Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalLpez Obrador's Youth in His Home State Shows Why He's Not a Demagogic Populist
“We saw right away that he was different. Andrés knows what the bite of an ant feels like.”
By James North
TODAY 5:01 PM
Tucta, Mexico—You can come here and listen to the people who worked with Mexico’s next president when he was a community organizer in his 20s to learn just how wrong and insulting it is to call him a “populist” or a “tropical messiah.” Here you can also get a glimpse of the political revolution that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, hopes will continue to spread across Mexico.
Tucta, located in the steamy, swampy southeastern state of Tabasco, is a village in an area populated mainly by indigenous Chontal people, who have historically suffered high levels of poverty and discrimination. The people here are campesinos, small farmers who grow corn, beans, vegetables, and fruits. López Obrador, a native of this state, came here in the 1970s, just out of university, to work with a government agency, the National Indigenous Institute. Reyes Arias Romano, whom everyone calls Don Reyes, is one of the local leaders. He earned the honorific “Don” not because he is a big landowner—he has a small plot just like his neighbors—but because he is a respected community leader, still president of an agricultural board at age 72.
“When Andrés first came we didn’t pay him much attention,” Don Reyes says. “Others had come before him and nothing changed. But when he moved into our community alongside us, we saw right away that he was different. Andrés was not afraid to roll up his pants and step into the mud. Unlike the other politicians, he knows what the bite of an ant feels like.”
Don Reyes has a sharp memory. He enumerates the changes that started once the young organizer got to work. “We pressured the government to bring electricity,” he says. “Before, we had to use candles and kerosene lamps. The first new housing project got started: 105 new homes, and then more later. Running water arrived. We set up a cooperative to make and commercialize handicrafts. We even started a community radio station.”
More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/lopez-obradors-youth-home-state-shows-hes-not-demagogic-populist/
Victor Jara killing: Nine Chilean ex-soldiers sentenced
Source: BBC News
4 July 2018
REUTERS
Victor Jara was killed when he was just 40 years old
A judge in Chile has found eight retired soldiers guilty of the 1973 murder of popular folk singer Victor Jara.
A ninth suspect was sentenced for his role as an accessory to Jara's murder.
Victor Jara was arrested the day after the military coup led by Gen Augusto Pinochet and taken to a sports stadium in Santiago, where he was tortured in front of other prisoners.
. . .
Soldiers had crushed his fingers, telling him he would never be able to play his guitar again. The 40-year-old singer became famous in the 1960s and 70s for his protest and pacifist songs such as The Right to Live in Peace.
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-44709924
Victor Jara, wife, two daughters.
Those 'Sonic Attack' Victims Are Actually Experiencing Mass Hysteria, Expert Claims
What if there never was any attack?
PETER DOCKRILL 3 JUL 2018
In 2016, US workers in Cuba were the targets of a mysterious 'sonic attack' carried out by a new, weaponised sound technology the world had never seen before. Follow-up attacks in China and elsewhere have since confirmed the arrival of this insidious, invisible threat.
But maybe, it could be possible that... nothing ever happened to them.
According to an expert on mass psychogenic illness, the strange symptoms experienced now by 26 Americans in multiple, international episodes could be the result of a contagious, mass delusion – not the hallmarks of an exotic sonic weapon for which there is no actual proof.
"I am convinced that what we're dealing with is a case of mass hysteria and mass suggestion," medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew told ABC News.
More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/sonic-attack-victims-actually-experiencing-mass-hysteria-expert-claims-psychogenic-illness-delusions-robert-bartholomew
Kentucky woman responds to backlash over giraffe killing
Source: Associated Press
Updated 4:50 pm CDT, Tuesday, July 3, 2018
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — A Kentucky woman vilified on social media for killing a giraffe on a 2017 hunt in Africa says she's received thousands of angry messages and death threats.
A photo of Tess Talley posing with a large giraffe went viral this week after the Twitter account of a site called Africa Digest posted two photos and called her a "white American savage."
Media report that Talley is from Johnson County in eastern Kentucky. She issued a statement this week saying the giraffe was not rare and she was participating in what she called "conservation through game management."
She says in the statement "some of the most vile things have been directed at me and many other women hunters."
Read more: https://www.chron.com/news/us/article/Kentucky-woman-responds-to-backlash-over-giraffe-13047751.php
Colombia's losing candidate claims systematic death threats to former campaigners
by Adriaan Alsema July 2, 2018
Gustavo Petro, who lost to President’select Ivan Duque in elections last month, said Monday that former campaign workers are receiving death threats throughout the country.
Petro said on Twitter that the “systematic threats” sent by the Aguilas Negras to Petro supporters and other social organizations are a crime against humanity.
“A systematic threat is a crime against humanity and the Prosecutor General must respond. His omission converts to complicity,” said Petro on Twitter.
Petro showed one of the threats sent to a campaign team in the Santander province in June when the guerrilla-turned-senator was competing over the country’s top job.
In the pamphlet, the authors make reference to a Petro campaign worker in the southern Huila department who was found murdered on the morning of the first round of elections.
It’s time to cleanse this country of all collaborators and so-called social leaders and followers of guerrilla Gustavo Petro.
Aguilas Negras
. . .
Armed groups formed by these extremists have killed tens of thousands of civilians during the armed conflict that began with the formation of leftist groups like the FARC and the ELN in 1964.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/colombias-losing-candidate-claims-systematic-death-threats-to-former-campaigners/
Obrador Hopes to Restore Mexican Sovereignty
July 2, 2018
By Dan Steinbock
International media touted the neoliberal reforms of President Enrique Peña Nieto for the past year or two. However, when the “reform” narrative proved hollow, Nieto’s approval rating plunged from almost 50 to barely 10 percent. So the establishment narrative changed: it shifted to a flawed portrayal of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as a Mexican Hugo Chávez who endangers Mexico’s future.
Perhaps that’s why before his landslide election victory as president on Sunday The Economist called Obrador “Mexico’s answer to Donald Trump” whose “nationalist populism” offers “many reasons to worry about Mexico’s most likely next president.” Similarly, U.S.-based economic hit men and political risk groups, including Ian Bremmer’s Eurasia Group, framed Obrador’s popular front as a “significant market risk.”
With few variations, the same narrative was replicated in establishment media. The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek and The Financial Times warned of a “firebrand leftist” whose biography is “replete with danger signals.”
What these ideologically-driven reports didn’t say is that Obrador is neither an overnight phenomenon nor Trump-induced collateral damage. In reality, Obrador’s movement is a belated triumph for Mexico’s popular will after decades of electoral fraud.
More:
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/02/obrardor-hopes-to-restore-mexican-sovereignty/
US meddling machine boasts of 'laying the groundwork for insurrection' in Nicaragua
JULY 2ND, 2018 Max Blumenthal
“Laying the groundwork for insurrection”
While some corporate media outlets have portrayed the violent protest movement gripping Nicaragua as a progressive grassroots upswell, the country’s own student leaders have suggested otherwise.
As Nicaraguan student protest leaders met with neoconservatives in Washington DC, a publication funded by the US government’s regime change arm – the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – boasted of spending millions of dollars “laying the groundwork for insurrection” against President Daniel Ortega.
Meeting with US right-wingers
In early June, Nicaragua’s leading young activists went on a junket to Washington DC, on the dime of the US government-funded right-wing advocacy group Freedom House. The Nicaraguan student leaders were there to beseech Donald Trump and other right-wing US government officials to help them in their fight against Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega.
On the excursion to the US capital, the young activists posed for photo-ops with some of the most notorious neoconservatives in the US Congress: Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (see tweets later in this article). The Nicaraguan student leaders were also shepherded to meetings with top officials from the State Department and the US government soft-power organization USAID. There, they were reassured that they would have Washington’s full-throated support.
More:
https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2018/07/02/us-meddling-machine-boasts-of-laying-the-groundwork-for-insurrection-in-nicaragua/
Toronto pay-what-you-can store aims to tackle landfills and hunger
Initiative aims to reduce dumping of ‘waste’ and sell it at prices set by buyers
Ashifa Kassam in Toronto
@ashifa_k
Mon 25 Jun 2018 00.00 EDT
In a bright, airy Toronto market, the shelves are laden with everything from organic produce to pre-made meals and pet food. What shoppers won’t find, however, is price tags. In what is believed to be a North American first, everything in this grocery store is pay-what-you-can.
The new store aims to tackle food insecurity and wastage by pitting the two issues against each other, said Jagger Gordon, the Toronto chef who launched the venture earlier this month.
Every provision is donated by a network of partners across the region, and many of them – from blemished or misshapen produce to staples that are nearing their expiry date – would have otherwise ended up in landfills.
“So it’s a simple procedure of taking those trucks that are destined for landfills, hijacking them and giving them to people in need,” Gordon said.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/25/toronto-pay-what-you-can-store-aims-to-tackle-landfills-and-hunger
Facebook removes fake pages in Latin America ahead of elections
David Lumb, @OutOnALumb
56m ago
Facebook has taken down more than 10,000 allegedly fake Pages, Groups and accounts sourcing from Mexico and Latin America for violating the platform's community standards. Specifically, they "broke our policies on coordinated harm and inauthentic behavior, as well as attacks based on race, gender or sexual orientation," according to a blog post written by Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy.
The post categorized this sweep as part of the platform's mission to regularly eliminate "bad actors," comparing it to the 837 million pieces of spam, 2.5 million pieces of hate speech and 583 million fake accounts it disabled in Q1 2018. Much of that was taken down before they were reported, which Facebook credited to the machine learning and AI that have become a strong component of its efforts to proactively clean out harmful content across the platform.
While this was more of a spring cleaning, Facebook's post noted that combing the site for harmful content would be critical in the run-up to elections in Mexico and elsewhere. The company has been emphasizing the more rigorous screening it'll undertake to resist foreign interference like the millions of ads and post flooding the platform from Russian actors leading up to the 2016 US presidential election.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/26/facebook-removes-10k-fake-pages-accounts-latin-america-ahead-of-elections/
(Short article, no more at link.)
The floating Aztec city
Meet the ancient Mexican metropolis. Situated on Lake Texcoco we find the incredible capital city of the Aztec empire; Tenochtitlan.
22 June 2018
When Spanish conquistadors under the command of Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico in the 16th Century, they encountered the unique indigenous empire of the Aztecs.
The capital city of this vast, wealthy empire was a floating metropolis known as Tenochtitlan. This video reveals how the Aztecs' mastery of engineering allowed them to create this fascinating marvel of Mesoamerica.
Video:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180622-tenochtitlan-the-mexican-metropolis
Please, if interested in seeing more, scan these thumbnails of images from articles on Tenochtitlan:
https://tinyurl.com/ydytc9c7
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