Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalVirtual reality helps protect Amazon jaguars
Virtual reality helps protect Amazon jaguars
July 11 2016 - 11:23AM
Toby Crockford
Virtual reality headsets, commonly used for video games and interactive social media videos, are giving hope to South America's threatened jaguar population.
The latest virtual reality and data collection technology will be taken into the depths of the Peruvian Amazon jungle in August to collect rare information about jaguars.
Professor Kerrie Mengerson will return to Peru in August to collect data on the threatened
jaguar population. Photo: Vanessa Hunter
Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers deputy director Professor Kerrie Mengersen will lead the expedition with the Lupunaluz Foundation, an Amazon conservation organisation.
This will be Professor Mengersen's second jaguar conservation trip to Peru after returning from a similar month-long journey in late November.
More:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/virtual-reality-helps-protect-amazon-jaguars-20160710-gq2dgw.html
Guatemalan President Praises 'Exemplary' Work of Genocidal Army
Guatemalan President Praises 'Exemplary' Work of Genocidal Army
President Jimmy Morales holds a military parade, something that was prohibited for over a
decade out of respect for the victims of the military genocide. | Photo: EFE
Published 4 July 2016
The U.N. has said the Guatemalan military carried out what amounted to genocide against the Indigenous population.
Former stand-up comedian and current Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales did not mean to joke when he emphasized Sunday the "exemplary" work done by the army despite the overwhelming evidence it is responsible for systematic murder and human rights abuses in the country.
In a speech at an Army Day ceremony—an event that was prohibited for over a decade out of respect for the victims of the military genocide—the president said that "the army has been an exemplary institution contributing its abilities for the benefit of the public."
Morales praised the army's role in helping during and after natural disasters, maintaining security, combating drug trafficking and in international peacekeeping missions. It has been an ongoing role, Morales said, that increases the "confidence that the people feel for their army."
Meanwhile, Defense Minister William Mansilla told reporters that they wanted the army once again to conduct parades on public streets, after participating in the commemorative acts for the 145th anniversary of the Revolution of 1871 and Army Day.
More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Guatemalan-President-Praises-Exemplary-Work-of-Genocidal-Army-20160704-0026.html
The Secrets in Guatemala’s Bones
The Secrets in Guatemala’s Bones
In the face of death threats, a forensic anthropologist has
spent two decades exhuming the victims of a “dirty” civil
war. Now his work might help bring justice for their murders.
By MAGGIE JONES JUNE 30, 2016
One afternoon in 1994, during his senior year in college, Fredy Peccerelli sat at an anthropology conference in Atlanta and stared at the man onstage. Peccerelli had seen the renowned bone detective Clyde Snow before, but only in a textbook. Snow, who was in his 60s, leaned forward at the lectern, speaking in his genial Texas drawl about blindfolded skulls and bodies dumped in clandestine graves. He wore his usual attire of an Irish tweed jacket, cowboy boots and a fedora.
In his career as a forensic anthropologist, Snow had traveled much of the world. His work had helped to identify the Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, victims of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy and members of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment, which fell with George Custer at Little Bighorn. More recently, he had founded a burgeoning movement in Argentina, Chile and Guatemala, training local teams to exhume victims of Latin America’s “dirty wars.” At the conference, Snow charmed Peccerelli and the rest of the room with tales of his adventures in Kurdistan, on horseback, searching for the missing. “He glowed,” Peccerelli told me. “He seemed like a character someone had dreamt up.”
Snow’s colleague Karen Ramey Burns also gave a talk that day. It was about a recent exhumation in Guatemala, the country Peccerelli’s own family fled during the civil war 14 years earlier. The first slide in Burns’s presentation showed the inside of a grave from a military massacre site. Several forensic anthropologists, all trained by Burns and Snow and none of them much older than Peccerelli, were using paintbrushes and chopsticks to whittle away at dirt embedded in eye sockets, skulls and femurs.
It was, Peccerelli would say later, his “struck-by-lightning moment.” He signed up for a class in Guatemala City the following January. For three weeks, Burns and members of the forensic team taught Peccerelli how bones can reveal signs of murder: the mark of a machete, for example, or the slice along a vertebra that indicates a slashed neck. At the end, the team offered him a job for $250 a month. Peccerelli flew back to New York and drove his pickup truck from Brooklyn to Guatemala. He planned to stay for one year.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/magazine/the-secrets-in-guatemalas-bones.html?_r=0
Researchers discover the first evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism in northern Europe
Researchers discover the first evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism in northern Europe
July 8, 2016
These remains display a large proportion of cut marks caused by stone tools when the meat was cut, and the bones display fractures as a result of having been broken to extract the marrow. Some bones were also used as tools for shaping stone tools. The Ikerbasque researcher Asier Gómez-Olivencia, who is currently working at the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country, has collaborated in this work published in the prestigious journal Scientific Reports.
The Neanderthals displayed great variability in their behaviour, including in their relationship with the dead. There is evidence on different sites (e.g. Chapelle-aux-Saints in France, and Sima de las Palomas on the Iberian Peninsula) that the Neanderthals buried the dead. Other sites show that the Neanderthals ate the meat and broke the bones of their fellow Neanderthals for food. Evidence of this cannibal behaviour has been discovered at various sites in France (e.g., Moula-Guercy, Les Pradelles) and on the Iberian Peninsula (Zafarraya, El Sidrón).
However, there are very few sites with Neanderthal remains north of latitude 50º, as only two of these sites have provided information on possible funerary treatment. Researchers have found partial skeletons in Feldhofer (Germany) and in Spy (Belgium), and these remains, together with the context in which they were found, allows researchers to deduce that they were interred. In fact, the excavation notes on the Spy II individual indicate that it was a complete skeleton found in a contracted position.
A new study, led by Dr Hélène Rougier, along with UPV/EHU researcher Asier Gómez-Olivencia, has discovered the largest number of Neanderthal human remains in northern Europe, not only in terms of the number of remains but also in terms of the number of individuals represented, a total of five: four adolescents or adults and one child. The site is the Troisième cavern in Goyet (Belgium). A third of the Neanderthal remains at this site display cut marks, and many bear percussion marks caused when the bones were crushed to extract the marrow. The comparison of the Neanderthal remains with other remains of fauna recovered on the site (horses and reindeer) suggests that the three species were consumed in a similar way. This discovery expands the range of known Neanderthal behaviour in Northern Europe with respect to the dead.
More:
http://phys.org/news/2016-07-evidence-neanderthal-cannibalism-northern-europe.html
Venezuela and When People Are Forced to Eat Shit!
Venezuela and When People Are Forced to Eat Shit!
July 8, 2016
by Andre Vltchek
In a powerful short novel by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, “No One Writes to the Colonel” (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba) set during the period of “La Violencia”, an old retired colonel struggles to survive, forgotten by the government which promised him a substantial pension some fifteen years earlier. The state is corrupt and brutal, and it had abandoned almost all of those who had fought for the country during the fierce “Thousand Days’ War”.
And so, no one writes to the colonel. No letters, no envelopes with his pension are arriving. The old man and his wife are living alone. Their son had died a few years earlier. Their savings are gone. There seems to be no hope.
The colonel has a rooster. It is a mighty fighting cock. He trains it; the bird is his only chance of survival, it is all that he has left, as well as his pride. At the end of the story, he is approached and offered money for the rooster. He turns the offer down. He would rather go hungry, but he will not be humiliated!
His wife approaches him, asking whether he sold the rooster. He tells her that he did not.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/08/venezuela-and-when-people-are-forced-to-eat-shit/
Disastrous toll – 21 Latin American journalists killed in past six months
Disastrous toll – 21 Latin American journalists killed in past six months
July 5, 2016
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is appalled to have to report that no fewer than 21 journalists were killed in the first six months of 2016 in Latin America, 14 of them in just two countries – Mexico and Guatemala.
This disastrous toll is attributable in part to flawed or non-existent protective mechanisms but above all to the alarming level violence, corruption and impunity in most of the region’s countries – a region that is now one of the world’s most dangerous for media personnel.
As in 2015, Mexico continues to register the biggest death toll, with nine journalists murdered in the first half of 2016. It is followed by Guatemala with five, Honduras with three, Brazil with two and Venezuela and El Salvador with one. None of these countries is officially at war, but each of them suffers from a significant degree of structural violence linked to ubiquitous armed groups that include Mexico’s cartels and Central America’s “maras.”
The motive of most of these deaths is still unknown*. When the police investigate them, the investigations soon get bogged down and are obstructed by corrupt officials. Impunity is, more than ever, at the centre of a vicious circle of violence against media personnel and journalism’s chronic depreciation.
More:
https://rsf.org/en/news/disastrous-toll-21-latin-american-journalists-killed-past-six-months
Death Squad Revelations and the New Police in Honduras
Death Squad Revelations and the New Police in Honduras
Wednesday, 06 July 2016 00:00
By Annie Bird, CIP Americas Program | News Analysis
On June 21, 2015 the London-based Guardian newspaper published an article describing the testimony of a soldier who says he deserted the army after his unit was given an order to kill activists whose names appeared on two lists. He reported seeing one list given to his Military Police unit that formed part of the Xatruch task force, and a second for a Military Police unit that formed part of the National Force of Interinstitutional Security (FUSINA) task force. The second contained the name of Lenca indigenous leader Berta Caceres, murdered on March 3, 2016.
On June 22 Honduran Defense Minister Samuel Reyes published a response to the Guardian article, claiming that the Military Police did not have a seventh battalion, that the FBI had not trained military forces in Honduras and that the TESON (Troops Specialized in Jungle and Nocturnal Operations) training course did not have US military trainers.
However, the Honduran military has reported to local press that the Military Police is in the process of creating a series of ten battalions, each with slightly under 500 soldiers. In December 2014 the military reported that the fifth and sixth battalions had graduated, and by January 2016 it reported that there were 4,000 active Military Police, making it clear at least eight battalions are in operation.
The Guardian article referred to reports of training by the FBI and other US agencies of the FUSINA joint task force in an activity Secretary Reyes himself announced in a press conference with US Embassy personnel on May 13, 2015, as reported by AFP and Honduran media.
More:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36710-death-squad-revelations-and-the-new-police-in-honduras
Biggest obstacle to peace in Colombia may not be FARC, but an ex-president
Biggest obstacle to peace in Colombia may not be FARC, but an ex-president
By Nick Miroff
The Washington Post
Published: July 7, 2016
PRADERA, Colombia — The young men in pastel-colored Polo shirts pulled up to the square in this war-battered town and jumped out, armed only with pens and clipboards.
Their leader and political idol, former president Alvaro Uribe, had called for a signature-collecting campaign of "civil resistance" to the government of President Juan Manuel Santos, who is nearing a peace accord with leftist rebels that would end 52 years of fighting.
The preppy activists didn't mince words. "Do you support Santos's deal with FARC?" shouted Jaime Arizabaleta, a conservative 25-year-old city council member from the nearby city of Cali. "Doesn't it bother you that those criminals won't see a single day in a prison cell?" Old men sipping rum in the shade straightened up to listen.
"Do you think it's fair that Santos will let all those FARC gangsters keep all their drug money, while families here struggle to survive?" he prodded. Hands reached for the clipboard to sign.
More:
http://www.stripes.com/news/americas/biggest-obstacle-to-peace-in-colombia-may-not-be-farc-but-an-ex-president-1.417951
Fight of the Condor: uncovering South America's shame – in pictures
Fight of the Condor: uncovering South America's shame – in pictures
From the mid-70s, leftwing political figures were imprisoned, tortured and killed throughout South America as part of a dictators’ pact called Operation Condor. Photographer João Pina has tracked its legacy
Thursday 7 July 2016 02.00 EDT
Photos to be seen at the link:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/jul/07/operation-condor-south-america-joao-pina-photographer-in-pictures
The Brazilian Coup and Washington's "Rollback" in Latin America
The Brazilian Coup and Washington's "Rollback" in Latin America
Sunday, 29 May 2016 00:00
By Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research | Op-Ed
It is clear that the executive branch of the U.S. government favors the coup underway in Brazil, even though they have been careful to avoid any explicit endorsement of it. Exhibit A was the meeting between Tom Shannon, the 3rd ranking U.S. State Department official and the one who is almost certainly in charge of handling this situation, with Senator Aloysio Nunes, one of the leaders of the impeachment in the Brazilian Senate, on April 20. By holding this meeting just three days after the Brazilian lower house voted to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, Shannon was sending a signal to governments and diplomats throughout the region and the world that Washington is more than ok with the impeachment. Nunes returned the favor this week by leading an effort (he is chair of the Brazilian Senate Foreign Relations Committee) to suspend Venezuela from Mercosur, the South American trade bloc.
There is a lot at stake here for the major U.S. foreign policy institutions, which include the 17 intelligence agencies, State Department, Pentagon, White House National Security Council, and foreign policy committees of the Senate and House. An enormous geopolitical shift took place over the past 15 years, in which the Latin American left went from governing zero countries to a majority of the region. For various historical reasons, the left in Latin America tends to favor national independence and international solidarity, and is therefore less willing to go along with U.S. foreign policy. I remember the first time I saw Lula Da Silva. It was in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2002. He was speaking to a crowd at the World Social Forum, and standing under a huge banner that said "Say No to Imperialist War in Iraq."
Lula is a good diplomat, and he maintained a good personal relationship with George W. Bush during their overlapping presidencies. But he changed the foreign policy of Brazil, and contributed to the regional development of an independent foreign policy. In 2005 at Mar del Plata, Argentina, the left governments buried the U.S.-sponsored "Free Trade Area of the Americas," thus putting an end to the American dream of a hemispheric commercial agreement based on rules designed in Washington. Brazil under the Workers' Party also strongly backed Venezuela against U.S. attempts to isolate, destabilize, and even topple its government. Lula's first foreign trip after his re-election in 2006 was to Venezuela, where he supported President Hugo Chávez in his own re-election campaign. The Workers' Party(PT) government also supported regional efforts to overturn the U.S.-backed military coup in Honduras, and successfully opposed the expansion of U.S. access to military bases in Colombia in 2009. And many in the U.S. foreign policy establishment (including then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) did not appreciate the Brazilian government's role in helping to arrange a nuclear fuel swap arrangement to settle the dispute with Iran in 2010, despite the fact that it was actually done at Washington's suggestion.
Washington's Cold War never ended in Latin America, and now they see their opportunity for "rollback." Brazil is a big prize, as is evidenced by the new foreign minister in the interim government. He is José Serra, who ran unsuccessfully for president against first Lula (2002) and Dilma (2010), and is expected to use his current position -- if this government survives -- as a springboard for a third shot at the presidency.
More:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/36224-the-brazilian-coup-and-washington-s-rollback-in-latin-america
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