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Sustainable use of Western Amazonia goes back 5,000 years

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Dolores
Dolores Piperno conducting unrelated lab research in Panama at the Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute, 2013. Photo by Sean Mattson – STRI.

Indigenous peoples were stewards of the Western Amazon

by STRI

Smithsonian scientists and their collaborators have found new evidence that prehistoric Indigenous peoples did not significantly alter large swaths of forest ecosystems in the western Amazon, effectively preserving large areas of rainforests to be unmodified or used in sustainable ways that did not reshape their composition. The new findings are the latest in a long scientific debate about how people in the Amazon have historically shaped the rich biodiversity of the region and global climate systems, presenting new implications for how the Amazon’s biodiversity and ecosystems can be best conserved and preserved today.

In recent years, scientists’ understanding of the Amazon rainforest has been increasingly informed by a body of research that suggests the landscape was actively, intensively shaped by Indigenous peoples before the arrival of Europeans. Some studies ascribe the tree species that now dominate the forest to prehistoric human management and landscape engineering. Other work posits that when colonizers from Europe caused massive losses to Indigenous Amazonians with disease, slavery and warfare, the sudden interruption in landscape-scale manipulation resulted in so much forest regrowth that it caused a global drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide that brought about a climactic shift that is known as the “Little Ice Age.”

Now a new study led by Smithsonian researchers, published June 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that for at least the past 5,000 years, large areas of the rainforest in western Amazonia located away from the fertile soils near rivers were not periodically cleared with fire or subject to intensive land use by the Indigenous population before the arrival of Europeans.

The study, led by Smithsonian senior scientist emerita Dolores Piperno of the National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, is the latest entry in a nearly decade-long scientific debate over prehistoric human influence in the world’s largest rainforest.

“Far from implying that complex, permanent human settlements in Amazonia had no influence over the landscape in some regions, our study adds substantially more evidence indicating the bulk of the Indigenous population’s serious impact on the forested environment was concentrated in the nutrient-rich soils near rivers, and that their use of the surrounding rainforest was sustainable, causing no detectable species losses or disturbances, over millennia,” Piperno said.

To explore the extent and scale of Indigenous modification of the Amazon, Piperno and her co-authors collected and analyzed a series of 10 roughly 3-foot-long soil cores from three sites in the remote northeastern corner of Peru.

The three sites were located at least a half-mile (about 1 kilometer) away from river courses and floodplains, known to researchers as interfluvial zones. Interfluvial forest comprises more than 90% of the Amazon’s land area and is therefore crucial to determining the extent of Indigenous influence on the landscape, precisely because most major settlements identified by archaeologists thus far are near rivers.

Piperno and her co-authors used the soil cores to create timelines of plant life and fire history at each location going back some 5,000 years. To do this, the team extracted long-lasting microfossil particles of dead plants called phytoliths and looked for traces of fire such as charcoal or soot. Fire, in a landscape that receives nearly 10 feet of rain annually, is nearly always human in origin and would have been instrumental in clearing large areas of land for human uses, such as agriculture and settlement.

The team identified which plant type each phytolith belonged to by comparing them with a comparative reference library of modern plants and used radiocarbon dating to reveal how long ago the plants lived. The dating of both phytoliths and charcoal determined the age of the plant fossils and any remnants of fire found in a core.

Finally, the researchers also conducted surveys of the modern forests found around each core. These forest inventories evinced the dizzying diversity of the region, yielding 550 tree species and 1,300 other species of plants.

Piperno said all the analyses pointed in the same direction: “We found no evidence for crop plants or slash and burn agriculture; no evidence for forest clearing; no evidence for the establishment of forest gardens. These are very similar to results from other regions of Amazonia. We now have a substantial amount of evidence that extensive, wholesale alterations of forest across the interfluvial areas of Amazonia did not occur in prehistory.”

Instead, the researchers saw a rainforest ecosystem that remained relatively stable for thousands of years and is much like the ones still standing in similarly undisturbed regions today.

“This means that ecologists, soil scientists and climatologists looking to understand this region’s ecological dynamics and capacity for storing carbon can be confident that they’re studying forests that haven’t been heavily modified by people,” Piperno said.

But she says it also means we “should not assume the forests were once resilient in the face of significant past disturbance,” and added that this has important implications for “good sustainable land use and conservation policies” because such policies “require adequate knowledge of past anthropogenic and natural impacts on the Amazonian ecosystem together with its responses.”

In light of these results, Piperno and the research team also find the idea that reforestation following the arrival of Europeans triggered the Little Ice Age implausible.

“Without significant forest clearing in these and other regions studied by our team and others it appears unlikely that there was sufficient forest regeneration to have affected global carbon dioxide after European contact,” Piperno said.

As for why there does not appear to have been any large-scale modification of the interfluvial Amazon, the simplest explanation for the pattern may be in the soil, which has so few nutrients that it would not have been desirable for crops and other plant manipulations compared to areas on riverbanks and floodplains.

Piperno said that more work still needs to be done in other yet unstudied regions away from riverbanks and floodplains to obtain a wider view of the vast Amazon and that the team’s results do not imply that no form of Indigenous forest management occurred in the region, just that it was not intensive enough to show up in the soil cores.

“To me, these findings don’t say that the Indigenous population wasn’t using the forest, just that they used it sustainably and didn’t modify its species composition very much,” Piperno said. “We saw no decreases in plant diversity over the time period we studied. This is a place where humans appear to have been a positive force on this landscape and its biodiversity over thousands of years.”

 

2
Long-lasting microfossil particles of dead plants called phytoliths seen under a microscope, sampled from soil cores taken by scientists from the Amazon Basin. Photo by Dolores Piperno – STRI.

 

3
An aerial photo of the Algodón River flowing through a forest of the Amazon
Basin in the remote northeastern corner of Peru. Photo by Álvaro del Campo.

 

4
An interior view of the Amazon Basin forests where scientists sampled
soil cores for their study, with each site located at least a half-mile
(about one kilometer) away from river courses and floodplains – regions
known to scientists as interfluv. Photo by Corine Vriesendorp.

 

 

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Contraloría, La concessión de Panama Ports

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Solis
 

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Baker, Vaccine patent monopolies

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LSE - CE
Photo by Christian Emmer — London School of Economics, LSE Blogs.

When we give rich people money, why does inequality surprise us?

by Dean Baker — Beat The Press

In recent weeks there have been several articles noting the enormous wealth that a small number of people have made off of the vaccines and treatments developed to control the pandemic. Many see this as an unfortunate outcome of our efforts to contain the pandemic. In that view, containing the pandemic is an immensely important goal, if some people get incredibly rich as result, it’s a price well worth paying. After all, maybe we can even tax back some of their wealth after the fact.

The infuriating part of this story is that it is so obviously not true. But, just as followers of Donald Trump are prepared to believe any crazy story he tells about the stolen election, our intellectual types are willing to accept the idea that the only way we could have gotten vaccines as quickly as we did was by granting a small number of companies and individuals patent monopolies. And, just as no amount of evidence can dissuade Trumpers from believing their guy actually won the election, it is not possible to get most people involved in policy debates to consider the possibility that we don’t need patent monopolies to finance the development of drugs or vaccines.

This is especially disturbing in the case of the current crop of vaccines developed in the United States and Europe. The development of mRNA technology was done overwhelming on the public dime. This is hardly a secret. In fact, the NIH owns one of the key patents that Moderna used in the development of its vaccine.

The New York Times even recently featured a piece highlighting the work of Dr. Kato Kariko, who it claims spent her whole career working on government grants and never earned more than $60,000 a year. Of course, it is reasonable to pay top notch researchers like Dr. Kariko considerably more than $60,000 a year, but the point is that researchers can be motivated by money (as well, as the commitment of many to help humanity), they don’t need government-granted patent monopolies.

The development of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was also paid for almost entirely with public money. AstraZeneca was in fact brought on after the fact as a partner, at the urging of Bill Gates. The vaccine itself was developed by a team of researchers at Oxford.

In the case of both the mRNA vaccines and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine we could have just contracted with the companies to do the work, we didn’t have to give them patent monopolies. If this sounds strange, go outside and look at the street in front of your house. The company that paved the street was paid on a contract with the government, it did not get a patent monopoly on the street.

For some reason, we cannot even get a serious discussion in policy circles about alternatives to patent monopolies for financing the development of drugs and vaccines. To my view, we should be looking to alternatives to patent and copyright monopolies as government funding mechanisms everywhere, but the case for alternatives is especially compelling in the case of biomedical research.[1]

The problem with biomedical research is that the proprietary nature of the knowledge, coupled with the enormous incentive to sell products at patent protected prices, is a huge invitation to corruption. The most dramatic example of this problem is with the opioid crisis, where the leading manufacturers have billions of dollars in settlements based on the allegation that they deliberately misled doctors and the general public about the addictiveness of the new generation of opioids. If OxyContin and other opioids had been selling as cheap generics, there would have been little incentive to lie about their addictiveness. And, of course if all the clinical trial results were fully public, they would not have been able to get away with lying in any case.

There is also the issue with drugs that the government or private insurers, regulated by the government, pick up the vast majority of the tab. For this reason, who don’t have to worry about direct government funding of research over-riding individual consumer decisions, as might be the case with items like cars or smart phones. Demand for a particular drug is already not determined by individuals, so there is nothing to usurp.

The great fortunes created by patent and copyright monopolies go well beyond the current crop of Covid vaccine billionaires. There are many people who have gotten tremendously rich developing software and other information technologies, medical equipment, and genetically modified plants, as a result of patent or copyright monopolies. Bill Gates has volunteered to be the poster child here.

While many of the contributions made by these rich people have been socially valuable, we have to recognize that the rewards they received were a policy choice. We could have made their patent and copyright monopolies shorter and/or weaker. We also could have relied more on direct funding for open-source research.

That is a basic logical point. Patent and copyright monopolies are not given by god, or even the constitution (go read Article 1, Section 8). We can structure them anyway we like and we can integrate them with other mechanisms for supporting research. Our decision to structure patent and copyright monopolies in a way that allows for a small number of people to get incredibly rich is because we have politicians who like very rich people.

There is nothing inherent in the market or any requirement of technology that requires this outcome. And, this outcome is justified by economists and reporters who are too lazy or incompetent to think for themselves. Just like any good Trumper, they repeat what they are told.

Vaccine Failure in the Pandemic

In spite of the celebration of the success of our vaccines in controlling the spread of the virus among people who get them, we have done an abysmal job in vaccinating the world. At this point, Africa, which has more than 15 percent of the world’s population, has received just 1.7 percent of the world’s vaccines. The situation in much of Latin America is not much better, as is the case in some of the poorer countries in Asia. India is of course suffering terribly from a shortage of vaccines, even though it is one of the world’s leading manufacturers and has a vaccine it developed itself.

China has been able to distribute 460 million vaccines domestically, in the last month. This is in addition to providing tens of millions off doses to countries around the world. At that pace, it will be able to produce enough vaccines to cover most of the world’s unvaccinated population early in 2022. By contrast, our experts insist that we can’t possibly make the US-European vaccines any more rapidly than we already are, even if we suspend patent protections and share technology. In fact. Thomas Cueni, the director general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, insists that we can’t even produce items like syringes and vials that are needed to distribute the vaccines. (This assertion can be found at 21.10 here.)

The implication is that China’s scientists and engineers must be much more competent than the US ones. (I realize the mRNA vaccines are more effective, but the Chinese vaccines have been very effective in bringing the pandemic under control in countries where they have been widely distributed, like Serbia and Hungary.) It’s too bad that we have such second-rate people in charge of our anti-pandemic efforts. (Bill Gates played a leading role with his foundation.) Maybe next time we should outsource the job to China.

[1] I discuss this issue in Chapter 5 of Rigged (it’s free).

 

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Polo Ciudadano, Minas y otros regalos

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PC - OB?

En medio de una enorme crisis fiscal, el gobierno de Cortizo regala los recursos naturales a un puñado de empresarios

por Polo Ciudadano

La prueba palpable de que los empresarios en Panamá financian las campañas electorales a cambio de que, al salir electos, les favorezcan con contratos, la constituye el acierto de los dueños del sector minero al haber puesto a uno de sus empleados en la vicepresidencia de la República, como lo es José Gabriel Carrizo.

Carrizo fue abogado de la mina de Molejón, Minera Petaquilla, cuyo dueño era el célebre Richard Fifer, mina que luego de lustros de explotación incontrolable, fue cerrada alegando “quiebra” en 2013, dejando a centenares de trabajadores sin sus cuotas de seguridad social y, lo que es peor, dejando un peligro grave de contaminación con sus tinas de deslave contaminadas con cianuro en la que el estado tuvo que gastar millones de dólares para evitar una catástrofe. Richard Fifer, el jefe de Gabriel Carrizo, pese a ser condenado por apropiarse de las cuotas de la seguridad social, no pagó ni un día en la cárcel gracias a su edad.

Ahora tenemos que el gobierno Cortizo-Carrizo favorece al sector minero: 1-) Incluyendo 25 mil hectáreas de bosque en el régimen de concesiones mineras (13/5/21); 2-) Anulando una resolución de 2015 del Ministerio de Comercio por la cual el Estado asumía las tierras de la mina de Molejón; 3-) Casualmente, cinco días después, aparece el ministro Ramón Martínez que anuncia un acuerdo para traspasar la mina de Molejón a la empresa Broadway Strategic Metals Inc.

A todo esto, podemos agregar que el gobierno panameño mantiene intacto el leonino contrato con la empresa canadiense First Quantum, que explota la mina de cobre denominada Minera Panamá, ubicada en Donoso, provincia de Colón, pese a que la Corte Suprema de Justicia declaró en 2017 inconstitucional el contrato ley en que se basa. Según denuncia el periodista Sergio Sánchez Minera Panamá habría extraído el equivalente a 1.455 millones de dólares en minerales, pero a Panamá sólo le tocaron 29,1 millones de esa fortuna. Regalías de apenas el 2%, cuando en Sudamérica los Estados exigen entre el 40 y 51% de regalías.

A este robo contra el patrimonio de la nación panameña hay que añadir el tremendo daño ecológico que producen estas minas a cielo abierto, daño del que no se hacen responsables como quedó demostrado en Molejón afectando a las comunidades en las que también están eximidas estas empresas de impuestos locales.

Paralelamente se planifica otra traición a los intereses de la patria con la negociación de la renovación del contrato con Panamá Ports Co. (PPC), que administra los puertos de Balboa y Cristóbal, otro asalto en descampado contra Panamá: esta empresa, en 25 años, tuvo utilidades por 909 millones de dólares, y eso que hubo mucha a empresas subsidiarias, pero sólo pagó al país 8 millones, cuando debió recibir 82 millones de dólares, sin contar con que Panamá dejó de percibir 600 millones del canon fijo y variable que se pactó en 1997 y que el gobierno de Mireya Moscoso le perdonó.

El contralor de la República y el ministro de Comercio “no han encontrado nada anormal” y consideran que la empresa cumplió, con lo cual piensan renovar por otros 25 años en iguales condiciones, con lo que el robo al erario continuará aumentando.

Mientras el gobierno empresarial del PRD-Cortizo-Carrizo hace estos regalitos a empresas privadas a costa de los bienes públicos y las riquezas minerales nacionales, el déficit público se sigue incrementando en medio de la crisis. ¿Cómo combate el déficit el gobierno empresarial? Cortando gasto social: recortes en salud pública y educación llevan a estas entidades al borde del abismo; achicando el Plan Panamá Solidario y cortando las ayudas a los pobres.

El Polo Ciudadano sostiene que es hora de un cambio real. Tenemos que exigir una reforma fiscal progresiva, en la que el que más gana pague más impuestos, incluyendo las grandes empresas, que en su mayoría están exoneradas. También hay que exigir la revisión de esos contratos antinacionales que regalan a precio de feria toda la riqueza nacional. Por eso se requiere la constitución de una verdadera alternativa política popular que saque del poder a estos agentes corruptos, siempre al servicio de intereses privados.

 

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Kermit’s birds / Las aves de Kermit

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heron
Yellow-crowned Night Heron ~ Martinete coronado OR Garza Nocturna cabeciamarilla ~ Nyctanassa violacea. Encountered at Panama City’s, Puente del Rey. Photo © Kermit Nourse.

Yellow-crowned Night Heron Martinete coronado

Especially a salt marshes and rocky beaches wading bird, mostly found on the Pacific Side but also a few on the Atlantic Side. These are found in the Perlas Archipelago, on Coiba and Taboga and a number of other Pacific islands. They’re also found farther inland, along wetlands adjacent to fresh water rivers. They’re common around Panama City. The species ranges from the Eastern USA to Peru and Northern Brazil and are fond in the Galapagos and the Antilles.

Especialmente un ave zancuda de las marismas saladas y las playas rocosas, que se encuentran principalmente en el lado del Pacífico, pero también algunas en el lado del Atlántico. Estos se encuentran en el archipiélago de Perlas, en Coiba y Taboga y en varias otras islas del Pacífico. También se encuentran tierra adentro, a lo largo de humedales adyacentes a ríos de agua dulce. Son comunes en la ciudad de Panamá. La especie se extiende desde el este de EE. UU. Hasta Perú y el norte de Brasil y le gustan las Galápagos y las Antillas.

 

https://youtu.be/uFpen99TJqA

 

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¿Wappin? Space is the place!

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aliens
Illegal aliens from a reactionary galaxy.

Out there stuff that third agers may remember

Danilo Pérez – Galactic Panama
https://youtu.be/toH1jQnEW4o

Pink Floyd — Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
https://youtu.be/8RbXIMZmVv8

Jefferson Starship – Hijack
https://youtu.be/zU0FMTooM90

Cássia Eller – O segundo sol
https://youtu.be/MLI2QlgjGmA

Carlos Santana & Alice Coltrane – Angel Of Sunlight
https://youtu.be/1wCAEsNZddw

Conjure One & Sinéad O’Connor – Tears From the Moon
https://youtu.be/4w0hHxrj7do

Tangerine Dream – Minor Turbulence
https://youtu.be/EZGN0-uF1bU

The Jazz Hop Café – Space Traveling
https://youtu.be/3ST4fDVyAzA

Elton John – Rocket Man
https://youtu.be/DtVBCG6ThDk

Björk – Moon
https://youtu.be/br2s0xJyFEM

Mad Professor – Solar System
https://youtu.be/quGMN4w-9pI

Flora Purim – Open Your Eyes You Can Fly
https://youtu.be/E4sKehbZSyo

The Beatles – Across the Universe
https://youtu.be/iotagMCkJRE

Enigma – Beyond The Invisible
https://youtu.be/f8mMWh62XpU

David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust
https://youtu.be/XXq5VvYAI1Q

Gato Barbieri – Straight Into The Sunrise
https://youtu.be/l7BIRvOufBo

Lou Reed – Satellite of Love
https://youtu.be/kJoHspUta-E

Orbital – Halcyon On and On
https://youtu.be/bV-hSgL1R74

Sun Ra Arkestra – NPR Tiny Desk Concert
https://youtu.be/H1ToFXHW5pg

 

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Editorial: A gold lure, so that we can be taken for suckers

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mashup
This graphic is a collage from the company’s website, mashup by Eric Jackson. Some important things to know about the claim are FIRST, that this is NOT a “public company” in the sense of its shares being traded on any stock exchange which imposes auditing and transparency regulations upon it; SECOND, if there is a “Third Party Advisory Board and Compliance Committee” the Panamanian people have not been told who that is.

Nito plays us for suckers

Neither born yesterday nor fresh off the plane – the editor may be getting old, with these “senior moments,” but some knowledge and memory persists.

What to think of a Panamanian government, and of a company, that claims the would-be concessionaire to be “of Canadian capital,” and both of which conceal the identity of their Panamanian Chief Operating Officer? And that guy is a Duque, of the very wealthy clan that used to own La Cresta, related to one of the founding stalwarts of the PRD, the late former Vice President Fito Duque? Might be a wonderful and competent man, but what we are being sold has been misrepresented by concealment. It’s not some disinterested Canadian firm, but “The Families” – a rabiblanco clan with a PRD relationship all along. The Cortizo administration and the company didn’t say so because they knew what the Panamanian public would rightly presume.

What to think of a Panamanian government, and of a company, which almost certainly in the period when the company’s proposed revival of the Petaquilla gold mine swindle was being formulated, had as ITS TREASURER a man now wanted by Spain after absconding with some $112 million from a cryptocurrency scheme? Yes, the company belatedly admitted that the guy resigned as director last year, but as of this morning has never admitted since the gold mine revival project that he was their treasurer. So what kind of business plan?

Which gets into the editor’s memories of a now-departed Panamanian hero, Fernando Manfredo Jr., who was acting Panama Canal administrator during the worst of Noriega and invasion times, and who later was the environmentalist running mate in the 1994 Rubén Blades presidential campaign. Before those things he was Omar Torrijos’s Minister of Commerce and Industry. When the Petaquilla Gold scheme first came up the editor did not own The Panama News, Richard Fifer’s sister worked for the owner, and the editor was sent out on trip to see parts of Penonome and hear the Petaquilla pitch. And THEN talked to Manfredo about it. Manfredo said that as a business proposition the gold mine was a loser, that given environmental regulations the project could not make money while complying with the law. His opinion was that it was just a stock swindle for investors deluded by mirages of golden riches.

And wouldn’t you know, that soon after Fifer got his concession he sued to be exempted of environmental regulations, arguing that they would make the project non-viable. He lost, but went ahead with it and was allowed to cut many a corner on the rules.

The mine was in production from 2011 to 2014. Its shares were the subject of an international insider trading and money laundering scandal, which Panamanian justice approved on the basis that such stock manipulations on shares traded in other countries but not Panama are legal here. Our financial system has never recovered from the disrepute of that ruling. Other stock markets shun Panama’s Bolsa de Valores. It’s part of the litany that has Panama on so many international financial black lists and gray lists.

Left behind was a leaking toxic mess, a work force that never got fully paid and this debt to the workers and the government from Seguro Social payments deducted from workers’ paychecks but kept by the management instead of paid into the system.

Go to the company’s website and there are claims of expertise in mining, long on purchases and sales and on oil drilling, but nothing really about which gold mine, where.

Get into the matter of WHO – what they say about themselves, and what they conceal about themselves – and many alarm bells go off. Get into the particulars of this gold mine, and yet more alarms, and Mr. Manfredo’s take from long ago echoes down through the years.

That’s not all there is to it – there is the proposed precious metals refinery

It’s worthwhile to refer to the company’s website and the biographies they give about their team, bearing in mind as well the things they conceal. We’re not really dealing with captains of industry, but with financial operators here.

And what’s a precious metals refinery? There are very few of them that are considered acceptable by folks like the European Union. Why’s that?

It gets back to some other long ago stories on which the editor worked.

Years ago I attended an archaeology lecture at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute about the pre-Columbian settlement of Panama by Chibchan peoples. But for the Embera and the Wounaan, all of Panama’s indigenous nations trace roots back to the plateau around Bogota, and the Chibchan cultural area. The first evidence for that was linguistic, and indigenous folk history. More modernly they get into DNA.

They can roughly estimate by the differences between two related languages when those who speak them went their different ways.

And then, with cultures that leave grave goods, facts that might be interpreted differently can be discerned.

As to GOLD ornaments, different gold deposits have different alloys, generally in this region mixes of gold, silver and copper. So if they dig up a grave in Cocle and find a gold huaca, by the metallurgy they can often tell where the metal was mined. You find Colombian gold in a grave in Panama? A family heirloom? Something taken in war and recast? Evidence of trade or intermarriage?

Modernly, you are trying to enforce sanctions to strangle the Venezuelan economy, or shut down a warlord in the Congo? You can tell by ingots of unrefined gold more ore less by the content of the alloys.

Venezuelan or Congolese gold, subject to international sanctions? You can identify those things by the alloys. But if you refine it to separate out the other metals and have more or less pure gold, that takes away the identifying marks.

So, in addition to being a money laundering center, establish a gold laundering facility in Panama? Then whine about how unfair the international sanctions are?

The Europeans are mostly concerned with “conflict minerals” that finance atrocious wars in Africa, which in turn send people fleeing to the north. Gold is one of the big ones. Uncle Sam and some of his friends, on the other hand, are big into economic sanctions for broadly political reasons, including against such gold producers as Venezuela and Russia.

But there is another concern, based on a treaty passed in 2013 and as to gold ever so slowly being phased into effect – or ignored as the case may be. It’s about mercury.

Recall the tale of the mad hatter? Used to be, mercury was widely used in the production of hats from beaver pelts. That toxic metal killed many a hatter, but better known were the psychological and neurological effects of those who practiced that trade.

In a scholarly article, chemists Dr. Louisa J. Esdaile and Dr. Justin M. Chalker summed up the mercury issue:

Mercury-dependent artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is the largest source of mercury pollution on Earth. In this practice, elemental mercury is used to extract gold from ore as an amalgam. The amalgam is typically isolated by hand and then heated—often with a torch or over a stove—to distill the mercury and isolate the gold. Mercury release from tailings and vaporized mercury exceed 1000 tonnes each year from ASGM. The health effects on the miners are dire, with inhaled mercury leading to neurological damage and other health issues. The communities near these mines are also affected due to mercury contamination of water and soil and subsequent accumulation in food staples, such as fish – a major source of dietary protein in many ASGM regions. The risks to children are also substantial, with mercury emissions from ASGM resulting in both physical and mental disabilities and compromised development. Between 10 and 19 million people use mercury to mine for gold in more than 70 countries, making mercury pollution from ASGM a global issue. With the Minamata Convention on Mercury entering force [in 2018], there is political motivation to help overcome the problem of mercury in ASGM. In this effort, chemists can play a central role.

That United Nations treaty, to which Panama is a party, is only slowly and unevenly implemented. One of its provisions lets countries ban the importation of gold and other things manufactured with mercury.

Consider where we are. The sort of small-scale mining in which mercury is used to separate gold is found in much of Latin America, including in several countries of the Amazon Basin, next door in Colombia and in Panama itself.

A dishonest gold refinery that looks the other way or actively falsifies records on the origin and extraction methods of metal that comes through its doors becomes quite the aid to illegal mining.

Back in the 1990s, the editor went on a boondocks slog to see one aspect of the illegal mining problem as affected Panama:

I went by piragua up the Cuango River in eastern Colon province with folks from INRENARE (a precursor of today’s MiAmbiente), the National Police and environmentalist groups.

That part of Panama had been invaded by dozens of Colombians, mostly young men, who were washing away a hillside along a tributary stream, using a fire hose and powerful pump, filtering the ore with screens and separating the gold from the rock with toxic chemicals. It was polluting the town of Cuango’s water supply. They had this sneering demagogue leader telling the Panamanian authorities that Cuango should just put chlorine in their water.

In my legally trained mind, I considered it a foreign invasion of Panama to strip away our resources and contaminate other resources in the process. As in, plenty of justification for the cops to just shoot the leader.

But I also know that what is legal isn’t always what’s wise, decent or effective. Risk a war with some Colombian faction or another, or the neighbor country’s government? Kill someone when less drastic means would do the job? Try to make mass arrests in an area of very difficult access? (We had to go more than an hour up jungle rivers.)

Eventually the cops caught up with these guys and there were selective arrests and the destruction of pumps and other equipment.

In such a situation in these days of the Minimata Convention, Panama could seize gold and identify the alloy, so as to give INTERPOL and other law enforcement agencies the identifying marks of such stolen resources on the international market.

However, a gold refinery makes that sort of enforcement of environmental laws far less possible.

Bottom line for Panama, which is already a target for international financial sanctions? Gold can also be laundered, and that practice becoming part of the isthmian business scene would likely draw some undesirable attention to these shores.

 

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Eartha Kitt, studio photo colorized by oneredsf1.

          I’m a dirt person. I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.

Eartha Kitt          

Bear in mind…

Brass shines as fair to the ignorant as gold to the goldsmiths.

Elizabeth I  

Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.

Seneca

Don’t gain the world and lose your soul, wisdom is better than silver or gold.

Bob Marley

 

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MINSA, Medidas modificadas frente el COVID-19

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MOLIRENA
Pronto abren las galleras, pero solo con un 25% de asistencia.

MINSA dice, excepciones para seguir…

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Levy, Think like a virus

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Vito the Virus and his boys
To stop the spread of COVID-19 across the globe, it’s important to understand the evolutionary imperative that viruses have to spread their genetic material. COVID viruses. Photo by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Think like a virus to understand why the pandemic isn’t over yet – and what the USA needs to do to help other countries

by Karen Levy, University of Washington

Kill every human on the planet.

This is the first assignment I give students in my public health classes, filled with do-gooders passionate about saving the world. Their homework is to play a game called Plague, in which they pretend to be pathogens bent on infecting everyone on the globe before humans can develop a cure or a vaccine.

Why this assignment? Because as a professor of infectious disease epidemiology, I aim to teach students to think like pathogens so they can learn how to control them.

With COVID-19, thinking like a pathogen leads to an inevitable conclusion: Getting the vaccine out to everyone in the world as quickly as possible is not just an ethical imperative, but also a selfish one.

Viruses use their hosts to replicate their genetic material.

Passing on genetic material a key goal

While many wealthy countries soon will offer vaccines to their entire populations, people in poorer countries might have to wait years for their shots. About half of U.S. residents are now at least partially vaccinated. Many other countries have yet to reach 1% vaccination coverage.

In the interim, SARS-CoV-2 will take advantage of this opening.

In reality, pathogens don’t actually want to kill all of their human hosts, because they would eventually have nowhere to live. Their goal is to pass on their genetic material to the next generation. They will do what they can to answer their evolutionary call.

A virus to-do list

Of course, viruses and bacteria don’t have brains so they don’t “think,” per se. But like all life forms, these particular living creatures are trying to maximize their chances of reproducing and having their offspring survive and reproduce.

As a single virus particle, you have two key items on the to-do list. First, you need a place to propagate. You need to reproduce yourself in large numbers, to increase the chances that one of your kids will do the right thing and provide you with some grandchildren. As a virus you are very good at this bit. No need to visit Tinder and find the perfect match, as you reproduce asexually. Instead you use the cellular machinery of your host – the human you infect – to reproduce yourself.

Second, you need a way to get from your current host to the next host that you will infect, otherwise known as transmission. For that you need both a portal of exit – the way to get out of your current host – and a portal of entry – the way to get into your next host. You need a susceptible host. And you need a way to travel to your next host.

Susceptible hosts? That was easy for SARS-CoV-2 when it first came on the scene. Because it was a novel pathogen, the entire global population was susceptible. No humans had full immunity to this particular virus from previous exposure, because it didn’t exist in human populations before 2019. Now, with each person who gets exposed or vaccinated, the number of susceptible hosts dwindles.

For a portal of exit, SARS-CoV-2 has a few options – mostly exhalation through breathing, but also through pooping and expelling other bodily fluids. For a portal of entry it has inhalation – the new host breathes it in – and to a lesser extent ingestion – the new host consumes it orally.

This means that transmission of this virus is relatively easy, involving an activity that people of all ages do all day: breathing. Other viruses require more specific activities or conditions, such as sexual intercourse or needle-sharing for HIV, or being bitten by a particular species of mosquito for Zika.

A woman inserting a swab into her mouth.
A woman at a testing site for asymptomatic COVID-19 in Portsmouth, England. Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images

SARS-CoV-2 is one smart virus

SARS-CoV-2 has had a lot of things playing in its favor, aside from having a global population naïve to it. Several other characteristics make it particularly successful.

First, while it does kill, it can also cause mild or asymptomatic infections in others. When pathogens kill most of their hosts, they are not so successful in spreading, because humans change their behavior in response to the perceived threat of the disease.

Ebola is a perfect example. College students would have been more likely to cancel their spring break plans to Florida in 2020 if they had expected that it might cause them to bleed out of their eyeballs, as happens in some people infected with the Ebola virus.

SARS-CoV-2 also has a long incubation period – the time between its infection of a new host and the start of the host’s symptoms. Yet it can be transmitted during the time before symptoms occur, which allows it to spread unnoticed.

Grieving women hugging one another.
Family members of a COVID-19 victim mourn as they wait outside Maulana Azad Medical College mortuary to collect the body on May 24, 2021, in New Delhi, India. Sanjeev Verma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

More transmission, more new variants

If you’re thinking like the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen now, you’re furiously searching for a way around current vaccine formulations. The more cases you cause, the more chances you have for new variants that can break through the vaccines. You don’t care whether these cases occur in Montana or Mumbai. This is why no human is safe from the pandemic until transmission is controlled everywhere.

Thinking like a pathogen requires thinking over an evolutionary time scale, which for a virus is very short, sometimes the course of a single human infection. SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses have astonishing powers to adapt to changing conditions.

One of their survival strategies is the built-in mistakes in their reproduction machinery that cause mutations. Occasionally, a mutation occurs that improves the ability of a virus to survive and spread.

This leads to new variants, like those we have seen emerge recently. So far, available vaccines appear effective against the variants. But new variants may reduce vaccine effectiveness, or lead to a need for booster shots. The increased transmissibility of the new variants has already likely made chances of reaching herd immunity through vaccination out of reach.

We watch in horror as the virus ravages India, and to some it may seem like a distant threat. But every new case offers another opportunity for a new variant to emerge and spread worldwide.

A woman receiving a vaccine in Ecuador.
Grace Macias, a fieldworker who works on the author’s projects, gets vaccinated in Quito, Ecuador, on May 23, 2021. Photo by Grace Macias, CC BY-ND

To outsmart the virus, we need shots in arms everywhere

That is why global access to vaccines is not only a moral imperative but also the only way to outsmart the virus. The USA can do a lot right now to ensure global access to vaccines even as we step up vaccination here.

The United States has already made substantial commitments to COVAX, a global collaboration to accelerate the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines and guarantee equitable distribution.

The United States. could channel additional funds now and pressure other countries to do the same. Funding commitments to COVAX may be hollow without a concurrent plan to quickly distribute the US vaccine stockpile that was amassed as we raced to buy up the first available doses.

In addition to vaccination, the United States and other well-resourced countries can help increase the availability of testing in all countries. These countries can also provide technical and logistics assistance to improve vaccine rollout efforts and work to coordinate and improve global genomic surveillance so new variants are quickly identified.

If this all seems expensive, think of the crushing economic costs of going back into lockdown. This is no time to be cheap.

To avoid jeopardizing the effectiveness of the millions of shots going into arms in rich countries, we must get shots into the arms of people in all countries.The Conversation

Karen Levy, Associate Professor of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

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Panama Maritime Authority in special session over Panama Ports contract

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Balboa
The Port of Balboa, circa 2019. Panama Maritime Authority photo.

A new ports deal could become
the template for other things

by Eric Jackson

Since this past Thursday, May 27 the Panama Maritime Authority (AMP by its Spanish initials) has been in “permanent session to consider the application of Panama Ports, a subsidiary of Hong Kong based Hutchison Ports, for a 25-year renewal of its 1997-2022 concession contract for the ports of Balboa and Cristobal.

Originally the deal called for a $22.2 million base rent, plus 10 percent of gross revenues. However, these requirements were waived in a 2002 decree by then-president Mireya Moscoso under a “parity” deal with respect to other port operations. The deal was again changed under the 2004-2009 Martín Torrijos administration, with the Panama government acquiring a 10 percent stake and presumably that percentage of profits or dividends. However — and the concept is relevant to other concession contracts — there were usually no profits, nor any dividends. Those were eaten up by overhead expenses and capital investments, some visible at a glance in all of those modern new cranes.

So the allegation against Panama Ports isn’t exactly fraud. It’s mostly that they reinvested their revenues in expanding and improving the ports. In the first 23 years and five months of the concession, Balboa and Cristobal reportedly generated $909 million in gross revenues, but Panama only received $8 million. Now it is claimed that with the canal expansion bringing bigger ships what load and unload more containers, notwithstanding the epidemic that ports are much busier and generate more revenue.

This, just at a time when Panama in free falling into a debt crisis and looking to generate more income. Other companies — Maersk subsidiary APM Terminal is one that’s mentioned — have expressed an interest in taking over from the Hutchison subsidiary if no deal is reached..

There is a deadline of sorts. The contract runs out next January and if no deal is reached then by the terms of the original contract there would be an automatic 25-year renewal.

 

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