August 11, 2014

Bolivia deports Argentine 'Dirty War' officer Paez

11 August 2014 Last updated at 06:25 ET
Bolivia deports Argentine 'Dirty War' officer


[font size=1]
Jorge Horacio Paez was arrested on Friday in the central Bolivian city of Santa Cruz[/font]

Bolivia says it has extradited an Argentine ex-officer accused of crimes against humanity committed under Argentina's military rule (1976-1983).

The officer, Jorge Horacio Paez Senestrari, was captured on Friday in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz.

He is accused of torture and aggravated homicide in Argentina's north-western San Juan province.

An estimated 30,000 people were tortured and killed during this period, in a campaign known as the "Dirty War".

On the run

Mr Paez, 68, had been on the run since 2011 and Interpol had issued a red notice, the highest possible alert, for his arrest.

He was detained in an apartment he had rented in Santa Cruz, which police said he only left at night for an hour at a time to buy basic supplies.

More:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-28739213

August 11, 2014

Victory: Fish & Wildlife Service To Stop Use Of GMO’s

Victory: Fish & Wildlife Service To Stop Use Of GMO’s
By Mike Ludwig, www.truth-out.org
August 10th, 2014

After facing a series of legal challenges from environmental groups, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service will phase out the use of genetically modified (GMO) crops and controversial neonicotinoid pesticides at farming projects on national wildlife refuges.

National Wildlife Refuge System chief James Kurth has directed the agency to stop using GMO crops and neonicontinoids on refuge farms by January 2016, according to a July 17 memo obtained by activists last week. The Fish and Wildlife Service is the first federal agency to restrict the use of GMOs and neonicotinoids in farming practices.

Neonicitinoids are a class of insecticides related to nicotine that act as nerve agents and are typically sprayed on crop seeds to kill insects. Scientists suspect that some neonicitinoids are responsible for declining populations of pollinating insects, and researchers in the Netherlands recently linked neonicotinoids to deaths among farmland birds.

For over a decade, GMO crops and neonicotinoid pesticides were used on a regular basis at farming projects on national wildlife refuges across the country. Federal court rulings shut down GMO farming on refuges in several regions afterenvironmental and food safety groups spent years challenging the practice both in and out of court, arguing the crops and poisons threaten the same ecosystems that the refuges are supposed to protect.

More:
http://www.popularresistance.org/victory-fish-wildlife-service-to-stop-use-of-gmos/

August 11, 2014

South Africa: Chilean President Announces New Mandela Scholarships

South Africa: Chilean President Announces New Mandela Scholarships
10 August 2014

Cape Town — Chilean President Michelle Bachelet Jeria says she has put a proposal to her government to avail 50 scholarships to students in South Africa and other African countries to pursue their master's degrees at a top university in Chile.

Briefing journalists after delivering the Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture in Cape Town on Saturday, President Bachelet said the awarding of the scholarships would be done in honour of the late President.

The President said Tata, who affectionately became known by his clan name Madiba, was her role model growing up.

&quot President) Nelson Mandela has been a leader who inspired me all of my life. So for me, this is very special.

"But also, as I said in the lecture, he has taught us so much. I have learnt so much from him ...

"So that is why ... in 2015, we are going to have 50 Nelson Mandela scholarships ... to go study at the University of Chile," she said.

More:
http://allafrica.com/stories/201408110420.html

You must remember President Mandela was despised by the US Republicans for a very long time, as well as the Cuban "exile" community.

August 11, 2014

Immigration reform and the Cuban Adjustment Act

Immigration reform and the Cuban Adjustment Act

By Keith Bolender • Published on August 11, 2014


While desperate children cross the American border from troubled Central American countries, leaders in the United States continue to demonstrate that no issue, no matter how emotionally charged or morally clear, is beyond politics. And there is one group that is particularly adept at duplicity when determining which immigrants deserve to be treated better than others.

The crisis has brought to the forefront a set of Congressmen who believe that children sent by their parents from Honduras, Guatemala and Salvador to the United States in the hopes of a better life have to be sent back unequivocally, less these unfortunates get away with flaunting the laws and take advantage of American generosity – which they apparently do not deserve.

Politicians, in large part from the Republican Party, have made it clear these children should not receive special consideration, regardless of the physical dangers or economic depravations they left in their home countries. Two from the Grand Old Party have been particularly vociferous in their determination to keep the immigration door closed for certain Latinos. Senators Ted Cruz from Texas and Florida’s Marco Rubio represent the hardest opponents of leniency towards these refugees. Wielding a great deal of influence, despite last year’s confusion when Rubio presented but then rejected his own more moderate legislation on the matter, the pair have been particularly effective in blocking any attempt at resolving the crisis or showing concern for the children crossing the border. Cruz led other Senate conservatives in urging rejection of the recently proposed House border security package based on the irritation that it excluded language prohibiting expansion of President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, an administrative change Obama made in 2012 to halt the deportation of some young immigrants.

What makes the position of Cruz and Rubio particularly disconcerting is that both come from an immigration background – specifically from a country where these immigrants are given special consideration – Cuba. Cruz was born in Canada to a Cuban father who experienced torture and beatings during the Batista dictatorship, fleeing the Caribbean island in 1957. Rubio, who comes from Cuban-American parents, at one point became somewhat muddled with his own family history when he previously claimed his parents left to escape the Castro tyranny, when in fact they legally immigrated to the United States in 1956, three years before the triumph of the revolution.

More:
http://progresoweekly.us/immigration-reform-cuban-adjustment-act/

August 11, 2014

How NAFTA Unleashed the Violence in Mexico

How NAFTA Unleashed the Violence in Mexico
By Victor M. Quintana | 7 / February / 2014

The Mexican countryside is not the same twenty years after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Rural Mexico is on fire, and not just because of the “bad guys”–the drug cartels and groups of hit men and thugs.


Criminal violence is not the only kind of violence, nor is it the factor that unleashed the humanitarian crisis in so many parts of rural Mexico. The drastic transformation of public agricultural policies–brought about by structural adjustment programs and the trade opening whose crowning moment was the passage of NAFTA–generated the conditions for the emergence of multiple forms of violence in the Mexican countryside.

Mexican presidents since 1983 pushed through a series of economic adjustment polices, including the expulsion of all seasonal farmers from the rural credit system. The price of fuel shot up: in 1983, a liter of gas cost 1.36 pesos; now it is more than 12 pesos. Prices began to drip for crops produced by small farmers since guarantee prices were eliminated. New subsidies were created, like Procampo, but these went mostly to large producers.

In spite of many warnings from farmer organization and researchers, NAFTA was signed when Mexican basic grains producers, especially peasants and medium-sized producers, could not compete–in terms of climatic conditions or subsidies or technology or governmental support program–with the most powerful agriculture in the world.

Without being able to compete with U.S. agriculture under the terms of the trade opening, hundreds of thousands of peasant groups went broke. Migration to the cities and the United States shot up. According to the Ministry of Labor, since 1994 1,780,000 people left the countryside. The Ministry of Social Development found that each day an average of 600 peasant farmers leave the countryside. Rural communities are being left without young men, converted into populations of women, children and old people. Community life has broken down; many town organizations have closed down. This is violence. Silent, but real.

More:
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/11427

August 11, 2014

Uruguay Opens Embassy In Palestine

Uruguay Opens Embassy In Palestine

MONTEVIDEO, Aug 4 (BERNAMA-NNN-Prensa Latina) -- Palestine welcomed the opening of an embassy of Uruguay in Ramallah, especially in these times of Israeli aggression.

The Republic newspaper published the text of a letter from Palestinian Foreign Minister, Riad Malki, to his counterpart Luis Almagro, in thanking the opening of a permanent diplomatic mission in Ramallah, headquarters of the government of Palestine.

After giving full support to facilitate the work of an Uruguayan ambassador, Malki denounced the escalation of criminal "Israeli occupation army in the Gaza Strip already caused more than 650 deaths and 1,900 injured".

Maliki renewed his will to further strengthen the growing ties between Palestine and Uruguay "on behalf of the interests and values that guide our peoples and governments."

http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v7/wn/newsworld.php?id=1057786

(Short article, no more at link.)

August 11, 2014

UNESCO: Mobile Clinics Program in Maracaibo

Mobile Clinics Program in Maracaibo
Venezuela

Background

The city of Maracaibo, the second largest in Venezuela, has a population of approximately one million four hundred thousand people. Its rapid growth has overwhelmed the health service facilities, negatively affecting especially those citizens with low incomes. This has resulted in the available resources being earmarked to curative activities, relegating almost completely existing medical assistance preventive programs.

The Mobile Clinics Program, conceived as a primary health service facilitator, utilizes Mobile Units to promote changes in medical attention by means of educational and preventive processes. The target populations which are to receive this new service are those living in outlying communities with few or no basic public services, much less medical facilities.


Narrative

The success of the Program is due to the transformation of the way health services are delivered to the communities. Attention is directed to the root cause of those processes that correlate directly to health problems. Its reach extends over a broad spectrum of common daily situations, going beyond the traditional medical emphasis. Health is conceptualized as a multifactorial process which has as a final outcome a specific pathology. In determining and preventing the conditions that lead to a particular disease, it is possible to break its cycle in the initial stages, where the economic cost is much smaller and with an overall higher social benefit. For this to be accomplished, it is necessary that the health team be intimately integrated with the target communities understand that there is a commitment to resolve their problems, which in turn motivates them to participate in more active manner. To this is added the integration of the actions carried out by various institutions and organizations that have a shared responsibility for solving the problem. All of which permits a better utilization of available institutional resources for the benefit of the sound development of the communities involved.

Examples of these actions can be observed in two neighborhoods located in the northern part of the city, neighborhoods which contain a high percentage of American Indian population (Wuayu). The first of these is San Antonio de los Ca�os which was established in 1.972. At the beginning of our work, this community did not have any public services (electricity, water, sewage, adequate roads), spatial ordering. and in spite of being located within the perimeter of the city, it presented characteristics one might expect to find in a rural area. This situation creates a large number of health problems, due to the absence of minimal subsistence conditions. As a consequence of this situation, and due to the characteristics of the area, the inhabitants were encouraged to establish contacts with the National Agrarian Institute (I.A.N.) to request a planimetric survey (road and lot map) of the community.

More:
http://www.unesco.org/most/southam9.htm

United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization

August 11, 2014

The Real Right To Life: Venezuela Expands Benefits for Elderly while the U.S. Pepper-Sprays Them.

Sun Nov 20, 2011 at 03:00 PM PST.

The Real Right To Life: Venezuela Expands Benefits for Elderly while the U.S. Pepper-Sprays Them.

"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." Mahatma Ghandi

In Chicago on November 7, 2011, hundreds of senior citizens joined with Occupy Chicago and their union supporters to protest the Congressional Super Committee's proposed cuts to social security and Medicare. Forty seven seniors were arrested, along with four persons in wheel chairs for refusing to move from the street.


[font size=1]
In Seattle, Dorli Rainey, age 84 was
pepper-sprayed in the face, when she dared to
stop to observe Occupy Seattle actions on
November 16, 2011, while 87 year old Francis
Goldin was pushed back in a crowd by police
during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in
New York City.[/font]

[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
While the oligarchs in the U.S. are arresting and pepper-spraying senior citizens and the disabled for daring to assembly to demand no cuts in their already minimal social security benefits, last month the socialist government in Venezuela launched a massive program, fueled by a comprehensive new law, to improve the quality of life of their senior citizens and disabled, by guaranteeing pensions, medical assistance, adequate food and housing and many other services to all in fulfillment of the mandate of section Venezuela's Constitution of 1999 which guarantees the rights, including the right to a quality life, to the elderly and disabled. (see http://venezuelanalysis.com/...)

The pensions must equate with the current minimum wage, which has been increased every May 1st for the last ten years, until Venezuela has the highest minimum wage in South and Central America. Previous to this initiative in Venezuela, social security benefits were only provided to those who had accumulated a certain number of work credits in formal jobs. These benefits will apply to all, whether they have worked in the formal economy and accumulated work credits or not.

Unfortunately, in the U.S., current Social Security pensions for many people provide less than poverty level income to recipients. The average benefit in the U.S. is a little more than $1100 a month, many people, especially women with low paid work histories, receive much less than that $1100. The federal poverty guidelines set $10,890 as the poverty line figure for the contiguous 48 states, while federal poverty levels figures for Hawaii are $12,540 and Alaska is set at $13,600.

More:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/20/1038411/-The-Real-Right-To-Life-Venezuela-Expands-Benefits-for-Elderly-while-the-U-S-Pepper-Sprays-Them#

August 10, 2014

U.S. Evangelicals cheer on Latin American culture wars

U.S. Evangelicals cheer on Latin American culture wars
Source: Reuters - Sun, 10 Aug 2014 13:15 GMT

By Alistair Bell and Mitra Taj

WASHINGTON/LIMA, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Losing the fight against same-sex marriage at home, leading U.S. Evangelical Christians are joining in the culture wars in Latin America as cheerleaders for opponents of gay legal partnerships, abortion and pornography.

One of the Americans is veteran legal crusader Mat Staver who was both a disciple of late Moral Majority co-founder Jerry Falwell and the leader of a campaign against the removal of religious symbols from celebrations of Christmas in stores and public buildings.

The other is Samuel Rodriguez, a dynamic Latino preacher with strong ties with Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Washington D.C. who describes his religion as mixing Martin Luther King Jnr. with televangelist Billy Graham and then "putting a little salsa on top."

Working together, both men increased their influence in Latin America in April when a U.S. Hispanic Evangelical group that they help to run took over one of the region's oldest Evangelical organizations.

"Because of what was happening in Latin America and what we are fighting here in America there needed to be a combination to be able to create a firewall for our Judeo-Christian values. That is what ultimately brought about this merger," Staver told his Faith and Freedom radio show.

Read more: http://www.trust.org/item/20140810130759-o4tvf/

August 10, 2014

Economic War in Venezuela continues ... BUT… Social programs forge ahead

Economic War in Venezuela continues ... BUT… Social programs forge ahead
By Arturo Rosales
Friday, Aug 8, 2014

All the “stories” published in the English speaking corporate media about food shortages and other problems in Venezuela completely miss the point. Yet they are intended to do so with the objective of discrediting the Maduro government as being inept and incompetent as it is “socialist”… or to be more accurate, heading in that direction.

The corporate media controlled by the international capitalist class would never laud Venezuela for doing a good job to eradicate poverty under a socialist banner, for example, or take care of and educate its population. If it did, I, for one, would have to question what the government was doing and look at its policies under a microscope.

To give readers an idea of how Venezuela is reported in the corporate media we just have to look at a study carried out by the University of West England on the BBC coverage of Venezuela from 1998 – 2008. This paragraph from the study sums it all up:

The researchers looked at 304 BBC reports published between 1998 and 2008 and found that only 3 of those articles mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the Chavez administration. The BBC has failed to report adequately on any of the democratic initiatives, human rights legislation, food programmes, healthcare initiatives, or poverty reduction programmes. Mission Robinson, the greatest literacy programme in human history received only a passing mention.

More:
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_67239.shtml