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New trial for Martinelli on reinstated illegal spying charges

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Martinelli, who is en route to putting his new RM (Realizando Metas) party on the ballot, reacted on Twitter to the news of the renewed charges by making light of the situation: “Today I knew that I will be the president of Panama in 2024. Without struggles there are no victories.” Photo of the ex-president and entourage from his Twitter feed.

Ricardo Martinelli to be tried again for eavesdropping without a warrant

by Eric Jackson

On November 20, another twist in a long-running case. In a three-hour online hearing a three-member Court of Appeals panel heard arguments from various lawyers, most notably senior organized crime prosecutor Ricaurte González, about whether an August 2019 trial court acquittal of the former president on eavesdropping and theft charges could stand. The 2-1 decision was that the ruling rejecting the spying charges was declared null, while the acquittal on the theft charges was upheld.

There will be a new trial for the warrantless surveillance of some 150 political rivals, purported allies at the time, journalists, attorneys, activists and leaders of non-governmental organizations. Those victims’ names and some of the details of their communications with others were found in a file on a National Security Council laptop that was seized in a raid on a former security director. The surveillance also inherently intercepted the emails and phone calls of others with whom those on the list of those under watch held electronic communications.

The Israeli Pegasus system that Martinelli use also has the capability of turning a laptop or cell phone that to its user is apparently turned off into a live room bug, useful for making video or audio recordings. The most notorious of these surreptitious files was a recording of a domestic argument involving then former judge and now legislator Zulay Rodríguez and her husband at the time, which was published on YouTube. Prosecutors under the Varela and Cortizo administrations have steadfastly blocked access to the invaded third parties in all of the information about themselves and thus blocked and redress for the invasions of OUR privacy. (This reporter had electronic communications with at least two people on the list of 150 surveillance targets.)

The equipment used, which was loaded with the Pegasus software, was last seen by someone who would talk about it in one of Ricardo Martinelli’s business offices. It has never been recovered. Has is been used since his presidency? Did it have anything to do with the intercepted WhatsApp communications of his successor, Juan Carlos Varela? The appeals court didn’t get into those matters, limiting itself to upholding the trial court’s finding that allegations that Martinelli personally stole the items in question wasn’t supported by sufficient proof.

Last year’s “not guilty” verdicts caused a storm of criticism. Since then they have added to the political instability inherent in the widespread belief that the justice system is absolutely corrupted. That popular belief will not dissipate anytime soon, but the trial court acquittal was particularly scurrilous.

In the long and winding procedural route to the trial, the Supreme Court, which had held original jurisdiction and conducted much of the investigation before remanding the case to an ordinary trial court, attached its investigative files as part of the body of evidence. But the trial court threw out all such evidence that the high court sent down with the case, contriving a novel procedural rationale to override a higher court’s order. This was the main fault on which the appeals court based its decision to nullify the acquittal on the eavesdropping charges.

That decision was the subject of two major appeals to higher courts, one set of which was thrown out on procedural ground, the other which went to the Supreme Court’s penal bench, which remanded it to the Court of Appeals. That latter court’s nullification of the acquittal remands the matter to a new trial court, with an order that none of the judges who dealt with the case below may participate in the new trial.

No date has been set for the new trial. It would be unlikely before January. But prosecutors are expected to be in court this week to ask for measures to prevent Martinelli’s flight to avoid prosecution. (He already did that once, which culminated in long extradition proceeding in the United States, where he took up residence in Miami.)

In the now mostly nullified trial that included both warrantless eavesdropping and theft charges, prosecutors had asked for a 21-year prison sentence. Shorn of the theft charges the case still could result in years of imprisonment and enough years of suspended political rights to prevent a 2024 presidential run by the now 68-year-old Martinelli. Depending on what prosecutors request and a judge grants, the former president might be headehttps://www.facebook.com/thepanamanewsd back to jail for preventive detention of may just be barred from leaving the country.

 

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Beach closures, paranoia, history and culture

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The beach in Santa Clara, closed by National Civil Protection System (SINAPROC, the lifeguards for which are in orange) with police on hand to enforce that, was closed on November 22. The red flag is a symbol of that, rather than a communist takeover. The order closing all beaches and riverbank bathing spots in Panama, by reference for gringos of a certain age, came 57 years after the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. By reference for those in charge of public safety in Panama, it came on a fairly nice day after several days of heavy rains. SINAPROC photo.

Are they coming to take you away?

by Eric Jackson

 

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Commentary on Facebook about the above situation, from someone in the Coronado area.

Ah, rainy season living in Panama!

Where there can be not too many clouds in the sky, the water at the beach can look calm as glass, and still swollen streams coming down from the hills and emptying into the bay can cause riptides that can — and DO — drown several people every year.

And if the person who goes for a sunset stroll can’t resist and goes in the water, if SINAPROC has to do a late afternoon search and rescue its people may get the choice between saving their own lives by going home as the sun goes down, or working far more dangrously in the dark.

But hey — isn’t the good life the ability to live the fantasy that the universe revolves around one’s self? And if it doesn’t, isn’t that clear evidence of a fiendish plot to control your life? A lot of cultures and subcultures are more fatalistic that this. Those who believe that God can play capricious tricks may have a different attitude from those whose religion is conspicuous consumption, or so on.

And what is it about the thick streak of conspiratorial thinking that runs through US culture, anyway?

As it turns out, November 22 marks an auspicious milestone in the developmemt of that way of thinking. On that day an apparently crazed former marine shot President Kennedy. The gunman had dabbled with communism, briefly living in the Soviet Union and bringing a wife home from there, approaching the Cubans and apparently being rebuffed by them, getting involved with a small Trotskyist faction whose members thought him weird.

But see, in that era the United States and forces allied with it did get into assassinations. A few days before Kennedy took office, the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba was murdered in the most brutal way by Colonel Mobutu, who was a thug dictator and darling of the west for decades afterward. The annoying Rafael Trujillo was taken out in the Dominican Republic a few months into the Kennedy administration. When the Diem brothers couldn’t maintain order in South Vietnam, they were killed in a coup. AND there were all these attempts to kill Fidel Castro, not to mention the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the terrifying Missile Crisis.

Lee Harvey Oswald was quickly dispatched by a mobbed-up businessman, but it was a matter of intense national interest to know the motive. The chief justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, was put in charge of a commission to find out what made Oswald’s  mind tick.

A thorough, credible and dispassionate investigation, however, would have posed a mortal threat to the entire planet. Allege that Kennedy and Castro were playing chicken with their respective hit men and Kennedy lost, and that could lead to nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. So certain key questions were pointedly not asked, and an awful lot of people noticed. It was a mother lode of conspiracy theories.

THEN, as the Vietnam War degenerated into an always denied humiliating loss for the United States, the notion that “THEY are lying to us” became a staple of the popular culture, even when  “they” were not. Enough lies lead to the suspicion that everything’s a lie. It’s the moral of the story about the boy who cried “wolf!”

A culture of exaggerated individualism, and history as taught in schools as tales of great men and terrible villains, fed the conspiratorial world view as a common delusion. Donald Trump has played to and amplified that madness.

So it becomes natural to presume that someone is plotting nefarious controls when a weekend on the beach is restricted for reasons invisible to the person affected by the restrictions.

But it’s about the possibilities of undertows and riptides generated by streams coming down from the hills. Those elemental forces can be subtle at first glance, and deadly when they have someone it their grip.

 

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Kermit’s birds / Las aves de Kermit

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Gartered trogon / Trogón enligado / Trogon caligatus. Photo © Kermit Nourse.

Gartered trogon ~ Trogón enligado

This bird, one of the most beautiful in Panama, is called the Gartered Trogon. That thing in its mouth is the caterpillar of the Megalopyge lanata moth, better known in West Indian English as the Shinney caterpillar. If you touch it you may be going to the hospital because it will give you a painfully toxic burn that can be fatal to those with allergies. The bird must have incredible vision because he saw the insect from a long way away and dove down to get it. He seemed to struggle a bit to swallow it too. What’s more, the bird builds its nest in the hives of termites, wasps or ants — to all of which it is immune. The ordinary clutch is two or three eggs.

This is a forest bird, ranging from eastern and central Mexico to the foothills of the Andes in Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. It eats insects and small fruit, tends to stay motionless in its perch and rarely flies very far.

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Esta ave, una de las más hermosas de Panamá, se llama Trogón enligado. Esa cosa en su boca se llama el gusano de ña mariposa Megalopyge lanata. Si lo toca, es posible que vaya al hospital porque le provocará una quemadura dolorosamente tóxica que puede ser funesta para las personas alérgicas. El pájaro debe tener una visión increíble porque vio al insecto desde muy lejos y se zambulló para atraparlo. Él también pareció luchar un poco para tragarlo. Además, el pájaro construye su nido en las colmenas de termitas, avispas u hormigas, a todas las cuales es inmune. La puesta ordinaria es de dos o tres huevos.

Se trata de un ave del bosque, que se extiende desde el este y centro de México hasta las estribaciones de los Andes en Ecuador, Colombia y Venezuela. Come insectos y frutos pequeños, tiende a permanecer inmóvil en su percha y rara vez vuela muy lejos.

 

 

 

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Facultad de Medicina, Días fiesta durante la Pandemia

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Toque en https://rosa.innovacion.gob.pa/ y allí se desplegará una acceso directo a su whatsapp, para que pueda comunicarse.

 

Benjamin & Davies, Foreign policy disasters Biden can address on his first day

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CODEPINK / Women for Peace contingent in a Washington women’s march. Photo © Fred Murphy.

Ten foreign policy fiascos that
Joe Biden can fix on Day One

by Medea Benjamin & Nicolas J.S. Davies – Common Dreams

Donald Trump loves executive orders as a tool of dictatorial power, avoiding the need to work through Congress. But that works both ways, making it relatively easy for President Biden to reverse many of Trump’s most disastrous decisions. Here are ten things Biden can do as soon as he takes office. Each one can set the stage for broader progressive foreign policy initiatives, which we have also outlined.

1) End the US role in the Saudi-led war on Yemen and restore US humanitarian aid to Yemen.

Congress already passed a War Powers Resolution to end the US role in the Yemen war, but Trump vetoed it, prioritizing war machine profits and a cozy relationship with the horrific Saudi dictatorship. Biden should immediately issue an executive order to end every aspect of the US role in the war, based on the resolution that Trump vetoed.

The United States should also accept its share of responsibility for what many have called the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today, and provide Yemen with funding to feed its people, restore its healthcare system and eventually rebuild this devastated country. Biden should restore and expand USAID funding and recommit US financial support to the UN, the WHO, and to World Food Program relief programs in Yemen.

2) Suspend all US arms sales and transfers to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Both countries are responsible for massacring civilians in Yemen, and the UAE is reportedly the largest arms supplier to General Haftar’s rebel forces in Libya. Congress passed bills to suspend arms sales to both of them, but Trump vetoed them too. Then he struck arms deals worth $24 billion with the UAE as part of an obscene military and commercial ménage à trois between the USA, the UAE and Israel, which he absurdly tried to pass off as a peace agreement.

While mostly ignored at the behest of the weapons companies, there are actually US laws that require the suspension of arms transfers to countries that use them to violate US and international law. They include the Leahy Law that prohibits the United States from providing military assistance to foreign security forces that commit gross violations of human rights; and the Arms Export Control Act, which states that countries must use imported US weapons only for legitimate self defense.

Once these suspensions are in place, the Biden administration should seriously review the legality of Trump’s arms sales to both countries, with a view to canceling them and banning future sales. Biden should commit to applying these laws consistently and uniformly to all US military aid and arms sales, without making exceptions for Israel, Egypt or other US allies.

3) Rejoin the Iran Nuclear Agreement (JCPOA) and lift sanctions on Iran.

After reneging on the JCPOA, Trump slapped draconian sanctions on Iran, brought us to the brink of war by killing its top general, and is even trying to order up illegal, aggressive war plans in his last days as president. The Biden administration will face an uphill battle undoing this web of hostile actions and the deep mistrust they have caused, so Biden must act decisively to restore mutual trust: immediately rejoin the JCPOA, lift the sanctions, and stop blocking the $5 billion IMF loan that Iran desperately needs to deal with the COVID crisis.

In the longer term, the United States should give up the idea of regime change in Iran — this is for the people of Iran to decide — and instead restore diplomatic relations and start working with Iran to deescalate other Middle East conflicts, from Lebanon to Syria to Afghanistan, where cooperation with Iran is essential.

4) End US threats and sanctions against officials of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Nothing so brazenly embodies the US government’s enduring, bipartisan disdain for international law as its failure to ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). If President Biden is serious about recommitting the United States to the rule of law, he should submit the Rome Statute to the US Senate for ratification to join 120 other countries as members of the ICC. The Biden administration should also accept the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which the United States rejected after the Court convicted the US of aggression and ordered it to pay reparations to Nicaragua in 1986.

5) Back President Moon’s diplomacy for a “permanent peace regime” in Korea.

President-elect Biden has reportedly agreed to meet South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in soon after he is sworn in. Trump’s failure to provide sanctions relief and explicit security guarantees to North Korea doomed his diplomacy and became an obstacle to the diplomatic process under way between Korean presidents Moon and Kim.

The Biden administration must start negotiating a peace agreement to formally end the Korean war, and initiate confidence-building measures such as opening liaison offices, easing sanctions, facilitating reunions between Korean-American and North Korean families and halting US-South Korea military exercises. Negotiations must involve concrete commitments to non-aggression from the US side to pave the way for a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and the reconciliation that so many Koreans desire — and deserve.

6) Renew New START with Russia and freeze the US trillion-dollar new nuke plan.

Biden can end Trump’s dangerous game of brinksmanship on Day One and commit to renewing Obama’s New START Treaty with Russia, which freezes both countries’ nuclear arsenals at 1,550 deployed warheads each. He can also freeze Obama and Trump’s plan to spend more than a trillion dollars on a new generation of US nuclear weapons.

Biden should also adopt a long overdue “no first use” nuclear weapons policy, but most of the world is ready to go much further. In 2017, 122 countries voted for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) at the UN General Assembly. None of the current nuclear weapons states voted for or against the treaty, essentially pretending to ignore it. On October 24, 2020, Honduras became the 50th country to ratify the treaty, which will now go into effect on January 22, 2021.

So, here is a visionary challenge for President Biden for that day, his second full day in office: Invite the leaders of each of the other eight nuclear weapons states to a conference to negotiate how all nine nuclear weapons states will sign onto the TPNW, eliminate their nuclear weapons and remove this existential danger hanging over every human being on Earth.

7) Lift illegal unilateral US sanctions against other countries.

Economic sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council are generally considered legal under international law, and require action by the Security Council to impose or lift them. But unilateral economic sanctions that deprive ordinary people of necessities like food and medicine are illegal and cause grave harm to innocent citizens.

US sanctions on countries like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea and Syria are a form of economic warfare. UN special rapporteurs have condemned them as crimes against humanity and compared them to medieval sieges. Since most of these sanctions were imposed by executive order, President Biden can lift them the same way on Day One.

In the longer term, unilateral sanctions that affect an entire population are a form of coercion, like military intervention, coups and covert operations, that have no place in a legitimate foreign policy based on diplomacy, the rule of law and the peaceful resolution of disputes.

8) Roll back Trump policies on Cuba and move to normalize relations.

Over the past four years, the Trump administration overturned the progress towards normal relations made by President Obama, sanctioning Cuba’s tourism and energy industries, blocking coronavirus aid shipments, restricting remittances to family members and sabotaging Cuba’s international medical missions, which are a major source of income for its health system.

President Biden should start working with the Cuban government to allow the return of diplomats to their respective embassies, lift all restrictions on remittances, remove Cuba from the list of countries that are not US partners against terrorism, cancel the portion of the Helms Burton Act (Title III) that allows Americans to sue companies that use property seized by the Cuban government 60 years ago, and collaborate with Cuban health professionals in the fight against COVID-19.

These measures would mark a down payment on a new era of diplomacy and cooperation, as long as they don’t fall victim to crass attempts to gain conservative Cuban-American votes in the next election, which Biden and politicians of both parties should commit to resisting.

9) Restore pre-2015 rules of engagement to spare civilian lives.

In the fall of 2015, as US forces escalated their bombing of ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria to over 100 bomb and missile strikes per day, the Obama administration loosened military rules of engagement to let US commanders in the Middle East order airstrikes that were expected to kill up to 10 civilians without prior approval from Washington. Trump reportedly loosened the rules even further, but details were not made public. Iraqi Kurdish intelligence reports counted 40,000 civilians killed in the assault on Mosul alone. Biden can reset these rules and start killing fewer civilians on Day One.

But we can avoid these tragic civilian deaths altogether by ending these wars. Democrats have been critical of Trump’s often ad hoc pronouncements about withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Somalia. President Biden now has the chance to truly end these wars. He should set a date, no later than the end of December 2021, by when all US troops will come home from all these combat zones. This policy may not be popular among war profiteers, but it would certainly be popular among Americans across the ideological spectrum.

10) Freeze US military spending, and launch a major initiative to reduce it.

At the end of the Cold War, former senior Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee that US military spending could safely be cut by half over the next ten years. That goal was never achieved, and the promised peace dividend gave way to a triumphalist “power dividend.”

The military-industrial complex exploited the crimes of September 11th to justify an extraordinary one-sided arms race in which the United States accounted for 45% of global military spending from 2003 to 2011, far outstripping its peak Cold War military spending. The military-industrial complex is counting on Biden to escalate a renewed Cold War with Russia and China as the only plausible pretext for continuing these record military budgets.

Biden must dial back the conflicts with China and Russia, and instead begin the critical task of moving money from the Pentagon to urgent domestic needs. He should start with the 10 percent cut supported this year by 93 representatives and 23 senators.

In the longer term, Biden should look for deeper cuts in Pentagon spending, as in Representative Barbara Lee’s bill to cut $350 billion per year from the US military budget, approximating the 50% peace dividend we were promised after the Cold War and freeing up resources we sorely need to invest in healthcare, education, clean energy and modern infrastructure.

 

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¿Wappin? A REAL Black Friday / Un VERDADERO Black Friday

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Black Lives Matter rally in Eugene, Oregon. Wikimedia photo by dsgetch.

No pale fake commercial holiday here
No hay pálidas “fiestas” comerciales aquí

The Persuaders – Black Power
https://youtu.be/m0yg-IwydB0

Jimmy Ruffin – What Becomes of the Broken Hearted
https://youtu.be/wBrBSSl0OOM

Janelle Davidson & Alejandro Lagrotta – Doble Dolor
https://youtu.be/U2EWkDn_Yyg

Peter Tosh – Till Your Well Runs Dry
https://youtu.be/jlB6UJmpybs

The Four Tops – Are You Man Enough?
https://youtu.be/apuvcUAnnB0

Chaka Khan – Through the Fire
https://youtu.be/TjWmw-8-OEk

Billie Holiday – God Bless The Child
https://youtu.be/Z_1LfT1MvzI

Luciano & Jesse Royal – The Music
https://youtu.be/07olcYWw8lo

Aisha Davis – Trouble
https://youtu.be/fiq1ZF5whbE

Lord Cobra – Crook Salesman
https://youtu.be/kEmeSBAtIuw

WAR – The World is a Ghetto
https://youtu.be/fLIaUdMzBtM

Tracy Chapman – Baby Can I Hold You
https://youtu.be/DqoLMGSBGYc

Marcia Griffiths – Electric Boogie
https://youtu.be/kdP7X-ALgfQ

Black Stalin – Sufferers
https://youtu.be/7suUKcjnRk4

Martha & The Vandellas – Nowhere to Run
https://youtu.be/ABbc-O_3_Ac

Daniel Bulgin & Los Soul Fantastics – Mujer
https://youtu.be/yWsbihAmPcs

Zahara – Loliwe
https://youtu.be/Z5jZu-y91VM

Neneh Cherry – Natural Skin Deep
https://youtu.be/uBUCfn5aj4Y

Kafu Banton – Pa’ Lante y Pa’ Atrás
https://youtu.be/YWL_BQb6ZjQ

John Coltrane in Belgium (1965)
https://youtu.be/IsBbM5PIAHk

 

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Next for The Panama News?

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Emergency measures here as everywhere

by Eric Jackson

Reorganizing through a machine disaster, in the midst of multiple matural disasters, as possible political disasters lurk, working around an economic disaster.

There you have it, folks — The Panama News in 2020.

It does seem to be getting better.

A year or so ago, the plan had been that, in the wake of a series of political campaigns that would disrupt my life and work on The Panama News, I would sleep it off for a day or three after the election, then start to make some changes to The Panama News. That’s still sort of the plan — bring back certain features to the website, perhaps eliminate or alter a few others, post a lot more things than I had been, step back a bit from the running crisis that has been the news coming out of the USA both on the website and on The Panama News social media.

A computer virus of some sort has crippled the main production computer, a Lenovo machine that’s now in the shop. It was my only connection to the Internet. I have weathered a number of such crises over the decades, but the Plan B was always to carry on at an Internet cafe. The COVID-19 virus and associated health regulations and economic disasters have shut down those establishments, surely a lot of them forever.

These worrds are typed on a borrowed machine – which I have to slowly program with the main links and features that I use./

Nothing that a bit of money to buy a new computer and fix the old one to be the new backup could not solve. But the epidemic has killed at least one of the regular donars, driven several others to move away from Panama, and hit the pocketbooks of just about everyone save a few pandemic profiteers.

It’s a small chip of a greater mosaic — no matter what any policy maker in any nation of any ideology may intend, the old economic arrangements as they were, say, five years ago, are never coming back. What is to come on the grand national and international scales should make an interesting set of stories.

I like my Chinese Lenovo laptop. I liked the Taiwanese Asus laptop that I used before that. As a student of history and politics I understand the concept of China as one civilization and also know that it has most often in one way or another been several countries at the same time. (From WHICH kingdoms did Confucius and Laozi hail?) I was sad to see Panama’s relations with Taiwan cut as they were, which is not to say that I ever thought that relations with the plucky Taiwanese — who were loyal friends to Panama — were ever any sort of reasonable substitute for formal ties to great power China. And when you do see this, it will come to you via a Huawei dongle stick from a guy without too many objections to Panama buying Chinese technology to give us better wireless Internet connections out here in the boonies of Cocle province.

Get to the Panamanian side of who I am and you find this modern anti-imperialst. None of this taking bribes from a state-sponsored Brazilian multinational, none of this taking orders from China about who can or can’t be our friends, none of this taking orders from Donald Trump about our trade relations with the Chinese. On the gringo side I am a Detroit Tigers fan, so “¡Fuera Yanqui!” perhaps, but never “Yankee Go Home” — whenever possible a Yankee should be tagged out before he crossed home plate.

ANYWAY, back to The Panama News, and some relevant considerations:

* Our backup during hacking crises has been our Facebook page, but now Mark Zuckerberg, on top of providing a forum for neofascist militias to recruit thugs who kill people, has throttled many media that don’t suit his political views, including The Panama News. In other words, he has altered the Facebook algorithms so that fewer people see what is posted on our Facebook page.

* Our Twitter feed is slowly growing, but that social medium is not so apt for blogging and discussion as Facebook tends to be.

* The email newsletters have been few and far between,. There is a revolt against the social media companies for many reasons. So do we go back to low tech email on a more regular basis? Several people have made that insistent request.

* I have long been looking for somebody, or better yet multiple somebodies, with different musical tastes than mine — especially folks younger than me — to add regular new playlists to my weekly ¿Wappin? features. Meanwhile, Google has inserted ads into things on YouTube.

* The Panama News has always had readers who use it to learn English. What I would REALLY like is a regular Spanish as a second language page. The notion that you can live here without knowing Spanish — unable to call an ambulance, report a fire, call the police about a crime in progress or so on — is downright dangerous.

* I keep my Facebook settings such that FB friends can post things on my wall, and it only occasionally gets abused. In my absence a friend or two have been posting but I really do need a few more such friends, and somebody trustworthy and diligent enough to ge tthe codes to be able to go in and delete malicious stuff.

* And yes, let’s get back to more NEWS, as opposed to opinion and feature stuff, from PANAMA. Since March is that along with the health restrictions have come a reduced ability to go out and cover the news. Much larger and richer media than The Panama News also rely more than they’d like on stories and images fed to them by the government.

SO THERE is a bit of my content wish list, but it’s all in the realm of theory unless some more resources, first to replace or repair the production computer, and then for general living and operations, come in. To donate to The Panama News, click here.

And just MY wishes? I want to be a bit more democratic than that. Send me an email at fund4thepanamanews@gmail.com with your thoughts about this publication’s future.

Eric Jackson
the editor

Por lo general, las poblaciones de vertebrados no están disminuyendo

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Las pérdidas extremas en unas pocas poblaciones provocan una disminución aparente de vertebrados a nivel global. Un perezoso en  Bocas del Toro. Foto por Steve Paton — Smithsonian.

Biodiversidad de vertebrados – un rayo de esperanza

por STRI

Poblaciones de vertebrados -desde aves y peces hasta antílopes, en general, no están disminuyendo, a pesar de lo que se ha pensado y dicho anteriormente.

En un artículo publicado recientemente en la revista Nature, un equipo de biólogos dirigido por la Universidad de McGill, descubrió que las cifras en declive de poblaciones de vertebrados de todo tipo están impulsadas por un pequeño número de poblaciones atípicas cuyo número está cayendo a tasas extremas. Una vez que estos valores atípicos se separan del resto, surge una imagen muy diferente y mucho más esperanzadora de la biodiversidad global.

(Las poblaciones son grupos de individuos de la misma especie que viven en un área en particular y, por lo tanto, la disminución del tamaño de la población precederá a la pérdida de especies).

Los reportes de muertes son exagerados.

Todo se reduce a las matemáticas, los modelos y distintos enfoques para calcular promedios.

Típicamente se han estimado que las poblaciones de vertebrados han disminuido en promedio por más del 50% desde 1970, basado en datos históricos de monitoreo de la vida silvestre. “Sin embargo, dados los métodos matemáticos previos utilizados para modelar poblaciones de vertebrados, esta estimación podría surgir de dos escenarios muy diferentes: disminuciones sistemáticas generalizadas, o algunas disminuciones extremas”, explica Brian Leung, ecologista de la Universidad de McGill, Catedrático UNESCO de Diálogos para la Sostenibilidad, asociado de investigación del Instituto Smithsonian de Investigaciones Tropicales y autor principal del estudio. En este artículo, los investigadores se plantearon la interrogante de manera diferente.

Usando un conjunto de datos de más de 14,000 poblaciones de vertebrados de todo el mundo recopiladas en la base de datos Living Planet, los investigadores identificaron aproximadamente el 1% de las poblaciones de vertebrados que han sufrido disminuciones extremas de población desde 1970 (como reptiles en áreas tropicales de América del Norte, Central y del Sur) y aves en la región del Indo-Pacífico). Cuando se cuentan este 1% extremo, los investigadores descubrieron que cuando se agrupaban todas juntas, en general las poblaciones de vertebrados restantes no aumentaban ni disminuían.

“La variación en este agregado global también es importante. Algunas poblaciones realmente están en peligro y regiones como el Indo-Pacífico están mostrando disminuciones sistemáticas generalizadas. Sin embargo, la imagen de un ‘desierto de biodiversidad’ mundial no está apoyada por la evidencia.” Comentó Leung. Esto es bueno, sería muy desalentador si todos nuestros esfuerzos de conservación durante las últimas cinco décadas tuvieron poco efecto”.

“Nos sorprendió lo fuerte que fue el efecto de estas poblaciones extremas en el impulso de la estimación anterior del declive global promedio”, agrega la coautora Anna Hargreaves, profesora del Departamento de Biología de McGill. “Nuestros resultados identifican regiones que necesitan una acción urgente para mejorar la disminución generalizada de la biodiversidad, pero también razones para esperar que nuestras acciones puedan marcar la diferencia”.

Para leer “Clustered versus catastrophic global vertebrate declines” por Brian Leung et al en Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2920-6

La investigación fue financiada por the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
doi.org: 10.1038/s41586-020-2920-6

Editorials: Panama has been warned; and Joe knows

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The SINAPROC disaster relief agency on a rescue mission to recover someone swept away by flood waters. It was the unfortunate usual result: a lifeless body recovered. So many rainy season drownings result from lack of or failure to use common sense around storm drains, streams and rivers. A lot of other casualties are of people living where they should not be, in harm’s way. Photo by SINAPROC.

As bad as it was it was just a warning

Sideswiped by two hurricanes in quick succession, very late into what has . traditionally been the hurricane season. We might be lucky to say it was just a freak event to go down in the record books for future generations to ponder. A bit more realistic would be that it’s a warning of climate changing in that direction.

We found all sorts of weaknesses in our defenses.

• Illegal construction in flood plains, some of it with the connivance of local officials, much of it makeshift housing built by poor folks with nowhere else to go.
• Buildings erected in places clearly vulnerable to landslides.
• An underdeveloped road transport system, such that in many places there were no practical detours around bridges carried away by floods or roads blocked by cascades or rocks or mud.
• Already inadequate storm drainage systems in many areas overloaded way past their maximums.
• Populated areas, from islands in the San Blas Archipelago to parts our main cities, that are clearly not prepared to survive even a slight rise in mean sea levels.
• Admirable and sometimes even heroic work by joint task forces from several agencies, but many of which were just not equipped for the tasks they faced.

Let’s play down the interminable processes of blame assignment and move forward from here.

Under poor leadership we run the risk of an increasingly militarized police state, or the transfer of corruption opportunities from one set of public officials to another. We must always be on our guard. But to SENAN, SENAFRONT, the Transito cops and the other divisions of the Policia Nacional, this country’s Security Ministry ought to add a Corps of Engineers with wide-ranging tasks and a vast and varied set of civilian reserves who can be called into service when needed.

A big part of the debt crisis that Panama faces is the product of at least a decade and a half of corrupt dealings with thug construction companies. The losses to the Panamanian public are in the multi-billion-dollar range. Bid rigging practices have become both sophisticated and lowbrow arts, and the legal sophistries upholding these ways of doing business are in themselves good arguments for a new constitution and the expulsion of many individuals from the nation’s bench and bar. So why not create a public engineering corps, perhaps based in part on the US Army Corps of Engineers, to take charge of our important public works construction projects?

Worthy public building inspection is hard to come by in Panama. Proper zoning and building permit decisions vary in each community with each change in local government officials, but when disaster strikes it’s national government agencies that have to come in. So might prevention be nationalized in addition to relief, via a corps of engineers that’s in charge of building permits and the inspection of construction projects?

If the Colon city center, and parts of the nation’s capital, are to be saved from slowly but inexorably rising seas, do we want Odebrecht, or Bolota’s relatives, or the usual highway construction gangsters, in charge of building the dikes and levees that will be needed to save it? It would be much cheaper and more effective to have an engineering corps, calling up labor from a large pool of reserves, performing the design and construction work.

We have been warned. Let’s look ahead, plan ahead and organize the government for the challenges to come.

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The complaint from the one side….

Joe knows

Let’s first understand something about the US political system. With single-member congressional and legislative districts and in most places a first past the post style of determining winners – some places have runoffs if nobody gets a majority – the math of American elections is what gives the United States a two-party system. But each of those parties is a coalition of forces that would be different parties in another country’s form of democracy.

The Republican factions traditionally unify over common interests in protecting the property and privileges of the very rich. The Democrats tend to fight out all the main issues of their times: civil rights for many categories of people, the existence of labor unions, the Vietnam War, the social welfare net, alcohol and drug prohibition – these were all by and large fought out among Democrats.

A presidential primary season affected by Bernie Sanders’s heart attack and Michael Bloomberg’s expenditure of half a billion dollars baiting him about it, then cut short by the COVID-19 epidemic gave the nomination to Joe Biden. It wasn’t some sneaky theft, nor was it a conspiracy within the Democratic National Committee. People who think in such conspiratorial terms do themselves and the causes they support no favors.

In the Congressional primary season, the right side of the party set all sorts of rules to stop the left, then broke their own rules in several races against left incumbents. They backed a dynastic surname against Senator Ed Markey in Massachusetts and lost. They campaigned with racist and bigoted dog whistles against Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar in Michigan and Minnesota respectively and lost. One of the senior ranking House Democrats and 50-year dynasty were outed by left challengers in New York and Missouri. The left side of the party won a bunch of open seat primaries, and in the general election those Democrats who supported Medicare for All won their races while several Democratic incumbents who didn’t lost to Republicans. The House Democratic Caucus shifted to the left this year, with two runoffs in Georgia to determine whether control of the Senate shifts from the Republicans to the Democrats.

First things first for Democrats – those two races in Georgia are crucial.

Beyond that, none of the party’s factions would gain from a failed Biden presidency, and if Biden has much sense he’d realize that if he tears his party apart with divisive policies there won’t be enough Republicans available for him to reach out and accomplish anything. So Democrats may be used to bickering, but there will be a need to unite the factions around a core of policies.

Then everyone on all sides of US politics ought to realize that nothing can go back to exactly what it was. The diplomatic world, American society, US government finances at every level, international trade relations and the things that are possible after a great pandemic don’t allow any return to the past. Nor do the changing demographics of US society. There is no return to the norms of the World War II generation or even of the Baby Boomers. Presuming that there is would be as delusional as any of the weird conspiracy theories.

Joe Biden knows all of that. Let’s see what he can do in the face of a new situation, without too much prophecy based on what he did in former circumstances.

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Bear in mind…

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

Lenny Bruce

My mother, with her excellent understanding, knew that prejudice squints when it looks, and lies when it talks.

Laure Junot Duchesse de Abrantès

If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.

Molly Ivins – about a Texas politician

Contact us by email at fund4thepanamanews@gmail.com

To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our our Facebook page to join in the discussion.

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¿Wappin? Viene el agua / Here comes the rain

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rain in Cocle
A day late, due to computer problems rather than the heavy rains
Un día tarde, por problemas informáticos más que por las fuertes lluvias

Cuando la lluvia sobre tu techo de zinc te provoca alucinaciones auditivas
When the rain on your zinc roof gives you audio hallucinations

The Beatles – Rain
https://youtu.be/cK5G8fPmWeA

Rómulo Castro – La Rosa de los Vientos
https://youtu.be/QUoV65mVgss

Aretha Franklin – I Wish It Would Rain
https://youtu.be/HltABBEaBbw

Willie Rosario – Lluvia
https://youtu.be/GLXmybkmdjQ

Vilma Palma e Vampiros – Mojada
https://youtu.be/dTyqrD5VJHQ

Of Monsters and Men – I of the Storm
https://youtu.be/tlCkafSYNJI

Lee Oskar – Before the Rain
https://youtu.be/3f56qh5PmUA

Enya – Echoes in Rain
https://youtu.be/8DDHulO485k

Etta James – Stormy Monday
https://youtu.be/oXnZLhss1g0

Prince – Purple Rain
https://youtu.be/TvnYmWpD_T8

Romeo Santos – La Tormenta
https://youtu.be/alxwWy5UtWk

Dido – Hurricanes
https://youtu.be/-mfladpK0AA

Mon Laferte – Vendaval
https://youtu.be/EIF6V9mE2ng

 

Contact us by email at / Contáctanos por correo electrónico a fund4thepanamanews@gmail.com

 

To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.

Para defendernos de los piratas informáticos, los trolls organizados y otros actos de vandalismo en línea, la función de comentarios de nuestro sitio web está desactivada. En cambio, ven a nuestra página de Facebook para unirte a la discusión.  

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