Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalIt Sure Seems Like the Trump Administration Is Suppressing Reports of Climate Change at USGS
By Rafi Letzter 10 hours ago
A NASA photo shows James Reilly, now the Trump-appointed director of the U.S.
Geological Survey, aboard the space shuttle Atlantis in 2001. Reilly promised not to
let political influences jeapordize science during his confirmation hearing in 2018.
(Image: © NASA)
Trump administration officials are removing references to climate change from U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) press releases, according to a report from ClimateWire reporter Scott Waldman.
USGS scientists are responsible for, among other things Earth-related, assessing various kinds of disaster risks and publishing research about those risks. That work seems to be continuing apace. But now when those scientists put together press releases about their results — documents that can tip off reporters about important findings, so the news can reach the public — they're finding those documents altered to avoid mention of climate change and even held up for months before being released to the public, according to Waldman's reporting.
Waldman gave the example of a particular study published March 19 in the journal Scientific Reports examining climate risks along the California coast. Its conclusions were stark: [Ocean Acidification: The Other Carbon Dioxide Threat]
"Coastal inundation due to sea-level rise (SLR) is projected to displace hundreds of millions of people worldwide over the next century, creating significant economic, humanitarian and national-security challenges," the researchers wrote in that study. "We show that for California, USA, the world’s 5th largest economy, over $150 billion of property equating to more than 6% of the state’s GDP and 600,000 people could be impacted by dynamic flooding by 2100."
More:
https://www.space.com/federal-government-trump-climate-censorship.html
"The stresses of poverty are written in their skin, in their bones, and in their teeth"
As Donald Trump escalates his attempts to seal the border, medical examiners in Pima County, Arizona prepare for more bodies.
Natascha Elena Uhlmann
JUL—11—2019 01:59PM EST
Last month, a six-year-old named Gurupreet Kaur died in an attempt to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
Originally hailing from Punjab, India, and hoping to join her father in the United States, Gurupreet, her mother, and three other Indian migrants made the trek through a remote stretch of the Sonoran Desert in an attempt to secure asylum in Arizona. As the June temperature reached more than 108 degrees, Gurupreet’s mother split off from the group in search of water. She would never see her daughter alive again.
“We trust that every parent, regardless of origin, color or creed, will understand that no mother or father ever puts their child in harm’s way unless they are desperate,” her parents, whose full names have not been released to the media, said in a statement released through the U.S. Sikh Coalition.
Gurupreet’s death speaks to the dangers of the journey to America: More than 2,100 migrants have died crossing into Arizona since 2001. Bruce Anderson, a forensic anthropologist with the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner in Arizona, told me that he is “looking at a body or a sun-bleached bone” every day. Tasked with investigating unexplained deaths in the state, Anderson’s job has become more difficult over time. According to his office’s most recent annual report, in the year 2000, Pima County’s medical examiners successfully identified 82 percent of Undocumented Border Crossers, the office’s term for migrants who have died attempting to cross into America. By 2018, that figure had dropped to 33 percent. Of the nearly 3,000 UBCs examined by the office since 2000, 1,050 remain unidentified.
More:
https://theoutline.com/post/7674/us-mexico-border-migrant-deaths-in-the-desert?zd=1&zi=6uagoeip
Hilarious! I have only a link to an article which is not available to copy and paste. Bolsonaro!
Bolsonaro Wants to Reintegrate Cubans Into Mais Médicos Program
https://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/brazil/bolsonaro-wants-to-reintegrate-cubans-into-mais-medicos-program/
~ ~ ~
You may recall during Bolsonaro's campaign he made a whole lot of noise, playing to his fascist base by saying as soon as he was the President he would be kicking out ALL the Cuban medical personel who were working with the very poor, the indigenous, the people living in the Amazon forest, etc., specifically because Brazilian doctors would NOT go there, just like the situation in Venezuela, and other countries.
He sent them all packing.
Now he sees the Brazilian doctors are not interested in going into the desperately poor parts of the country and helping the very poor people, and he wants the Cuban doctors back.
Trump, with "Trump of the Tropics."
Duque asks Colombia's patron saint to help country overcome hatred incited by his own party
by Adriaan Alsema July 10, 2019
Colombia’s President Ivan Duque on Tuesday asked his country’s patron saint to help his country overcome hatred that has been incited by his far-right party.
Duque made the curious request to Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquinquira on the 100th anniversary of the Catholic icon becoming Colombia’s patron saint.
The president asked the patron saint to help and guide his country “overcome hatred and divisions; so we can overcome prejudices and understand that what makes us strong as a nation is the sense of unity and never the deepening of divisions.”
While Duque was attending the ceremony in Chiquinquira, the Boyaca town named after the patron saint, his far-right party embarked on another social media campaign to discredit cartoonist “Matador,” over his criticism on Duque and the president’s controversial political patron, former President Alvaro Uribe.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/duque-asks-colombias-patron-saint-to-help-country-overcome-hatred-incited-by-his-own-party/
Medellin's latest propaganda hoax cost local taxpayers $370K
Medellin’s latest propaganda hoax cost local taxpayers $370K
by Adriaan Alsema July 2, 2019
Medellin‘s mayor lied about being “elected” to be featured on Discovery Channel. The “recognition of such an important network” cost the local taxpayers $370 thousand.
“The good news doesn’t stop,” Mayor Federico Gutierrez proudly told local television network Telemedellin on June 21, claiming that Discovery Channel “elected” Medellin to be featured in six promotional videos.
These videos would, among other things, show “how the city has left behind its past of drug trafficking and violence,” the mayor said on Twitter.
The Mayor’s Office went on to falsely claim that “we were elected as a Discovery City” because “Discovery Colombia found that Medellin complies with international innovation standards.”
Medellin wasn’t elected anything. The local government paid Discovery Communications $440 thousand for advertisement, of which $370 thousand was destined for the transmission of the promotional videos, contracts obtained by political news website La Silla Vacia demonstrated.
The hoax is the latest of a growing list of reports about the excessive propaganda expenses made by Gutierrez, whose city administration has spent more than any other city on propaganda.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/medellins-latest-propaganda-hoax-cost-local-taxpayer-370k/
First stories to make it to U.S. readers, years ago, seemed impossibly vicious.
Doesn't look as if a thing has been changed to reign in the mind-boggling cruelty.
Here's an article from Human Rights Watch from 5 years ago:
March 20, 2014
The Crisis in Buenaventura
Disappearances, Dismemberment, and Displacement in Colombia’s Main Pacific Port
Years of violence have driven more than 5 million Colombians from their homes, generating the second largest population of internally displaced people in the world. Nowhere in Colombia is the problem of forced displacement worse today than in Buenaventura, a largely Afro-Colombian port on the country’s Pacific coast. For each of the past three years, Buenaventura has led all Colombian municipalities in the numbers of newly displaced persons, according to government figures. In 2013, more than 13,000 Buenaventura residents fled their homes.
Left-wing guerrillas operate in Buenaventura’s rural areas and have historically been a major cause of displacement in the area. Currently, however, the violence and displacement in Buenaventura is concentrated in its urban center, where guerrillas have virtually no presence, and 90 percent of the municipality’s population lives.
Human Rights Watch visited Buenaventura’s urban center in November 2013 to investigate what was causing massive displacement there. We found a city where entire neighborhoods were dominated by powerful paramilitary successor groups[1]—known as the Urabeños and the Empresa—who restrict residents’ movements, recruit their children, extort their businesses, and routinely engage in horrific acts of violence against anyone who defies their will.
The successor groups have “disappeared” scores—and possibly hundreds—of Buenaventura residents over the past several years. They dismember their victims and dump the body parts in the bay and along its mangrove-covered shores, or bury them in hidden graves, according to residents and officials. In several neighborhoods, residents report the existence of casas de pique—or “chop-up houses”—where the groups slaughter their victims. Several residents we spoke with report having heard people scream and plea for mercy as they were being dismembered alive. In March 2014, after criminal investigators found bloodstains in two suspected “chop-up houses” in the city, the police said they had identified several locations where perpetrators had dismembered victims alive before tossing them in the sea.
More than 150 people who were reported to have gone missing in Buenaventura between January 2010 and December 2013 are presumed by officials to have been abducted and “disappeared,” twice as many as in any other municipality in Colombia. Interviews with authorities and residents, as well as official reports, strongly suggest that the actual number of people who have been abducted and killed by paramilitary successor groups in the city is significantly higher.
One of the main sources of underreporting is the fear of reprisals. For example, one resident told Human Rights Watch he heard the screams of a man he believed was being dismembered, but did not report the crime. “No matter how much screaming you hear, the fear prevents you from doing anything,” he said. “People know where the ‘chop-up houses’ are but do not do anything about it because the fear is absolute.”
More:
https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/03/20/crisis-buenaventura/disappearances-dismemberment-and-displacement-colombias-main
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Medellin gangs use ‘horror houses’ to torture and dismember victims
by Emma Rosser October 8, 2015
The center of Medellin is home to “horror houses” used to torture and dismember, the city’s mayor admitted on Wednesday, exposing a bloody threat to society.
These sites where horrific acts of violence occur have of late been denounced by human rights organization amid the appearance of dismembered bodies in city, however the city’s officials previously denied the connection, until now.
“There are places where people are dismembered. When they kill a person and dismember them, it sends a message to society and members of the structures in charge. Without a doubt, there are places where people are dismembered,” said Deputy Mayor for Governance and Security of Medellin, Luis Fernando Suarez.
Four dismembered bodies were discovered in September bound in plastic bags with colored ribbons are now thought to be connected to these slaughter-houses, the handiwork of deadly gangs characterized by such practice.
Luis Fernando Quijano, leader of Human Rights for Medellin said “There are scores settled and obviously actions on the part of the terrorists to silence the people under a cloak of terror.” Additionally connecting bodies discovered in May and June, “bagged, tied, tortured”.
Revelation of bloody slaughter
“Horror houses have existed and continue to exist in Medellin. The houses are near streams, by walls, thick walls where the illegal resolve their problems” said Luis Guillermo Pardo, president of the NGO C3, a consultation group focusing on urban conflict.
Pardo described how victims are kidnapped and taken to these places, in order to obtain information they are tortured until criminals get what they are after, from whence bodies are dismembered, dumped into the river to erase the evidence.
“There are 15 “horror houses” in Comuna 10. They kill the person, dismembered them, the body is wrapped in plastic bags and thrown in streams or in the Medellin River,” said Pardo. The district of Comuna 10 is the center of the city.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/medellin-gangs-use-horror-houses-to-torture-and-dismember-victims/
ETC., ETC., ETC., ETC.
TV Marti Reporter Under Investigation for Faking Televised Mortar Attack
Source: Voice of America News
By Brian Padden
July 9, 2019 07:23 PM
FILE - A view of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which oversees Radio and TV Marti, in Miami, June 22, 2007.
FILE - A view of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which oversees Radio and TV Marti, in Miami, June 22, 2007.
WASHINGTON - The United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) is investigating allegations that a reporter for its TV Marti service, mandated to broadcast objective news into Cuba, faked a mortar attack during a televised report from Nicaragua.
The TV Marti reporter at the center of the fake news allegations is Tomas Regalado Jr., the son of the director of the Office of Cuban Broadcasting, Tomas Regalado Sr. The elder Regalado has made a priority of raising journalistic standards and practices after the government-funded broadcaster aired anti-Semitic content calling liberal philanthropist George Soros "a non-believing Jew of flexible morals."
Alleged staging
Spanish language media sites CiberCuba and Cubanos por el Mundo recently called into question the validity of a Marti report, allegedly from November 2018, which showed Regalado Jr. reporting from a street in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, when a small explosion occurred directly behind him.
. . .
Regalado Sr., the OCB director and former mayor of Miami, told The New York Times he has recused himself from the investigation into his son and that he plans to continue in his leadership role with the organization.
Read more: https://www.voanews.com/usa/tv-marti-reporter-under-investigation-faking-televised-mortar-attack
Anyone knowing any part of the history of Radio or TV Marti from Miami won't be surprised by this discovery. Very glad to see it was actually acknowledged.
Both broadcasting companies are staffed by, programmed by, controlled by South Florida Cuban-American "exiles" or their relatives, and the two operations are financed entirely by U.S. taxpayers, at the cost of tens of millions of dollars. Efforts to terminate the services made by Congress members, like Democratic Rep. David Skaggs, of Colorado, will trigger retaliation like the threats and the actions from Cuban "exile" Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Miami, who set out to take out advertising throughout Colorado, smearing Rep. Skaggs, and destroyed his ability to be re-elected.
Many have wanted to end this pork barrel project which benefits the employees and officials of Radio/TV Marti alone, ever since the Miami head of the Cuban-American National Foundation in Miami, Jorge Mas-Canosa arranged with Ronald Reagan to put them into operation during Reagan's Presidency. Jorge Mas-Canosa was convinced he was going to be the next President of Cuba, after the US overthrew the Cuban revolution.
Time for both stations to be retired, now.
Colombia's combat kills increase 87%: study
by Adriaan Alsema July 9, 2019
The number of alleged members of illegal armed groups killed by the military increased 87% in the first half of 2019, according to a report by conflict FIP obtained by newspaper El Tiempo.
The numbers coincide with those made public by the country’s defense ministry and come amid concerns that the military results could be inflated with murdered civilians.
According to El Tiempo, the Fundacion Ideas para la Paz (FIP) registered 62 military offensives between January and June, am 82% increase compared to the same period last year.
. . .
National Army commander General Nicacio Martinez ordered his troops to double the number of combat kills and captures in a controversial directive that was met with resistance within the military.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/colombias-combat-kills-increase-87-study/
The Disturbing Resilience of Scientific Racism
A new book explores how racist biases continue to maintain a foothold in research today
Nazi officials use calipers to measure an ethnic German's nose on January 1, 1941. The Nazis developed a pseudoscientific system of facial measurement that was supposedly a way of determining racial descent. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images)
By Ramin Skibba
smithsonian.com
May 20, 2019
Scientists, including those who study race, like to see themselves as objectively exploring the world, above the political fray. But such views of scientific neutrality are naive, as study findings, inevitably, are influenced by the biases of the people conducting the work.
The American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” His words were borne out, in part, by science. It was the century when the scientifically backed enterprise of eugenics—improving the genetic quality of white, European races by removing people deemed inferior—gained massive popularity, with advocates on both sides of the Atlantic. It would take the Holocaust to show the world the logical endpoint of such horrific ideology, discrediting much race-based science and forcing eugenics’ most hardline adherents into the shadows.
The post-war era saw scientists on the right-wing fringe find ways to cloak their racist views in more palatable language and concepts. And as Angela Saini convincingly argues in her new book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, published May 21 by Beacon Press, the “problem of the color line” still survives today in 21st-century science.
In her thoroughly researched book, Saini, a London-based science journalist, provides clear explanations of racist concepts while diving into the history of race science, from archaeology and anthropology to biology and genetics. Her work involved poring through technical papers, reports and books, and interviewing numerous scientists across various fields, sometimes asking uncomfortable questions about their research.
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/disturbing-resilience-scientific-racism-180972243/#uwvBIq6EdurUVXWH.99
Almost 1000 of Colombia's human rights defenders and community leaders threatened with death
by Adriaan Alsema July 5, 2019
Almost 1000 of Colombia’s human rights defenders and community leaders have received death threats, according to the country’s ombudsman.
At an event with social leaders in Cali, Ombudsman Carlos Negret said Wednesday that 983 social leaders have received personal threats and said it is “necessary to believe what the pamphlets say, they may not be ignored.”
Since last year’s congressional elections in March, 481 human rights defenders were the victim of some kind of aggression, the vast majority through death threats. Twenty of them were assassinated and 13 survived assassination attempts.
Since 2016, the year in which the FARC guerrilla group agreed to lay down its weapons, 462 leaders have been assassinated, according to the ombudsman.
Negret stressed the particular vulnerability of female leaders like Maria del Pilar Hurtado, whose assassination in the northern Cordoba province sparked a national wave of indignation.
The ombudsman’s remarks came a day after the suspension of mayor of the town where Del Pilar lived amid suspicions he could be tied to the death squads that have been terrorizing his town.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/almost-1000-of-colombias-human-rights-defenders-and-community-leaders-threatened-with-death/
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