Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalBrazil fines meatpacking companies, including giant JBS, for buying illegally raised cattle
By FABIANO MAISONNAVE
Updated 7:28 PM CDT, October 28, 2024
BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) Brazils environmental agency has levied $64 million in fines against 23 meatpacking companies and their suppliers for buying and selling cattle raised illegally on deforested land in the Amazon.
The operation, dubbed Cold Meat 2, launched last week. It tracked 18,000 head of cattle raised in 100 square miles (260 square kilometers) of pasture that has been banned for commercial use due to illegal deforestation. The agents also apprehended 8,854 head of cattle found inside the restricted areas. News of the fines began emerging over the weekend.
Cattle raising is the main driver of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, with 90% of the total area cleared between 1985 and 2023 converted to pasture. That represents a total of 227,800 square miles (590,000 square kilometers), slightly larger than France. As a result, 14% of the Amazon is covered by grazing land, according to MapBiomas, a network of nongovernmental organizations that monitors land use.
Among those fined was JBS, the worlds largest meat-packing company. JBS has applied to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, a move that has faced opposition from some U.S. lawmakers and environmental nonprofits. Its not clear when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission may make a decision on JBS bid.
More:
https://apnews.com/article/amazon-deforestation-cattle-jbs-nyse-brazil-76bd1fe0c0f3cd77f0e5a4be8e366ab5
Wesley (right) and Joesley Batista
(Is it wise to pull that finger?)
Scientists Uncover the Ancient Origins of Baobab Trees in Genetic Study
The trees originated in Madagascar 21 million years ago but later traveled long distances by way of ocean currents, according to new research
Aaron Boorstein
Staff Contributor
May 21, 2024
Baobab trees can reach 100 feet tall, and they support entire ecosystems and communities with their large structures and natural resources. Tuul & Bruno Morandi via Getty Images
Its sometimes called the Tree of Life for its supportive qualities and long lifespan stretching thousands of yearsand its also known as the Upside-Down Tree for its root-like branches. But no matter the name, the baobab tree has long captivated the human imagination with its surreal shape and enduring presence.
Eight living species of the baobab genus Adansonia exist worldwide: one in mainland Africa, six in Madagascar and one in northwestern Australia. Yet, the origins of these botanical behemoths have eluded scientists for years.
Many researchers thought the trees began on the African mainland, then spread to the other locations, the New York Times Rachel Nuwer reports. However, a study published last week in the journal Nature used the genomes of each baobab species to unravel the trees ancient origins, instead tracing its lineage to Madagascar 21 million years ago.
Over the course of millions of years, the team reports, diverse baobab species emerged across Madagascar, driven by ecological competition and environmental conditionsincluding altitude, sea level and volcanic activity. Eventually, two baobab species traveled from Madagascar to continental Africa and northwestern Australia where they, too, evolved into unique species.
These baobab seeds were likely transported across continents by the Indian Ocean gyre, a system of rotating currents in the Indian Ocean that circulate clockwise.
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-uncover-the-ancient-origins-of-baobab-trees-in-genetic-study-180984384/
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- click for image -
https://tinyurl.com/yduvcnzw
Man with baby baobob
Telescope with world's largest digital camera will be a 'game-changer' for astronomy
By Jacopo Prisco, CNN
8 minute read
Updated 5:18 AM EDT, Wed October 23, 2024
CNN
On a mountaintop in northern Chile, the worlds largest digital camera is preparing to power up.
Its mission is simple yet ambitious to photograph the entire night sky in extreme detail and unlock some of the universes deepest secrets.
Housed inside the Vera C. Rubin Observatory a new telescope nearing completion on Cerro Pachón, a 2,682-meter (8,800-feet) tall mountain about 300 miles (482 kilometers) north of the Chilean capital Santiago the camera has a resolution of 3,200 megapixels, roughly the same number of pixels as 300 cell phones, and each image will cover an area of sky as big as 40 full moons.
Every three nights, the telescope will image the entire visible sky, producing thousands of pictures that will let astronomers see anything that moves or changes brightness. The expectation is that in this way, Vera Rubin will discover about 17 billion stars and 20 billion galaxies that weve never seen before and thats only the beginning.
Theres so much that Rubin will do, says Clare Higgs, the observatorys astronomy outreach specialist. Were exploring the sky in a way that we havent before, giving us the ability to answer questions we havent even thought to ask.
More:
https://www.cnn.com/science/vera-rubin-worlds-largest-camera-spc/index.html
Vera C. Rubin Observatory
Cerro Pachón, Chile
El Salvador commits savings from creative debt refinancing to river conservation
El Salvador commits savings from creative debt refinancing to river conservation
- click link for image -
https://tinyurl.com/ha793jx8
FILE - This photo released by the National Civil Police shows the Lempa River after it overflowed in Bajo Lempa, Usulutan, El Salvador, Oct. 6, 2005. (AP Photo/National Civil Police, File)
By MARCOS ALEMÁN and CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN
Updated 4:12 PM CDT, October 18, 2024
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) One of Central Americas longest rivers will be the primary beneficiary of El Salvadors deal to refinance $1 billion of debt with support from the U.S. government amid a resurgence in so-called debt-for-nature swaps.
In the deal announced by both governments this week, El Salvador committed the $350 million it will save to conservation projects benefiting the Lempa River, which provides two-thirds of the countrys water supply.
Jorge Oviedo of the non-governmental organization Environmental Investment Fund of El Salvador, said the agreement would improve peoples lives and support the climate resilience that we need as Salvadorans. His organization will partner with Catholic Relief Services to manage the program.
The Lempa Rivers headwaters are in Guatemala and it flows through Honduras en route to El Salvador where it empties into the Pacific Ocean.
I describe it as the heart and lungs of the country, said the Catholic Relief Services Paul Hicks, interim program director for the Rio Lempa Conservation and Restoration Program. The Lempa provides not only drinking water, but also hydroelectric power, as well as water for agriculture and industry.
More:
https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-river-conservation-debt-deal-6163b1ea39f4f5698fd6d02d087c6475
'Most of Us Will Never Benefit From the Affirmative Action of Generational Wealth.'
Michelle Obama said the quiet part out loud.
October 15, 2024 by William Spivey
To understand their connection, two concepts must be clearly understood: Affirmative Action and Generational Wealth. In the minds of many, affirmative action is giving someone something they hadnt earned because of the color of their ethnicity or gender. Im afraid I have to disagree with that. I see it as a means to preserve wealth and power for the majority, establishing minimum quotas that are rarely exceeded and maintaining the status quo. But for this story, giving someone something they didnt deserve works just fine.
Generational wealth is the passing down of assets from one generation to the next. Its like beginning a game of Monopoly and already owning Boardwalk and Park Place, while others go directly to jail without passing Go and not collecting $200.
In America, there is no royalty and no titles to pass down. Some families made their money in questionable ways but have attained respectability. Families with the oldest money in the United States sold gunpowder and liquor. They grew rich off the shipping and sale of human beings. Some were railroad magnates, exploiting the labor of others to lay the tracks. The grandfather of a current presidential candidate made his money selling sex and liquor in a Canadian brothel. The beneficiaries of that family wealth didnt earn their fortunes; they benefited from being born into a family where someone broke or exploited the rules.
Most of Americas wealth hasnt been handed down for multiple generations. The middle class and upper middle class are relatively new and only a few generations old. Where once there were only the rich and the poor, with few in between, a large percentage of people are now acquiring enough wealth to pass down to the next generation in their family through the ownership of property and land.
Affirmative action and generational wealth are rarely linked, and when Michelle Obama mentioned them early in her speech at the 2024 Democratic Convention, I howled.
More:
https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/most-of-us-will-never-benefit-from-the-affirmative-action-of-generational-wealth/
Mexican mayor murdered days after starting job
7 days ago
Graeme Baker
BBC News
The mayor of a Mexican city plagued by drug violence has been murdered less than a week after taking office.
Alejandro Arcos was found dead on Sunday in Chilpancingo, a city of around 280,000 people in the southwestern state of Guerrero. He had been mayor for six days.
Evelyn Salgado, the state governor, said the city was in mourning over a murder that "fills us with indignation". His death came three days after the city government's new secretary, Francisco Tapia, was shot dead.
Authorities have not released details of the investigation, or suspects. However, Guerrero is one of the worst-affected states for drug violence and drug cartels have murdered dozens of politicians across the country.
Authorities confirmed Arcos's murder after unverified social media images showed what appeared to be his remains.
Arcos's social media posts show that he had spent his days in office supervising disaster relief efforts following Hurricane John last month, which caused severe flooding.
. . .
More than 450,000 people have been murdered and tens of thousands have gone missing across Mexico since the government deployed the army to combat drug trafficking in 2006.
More:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8dj0833g99o
~ ~ ~
You may recall George W. Bush was connected to Mexico's Pres. Felipe Calderón to set in motion the militarization of Mexico's drug war. Clearly they did a "heck of a job" together, "didn't they?
Bush Asks Congress for $1.4 Billion to Fight Drugs in Mexico
By James C. McKinley Jr.
Oct. 23, 2007
MEXICO CITY, Oct. 22 President Bush asked Congress on Monday to approve a $1.4 billion aid package over the next three years to help the Mexican government fight narcotics traffickers, who have unleashed a bloody underworld war that has left more than 4,000 dead across Mexico in the last two years.
The plan calls for the United States to give Mexico $500 million over the next 12 months to provide training for the police and tools to dismantle drug cartels, including helicopters, surveillance planes, drug-sniffing dogs and software to track cases. An additional $50 million would go to Central American countries for the same purposes.
The United States would also provide advisers to help vet police recruits, establish a witness protection program and set up citizen-complaint offices to cut down on the endemic corruption in Mexican police forces, State Department officials said.
Thomas A. Shannon Jr., the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said the initiative was intended to bolster the administration of President Felipe Calderón as it continues an unprecedented crackdown on organized crime.
Since taking office in December, Mr. Calderón has sent tens of thousands of troops into towns once controlled by drug cartels to restore order; extradited several well-known drug kingpins to the United States for prosecution; and stepped up seizures of cocaine, guns and illicit cash. The result has been a violent backlash from criminal organizations.
More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/world/americas/23mexico.html
Or, for non-subscribers:
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/world/americas/23mexico.html
George W Bush and Felipe Calderón during the negotiations of the Mérida Initiative.
The Pinochet Regime at 50: The Assassination of General Carlos Prats and Sofa Cuthbert
Car Bombing in Buenos Aires Marked First Act of State-Sponsored International Terror of Chilean Military Regime
On 50th Anniversary of Prats Assassination, Archive Posts Key U.S. and Chilean Records on Pinochets Use of Terrorism to Eliminate Threats to His Regime
Published: Oct 1, 2024
Briefing Book #
871
Edited by Peter Kornbluh
Washington, D.C., October 1, 2024 - On the 50th anniversary of the Pinochet regimes first act of international terrorism, the National Security Archive is posting a compilation of documents, including CIA intelligence reports and a judicial confession of the Chilean secret police operative, Michael Townley, who constructed, placed, and detonated the car bomb that killed Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974.
Only weeks after the bombing, a friend of the Prats daughters gave them a chilling message: the Pinochet regime planned to celebrate the coup every September by eliminating specific persons deemed a threat to the dictatorship. This information proved to be prescient. The following September, the Vice President of the Chilean Christian Democrat Party, Bernardo Leighton, and his wife were gunned down and critically injured on a street in Rome. A year later, on September 21, 1976, a car bomb similar to the one that killed the Prats took the lives of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, D.C.
After Gen. Prats was assassinated, his daughters salvaged the manuscript of his memoir, which was subsequently published in Mexico.
The first [assassination] was our parents, Sofía, Angélica and Cecilia Prats write in their new book, Lo que tarde la justicia, published in Chile this week.
The compilation of records posted today marks an anniversary that was commemorated in Buenos Aires, where the attack took place, as well as in Chile, where the atrocities of the Pinochet era continue to cast a shadow over present-day politics. The Prats case, notes Archive Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh, provides a dramatic reminder of the true terrorist nature of the military dictatorshipand of Pinochet himself.
More:
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2024-10-01/pinochet-regime-50-assassination-general-carlos-prats-and-sofia
Gaia space telescope discovers 55 'runaway' careening away from stellar cluster at 80 times the speed of sound
By Robert Lea published 5 hours ago
"Discovering something new is always a thrill for a scientist."
An illustration of the star cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud ejecting runaway stars (Image credit: Danielle Futselaar, James Webb Space Telescope/NIRCam - NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI.)
Using Europe's Gaia space telescope, astronomers have identified 55 runaway stars being ejected at high speeds from a densely packed young cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. This is the first time so many stars have been seen escaping from a single star cluster.
The star cluster R136, located around 158,000 light-years away, is home to hundreds of thousands of stars and sits in a massive region of intense star formation in the LMC. It's home to some of the biggest stars ever seen by astronomers, some with 300 times the mass of the sun.
The runaway stars were ejected in two bursts over the last two million years. Some of them are racing away from their homes at over 62,000 mph (100,000 kph) about 80 times as fast as the speed of sound on Earth. The runaways massive enough to die in supernovas, leaving behind black holes or neutron stars, will behave like cosmic missiles, exploding up to 1,000 light-years from their origin point.
The discovery was made by a team of astronomers led by University of Amsterdam researcher Mitchel Stoop using Gaia, which precisely monitors the positions of billions of stars. The findings increase the number of known runaway stars by a factor of 10.
Scientists think that stars are exiled from young star clusters like R136 which is estimated to be less than 2 million years old (that may seem ancient, but compare it to our 4.6 billion-year-old solar system) when crowded stellar newborns cross paths and cause orbits to be gravitationally disrupted. What surprised the team, however, was the revelation that more than one major escape event had happened in R136, and the second one happened quite recently (in cosmic terms, at least).
More:
https://www.space.com/the-universe/stars/gaia-space-telescope-discovers-55-runaway-careening-away-from-stellar-cluster-at-80-times-the-speed-of-sound
So glad you left the link to your first post in Editorials, Appalachiablue.
I added a post to your original information there:
2. Isn't it sad that US schools have not considered it worth acknowledging atrocities like this
coming from countries with leaders who were fully supported by the US government officially throughout the history of US policy in the Western Hemisphere?
The barbarity, cruelty, and evil behind this war upon Haitians by Trujillo couldn't be more horrendous.
Thank you, so much, for supplying a light to critically important information which was deliberately withheld from students' basic understanding of history known by everyone else in the Western Hemisphere south of the US Southern Border.
Thank you, again, appalachiablue.
~ ~ ~
(Graphic contents follow, sadly)
Follow-up info. concerning how great Trujillo was among his own citizens from Time Magazine, 1962
TIME
April 13, 1962 12:00 AM GMT-5
In the 4½ months since the last of Rafael Leonidas Trujillos family departed, thousands of Dominicans previously silenced by terror have come forward to describe the crimes of the dead dictators secret police, his army and personal goon squads. Last week Dominican Attorney General Eduardo Antonio Garcia Vasquez, who investigated the stories, reported a preliminary toll: known murders plus those missing and presumed dead come to 5,700 in the past five years. The total for the Trujillo regimes full 31 years may run to the tens of thousands.
Justice has been slow in coming to the Dominican Republic. Of the several thousand members of Trujillos dread S.I.M. (Military Intelligence Service), only a handful are under arrest; not one has been tried. The rest have either been permitted to slip into exile or are openly walking the streets; some are still on active duty.
The reason is not hard to find. Though President Rafael Donnellys seven-man Council of State has been installed to guide the country toward democracy, it operates under a shaky truce with the still powerful military that remains from Trujillos time. In plain language the council is afraid to anger the trigger-happy officers by searching out the killers in their ranks. Says an official of the council: Lots of military men are implicated. You know where we would end up if we pressed too hard.
Nine & Forty. The civilian council may find itself forced to act before long as more and more of the Trujillos grisly secrets are put before the public. Attorney General Garcia Vasquez reports that two of the busiest murder factories were located in the capitals environsLa Carenta (The Forty), so-called because it was on 40th Street in Santo Domingo, and Kilometer Nine, beside a highway nine kilometers east of the capital. Both were run by the S.I.M., and both were equipped with relatively unsophisticated but highly effective torture instruments. One device was an electric chair used both for shocking and for slow electrocution.
Survivors know it was slow because the P.A. system blared the victims screams throughout the cell blocks. A variant was the Pulpo (Octopus), a many-armed electrical device attached by means of small screws inserted into the skull. Trujillos men also employed a rubber collar that could be tightened enough to sever a mans head, an 18-in. electrified rod (the Cane) for shocking the genitals, nail extractors, leather-thonged whips, small rubber hammers, scissors for castration.
Burned Alive. Sometimes the dictator himself took a hand in the proceedings. Carlos M. Nolasco, a former sergeant implicated in a 1959 air force conspiracy, tells of Trujillos arriving one night at Nine to deal with eight officers arrested after the plot was broken. Says Nolasco: The tyrant ordered the compromised officers burned alive. Other survivors tell of a ferocious murder binge immediately after Trujillos assassination by a band of gunmen last May. Literally scores of people were horribly tortured and killed. Among the victims: General Rene Roman Fernandez, an in-law of Trujillo and secretary of the armed forces, who was suspected of playing a role in the plot. S.I.M. agents took the general to Nine, where he was left for days with his eyelids stitched to his eyebrows; he was then beaten with baseball bats, drenched with acid, exposed to swarms of angry ants, shocked repeatedly in the electric chair, and finally put out of his misery with 56 submachinegun slugs.
What eventually happened to the bodies is still largely a mystery. Only a few were handed back to relatives. The majority, investigators believe, were tossed to sharks, or were stuffed into an incinerator at nearby San Isidro airbase. Almost every day, pathetic appeals are made asking information about the disappearance of a brother, a sister, a parent. The air force has repeatedly refused the attorney general permission to look into the incinerator.
More:
https://time.com/archive/6623424/dominican-republic-chambers-of-horror/
'We need 'em worse than they need us': how Haitian workers feed the US
Laborers from the Caribbean nation pick berries and process Thanksgiving turkeys across rural America
Ayanna J Legros
Thu 3 Oct 2024 12.00 EDT
On a foggy morning in June 2021, I left my Durham, North Carolina, home to travel two and a half hours to rural Whiteville, North Carolina, population 5,000-ish. I headed there to meet some of the towns newest, albeit temporary, residents: 200 Haitian migrants employed as blueberry pickers.
These farm workers put food on our tables and on family tables back in Haiti. But theyre a less visible work force in our food supply chain, toiling largely out of sight on farms in places like Columbus county, with its miles of fields. They are doubly invisible among US guest workers, who overwhelmingly hail from Mexico.
But Haitian migrants also come to the US and locations across the hemisphere to work in food production or other service industries. Their numbers have increased after the devastating 2010 earthquake, and many have been able to use temporary protected status (TPS) to stay and work in the US due to conditions that make it hard to return home.
Others brave unsafe border crossings into the Dominican Republics sugarcane fields for abusively low wages. Some board rickety boats to voyage into Turks and Caicoss shark-filled waters to serve tourists in luxury resorts. Many endure human trafficking into Maryland to pick tomatoes or risk getting whipped by border patrol agents as they walk across the arid US-Mexico border. And as anthropologists Vincent Joos and Laura Wagner once pointed out, theres a good chance your Thanksgiving turkey was processed by Haitian workers in North Carolina.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/03/haitian-farm-workers-north-carolina
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