Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalThe Maya Civilisation Was Far More Complex Than We Thought, Major Discovery Has Revealed
The Maya Civilisation Was Far More Complex Than We Thought, Major Discovery Has Revealed
"Oh wow, we totally missed that."
BEN GUARINO, THE WASHINGTON POST
28 SEP 2018
In the autumn of 1929, Anne Morrow Lindbergh and her husband Charles flew across the Yucatán Peninsula. With Charles at the controls, Anne snapped photographs of the jungles just below.
She wrote in her journal of Maya structures obscured by large humps of vegetation. A bright stone wall peeked through the leaves, "unspeakably alone and majestic and desolate - the mark of a great civilization gone."
Nearly a century later, surveyors once again took flight over the ancient Maya empire, and mapped the Guatemala forests with lasers.
The 2016 survey, whose first results were published this week in the journal Science, comprises a dozen plots covering 830 square miles, an area larger than the island of Maui. It is the largest such survey of the Maya region, ever.
More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/lidar-upends-long-held-theories-about-mayan-civilization
Stunning 3D laser maps reveal the sprawling Mayan 'megalopolis' where more than 61,000 ancient struc
Stunning 3D laser maps reveal the sprawling Mayan 'megalopolis' where more than 61,000 ancient structures lay hidden beneath Guatemala's forest canopy
More than 60,000 previously unknown Mayan structures have been uncovered in Peten, Guatemala
Researchers say the abundance of defensive walls, ramparts and fortresses suggests warfare was rife
The ground-breaking research used LIDAR technology to map the area, relying on laser pulses
The researchers have now published the results of what they say is the largest lidar survey to date
By CHEYENNE MACDONALD FOR DAILYMAIL.COM and PHOEBE WESTON FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 17:55 EDT, 27 September 2018 | UPDATED: 22:20 EDT, 27 September 2018
Stunning new maps covering over 2,000 square kilometers of northern Guatemala have revealed the site of an ancient Maya mega-city hidden in the dense tropical forest.
Researchers uncovered more than 61,000 ancient structures at the site using LiDAR technology, which relies on laser pulses to map out the topography.
Evidence from the exhaustive survey supports earlier suspicions that upwards of 11 million people lived in the Maya Lowlands from the year 650 to 800 CE.
The experts also say the discovery shows the ancient people modified the wetlands for their agricultural needs, and even created networks of roadways to connect distant cities and towns.
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More:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6216505/Stunning-3-D-laser-maps-reveal-sprawling-Mayan-megalopolis-hidden-Guatemala.html
Scientists uncover tens of thousands of ancient Mayan structures that could change our understanding
New findings uncover the mysterious lives of millions of people
Andrew Griffin @_andrew_griffin
3 hours ago
Scientists have uncovered tens of thousands of Mayan structures, potentially changing our understanding of the ancient civilisation.
The newly found evidence gives an insight into the lives of millions of people that have remained largely mysterious until today.
It was discovered using high-tech Lidar technology, which uses pulses of laser light to map land cover and topography in 3-D. That land is usually covered in dense woodland, making surveys of the area difficult.
The new research, according to the scientists behind it, gives an understanding of the area with "unprecedented scope" that "compels" a re-evaluation of our understanding of Mayan culture.
More:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/maya-ancient-structures-discovery-latest-economy-transport-a8558466.html
Science:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/122859741
Guatemala ex-intel chief acquitted on 1980s genocide charges
Updated 11:31 am CDT, Thursday, September 27, 2018
MEXICO CITY (AP) — A Guatemalan court has absolved the late dictator Efrain Rios Montt's former intelligence chief of 1980s civil war rights abuses for a second time.
In a 2-1 decision, the tribunal ruled late Wednesday that Jose Mauricio Rodriguez will not see prison for genocide and crimes against humanity.
The justices unanimously held that the abuses were committed by the military, but disagreed on whether it was proven that Rodriguez gave the commands.
Prosecutors had argued that the 73-year-old ex-military officer knew about and ordered the killings of 1,771 indigenous Ixil Guatemalans by the army during Rios Montt's 1982-1983 regime.
More:
https://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Guatemala-ex-intel-chief-acquitted-on-1980s-13262798.php
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What was Guatemala’s ‘Silent Genocide’?
Sep 27, 2018
Former military general Jose Mauricio Rodriguez has been acquitted of mass murder of Mayans during 36-year civil war
Getty Images
Families are still seeking justice for the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed during the brutal civil war
A court in Guatemala has ruled that genocide was committed against ethnic Mayan civilians during the country’s protracted civil war but has acquitted a former military chief of ordering the mass murder.
Retired general Jose Mauricio Rodriguez, 73, was accused of ordering the killings of almost 1,800 indigenous Ixil civilians, and of disappearing tens of thousands more, during the dictatorship of Efrain Rios Montt in 1982 and 1983. The dictator’s brutal 14 months in power are considered the “darkest hours” of the Guatemalan civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.
The court’s ruling is the culmination of the Guatemalan Maya’s decades-long fight for justice, a process that has been fraught with retrials, appeals and overturned convictions. “The harm caused by the genocide affects the lives of many Mayan Guatemalans even today,” says Luke Moffett, a law lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, in an article on The Conversation.
. . .
Why was there civil war?
For more than a decade from 1931, Guatemala was led by Jorge Ubico, a ruthless CIA-backed dictator who gave sweeping concessions to the US-based United Fruit Company, a vast corporation with control over the politics of multiple countries in the region.
More:
http://www.theweek.co.uk/96750/what-was-guatemala-s-silent-genocide
WWII Bombs Had Rippling Effect on the Edge of Space
By Megan Gannon, Live Science Contributor | September 26, 2018 07:40am ET
Nearly 80 years on, impacts from the violent bombings of World War II are still felt around the globe. Christopher Scott would know —two of his aunts were killed at just 9 and 11 years of age during the London Blitz, Nazi Germany's eight-month onslaught against the British.
Those aerial raids didn't just have rippling effects through generations of families. Scott, who is a space and atmospheric physicist at the University of Reading in the U.K., recently found that the bombs were felt at the edge of space, too.
By combing through archival data, Scott discovered that shock waves from the bombs briefly weakened the ionosphere, the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere. [10 of the Most Powerful Explosions Ever]
From lightning to bombs
Between around 50 and 375 miles (80 and 600 kilometers) above the ground, the ionosphere is where auroras are created and where astronauts on board the International Space Station live. Atoms of gas in this layer of the atmosphere get excited by solar radiation, forming electrically charged ions. The density and altitude of electrons, the negatively charged particles, in the ionosphere can fluctuate. [Infographic: Earth's Atmosphere Top to Bottom]
More:
https://www.livescience.com/63677-wwii-bombs-edge-of-space.html?utm_source=notification
Colombia's prosecutions on killings by army in limbo
by Jose Miguel Vivanco July 15, 2018
Last month, Colombian lawmakers passed a bill detailing the functioning of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a judicial system negotiated with the FARC as part of the peace talks. The bill includes a provision – proposed by supporters of President-elect Ivan Duque – that is likely to halt prosecutions of killings by the army and other abuses.
. . .
Critics have characterized the provision as a distortion of the peace accord – likely to grant more lenient treatment to government soldiers than to FARC fighters. But it’s worse than that. The measure could put prosecutions against army soldiers and officers on complete hold.
Already, judges have moved some cases from the ordinary courts to the Special Jurisdiction. And a bill passed by Congress last November – now under Constitutional Court review—goes much farther. If approved, it will largely stop prosecutions in regular jurisdictions for crimes linked to the armed conflict. Under that bill, ordinary courts cannot, among other activities, issue judgments, or send suspects in such cases to pre-trial detention.
With these changes in place, army generals now under investigation for their brigades’ systematic execution of civilians could slip into a convenient legal limbo. Victims of these killings, committed across Colombia between 2002 and 2008, were recorded as enemies killed in combat, and officers were rewarded for running up the body count. The killings came to be known as “false positives.”
More:
https://colombiareports.com/colombias-prosecutions-on-killings-by-army-in-limbo/
How Colombia is preventing you from knowing the truth about the country
by Adriaan Alsema September 3, 2018
Colombia’s foreign ministry has ousted and repelled freelance foreign journalists simply by failing to grant them the visas they need to work.
Over the past week, The Bogota Post and Colombia Reports have made an inventory and gathered testimonies of foreign journalists and correspondents who have been unable to obtain or renew a migrant visa.
How bad the situation is
Over the past two decades, media outlets have sacked the vast majority of their foreign correspondents. As a consequence, much of the news you receive from Colombia comes from freelancers.
Colombia’s Foreign Ministry knows this because whenever we, for example, report that both former President Juan Manuel Santos and President Ivan Duque have been implicated in the Odebrecht bribery scandal, it’s the foreign ministry that has to deal with the fallout.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/how-colombia-is-getting-rid-of-foreign-correspondents/
Chasing the Murderers of Ayotzinapa's Forty-Three
BY
CHRISTY THORNTON
Examining the disappearance of forty-three students in southern Mexico four years ago can lead to only one conclusion: culpability lies with the Mexican state.
Family of forty-three missing students from Ayotzinapa normal school lead a protest, September 26, 2015 in Mexico City, Mexico. Brett Gundlock / Getty
Review of Anabel Hernández, A Massacre in Mexico (Verso, 2018).
This month marks four years since the brutal attack on the students from the Aytozinapa rural normal school, a teacher training college in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, in which six people were killed and forty-three students were forcibly disappeared. After all this time, and after multiple investigations, there is still no definitive explanation of what happened that night in 2014 in the small city of Iguala: Who took the students? Where were they taken? What happened to them? More than one hundred people have been arrested in connection with the Ayotzinapa attack, but despite this, students’ families still lack answers to these most basic questions.
The families are joined in their struggle for answers by human rights groups, international legal experts, and fearless journalists, perhaps most prominent among them Anabel Hernández, whose book about the Ayotzinapa disappearances, A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story Behind the Missing 43 Students (Verso), is out in English this fall. While there are few new revelations in the book (it was published in Spanish in 2017 and is based on reporting Hernández has undertaken since the attack) it is the most comprehensive account of what is known about the attack — and about the astonishingly corrupt government investigation that followed.
That investigation is the real subject of the book. The families’ frustrations derive not just from not knowing what happened to their sons, four years on, but also from the fact that they must undertake their struggle for truth against their own government, which has, at every turn, stymied their search for the truth.
Hernández shows why, in painstaking detail. A Massacre in Mexico presents an overwhelming case that federal government investigators working for the administration of Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto created a false narrative of local culpability and sought to close the case before an investigation could reveal the involvement of federal officials.
More:
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/09/ayotzinapa-massacre-missing-students-pena-nieto
Savage US ad: 'Biggest wow moment ever seen'
22 Sep, 2018 2:01pm 2 minutes to read
news.com.au
By: Nick Bond
A US political campaign ad is making waves online thanks to a surprising sting in its tail that's been described as "the biggest wow moment" of any political ad ever.
The advertisement is one of a series that Arizona Democrat David Brill has launched against Republican congressman Paul Gosar, who he is hoping to unseat in an upcoming election in the state.
It starts as a family standard political campaign ad, as a group upstanding citizens — Grace, a rural pysichian, lawyer David, medical interpreter Jennifer among them — passionately discuss why current congressman Paul Gosar does not represent them, reports news.com.au.
"If he actually cared about people in rural Arizona, I bet he'd be fighting for social security, for better access to healthcare. I bet he'd be researching what is the most insightful water policy to help Arizona sustain itself and be successful," says Jennifer.
More:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12129931
With US Bombs Killing Kids in Yemen, Sanders Tells Pompeo 'Human Lives Worth Far More Than Defense C
Published on
Thursday, September 20, 2018
byCommon Dreams
With US Bombs Killing Kids in Yemen, Sanders Tells Pompeo 'Human Lives Worth Far More Than Defense Contractor Profits'
"Hopefully this news will reach the living rooms of all Americans," said Rep. Ro Khanna, "because I have faith the great people of this country do not support a war like this."
byJake Johnson, staff writer
American-made bombs are being used to massacre large numbers of civilians in Yemen, and new reporting shows that the Trump administration is allowing this carnage to continue and escalate in order to protect the profits of defense contractors.
Just days after the Yemen-based human rights group Mwatana gave CNN exclusive access documents showing that U.S.-manufactured bomb fragments have been found at the scene of at least 11 separate Saudi-led attacks on Yemeni civilians since 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo opted to continue American military support for Saudi Arabia over the objections of his staff in an effort to preserve $2 billion in weapons sales to the brutal monarchy.
"Pompeo overruled concerns from most of the State Department specialists involved in the debate who were worried about the rising civilian death toll in Yemen," the Journal reported, citing a classified State Department memo. "He sided with his legislative affairs team after they argued that suspending support could undercut plans to sell more than 120,000 precision-guided missiles to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)."
"Secretary Pompeo's certification last week that the Saudi-led coalition was taking appropriate steps to protect civilians in Yemen was ridiculous on its face," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in response to the Journal's reporting on Thursday. "But now we find out that Pompeo overruled the advice of his own State Department experts and legal advisers in order to make that certification to Congress, because he feared not doing so would endanger U.S. arms sales to the Saudis and Emiratis currently destroying Yemen."
More:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/09/20/us-bombs-killing-kids-yemen-sanders-tells-pompeo-human-lives-worth-far-more-defense
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