes to immigrant cases.”

“I figured—this is a child. She was raped… She’s not in school. She has no one taking care of her. There’s no way that you can say that this child was not neglected or abused or abandoned,” Gil said.

More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/florida-judges-are-turning-their-backs-on-abused-young-immigrants/

Andrea Rodriguez, Associated Press
Updated 3:00 pm, Friday, January 19, 2018



HAVANA (AP) — On a sweltering early summer afternoon in Miami's Little Havana, President Donald Trump told a cheering Cuban-American crowd that he was rolling back some of Barack Obama's opening to Cuba in order to starve the island's military-run economy of U.S. tourism dollars and ratchet up pressure for regime change.

That doesn't appear to be happening. Travel to Cuba is booming from dozens of countries, including the U.S. And the tourism dollars from big-spending Americans seem to be heading into Cuba's state sector and away from private business, according to Cuban state figures, experts and private business people themselves.

The government figures show that 2017 was a record year for tourism, with 4.7 million visitors pumping more than $3 billion into the island's otherwise struggling economy. The number of American travelers rose to 619,000, more than six times the pre-Obama level. But amid the boom — an 18 percent increase over 2016 — owners of private restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts are reporting a sharp drop-off.

"There was an explosion of tourists in the months after President Obama's detente announcement. They were everywhere!" said Rodolfo Morales, a retired government worker who rents two rooms in his home for about $30 a night. "Since then, it's fallen off."

More:
http://www.chron.com/news/world/article/Tourism-booming-in-Cuba-despite-tougher-new-Trump-12509442.php#photo-14909136

Published 17 January 2018

Cuba's infant mortality rate is significantly lower than some of the poorest parts of the United States.

With no solution in sight regarding infant mortalities, residents of Chicago's South Side, home to numerous predominantly Black neighborhoods, have resorted to mentors from the Cuban Ministry of Public Health for help.

Why? The small socialist island, though it has endured a half-century economic blockade imposed by the United States, has an infant mortality rate (4.3 per 1,000 people) lower than its neighbor to the north (5.7 per 1,000 people), according to the World Health Organization.

In fact, Cuba's infant mortality rate is significantly lower than some of the poorest parts of the United States. A good example is the neighborhood of Englewood. With an infant mortality rate of 14.5 babies per 1,000, its statistics mirrors that of war-torn Syria.

More:
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Cuban-Doctors-to-Help-Patients-in-South-Side-Chicago-20180117-0018.html

by Stansfield Smith / January 11th, 2018

Evo Morales will soon have been the president of Bolivia for 12 years, heralding the ascent of the indigenous social movements to governmental power. This ended the apartheid system against the indigenous that existed for 500 years in Bolivia. Morales won in 2005 with 53.7% of the vote, followed by re-elections in 2009 with 64.2% and 2014 with 61.3%.

The country has made great strides in economic development, national sovereignty, women’s and Original Peoples’ rights, respect for Mother Earth, raising the people’s standard of living, level of education, and health care.

His presidency, which has brought an era of relative social peace and economic growth, has been the longest in Bolivia’s history. Since 1825, Bolivia has had 83 presidents with 37, almost half, by means of coup d’etat.

Previous presidents typically lacked social legitimacy, representing a political system that excluded participation of the indigenous peoples, plagued by social and economic inequality, subjugated to foreign interests, and complicit with the looting of natural resources. By 2002, after years of neoliberal regimes serving foreign — mostly U.S. — corporations, the proportion of the rural population living in extreme poverty had risen to 75%.

More:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/01/eleven-years-of-the-process-of-change-in-evo-morales-bolivia/

Eleanor Gibson | 1 hour ago

Mexico City studio Comunal Taller de Arquitectura has completed a prototype for social housing in a mountain town, using a prefabricated bamboo frame that residents can use to replicate the structure in just seven days.

Comunal Taller de Arquitectura, which translates to Communal Architecture Workshop, completed the residence in Cuetzalan del Progreso – a town in the south-central state of Puebla – as an example of social housing that could be quickly and easily built across the region.

The studio previously designed a similar proposal for social housing in 2013 in a town named Tepetzintan, after it found a backlog in the provision of government funded housing. It worked with residents to develop an alternative self-build scheme that utilised local bamboo to make a modular and prefabricated frame, along with local wood and stone.

However in 2016, Mexico's National Housing Commission reviewed its conditions for funding, and banned self-build projects that employed these materials and construction techniques.

More:
https://www.dezeen.com/2018/01/16/bamboo-social-housing-rural-mexico-built-by-residents-one-week-comunal-taller-de-arquitectura/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dezeen+%28Dezeenfeed%29

By Mariela Jara

LIMA, Jan 15 2018 (IPS) - The political crisis triggered in Peru by the presidential pardon of former president Alberto Fujimori granted on Christmas Eve casts a shadow of doubt over what actions will be taken to curb violence against women in this country, where 116 femicides were registered in 2017, and which ranks eighth with respect to gender-related murders in Latin America and the Caribbean.

“The pardon devalues the actions that the government may undertake to achieve a life without violence, because it has released one of the worst violators of the human rights of women,” said Liz Meléndez, director of the non-governmental Flora Tristán Women’s Centre.

Meléndez pointed out that in the 1990s, Fujimori was responsible for a public policy that forcibly sterilised more than 200,000 Andean indigenous peasant women, a crime for which he will not be investigated or penalised since he was granted a presidential pardon.

“This impunity is outrageous,” she said, since due to problems of access to justice, poverty and discrimination, it was only possible to put together a file of 2,074 cases.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/01/pardon-former-peruvian-president-fujimori-deals-blow-fight-gender-violence/

Drinks company names new energy drink ‘Bolsomito’ after Jair Bolsonaro
‘Trump is doing an excellent job. That is the job we want in Brazil’

Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro

@domphillips
Sun 14 Jan 2018 05.00 EST

Brazil’s extreme rightwing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro might not seem an obvious mascot for a fizzy drink: he has praised the country’s military dictatorship, said his children could never have been gay because they were too well-educated, and told a leftist lawmaker congresswoman that she was “too ugly to be raped”.

But a Brazilian company has named a new energy drink the “Bolsomyth” – “Bolsomito” in Portuguese – after the controversial Rio de Janeiro lawmaker.

Bolsonaro, a former army officer, is polling second after former president Luiz Inácio da Silva before October’s election.

. . .

The military dictatorship he defends imprisoned and tortured thousands of its opponents, including Dilma Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla and Lula’s successor as Workers’ party president. Hundreds more were executed or disappeared.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/14/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-energy-drink-bolsomito

By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor | January 11, 2018 01:34pm ET



The blackest feathers of these rainforest birds are fundamentally differently shaped, on a microscopic level, compared with regular black feathers. The nanostructure of the feather makes them particularly prone to scattering and reabsorbing light, and that in turn makes them not only black, but a dull black that seems to whisk light away.

"The black is so striking on these birds of paradise. It really does look different," said Teresa Feo, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's Division of Birds. "When you look at them, they're so dark your eyes can't focus on them. You almost feel a little woozy." [In Photos: Beautiful Hummingbirds of the World]

Blackest of blacks
Birds of paradise are better known for their dramatically flashy colors than their dark plumage. They are found in places like Indonesia and Australia, and are famous for their long tails, bright colors and showy mating dances.

Alongside their colorful feathers, though, many species sport matte black feathers that are "just so weird," Feo told Live Science. This weirdness prompted Harvard graduate student Dakota McCoy to start studying the feathers' structure to figure out why they were so good at absorbing light. Feo and several other colleagues would later join the project to help do imaging work and model the optics of the feather structures of five bird of paradise species and two plain black bird species.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/61406-black-hole-bird-of-paradise.html?utm_source=notification

By Francesca Friday • 01/10/18 4:30pm



Brazilian President Michel Temer at UN headquarters in New York on September 19, 2017.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Brazil has joined France in the unapologetic, state-supported pursuit of online censorship, citing that an onslaught of fake news is disrupting its impending elections. Brazil’s Federal Police announced its plan in a tweet to “combat false news during the election process” by means of a “specially formed group” for the upcoming 2018 primaries, adding that “the measures are intended to identify and punish the authors of ‘fake news’ for or against candidates.”

The proposed group of government officials who will be responsible for filtering online political content the way they see fit, even though there is no legislation currently in place to warrant censorship to such an extremity, will be comprised of high-ranking judiciary officials, including conservative Supreme Court Judge Gilmar Mendes, who is notorious for halting the impeachment of President Michel Temer after he was charged with illegal campaign funding.

One of Brazil’s top police officials, Federal Police Director of Investigation and Organized Crime Eugênio Ricas, told Brazilian news site RF that the delegated task force is already mobilized and that their goal is “not the creation of a new law” but “to establish a protocol of action during the elections to combat fake news.”

When pressed on what legislation is currently in place to reprimand purveyors of fake news, Ricas issued a grave warning—if current law fails, they will enact the Law of National Security, an archaic piece of legislation instated by Brazil’s military state in 1983 that makes it a felony to “spread rumors that cause panic.” Although Ricas admits that “Brazil needs to modernize its legislation,” censorship laws from a past dictatorship do not perturb him. “If this does not happen it is our obligation to work with the legal framework we have,” he said.

More:
http://observer.com/2018/01/brazil-france-toe-the-line-between-censorship-controlling-fake-news/

By Hanneke Weitering, Space.com Staff Writer | January 10, 2018 02:04pm ET

- click for image -

https://img.purch.com/h/1400/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA3My8yNzcvb3JpZ2luYWwvanVwaXRlci1zb3V0aC1wb2xlLmpwZw==

Cyclones swirl at Jupiter's south pole in this photo from NASA's Juno spacecraft.
Credit: Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles/NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS



NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Before NASA sent its Juno spacecraft to explore Jupiter, astronomers were "totally wrong" about much of what they thought they knew about the planet, the mission's principal investigator, Scott Bolton, said during a lecture here at the 231st meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Tuesday (Jan. 9).

Juno, which launched in 2011 and is currently orbiting Jupiter, is not the first spacecraft to study the gas giant up close. NASA's Pioneer and Voyager missions flew by Jupiter in the 1970s, and the Galileo spacecraft later spent eight years orbiting the planet. Even before that, humans had been studying Jupiter with telescopes for hundreds of years.

"Our ideas were totally wrong about the interior structure, about the atmosphere, [and] even about the magnetosphere," Bolton said. Astronomers believed that Jupiter had either a very small and dense core, or perhaps no core at all. But data from Juno revealed that Jupiter has an enormous, "fuzzy" core that might be partially dissolved. This discrepancy between scientists' expectations and the data suggests that there's a lot we still don't know about giant gas planets, he explained.

By the time Juno launched, astronomers had a pretty good idea of what to expect from the new images and data it would collect at Jupiter — or so they thought. [Photos: NASA's Juno Mission to Jupiter]

More:
https://www.space.com/39348-juno-jupiter-mission-planet-revelations.html?utm_source=notification