Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalIraqi Man Shot Dead in Dallas While Taking Pictures of Snow
Source: ABC News
Iraqi Man Shot Dead in Dallas While Taking Pictures of Snow
Mar 6, 2015, 5:26 PM ET
By MEGHAN KENEALLY
[font size=1]
Ahmed Al-Jumaili is seen in this undated photo provided by the Dallas police.
Courtesy Dallas Police Department[/font]
A man who just recently moved to Dallas from Iraq was shot dead as he was taking photos of the first snowfall he had ever seen, police said.
Authorities are investigating the death of Ahmed Al-Jumaili, 36, who was killed in the parking lot of an apartment complex late Wednesday night.
Al-Jumaili only moved to America three weeks ago, according to a fundraising page set up by friends.
The Dallas Police Department said that the shooting took place at 11:40 p.m., when Al-Jumaili and his wife were taking photos of the snow. He was transported to a nearby hospital, where he died.
According to ABC affiliate WFAA, witnesses told police that a group of men randomly started firing a gun and some nearby cars were also hit.
Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/US/iraqi-man-shot-dead-dallas-taking-pictures-snow/story?id=29451260
Colombia: New Killings, Disappearances in Pacific Port
Colombia: New Killings, Disappearances in Pacific Port
Government Fails to Stop Criminal Groups’ Abuses
March 4, 2015
(Buenaventura) – Paramilitary successor groups are abducting, “disappearing,” and dismembering residents of the mostly Afro-Colombian port of Buenaventura, despite government measures announced a year ago to curb the violence, Human Rights Watch said today.
On March 6, 2014, after police reported finding several “chop-up sites” in Buenaventura where victims had been dismembered, President Juan Manuel Santos announced a “special intervention” to improve public security and dismantle paramilitary successor groups there. But new Human Rights Watch research shows alarming levels of abuses by the groups since the intervention began, including disappearances, sexual violence, and child recruitment. The groups have driven at least 6,900 residents from their homes since Santos’s announcement, with the municipality still having the highest rate of forced displacement in Colombia.
“A year has passed since the government announced it was going to take action in Buenaventura, and powerful criminal groups are still terrorizing residents,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “Government measures have helped reduce violence, but the gangs’ brutal control over many neighborhoods remains fundamentally unchanged.”
Human Rights Watch visited Buenaventura last May and November and in February 2015, interviewing more than 70 abuse victims, their family members, public officials, and others.
More:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2015/03/04/colombia-new-killings-disappearances-pacific-port
Sabino Romero: an Indigenous Leader Who Kept His Eyes on the Prize
March 04, 2015
The Film "Sabino Vive"
Sabino Romero: an Indigenous Leader Who Kept His Eyes on the Prize
by CHRIS GILBERT
Caracas.
The Yukpa chief Sabino Romero should be remembered as having staged a 21st century Indian uprising. Having been chased from their ancestral lands in western Venezuela during the last century, the Yukpas under his leadership managed to recuperate a great part of that territory, taking it back from powerful ranchers. Sabino did this with a scrappy group of followers and (to the lasting shame of many of us) with little outside support, including scant support from the revolutionary government that he consistently identified with.
Eventually this led to the inevitable happening: the chief’s being gunned down by a hit-man in the service of local ranchers. In spite of the complicity of the region’s police forces, the ranchers took a long time to achieve their goal: in 2006 they sponsored several assassination attempts, all of them unsuccessful; in 2008 they arrived at his family house but only succeeded in beating up his 97-year-old father, who died two weeks later; in 2012 three of his fellow Yukpa leaders were killed by the ranchers’ men; on March 3 of 2013 two days before Chávez’s death – a news piece that tended to cover up the story – they fatally shot him.
Much of this is documented in a very good, if low-budget film that Carlos Azpúrua has recently completed. The film is critical in an intelligent way. That is, it shows rather than says what happened, letting people, including the ranchers, speak for themselves. This hands-off approach makes Sabino Vive: las últimas fronteras all the more forceful, since the facts are all there and the conclusions unavoidable, including that the central government has some share of the blame in his death, if only for inaction.
Many people, even those whose perspective is not slanted by interest in the Yukpa’s lands – which are of great strategic and economic value – have a difficult time seeing this issue clearly. Some blame the Yukpa for the attitudes assumed by a few anarchist hotheads who support them. But are they really responsible for all of their supporters? Some say that the Yukpa are inveterate cattle rustlers. But do these indigenous people not have a right (like the wood-gatherers that the young Marx defended on the basis of their “customary rights”) to cull from lands that were originally theirs?
Yukpa chief Sabino Romero.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/04/sabino-romero-an-indigenous-leader-who-kept-his-eyes-on-the-prize/
Medea Benjamin: Americans Can Go to Cuba
March 04, 2015
Just Don’t Lay on the Beach!
Americans Can Go to Cuba
by MEDEA BENJAMIN
On a recent CODEPINK trip to Cuba with a 150-person delegation, we found the island crawling with Americans taking advantage of the relaxation of US travel restrictions and the historic thawing of US-Cuban relations. Conan O’Brien was taping his comedy show at a Cuban cigar factory. Senators from Minnesota, Missouri and Virginia were dining at the elegant National Hotel after several days of meetings with Cuban officials. A scholarly group from The Nation magazine was touring the museums with US-Cuba expert Peter Kornbluh. Fresh-faced high school students from Wisconsin were contestants in a jazz competition at a smoke-filled Havana night club. And bulky Texas ranchers with cowboy hats were chugging through Old Havana in a bubble-gum pink 1950 Chevy convertible taxi, scoping out potential business opportunities.
Our huge delegation, put together in a mere 6 weeks, included black Americans looking at race issues, LGBT activists exploring gay rights, and health workers meeting with Cuban family doctors. The exchanges were lively, enlightening and inspiring.
Cubans and Americans alike are delighted with the opening. Cubans are desperate for more money to flow into the island, especially now that Cuba’s key trading partner Venezuela is experiencing an economic and political crisis. And despite the 50-plus years of US attempts to sabotage the island’s socialist experiment, Cubans feel a great affinity towards Americans. They love US jazz, movies, baseball and Apple computers. Americans love Cuban salsa, cigars, rum, beaches, vintage cars and the outgoing, fun-loving Cuban people. For decades, travel restrictions have kept Americans for joining the millions of Canadians, Europeans and other vacationers who flock to Cuban beaches every year. Technically, US citizens have not been banned from traveling to Cuba, but under the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, it has been illegal for Americans to spend money there.
A series of exceptions have been made over the years for family, religious and humanitarian purposes. This has generally meant that U.S. citizens could only travel as part of a group that was granted a license for an approved purpose. The licensing process was daunting, time consuming and often rejected.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/04/americans-can-go-to-cuba/
Conan O’Brien on his Cuban jaunt: ‘I felt really strongly about this’
Conan O’Brien on his Cuban jaunt: ‘I felt really strongly about this’
By Andrea Morabito
March 4, 2015 | 12:01am
No late-night talk show host had filmed in Cuba since Jack Paar in 1959 — so when President Obama announced plans to thaw relations with the country last December, Conan O’Brien jumped on the opportunity.
His resulting four-day, clandestine trip to Havana over President’s Day weekend is documented on Wednesday’s episode of “Conan” (11 p.m. on TBS) — which finds the 6-foot-4, red-haired host in a country where the locals don’t recognize him (and he has only an eighth-grade knowledge of Spanish with which to communicate).
“I felt really strongly about this — I don’t want this to be a snarky American comedy take. I don’t want this to be political,” O’Brien told a group of reporters over lunch in New York last week. “A lot of my [on-location sketches] are me as a fish-out-of-water … I want to go as a comedian who’s making fun of himself and I want to try and make the Cuban people laugh. In that regard, I think we were successful.”
Plans for the Cuba trip were made quickly and under the radar — O’Brien didn’t even tip off his bosses at Time Warner. Instead, executive producer Jeff Ross contacted a production company in Havana, which got a staff of 10 an invitation from the Cuban government to visit as part of a cultural exchange.
More:
http://nypost.com/2015/03/04/conan-obrien-on-his-cuban-jaunt-i-felt-really-strongly-about-this/
Venezuela’s Continuous Coup
March 03, 2015
Is it Imminent? It's Everpresent!
Venezuela’s Continuous Coup
by ALFREDO LOPEZ
When Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma was arrested last week, charged with organizing and leading a coup, the U.S. State Department’s spokeswoman Jen Psaki said: “The allegations made by the Venezuelan government that the United States is involved in coup plotting and destabilization are baseless and false. The United States does not support political transitions by non-constitutional means.”
That remarkable quote — denying what has been a well-known and fully documented pillar of U.S. foreign policy for the last 30 years — tells us more truth than the lie Psaki was trying to spread. Why, at this point, would Washington make such a definitive and laughably false statement?
Legacy and Challenge: Maduro salutes Chavez at rally
The evidence is overwhelming that the rich and powerful of Venezuela have followed a continuous, constantly morphing plan to de-stabilize the country and take over the government by any means necessary and that the United States government knows about that plan, supports it and, as much as it can, is assisting in it.
“There’s been an ongoing effort to destabilize the government,” said author Miguel Tinker Salas, a top authority on the Venezuela’s situation, “to represent the government as a crisis in crisis mode, and to depict the country as if it’s on the brink of a precipice.”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/03/venezuelas-continuous-coup/
Honduras Is Sold as a Libertarian Paradise -- I Went, and Discovered a Capitalist Nightmare
Honduras Is Sold as a Libertarian Paradise -- I Went, and Discovered a Capitalist Nightmare
A glimpse into a society run for the benefit of a handful of the rich and global conglomerates.
By Edwin Lyngar / Salon
March 2, 2015
Last month, I spent my final vacation night in Honduras in San Pedro Sula, considered the most dangerous city outside of the war-torn Middle East. I would not have been scared, except that I traveled with my wife and our four children, aged 5, 7, 14 and 18. On our last taxi ride, we could not find a van to fit us all, so we rode in two taxis. Mine carried me and my two daughters, aged 5 and 14, while the driver blasted Willie Nelson singing “City of New Orleans” (a city that is also considered very dangerous).
It was a surreal moment, traveling in one of the most dangerous cities in the world with my babies in tow. I gave a nod to the radio. “Willie,” I said, and he gave me a grin and vigorous “sí.” There’s a lot of American cowboy culture in Honduras, but along with silly hats, Honduras has also taken one of our other worst ideas—libertarian politics. By the time I’d made it to San Pedro Sula, I’d seen much of the countryside and culture. It’s a wonderful place, filled with music, great coffee, fabulous cigars and generous people, but it’s also a libertarian experiment coming apart.
People better than I have analyzed the specific political moves that have created this modern day libertarian dystopia. Mike LaSusa recently wrote a detailed analysis of such, laying out how the bad ideas of libertarian politics have been pursued as government policy.
In America, libertarian ideas are attractive to mostly young, white men with high ideals and no life experience that live off of the previous generation’s investments and sacrifice. I know this because as a young, white idiot, I subscribed to this system of discredited ideas: Selfishness is good, government is bad. Take what you want, when you want and however you can. Poor people deserve what they get, and the smartest, hardworking people always win. So get yours before someone else does. I read the books by Charles Murray and have an autographed copy of Ron Paul’s “The Revolution.” The thread that links all the disparate books and ideas is that they fail in practice. Eliminate all taxes, privatize everything, load a country up with guns and oppose all public expenditures, you end up with Honduras.
More:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/honduras-sold-libertarian-paradise-i-went-and-discovered-capitalist-nightmare
Farmer Cooperatives, Not Monsanto, Supply El Salvador With Seeds
Farmer Cooperatives, Not Monsanto, Supply El Salvador With Seeds
Tuesday, 03 March 2015 12:57
By Nathan Weller, EcoViva | Report
In the face of overwhelming competition skewed by the rules of free trade, farmers in El Salvador have managed to beat the agricultural giants like Monsanto and Dupont to supply local corn seed to thousands of family farmers. Local seed has consistently outperformed the transnational product, and farmers helped develop El Salvador’s own domestic seed supply–all while outsmarting the heavy hand of free trade.
This week, the Ministry of Agriculture released a new round of contracts to provide seed to subsistence farmers nationwide through its Family Agriculture Program. Last year, over 560,000 family farmers across El Salvador planted corn and bean seed as part of the government’s efforts to revitalize small scale agriculture, and ensure food security in the rural marketplace. Drought conditions across the country made access to seed all the more vital for rural livelihoods, making the seed packets supplied through the government program the primary means for thousands of families to put food on the table.
In 2015, rural cooperatives and national associations will produce nearly 50% of the government’s corn seed supply, with 8% coming from native seed—a record high. In the Lower Lempa, where seven farmer organizations have produced corn seed since 2012, this means over 4,000 jobs and income for rural households, primarily employing women and young adults. The public procurement of seed—or the government’s purchasing power through contracts—signifies over $25 million for a rural economy still struggling to diversify and gain traction.
The success of locally-bred seed varieties, compounded with their low production costs, allowed the Family Agriculture Program to contribute to historically high yields nationwide for corn and beans. Last year, more farmers produced more corn and beans at the most efficient yield per acreage than any other year over the last decade. This has also led to a significant adjustment in El Salvador’s trade balance on corn: Imports of white corn in 2014 were a full 94% less than 2011.
More:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/29419-farmer-cooperatives-not-monsanto-supply-el-salvador-with-seeds
A Once and Future Revolution: The Legacy of Hugo Chávez
March 02, 2015
A Once and Future Revolution
The Legacy of Hugo Chávez
by ROGER D. HARRIS
The rich and reactionary in Venezuela and their allies in Washington celebrated when Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez died two years ago on March 5, 2013. US President Barack Obama did not even make the customary and common courtesy of sending his condolences for the passing of a head of state.
Instead the US empire stepped up its demonization campaign against Chávez’s legacy in order to bury his Bolivarian Revolution. In contrast to his treatment of Chávez, Obama was effusive in his praise of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who died in January 2015 and was the leader of a country which Amnesty International rightly labels one of the most tyrannical and repressive regimes in the world.[1]
¡Yo Soy Chávez!
So why did poor and progressive people in Venezuela, throughout Latin America, and indeed all over the world mourn Chávez’s passing and proclaim ¡Yo soy Chávez! (I am Chávez)?
Lisa Sullivan, a School of the America Watch activist who has lived in the barrios of Venezuela where she brought up her three children, had this to say at the time of Chávez’s passing: “Let there be no doubt: the Venezuelan people have come of age. Chávez is gone, but what resonates on every street and every plaza today: Yo soy Chávez. I am Chávez. I am the leader, the dreamer, the visionary, the teacher, the defender of justice, the weaver of another world that is possible.”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/02/the-legacy-of-hugo-chavez/
Venezuelans Commemorate 26th Anniversary of the Caracazo
Venezuelans Commemorate 26th Anniversary of the Caracazo
By Lucas Koerner
Caracas, February 27, 2015 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – Dozens gathered in the South Cemetery of Caracas on Friday to commemorate the 26th anniversary of the "Caracazo", the 1989 popular rebellion which saw Venezuela's poor and excluded majority rise up against the IMF (International Monetary Fund) structural adjustment package imposed by President Carlos Andres Perez.
Popularly known by the abbreviation of the date, "27-F", the Caracazo is solemnly remembered as one of the most brutal instances of state repression in contemporary Venezuelan history.
Responding to two days of popular social unrest against his government, Perez suspended constitutional guarantees and sent the armed forces in to "restore order". The result was mass human rights violations, including killings, torture, arbitrary arrests, and disappearances.
Over the course of 72 hours, somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 people were killed or disappeared by the state, although the real figure is still unknown due to the existence of mass graves.
Organized by the National Human Rights Network, Friday's ceremony was attended by survivors, human rights activists, local political leaders, and students of the National University of the Armed Forces (UNEFA). It was also broadcast on national television.
More:
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11240
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