Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalCanada to Legalize Pharmaceutical-Grade Heroin – As Science Proves Ending the Drug War Works
Canada to Legalize Pharmaceutical-Grade Heroin – As Science Proves Ending the Drug War Works
Published: May 17, 2016
Source: Claire Bernish
Canada took direct aim at the war on drugs Friday, announcing it will propose allowing doctors to prescribe pharmaceutical-grade heroin under its Special Access Program (SAP).
“A significant body of scientific evidence supports the medical use of diacetylmorphine, also known as pharmaceutical-grade heroin, for the treatment of chronic relapsing opioid dependence. Diacetylmorphine is permitted in a number of other jurisdictions, such as Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland, to support a small percentage of patients who have not responded to other treatment options, such as methadone and buprenorphine,” the Government of Canada website states.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party have made moves against the drug war, including indications during his campaign that cannabis may be legalized. As Canada’s Liberal Party website states:
“Canada’s current system of marijuana prohibition does not work. It does not prevent young people from using marijuana and too many Canadians end up with criminal records for possessing small amounts of the drug.
More:
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Canada_to_Legalize_Pharmaceutical-Grade_Heroin_–_As_Science_Proves_Ending_the_Drug_War_Works/51205/0/38/38/Y/M.html
Brazil ethics panel questions ex-speaker on bank accounts
Source: Associated Press
Brazil ethics panel questions ex-speaker on bank accounts
Updated 2:33 pm, Thursday, May 19, 2016
SAO PAULO (AP) — The ethics committee of Brazil's lower house began hearings Thursday that could lead to the expulsion of one of the country's most powerful lawmakers.
A Supreme Court decision earlier this month had already suspended Eduardo Cunha as speaker of the chamber of deputies, and now his colleagues are considering whether he should be kicked out of the body entirely.
Cunha is facing allegations of lying to congress by denying holding overseas bank accounts, an assertion he repeated at the hearing. He has been charged with corruption and obstruction of justice.
Swiss prosecutors contend that Cunha held secret accounts at the Julius Baer bank worth an estimated $5 million, funds that Brazilian investigators suspect are linked to a corruption scheme at state oil company Petrobras.
Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Brazil-ethics-panel-questions-ex-speaker-on-bank-7725536.php
Brazil Gets Its Very Own Stonehenge for Rio Olympics
Brazil Gets Its Very Own Stonehenge for Rio Olympics
By Alanna Martinez • 05/19/16 4:13pm
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Rendering of Mariko Mori's Ring: One With Nature (2016) presented by the Faou Foundation.Rendering of Mariko Mori’s Ring: One With Nature (2016) presented by the Faou Foundation. (Photo: Courtesy Faou Foundation)
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Through a complicated system of motorized pulleys, Japanese artist Mariko Mori has raised a ten-foot-wide ring to the top of a waterfall in the Brazilian rainforest. On August 2, three days before the 2016 Summer Olympics kick off in nearby Rio de Janiero, Ms. Mori’s sculpture, Ring: One With Nature, will be unveiled to the public, and her dream of bringing a modern-day, 21st-century Stonehenge to every habitable continent on Earth will be one step closer to reality.
The giant acrylic sculpture is the second in a series of six that Ms. Mori envisions placing at strategic locations worldwide. In 2010, the artist founded the environmental nonprofit Faou Foundation, with the goal of creating monumental artworks for unique ecological environments throughout the world. Ms. Mori also plans to create pieces for Europe, North America, Western Australia, and South Africa. (For the latter she already has a “vision in her head” for a location.) The works, inspired by the history’s great structures such as the Pyramids at Giza and Moai of Easter Island, are meant to spread ecological awareness and allow viewers to “confront nature” through art, Ms. Mori told the Observer.
Her first project with Faou, a 14-foot-tall opaque megalith titled Sun Pillar that changes colors in sunlight, was erected on Japan’s Miyako Island in Okinawa in 2011. The sculpture’s location on the island’s small bay was chosen for its alignment with the sun during the Winter Solstice. The piece is one half of a work she calls Primal Rhythm, which will be completed in the near future with the addition of a floating orb installed in the center of the bay that changes colors with the tides.
Like Sun Pillar, Ring‘s spot atop Brazil’s 190-foot-tall Véu da Noiva waterfall—just an hour and a half from Rio and a six minute walk from the entrance of a state park—will also align with the sun during the shortest day of the year on December 21, and changes color from blue to gold in the light. Beside its astrological alignment, Ms. Mori required only that the work’s location have a “very, very magical appearance” and “magnificent rainforest energy.”
More:
http://observer.com/2016/05/brazil-gets-its-very-own-stonehenge-for-rio-olympics/
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"Sun Pillar" on Okinawa
Artist's rendering of the Ring. [/center]
More images of her work:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p012wbdn/p012wb0d
The Clinton-Colombia Connection
The Clinton-Colombia Connection
May 19, 2016
Exclusive: Despite a grisly human rights record and alleged ties to drug traffickers, Colombia’s ex-President Uribe has been a favorite of Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill, helping Clinton associates turn hefty profits, reports Jonathan Marshall.
By Jonathan Marshall
On June 29, 2009, one day after Honduran military leaders ousted their country’s democratically elected president, President Obama publicly branded the coup illegal and denounced it as “a terrible precedent.” Yet even as he spoke, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was ensuring that U.S. aid continued and that major capitals would recognize the new regime.
Human rights activists have long decried her for abandoning democratic rights and values in Honduras. But many have overlooked her cozy embrace of the morally compromised Latin American leader who happened to be sharing the White House podium when Obama made his remarks: Colombian President Álvaro Uribe.
Obama was hosting Uribe to build political support for the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement, which both he and Hillary Clinton had vigorously opposed during the 2008 election campaign. Obama praised Uribe’s “courage” and his “admirabl(e)” progress on human rights and fighting drug cartels since taking office in 2002 — a controversial claim that Clinton’s State Department would certify that September.
A year later, the love affair between the Obama administration and Uribe grew even hotter. After landing in Bogota for an official visit in April 2010, Defense Secretary Robert Gates lauded the “historic” progress that Uribe’s government had made in the war against “narco-traffickers and terrorists.”
More:
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/05/19/the-clinton-colombia-connection/
Brazil's Coup Government Is at War with Marginalized Groups
Brazil's Coup Government Is at War with Marginalized Groups
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Demonstrators burn a poster with the images of President of the Brazilian Senate Renan Calheiros (L) and Brazil's
interim President Michel Temer in Sao Paulo, Brazil, May 12, 2016. | Photo: Reuters
Published 19 May 2016 (3 hours 54 minutes ago)
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The coup government does not seem to be concerned with the millions of Black, low-income, mestizo, Indigenous or LGBT people in the country.
In a recent interview with The Intercept, ousted Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said that the coup government of Michel Temer showed disregard for the country when he formed a cabinet entirely devoid of women or Black people.
“I think not having any woman or black people in the government shows a certain lack of care for the country you are governing," said Rousseff.
The Temer government, installed into power after the Congress voted to proceed with an impeachment trial, has been pegged as illegitimate by the supporters of the democratically elected president.
It appears that because the coup government does not seek to obtain legitimacy from the populace, it is seemingly unconcerned with the millions of Black, low-income, mestizo, Indigenous or LGBT people in the country.
More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Brazils-Coup-Government-Is-at-War-with-Marginalized-Groups-20160519-0024.html
A Latin American Humanitarian Emergency Invisible to the World
A Latin American Humanitarian Emergency Invisible to the World
By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, May 18 2016 (IPS) - “This is a humanitarian crisis,” said Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres, referring to the generalised violence in Mexico and in Honduras and other countries of Central America, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and is a product of transnational crime, but is invisible to the international community.
Zúñiga Cáceres, the daughter of indigenous environmental activist Berta Cáceres, who was murdered on Mar. 2, is in Mexico after visiting several European cities to ask for help clarifying her mother’s murder and to call for a cancellation of the financing for the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project, to which the Lenca indigenous people are opposed.
In an interview with IPS she admitted that despite the death threats and the murders of other activists, she didn’t believe they would dare kill her mother, who was so well-known at an international level. She herself and her siblings had fled to Mexico due to the threats against members of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras (COPINH), which was founded by Cáceres 23 years ago. She had been studying in Mexico for a month when her mother was killed.
Now she wants to tell the world about communities that are displaced and forced off their land because of a “neoliberal, racist and patriarchal” system. The victims, she said, are not only the Lenca Indians. Also affected are the Garifunas, mixed-race descendants of native people and African slaves, who have been displaced by the construction of tourist resorts in their coastal territory.
To that is added abuse by the police and other agents of the state, since the 2009 coup d’etat that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya, mixed with criminal violence that has forced thousands of people to seek refuge outside of Honduras.
The victims, she said, are not only the Lenca Indians. Also affected are the Garifunas, mixed-race descendants of native people and African slaves, who have been displaced by the construction of tourist resorts in their coastal territory.
More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2016/05/a-latin-american-humanitarian-emergency-invisible-to-the-world/
Cannes red carpet protest: 'Brazil is not a democracy'
Source: Associated Press
Cannes red carpet protest: 'Brazil is not a democracy'
Jake Coyle, Ap Film Writer
Updated 8:47 pm, Tuesday, May 17, 2016
CANNES, France (AP) — The cast of the Brazilian film "Aquarius" held a protest at their Cannes Film Festival red carpet premiere on Tuesday, holding signs reading that Brazil is no longer a democracy.
Other signs claimed that Brazil has been the victim of a coup. On Thursday, Brazil's Senate voted to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, the South American country's first female leader, for allegedly using illegal accounting tricks to hide deficits in federal budgets.
Rousseff has insisted she has done nothing wrong and has called the impeachment a coup. The Senate elected an acting president, 75-year-old Michel Temer, who's married to a 32-year-old former beauty pageant contestant.
"Aquarius," directed by Kleber Mendonca Filhois, is about an aging music critic trying to keep her apartment against developers. It's competing for the Palme d'Or.
Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/article/Cannes-red-carpet-protest-Brazil-is-not-a-7521757.php
(Short article, no more at link.)
Chile asks U.S. to extradite suspects in 1976 murder of diplomat
Source: Reuters
Chile asks U.S. to extradite suspects in 1976 murder of diplomat
Tue May 17, 2016 1:48pm EDT
Related: World, United Nations
Chile's Supreme Court asked the United States on Tuesday to extradite three former agents who worked for Augusto Pinochet's 1973-90 military dictatorship and are suspected of the murder of a United Nations diplomat 40 years ago.
In a unanimous verdict, the court asked that the United States hand over Chilean Armando Fernandez Larios, American Michael Townley and Cuban Virgilio Paz. All three are wanted in Chile for the detention, torture, and killing of Spanish-Chilean citizen Carmelo Soria on July 14, 1976.
According to the courts, Soria was arrested as he traveled home from his office in Santiago at the United Nations' Latin American arm. He was taken by the DINA, Pinochet's feared secret police force, to a torture center in the outskirts of the city.
Soria's body was later found in his damaged car in a roadside ditch in an apparent attempt to make his death seem like a drunk driving crash, according to investigators.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-chile-crime-extradition-idUSKCN0Y8296?rpc=401
[center]
Michael Townley
Virgilio Paz, blue shirt [/center]
Refering to Virgilio Paz and his connection to the Bushes:
Three of the men were flown to Miami and met by their jubilant supporters just days before the 2004 presidential election. But Posada disappeared -- until his emergence here last month.
The quartet are not the only unsavory characters to be given the red carpet in Miami. Reps. Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen, with the backing of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, wrote letters on behalf of several exile militants held in U.S. prisons for acts of political violence. Some were released in 2001, including Jose Dionisio Suarez Esquivel and Virgilio Paz Romero, both convicted for the notorious 1976 car bomb-murder of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American assistant Ronnie Moffitt, in Washington. Once released, instead of being deported like other non-citizen criminals, they have been allowed to settle into the good life in Miami.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58297-2005Apr16.html
Dilma Rousseff's impeachment was led by the white, wealthy men who now make up the Brazilian cabinet
Dilma Rousseff's impeachment was led by the white, wealthy men who now make up the Brazilian cabinet
Brazil is among the most diverse countries on earth. Not since the last dictatorship has a Brazilian government been so unrepresentative of its people
Manuel Barcia Paz |
2 hours ago
When Brazil re-elected President Dilma Rousseff in 2014, I challenged the idea – shared by the Economist magazine, among others – that had the elections been determined by GDP (that is, by economic wealth) and not by universal suffrage, Rousseff would have never been re-elected. What seemed like a harmless remark back in 2014 turned into a nightmarish reality, as the president was forced out of office earlier this week.
Let’s start calling things by their name: what’s happening in Brazil today is a coup d’etat. A coup sponsored by both internal and external forces; forces that have many times before done away with democratically elected governments in Latin America, to satisfy the needs of neoliberal capitalism. Just for a quick check, remember the coups orchestrated in Venezuela in 2002, Haiti in 2004, and Honduras in 2009, under the uninterested eyes of the international community.
What we are seeing now is an impeachment process that was well in the making from the moment the validity of one of the largest democratic elections in the history of the world was questioned.
White, privileged, wealthy, male Brazilians have led the impeachment charges; those same white, privileged, wealthy, male Brazilians that used to have suffrage all for themselves – before power was wrested from their often-bloody hands by former slaves, indigenous populations, women, and LGTB groups.
More:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/dilma-rousseffs-impeachment-was-led-by-the-white-wealthy-men-who-now-make-up-the-brazilian-cabinet-a7030761.html
CIA spy tip-off led to arrest of Mandela: report
Source: Agence France-Presse
CIA spy tip-off led to arrest of Mandela: report
May 15, 2016
London (AFP) - A tip from a CIA spy to authorities in apartheid-era South Africa led to Nelson Mandela's arrest, beginning the leader's 27 years behind bars, a report said on Sunday.
Donald Rickard, a former US vice-consul in Durban and CIA operative, told British film director John Irvin that he had been involved in Mandela's arrest in 1962 which was seen as necessary because the Americans believed he was "completely under the control of the Soviet Union", the report in The Sunday Times newspaper said.
"He could have incited a war in South Africa, the United States would have to get involved, grudgingly, and things could have gone to hell," Rickard said.
"We were teetering on the brink here and it had to be stopped, which meant Mandela had to be stopped. And I put a stop to it."
Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/cia-spy-claimed-tip-off-led-mandela-arrest-105645079.html?nhp=1
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