Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalChicago Building Where Nearly 1,000 Birds Died in One Night Last Fall Installs Bird-Safe Window Film
The glass-covered lakefront convention center has long been known among wildlife advocacy groups as a site of mass casualties for migratory birds
Sarah Kuta
Daily Correspondent
July 23, 2024 4:10 p.m.
Last October, a lakeside event venue in Chicago made headlines around the world after nearly 1,000 birds died in a single night after crashing into the building’s glass exterior. The next morning, the ground outside McCormick Place Lakeside Center looked like a “carpet of dead birds,” as one shocked onlooker described it at the time.
Now, ahead of the annual fall migration, the building’s managers are taking steps to make the facility safer for avians passing through the city. The Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which manages McCormick Place, is investing $1.2 million to cover the venue’s windows with a special film that’s designed to prevent birds from colliding into glass. Crews started work in early June and expect to wrap up by early September.
In addition to installing the film, the center plans to continue taking other steps to thwart collisions, such as drawing the drapes and shutting off lights at night, which is when many migratory species do most of their flying.
“As an organization that strives to be a good neighbor and environmental steward, the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (MPEA) remains committed to minimizing McCormick Place’s impact on local and migratory birds,” says Larita Clark, MPEA’s chief executive officer, in a statement, as reported by WTTW’s Patty Wetli.
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chicago-building-where-nearly-1000-birds-died-in-one-night-last-fall-installs-bird-safe-window-film-180984755/
HRW report reveals El Salvador children subjected to human rights violations amid gang crackdown
Samara Baboolal | U. Nottingham School of Law, GB
JULY 17, 2024 04:33:21 AM
Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report Tuesday claiming that children’s rights in El Salvador have been violated since the country declared its state of emergency in 2022. The report reveals that children in low-income communities have been arbitrarily detained, tortured, and faced severe mistreatment as a result of the country’s “war on gangs.”
The report, “Your Child Does Not Exist Here,” details that since the state of emergency roughly 3,000 children were arbitrarily detained in what witnesses call “indiscriminate sweeps.” Over 90 people were interviewed by HRW and described coercion at the hands of police, among other human rights violations. The interviewees say that police forces would detain them for questioning for up to 7 days at a time, often keeping them with adults.
HRW says detained children were then faced with “overcrowding, lack of adequate food and health care, and […] denied access to their lawyers and family members.” Children have also been subjected to “beatings and sexual violence” from other detainees. The report says that the majority of children subjected to these human rights violations are from low-income communities, as these areas tend to have higher rates of gang violence and presence. The report says:
For decades, pervasive poverty, social exclusion, and lack of educational and work opportunities have left few viable paths forward for children, enabling gangs to recruit and exploit them and security forces to stigmatize and harass them.
President Nayib Bukele requested the state of emergency, which came into effect on March 27, 2022, as a means of combating criminal gangs. The decree allows the government to temporarily restrict constitutional freedoms. It was extended on July 10 for another 30 days.
More:
https://www.jurist.org/news/2024/07/hrw-report-reveals-el-salvador-children-subjected-to-human-rights-violations-amid-gang-crackdown/
Ludlow Massacre site receives restoration grant from National Park Service
By Dan Boyce
·
Jul. 16, 2024, 4:26 pm
Armed United Mine Workers of America, Ludlow Tent Colony 1914.
The National Park Service is providing more than $150,000 towards preserving the site of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. The grant was announced last week as part of the American Battlefield Protection Program.
The Colorado National Guard attack on mine workers north of Trinidad is considered a turning point in the history of the U.S. Labor movement. In 1914, United Mine Workers of America members camped in a tent colony in what is now the ghost town of Ludlow and declared a strike over working hours and mine safety.
In response, on April 20th, National Guard troops aligned with the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company attacked the approximately 1,200-member colony in an attempt to break the strike. The troops killed 21 people, 11 of them children.
. . .
President Woodrow Wilson eventually ordered federal troops to establish peace across the strike zone. The U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations would go on to place much of the blame on John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his inaction as manager of the site. A union was established within the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company the following year.
More:
https://www.cpr.org/2024/07/16/ludlow-massacre-site-receives-restoration-grant-national-park-service/
Social media polls deliberately skew political realities of 2016, 2020 US presidential elections, finds researchers
JULY 16, 2024
Editors' notes
Informal political polls conducted on X/Twitter during both the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections were significantly skewed by questionable votes, many of which may have been purchased from troll farms.
This conclusion, reached by a team of scientists led by Przemyslaw (Przemek) Grabowicz, research assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, shows that X/Twitter's poll system deliberately reports biased public vote counts. On average, the results of such questionable polls favored Donald Trump over Joe Biden, 58% to 42% in a head-to-head comparison, during 2020.
The team additionally found that there were approximately 50% more questionable votes in pre-election polls than in those following the presidential elections, suggesting that skewing social polls is a deliberate tactic to influence political outcomes.
In 2024, such biased social polling from X/Twitter was publicly featured by Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social, presumably to create the impression of his overwhelming popularity. These results are detailed in two papers, one published recently in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media and the other available on the arXiv preprint server.
More:
https://phys.org/news/2024-07-social-media-polls-deliberately-skew.html
NASA's Webb investigates eternal sunrises, sunsets on distant world
July 15, 2024
Source:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
. . .
Researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have finally confirmed what models have previously predicted: An exoplanet has differences between its eternal morning and eternal evening atmosphere. WASP-39 b, a giant planet with a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter, but similar mass to Saturn that orbits a star about 700 light-years away from Earth, is tidally locked to its parent star. This means it has a constant dayside and a constant nightside -- one side of the planet is always exposed to its star, while the other is always shrouded in darkness.
Using Webb's NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph), astronomers confirmed a temperature difference between the eternal morning and eternal evening on WASP-39 b, with the evening appearing hotter by roughly 300 Fahrenheit degrees (about 200 Celsius degrees). They also found evidence for different cloud cover, with the forever morning portion of the planet being likely cloudier than the evening.
Astronomers analyzed the 2- to 5-micron transmission spectrum of WASP-39 b, a technique that studies the exoplanet's terminator, the boundary that separates the planet's dayside and nightside. A transmission spectrum is made by comparing starlight filtered through a planet's atmosphere as it moves in front of the star, to the unfiltered starlight detected when the planet is beside the star. When making that comparison, researchers can get information about the temperature, composition, and other properties of the planet's atmosphere.
"WASP-39 b has become a sort of benchmark planet in studying the atmosphere of exoplanets with Webb," said Néstor Espinoza, an exoplanet researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute and lead author on the study. "It has an inflated, puffy atmosphere, so the signal coming from starlight filtered through the planet's atmosphere is quite strong."
More:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/07/240715135814.htm
WASP-39b Wikipedia:
WASP-39b, officially named Bocaprins, is a "hot Jupiter" extrasolar planet discovered in February 2011[3] by the WASP project, notable for containing a substantial amount of water in its atmosphere.[1][4][5] In addition WASP-39b was the first exoplanet found to contain carbon dioxide in its atmosphere,[6][7] and likewise for sulfur dioxide.
WASP-39b is in the constellation Virgo, and is about 700 light-years from Earth.[1] As part of the NameExoWorlds campaigns at the 100th anniversary of the IAU, the planet was named Bocaprins, after the beach Boca Prins [de; es] in the Arikok National Park of Aruba.
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-39b
How Donald Trump might make it harder to vote if he wins a new term
The warning comes as Democrats say that democracy is on the ballot, Trump suggests he won't accept a defeat and Republicans say they want to make it harder to cheat.
Erin Mansfield
USA TODAY
Published 5:10 a.m. ET July 13, 2024 | Updated 5:10 a.m. ET July 13, 2024
A liberal watchdog organization is warning that former President Donald Trump is on a mission to make it harder for people to vote in 2024 and beyond, and he is ready to discredit the results if he loses.
In a new report this week, the American Civil Liberties Union pointed to Trump and his allies’ refusal to commit to accepting the results of this year's presidential election.
Even if he does win, the ACLU said, Americans should expect Trump will abuse his executive power to interfere with elections, such as prosecuting spurious claims of voter fraud, purging voters from rolls, and using federal police powers to intimidate local election workers.
It’s one of the strongest nonpartisan warnings yet of the potential consequences of a second Trump presidency, as anxious Democrats say that democracy is on the ballot but Republicans counter that the purpose of their new election laws is to make it harder to cheat.
More:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/07/13/trump-win-voting-rights-effect/74384702007/
Archaeologists May Have Found Home Built by One of New England's First Black Property Owners
Pompey Mansfield was an enslaved man who won his freedom, purchased land, constructed a house and became a prominent community leader
Eli Wizevich
Reporter
July 10, 2024
Researchers have unearthed the stone foundations of a house that may have belonged to Pompey Mansfield (known as “King Pompey”), an enslaved man from West Africa who won his freedom and became one of the first Black landowners in colonial New England.
At some point after his birth in the early 1700s, Mansfield was abducted and brought to Massachusetts. Historians don’t know how long he was enslaved or when he was freed. In 1762, he appears to have purchased two acres of land, where he eventually built a small house.
“King Pompey was an esteemed leader in the Black community, but his home and property have always been a mystery,” says Kabria Baumgartner, a historian at Northeastern University and member of the research team, in a statement. The researchers wanted to solve that mystery. They started their search with a crucial piece of evidence: an 1829 map of northeastern Massachusetts featuring a tiny square marked with the words “Black King Pompey.” However, the map alone would not be enough.
“I have learned over the years of doing archaeology, looking for sites on early colonial and even historic maps, it’s hardly like you can enter them into your GPS,” Meghan Howey, an archaeologist at the University of New Hampshire and member of the research team, tells Beth Treffeisen of Boston.com.
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-find-homestead-belonging-to-one-of-new-englands-first-black-property-owners-180984679/
U.S. Christian Nationalists Are Celebrating Latin American Dictators
U.S. Christian Nationalists Are Celebrating Latin American Dictators
The far right in the United States has alarming connections to the far right in Latin America.
BY JEFF ABBOTT JULY 12, 2024 5:11 PM
One of the most important groups in Donald Trump’s reelection campaign for President of the United States is Christian nationalists. Their influence is best captured in the promotion of the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which seeks to implement a Christian supremacist government in the United States.
But increasingly, the thought leaders of Christian supremacy and their supporters in the United States are looking to Central and South America. Among these examples they have embraced are El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, and Argentina’s libertarian firebrand president, Javier Milei.
“In countries like Hungary, Argentina, and El Salvador, bold Christian leaders are defending democracy and fighting corruption,” Lance Wallnau, a Christian dominionist and promoter of the dangerous Seven Mountains Mandate wrote in a post on X. “In El Salvador, a leader embraced Christian values to combat a corrupt Marxist regime, using the military to dismantle gangs like MS-13.”
The Seven Mountains Mandate is a branch of dominionist theology that argues that Christians must take control of key aspects of society, specifically the family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government, in order to guide the country in a Christian direction.
More:
https://progressive.org/latest/us-christian-nationalists-are-celebrating-latin-american-dictators-abbott-20240713/
Javier Milei, brandishing his campaign chainsaw
Nayib Bukele, El Salvador
Bukele Lobbyist Received $325,000 in Three Months to Court MAGA Politicians
Wednesday, July 10, 2024
Jimmy Alvarado
Leer en español
One of the authors of Nayib Bukele’s strategy to draw close to the Make America Great Again movement in the United States is Argentinian advisor Damian Mathías Merlo Denebardi. Merlo is registered with the U.S. Justice Department since January 2022 as a lobbyist on behalf of the Office of the President of El Salvador via Latin America Advisory Group LLC, where he is a managing partner.
U.S. public records show the payments he received for a slice of this work. Between April and June 2023, Merlo’s firm took in five transfers of $65,000 USD each, totaling $325,000, for at least nine months of labors by that point on behalf of the Bukele administration. At the time of filing he was set to receive a sixth outstanding payment, thereby reaching $390,000, but the records available online do not state whether this latter check was issued. On February 13, Merlo submitted documents to the Justice Department stating that his contract with the Salvadoran Presidency was set to end in under four months, on May 31, 2024.
While the Salvadoran government’s own public-information portal does not provide information on his contractual duties, the U.S. documents record his lobbying to strengthen relations between El Salvador and the United States, chiefly by reaching out to Republicans in Congress and right-wing influencers supportive of Donald Trump. These documents also reveal a photocopy of the contract he signed in January 2022 with Claudia Juana Rodríguez de Guevara, at the time Bukele’s private secretary.
- click link for image -
https://elfaro.net/get_img?ImageWidth=720&ImageId=40731
In February 2024, Bukele lobbyist Damian Merlo met at CPAC with Matt and Mercedes Schlapp, respectively the director of CPAC and former director of strategic communications for the Trump administration.
- click link for image -
https://elfaro.net/get_img?ImageWidth=720&ImageId=40732
Donald Trump Jr (bottom-right), Damian Merlo (with glasses), Matt Schlapp (standing), and Kimberly Guilfoyle (center-left) in Casa Presidencial in San Salvador for a reception following the June 1 inauguration.
Documents filed under the Foreign Agents Registry Act (FARA) record at least 15 meetings with conservative U.S. politicians, some of whom traveled to San Salvador for the inauguration of Bukele’s unconstitutional second term. Among them is Florida Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. One report filed by Merlo listed one text message, four emails, and an in-person meeting with Salazar —a former journalist who is close to right-wing movements in the hemisphere and has endorsed Donald Trump for president this year— in May and June 2023.
More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202407/el_salvador/27489/bukele-lobbyist-received-325-000-in-three-months-to-court-maga-politicians
Looking for the quote by Jimmy Carter's lead diplomat in Cuba, I was sad to discover this news:
Wayne S. Smith, diplomat who resigned over U.S. policy toward Cuba, dies at 91
He invited controversy with his outspoken advocacy of restoring normal relations between the countries.
By Matt Schudel
July 7, 2024 at 10:54 a.m. EDT
Wayne S. Smith in 2005 speaking to Cuban Americans in Miami who opposed the U.S. embargo against Cuba. (Alan Diaz/AP)
Wayne S. Smith, an American envoy in Cuba when Fidel Castro took control of the island nation in 1959 and who returned to a diplomatic post in Havana two decades later, only to resign in opposition to the U.S. embargo and other punitive measures against Cuba, died June 28 at his home in New Orleans. He was 91.
He had complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said his daughter, Melinda Smith Ulloa.
Mr. Smith was an idiosyncratic blend of blunt-spoken Texan and diplomatic finesse who became one of the country’s leading authorities on Cuba during his 25-year career with the State Department. He was first assigned to Cuba, just 90 miles from Key West, Fla., in 1958.
U.S. Embassy staff members were shaking off their New Year’s Eve hangovers early on Jan. 1, 1959, when Cuba’s strongman president, Fulgencio Batista, fled the country as Castro’s forces closed in on Havana.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/07/07/wayne-smith-cuba-dies/
(The article states Wayne Smith was in Havana when former President Obama re-opened diplomatic relations with Cuba. You may recall Obama also visited Cuba with his family, as had former President Jimmy Carter and Rosalyn during George W. Bush's pResidency.)
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