Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalCopan Excavations In Honduras Reveal Royal Connections
Copan Excavations In Honduras Reveal Royal Connections
Hieroglyphic staircase in Copan (Honduras) | Photo: wikicommons
Published 3 September 2018
Scientists unearthing the Mayan ruins in Copan, Honduras are finding connections between royalty and the El Chorro community.
Scientists from Honduras and China are working together to uncover the history of the ruins in Copan, Honduras to understand a particular Mayan community, El Chorro, and their relationship with the Copan royal court more than 1,400 years ago.
Scientists from the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH) and the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Social Sciences of China are investigating what’s called the 8N11 Group section of Honduras’ largest archeological site, to better understand the El Chorro community and its political and economic relationship with Copan Mayan royalty.
The excavations, which began in August 2015 and are expected to run until 2020. "In five years we hope to have investigated the entire complex and completed all restoration,” explained archaeologist Jorge H. Ramos from the INAH, in charge of the excavations.
More:
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Copan-Excavations-In-Honduras-Reveal-Royal-Connections-20180903-0017.html
Six reasons why Mexico should not sign a shady agreement with the US
Six reasons why Mexico should not sign a shady agreement with the US
Posted 29 Aug 2018, 10:45am
Written by Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International
It angers us to hear how they separate children from their parents, how they allow migrants to die in the desert, and how they detain people - sometimes for years - who are just seeking protection. These are the actions of a government using inhumane policies to deter people from seeking refuge in its country, despite the fact that there are thousands of people who need to escape widespread violence in countries such as Honduras and El Salvador.
Currently, some of these people have the opportunity to get to the US-Mexico border and formally request asylum before immigration authorities - although, from there, the asylum process is long. This option means that they don't have to cross the border irregularly or put their lives at risk. However, the US government now intends to close its doors definitively, and it would appear that it wants to involve Mexico in this dirty business.
In recent weeks, Mexican diplomats have met with officials from the US Department of Homeland Security and one discussion item has been a possible bilateral agreement on refugees. Under this agreement, the United States could turn away people seeking refuge if they get to the United States by going through Mexico. Mexico would be declared a "safe third country" where people seeking asylum would have to go for protection, as a requirement. An agreement of this sort would violate international law and would result in millions of people suffering.
This is not the first time that the Trump administration has sought to transfer its international responsibility to Mexico. When he first came into office, Trump proposed a measure whereby every person requesting asylum in the United States would have to wait for their application results in Mexico. At that time, chancellor Luis Videgaray completely rejected the idea of Mexico becoming a "waiting room" for the United States.
More:
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/blogs/global-voices/six-reasons-why-mexico-should-not-sign-shady-agreement-us
Colombia charges 13 former Chiquita executives over hundreds of murders
Source: Colombia Reports
by Adriaan Alsema September 1, 2018
Colombia’s prosecution said Friday it would charge more than a dozen former executives of the popular Chiquita bananas on charges they used death squads to increase profits.
In a press statement, the prosecution that said 13 former Chiquita executives, including three Americans, one Costa Rican and one Honduran for mass killings by paramilitary groups that took place between 1997 and 2004, will be expected in court to respond to terrorism support charges.
The criminal charges against Chiquita are the first after more than a century of often brutal labor practices, initially under the name of the United Fruits Company.
How much blood is there on a banana?
The charges brought are only about human rights violations between 1990 and 2004 when Chiquita allegedly financed paramilitary groups through subsidiaries and death squads’ front companies in a phenomenon called “para-economics.”
Read more: https://colombiareports.com/terror-for-profit-colombia-charges-14-former-chiquita-executives/
Ancient Mayan Clearcutting Still Impacts Carbon in Soil Today
Even 1,000 years after a forest regrows, the soil beneath still won’t hold as much carbon as it once could, a new study suggests
(Wikimedia Commons)
By Jason Daley
smithsonian.com
August 21, 2018
There’s a popular notion that the ancient Maya lived in total harmony with the land, leading a sustainable lifestyle that took only what they needed from the vast tropical forests surrounding them. But that’s not really the case. The Maya deforested large swathes of land, cutting down trees in order to plant fields of corn, for firewood and for building their monumental temples. When a massive drought struck around 900 A.D., it’s believed the society did not have the forests and other resources to fall back on, leading to the end of an empire. But it turns out in the intervening 1,100 years, the impact of that resource depletion can still be felt. Maddie Stone at Earther reports that a new study shows that clearcutting has impacted the soil’s ability to store carbon, a finding that has big implications for modern societies.
Today, much of the land cleared by the Maya has been reclaimed by the rainforest, and one would think the area has completely recovered from the exploitation. But in a new study in the journal Nature Geosciences, geochemist Peter Douglas of McGill University and his colleagues examined soils from the area. According to a press release, they extracted sediment cores from three lakes in the Maya lowlands of Mexico and Guatemala. They then used radio-carbon dating to get the ages of plant waxes, molecules produced by vegetation that bind with minerals and last a very long time. The waxes wash out of the soil into the lakes. When the age of the plant waxes is compared to the age of fossils in the sediment cores, it can tell researchers how long those plant waxes, and presumably soil carbon, has been in the ground. The larger the age gap between the waxes and the fossils, the longer the carbon has been sequestered in the ground.
What the study shows is that once the Maya began deforestation, the soil began to lose its ability to store carbon long term. Over the past 3,500 years, which includes the time the Maya were active in the region, the age of the plant waxes decreased from 70 to 90 percent, a sign that the soil is simply not holding as much carbon as in pre-Maya times, instead releasing it into the atmosphere.
“When you go to this area today, much of it looks like dense, old-growth rainforest,” Douglas says in the release. “But when you look at soil carbon storage, it seems the ecosystem was fundamentally changed and never returned to its original state.”
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ancient-mayan-clearcutting-still-impacts-soil-carbon-today-180970089/#xsY5JhS7ETK8hW0K.99
Monster Galaxy Churns Out 1,000 Times As Many Stars As Our Own
COSMOS-AzTEC-1 is almost 13 billion years old highly organized but unstable and could shed light on galaxy evolution
Artist’s rendering of COSMOS-AzTEC-1. (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)
By Jason Daley
smithsonian.com
3 hours ago
SMARTNEWS Keeping you current
Monster Galaxy Churns Out 1,000 Times As Many Stars As Our Own
COSMOS-AzTEC-1 is almost 13 billion years old highly organized but unstable and could shed light on galaxy evolution
image: https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/Jn-AQuFEH2_3TzE-RYzvWV6nVs0=/800x600/filters:no_upscale()/
Aztec Galaxy
Artist’s rendering of COSMOS-AzTEC-1. (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)
By Jason Daley
SMITHSONIAN.COM
3 HOURS AGO
12500036
About 10 years ago, astronomers catalogued a galaxy 12.4 billion light years away called COSMOS-AzTEC-1, a giant “monster galaxy” believed to be an ancestor of massive modern galaxies like ours. Galaxies go through an evolutionary process, changing from disordered masses of gasses to star-filled stunners like our own beautiful Milky Way. Because researchers are viewing AzTEC-1 at the early stages of its existence, they expected that it would still be a little chaotic. But Sarah Lewin at Space.com reports the galaxy might be ahead of the curve: the monster galaxy is producing 1,000 times as many stars as the Milky Way.
Researchers got a closer look at what’s going on in this galaxy far, far, away using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, a telescope that has 10 times greater resolution of previous telescope models. Essentially, AzTEC-1 looks more mature than it is, but looks can be deceiving. Lewin reports that while the galaxy is certainly more productive than expected for its age, it isn’t exactly a well-oiled, steady star-making machine. And while it’s not a total mess like they’d predicted either, it might not remain sustainable for very long.
“A real surprise is that this galaxy seen almost 13 billion years ago has a massive, ordered gas disk that is in regular rotation instead of what we had expected, which would have been some kind of a disordered train wreck that most theoretical studies had predicted,” study co-author Min Yun of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says in a statement.
In most galaxies, there is one dense cluster of star-forming gas in the center. AzTEC-1, however, has two off-center clouds thousands of light years from its galactic center that are also dense enough to produce stars, the team reports this week in the journal Nature.
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/monster-galaxy-churns-out-1000-times-many-stars-our-own-180970171/#wHbu4b5wtUUm1hEv.99
The U.S. planned to get into the fake Facebook game in Cuba
Turns out plans for Facebook fakes aren't limited to just Russia and Iran.
CASEY MICHEL
AUG 30, 2018, 4:41 PM
Earlier this month, Facebook unveiled something of a watershed moment when it came to social media interference operations. As Facebook revealed, hundreds of fake accounts — including those pushing Scottish secession — had been traced back to Iran, including some tying directly to Iran’s main propaganda organ, Press TV.
With the revelation, it was clear that Facebook fakery — and fake accounts on other platforms, from Instagram to Twitter — was no longer the limited to Russia alone. Other actors had watched Russia’s success, and were looking to follow suit.
And now, another government has been outed as planning to push inauthentic Facebook accounts to spread mixtures of news and opinion to unwitting audiences: the United States.
As the Miami New Times revealed last week, the U.S. had “put together its own plans to use Facebook to foment dissent clandestinely[.]” The target? Cuba.
More:
https://thinkprogress.org/the-u-s-planned-to-get-into-the-fake-facebook-game-in-cuba-b80848761819/
Overnight Energy: EPA tells Supreme Court to not take up an appeal on earth warming chemicals
Source: The Hill
Overnight Energy: EPA tells Supreme Court to not take up an appeal on earth warming chemicals| EPA head says new coal plan will ‘level the playing field| Pentagon warns against EPA’s transparency in science rule
BY MIRANDA GREEN AND TIMOTHY CAMA - 08/28/18 05:27 PM EDT
EPA TELLS SCOTUS NOT TO TAKE UP CASE OVER OBAMA RULE: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t want the Supreme Court to hear an appeal of a court ruling that overturned the agency’s limits on certain Earth-warming chemicals used in air conditioners.
Trump administration attorneys told the high court in a Tuesday brief that the EPA is no longer pursuing the type of regulation that the lower appeals court overturned, so the appeal by companies wishing to reinstate the rule is unnecessary.
The case concerns a 2015 rule under which the Obama administration sought to limit the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). The chemicals have been used in recent years to replace ozone-depleting chemicals, but HFCs are potent greenhouse gases, so the EPA sought to stop their use as well.
The Trump administration defended the HFC restrictions before the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but lost. Now EPA officials are exploring other ways to regulate HFCs.
Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/overnights/404068-overnight-energy-epa-tells-supreme-court-to-not-take-up
Trump tweets about white farmers while indigenous peoples face annihilation
Raj Patel
As the alt-right obsesses over white South African farmers, indigenous activists are murdered in ever greater numbers
Sun 26 Aug 2018 22.24 EDT
The first time Donald Trump tweeted about Africa, he agonised over white people. After watching Fox News’ coverage of the South African land debate last week, the President of the United States instructed his secretary of state to look into the “large scale killing of farmers”. Followers of Peter Dutton’s nine months tenure at Australia’s home affairs ministry will recognise the lie, peddled by the “alt-right”, that black South Africans are targeting white farmers. As the Guardian reported in June, farmer and farmworker murders are at a 20-year low.
But for white people living in every settler state, there’s an awkward question that translates from the Americas to Australia to South Africa to Canada and beyond. How did land become private property, and is that property legitimate? Land struggles, it turns out, might be a way of teaching racists a bit of history and geography.
For as long as the modern state and corporation have existed, indigenous people have faced annihilation as they defend their land. According to Global Witness, last year saw a record 207 indigenous activists killed from India to Honduras while resisting mining and, above all, agribusiness industries. In order for the supplies of palm oil to continue uninterrupted, the indigenous people who live in suitable forest find themselves an impediment to profit.
The perpetrators wash the blood from their hands certain that governments won’t trouble them. In Brazil, for instance, the butchering of the Gamela indigenous people by farmers and security forces has yet to be prosecuted. Violence against activists has been met by the government of Michel Temer with a rollback of legislation protecting indigenous people and further support to agribusiness. Agribusiness returned the favour, protecting Temer from prosecution for corruption.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/27/trump-tweets-about-white-farmers-while-indigenous-peoples-face-annihilation
Private sector behind mass killing of Colombia's social leaders: prosecution
Source: Colombia Reports
by Adriaan Alsema August 26, 2018
Colombia’s private sector is using death squads to assassinate social leaders who seek the return of stolen land, according to the country’s prosecution.
Authorities have long claimed that drug traffickers and ELN guerrillas were behind the killings, but top officials told President Ivan Duque on Thursday that businessmen are behind many of the killings to prevent the restitution of land they stole during the war.
According to Deputy Prosecutor General Maria Paulina Riveros, the private sector’s ties to organized crime and paramilitary groups are particularly problematic in the Antioquia province and the Uraba region.
At least 39 palm oil companies have been convicted for using paramilitary death squads to steal land between 1997 and 2005 in the Uraba region alone, Rivera said. Her office is also investigating ranchers.
Read more: https://colombiareports.com/private-sector-behind-mass-killing-of-social-leaders-prosecution/
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON PLAYS AROUND WITH A SUPER-SMART DOG
POSTED BY DONNIE LEDERER ON AUGUST 25, 2018
It’s very easy to get aggravated with Neil deGrasse Tyson when he spends his Twitter time seemingly obsessed with the scientific inaccuracies of some of our favorite films like Star Wars (we know he’s just playing around, but still). Having said that, it’s also easy to be enthralled by him. Not many people are as passionate about something as he is about science. Watching him talk about it can suck you right in. Now, once you add an adorable dog into the mix, it makes it even easier. Add a SUPER SMART dog, and it becomes something wonderful.
In a video from PBS’ Nova, which we first saw over on Laughing Squid, Neil is shown interviewing the late professor John Pilley from Wofford College. His border collie, Chaser, is one of the smartest dogs we’ve ever seen. We’re talking Benji smart (Not sure if she was Krypto smart. They never really talked about how she is affected by Earth’s yellow sun). John had trained Chaser to remember the images and names of over 1000 different dolls. The typically skeptical Neil decided to put Chaser’s memory to the test, having her bring back random dolls of his choosing. He then took the experiment one step further by adding in a doll that Chaser had never seen or heard of before.
What you will witness in the above video is something amazing, as Chaser was able to find every single item that Neil called out for. Now, if we only knew how to train our own dogs (or cats) to find the remote, car keys, or anything that we lose on a daily basis.
You can check out more videos from NOVA on their YouTube channel here.
More:
https://nerdist.com/neil-degrasse-tyson-super-smart-dog/
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