Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalForgotten Mayan city 'discovered' in Central America by 15-year-old
Source: Independent
Forgotten Mayan city 'discovered' in Central America by 15-year-old
William Gadoury made a link between the location of Mayan cities and the civilization's major constellations
Samuel Osborne |
@SamuelOsborne93 |
13 minutes ago|
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View of the ancient 'Valley of the Warriors' in Chiapas, Southern Mexico, which has recently been shown to be the largest pyramidal acropolis in Mesoamerica (file image) JANET SCHWARTZ/AFP/Getty Images
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A 15-year-old boy believes he has discovered a forgotten Mayan city using satellite photos and Mayan astronomy.
William Gadoury, from Quebec, came up with the theory that the Maya civilization chose the location of its towns and cities according to its star constellations.
He found Mayan cities lined up exactly with stars in the civilization's major constellations.
Studying the star map further, he discovered one city was missing from a constellation of three stars.
Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/forgotten-mayan-city-discovered-in-central-america-by-15-year-old-a7021291.html
NewPanama Papers: Son of a man who killed Emmett Till named in latest leaks
Source: Independent
Panama Papers: Son of a man who killed Emmett Till named in latest leak
The Mississippi businessman was connected to the Mossack Fonseca law firm
Feliks Garcia New York |
@feliksjose |
20 minutes ago|
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Mario Bennett/Facebook
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The latest release of the Panama Papers includes the name of a Mississippi businessman whose father killed 14-year-old Emmett Till - one the most high-profile racialized killings in the pre-Civil Rights US.
Harvey Milam - son of a man who admitted to killing Till, JW - showed up in the latest leak of the 11m documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in April. The documents implicated numerous heads of state, businessmen, and celebrities in money laundering and tax evasion scandals, with the help of the law firm Mossack Fonseca in Panama.
According to the ICIJ, Mr Milam was a client of Michael B Edge, who was an "unofficial representative" of Mosseck Fonseca questioned by the FBI in 2000.
Mr Milam was reportedly sued by the Nevis-based insurance company, Condor Insurance Limited, who claimed that he cheated investors by “fraudulently transferring the insurer’s assets to other companies”. The insurance company accused Mr Milam of transferring $313m in assets to Condor Guaranty, Inc, “to put them out of the reach of creditors,” the lawsuit filing reads.
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JW Milam (right) Rex
Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/panama-papers-emmett-till-jw-milam-son-a7021301.html
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Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam.
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Jailed in El Salvador after losing their pregnancies
Jailed in El Salvador after losing their pregnancies
By Guest Writer
May 8, 2016 at 11:45 AM
For many of us around the world, Mother’s Day falls on May 8th this year, which also marks Teodora’s 36th birthday. Teodora has spent eight years in prison, and will spend yet another birthday and another Mother’s Day, which comes just two days after ours, without her family.
Amnesty campaigner Karen Javorski takes us inside one of El Salvador’s most notorious prisons to meet Teodora del Carmen Vásquez and María Teresa Rivera, women jailed after pregnancy complications.
Teodora shares a cell with 70 other women. For María Teresa, it is 250. Cramped together like this, the women often have to sleep on the floor under the building’s hot tin roofs.
This is Ilopango prison on the outskirts of San Salvador, capital of El Salvador. I’m here with my Amnesty colleagues, and our local partners, to visit Teodora del Carmen Vásquez and others from “Las 17”, a group of Salvadoran women who are in prison after suffering pregnancy-related complications.
More:
http://blog.amnestyusa.org/americas/jailed-in-el-salvador-after-losing-their-pregnancies/
Documentary About Peru's Bagua Massacre Wins Award in Madrid
Documentary About Peru's Bagua Massacre Wins Award in Madrid
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Peruvian Indigenous leader Alberto Pizango is the subject of a new, award winning documentary about an Indigenous uprising against free trade and globalization. | Photo: AFP
Published 7 May 2016
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The film "When Two Worlds Collide" unmasks the violence that globalization unleashed on Peru's Amazon Indigenous communities.
A documentary showing the mass killing of a Peruvian Amazon community won the first prize at the Madrid International Documentary Film Festival, in Spain.
When Two Worlds Collide” tells the story of Alberto Pizango, an Indigenous leader who became one of the most wanted men in Peru. He faces charges for his involvement in the clashes between local communities and military forces due to land conflicts.
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Protests turned deadly in Bagua, Peru. Photo: Reuters
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What started as a protest against the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement over provisions opening the Amazon to oil and gas exploitation and logging turned deady when President Alan Garcia sent in the military to put down the upsrising. The “Bagua Massacre," as it is known, left 33 people dead and hundreds injured in June 2009.
The measures carried out by Garcia to implement the trade deal which drew the anger of affected communities violated Indigenous rights laid out in both the country's constitution and international treaties. Years later, thanks to WikiLeaks, it was shown that Washington shares responsibility for the bloodshed as a U.S. State Department cable warned Garcia that "there would be implications for the recently implemented Peru-US Free Trade Agreement” if the protests aren't dealt with. Another cable actually blames the violence on the Indigenous communities.
More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Documentary-About-Perus-Bagua-Massacre-Wins-Award-in-Madrid-20160507-0035.html
The Wall Street Journal is Playing Dirty in El Salvador, Again
May 6, 2016
The Wall Street Journal is Playing Dirty in El Salvador, Again
by Hilary Goodfriend
San Salvador, El Salvador.
As usual, Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady has raked up such a scandalous mountain of defamation, fabrication and redbaiting in her most recent piece on the power struggles within El Salvador’s oligarchic private sector that it’s hard to know where to start. The task of refuting Ms. O’Grady is daunting to the point of exhaustion. That is, of course, a hallmark of this kind of Reaganite Cold War propaganda: overwhelm the public with so much misinformation that those seeking the truth are left far behind as they scramble to disprove, fact-by-fact, the long-cold trail of lies.
Yet Ms. O’Grady’s column raises a deeply perplexing question: Why on earth should the internal elections within a remote Salvadoran business association make headlines in one of the country’s most widely circulated periodicals? To explore this, we must not lose ourselves in each incendiary absurdity, and instead examine the narrative.
Ms. O’Grady’s principal argument appears to be that bloodthirsty Soviet-Chavista-Cuban totalitarians have high-jacked El Salvador, turning what was once a free-market paradise into a Venezuelan hellscape of public pensions and environmental regulations.
It is worth noting that El Salvador’s government is not in fact trying to “nationalize the privatized pension system,” but in fact has proposed a mixed public-private system to reform the dismally unsustainable and inequitable current system that only covers 25% of the working population and has generated over $250 million in profits for private pension fund administrators while indebting the government to those same companies to the tune of millions.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/06/the-wall-street-journal-is-playing-dirty-in-el-salvador-again/
Pánfilo, that Cuban comedian Obama joked with in Havana, pays a visit to Washington
Pánfilo, that Cuban comedian Obama joked with in Havana, pays a visit to Washington
By David Montgomery
May 1
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Cuban comedian Luis Silva performs in the guise of his character Pánfilo at the Cuban Embassy in Washington. (David Montgomery/The Washington Post)
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About two weeks before President Obama made his historic trip to Havana in March, one of Cuba’s most popular comedians received a phone call from the U.S. Embassy.
“I thought there must be a problem with my visa!” recalls Luis Silva, also known as Pánfilo, the name of his famous comedic character, a prickly but good-hearted retiree who jokes about the struggles of daily life.
The real reason for the call was to see if Silva was interested in doing some comedy during Obama’s visit. Silva assumed U.S. officials had in mind a performance for the dignitaries. But no. The pitch was: How would Silva like to collaborate on a sketch that would feature Pánfilo and Obama?
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“I was astonished,” says Silva, 37, a writer and star of the weekly situation comedy show “Vivir del Cuento” — roughly, “Surviving by Your Wits” — that features Pánfilo and is watched by an estimated two-thirds of Cubans on Cuban television.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/05/01/panfilo-that-cuban-comedian-obama-joked-with-in-havana-pays-a-visit-to-washington/
‘Brazil Is One of the Most Unequal Countries in the World’
‘Brazil Is One of the Most Unequal Countries in the World’
CounterSpin interview with Maria Luisa Mendonça on Brazil's president under fire
By Janine Jackson
Apr
28
2016
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Maria Luisa Mendonça: “This is not an impeachment, because there is no legal basis for the impeachment right now.”
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Janine Jackson: The situation in Brazil—where President Dilma Rousseff faces impeachment charges spurred by legislators, many of whom are themselves under investigation for corruption—is hard to grasp at a glance, but glances are all we get in US media. And when it comes to Latin America, elite media haven’t been shy about their disaffection for leftist governments, sometimes going to great lengths to paint them as delusional and dangerous to the region, and somehow to the US.
So how do we assess the situation in Brazil without that particular filter? Here to help us with that is Maria Luisa Mendonça. She is director of Brazil’s Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, and a professor in the international relations department at the University of Rio de Janeiro. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Maria Luisa Mendonça.
Maria Luisa Mendonça: Thank you very much.
JJ: NBC’s Chuck Todd retweeted an image of some of the people protesting in the street for Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, and it was labeled “The People vs. the President.” And that’s kind of the picture you get from a quick look at US media. Is that a fair picture of what’s happening in Brazil? What would be a clearer picture of events there?
MLM: Yes, that’s not at all a clear picture. What we have been seeing in the media in the United States is a very simplistic version, basically saying that there are accusations of corruption against the government, and people were protesting against the government. What is missing is that there have been huge demonstrations in favor, in support of the government, and against what we are calling a coup.
This is not an impeachment, because there is no legal basis for the impeachment right now. The president has not been accused of any corruption crimes, and the opposition parties themselves are the ones concerned with the recent investigations of corruption. Because the government gave more autonomy to the federal police, and several opposition leaders are being accused of having, for instance, hidden accounts in Switzerland, in offshores with millions of dollars. That has been documented.
The accusation they are using against the president is that she used a type of budget mechanism to borrow from public banks and then invest in social programs in Brazil, which is a very common mechanism that is being used by other administrations, previous administrations in Brazil, by state governors. And every country in the world issues bonds to pay for social spending. The United States does this.
So there is no legal basis for the impeachment, and there is a lot of support for the government. In fact, because the opposition has not been able to win elections in more than a decade, and they never accepted the result of the elections that happened just last year that re-elected Dilma Rousseff, they are trying to subvert the electoral process and take power.
More:
http://fair.org/home/brazil-is-one-of-the-most-unequal-countries-in-the-world/
Argentina 'dirty war' suspect Omar Graffigna goes on trial aged 90
Source: Associated Press
Argentina 'dirty war' suspect Omar Graffigna goes on trial aged 90
Former head of Argentina’s air force and two ex-subordinates charged over disappearance of activist couple during 1976-1983 dictatorship
Associated Press in Buenos Aires
Wednesday 4 May 2016 21.14 EDT
The former head of Argentina’s air force and two ex-subordinates are on trial for alleged abduction and disappearance of activists during the Latin American nation’s 1976-1983 dictatorship.
Omar Graffigna, 90, is accused of abducting activist couple Patricia Roisinblit and Jose Manuel Perez Rojo in 1978.
Roisinblit was eight months pregnant when she, Perez Rojo, and a 15-month-old daughter were taken to a clandestine detention centre. What happened to the couple is unknown.
Guillermo Perez Roisinblit, the son Roisinblit gave birth to during detention, is a plaintiff in the trial that began this week. He was adopted by another family.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/05/argentina-dirty-war-suspect-omar-graffigna-goes-on-trial-aged-90
Honduras : opposition radio journalist narrowly escapes murder attempt
May 3, 2016
Honduras : opposition radio journalist narrowly escapes murder attempt
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns the attempt to murder well-known opposition radio journalist Félix Molina in the Honduran capital yesterday, on the eve of World Press Freedom Day, and urges the Honduran authorities to identify those responsible and provide journalists with effective protection.
In the same day, Molina was targeted twice. The first time, he escaped two armed individuals who tried to rob him while he was travelling in a taxi. The second attempt happened a few hours later, when two different individuals attacked him at the same place where he had escaped earlier. This time, they did open fire against the taxi, but Molina managed to take cover behind a seat and the shots hit him in the legs. He is now in a Tegucigalpa hospital where doctors say his injuries are no longer life threatening.
Molina is the director of the community media organisation “Alter Eco” and was the former host of Resistencia, a programme aired by the very popular opposition radio stations, Radio Globo and Radio Progreso. He has been a popular broadcaster ever since the 2009 coup d’état and has received many death threats in connection with his frequent criticism of the government.
He had just pointed out that those arrested for the 3 March murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres – a murder that shocked the entire country and the international community – were linked to certain Honduran politicians.
More:
https://rsf.org/en/news/honduras-opposition-radio-journalist-narrowly-escapes-murder-attempt
Building on shells: Interdisciplinary study starts unraveling mysteries of Calusa kingdom
Building on shells: Interdisciplinary study starts unraveling mysteries of Calusa kingdom
April 28, 2016 by Stephanie Schupska
Building on shells: Study starts unraveling mysteries of Calusa kingdom
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This LiDAR image shows the central portion of Mound Key, located in Estero Bay adjacent to Fort Myers Beach in Florida along the Gulf of Mexico. Credit: Victor Thompson/University of Georgia
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Centuries before modern countries such as Dubai and China started building islands, native peoples in southwest Florida known as the Calusa were piling shells into massive heaps to construct their own water-bound towns.
One island in particular, known as Mound Key, was the capital of the Calusa kingdom when Spanish explorers first set foot in the area. Supported in part by a grant from the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration, a new interdisciplinary study led by University of Georgia anthropologist Victor Thompson unearths information on how the composition of Mound Key, located in Estero Bay adjacent to Fort Myers Beach in Florida along the Gulf of Mexico, changed over the centuries in relation to both environmental and social shifts.
The findings were published April 28 in the journal PLOS One.
"This study shows peoples' adaptation to the coastal waters of Florida, that they were able to do it in such a way that supported a large population," said Thompson, an associate professor of anthropology in UGA's Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and the director of the Center for Archaeological Sciences. "The Calusa were an incredibly complex group of fisher-gatherer-hunters who had an ability to engineer landscapes. Basically, they were terraforming.
"China creates islands. Dubai creates islands. The Calusa created islands."
Mound Key was primarily constructed of heaps of shells, bones and other discarded objects known as midden. Thompson and his colleagues did intensive research on the island in 2013 and 2014 and used coring, test and block excavations and radiocarbon dating to determine that the midden wasn't uniform from top to bottom.
More:
http://phys.org/news/2016-04-shells-interdisciplinary-unraveling-mysteries-calusa.html
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