One thing about Georgia’s racist governor and secretary of state: they were “elected” in 2019 in part by slamming the door on voting by Georgians living abroad.
Mr. Trump’s order comes down: first class US mail — including ballots — has been slowed
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.
Citing increased fears of an authoritarian crackdown, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Eleanor Holmes Norton announced Monday they are introducing a bill this week requiring federal law enforcement officials to wear identification when on duty or serving the public.
Federal agents are expected to head to cities around the country over the next few weeks — a deployment that would follow at least a week of operations in Portland, Oregon as part of what is widely seen as a rollout for a more intense and nationwide effort.
In June, demonstrators in Washington were cleared from a park near the White House by federal law enforcement officers so President Donald Trump could have a photo op at nearby St. John’s Church.
“Secret police snatching Americans off of street corners and shooting rubber bullets at peaceful demonstrators is something we would expect to see in an authoritarian state, not outside the White House,” Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, said in a statement. “Yet, that is our current reality.”
“This bill will increase accountability and oversight for law enforcement,” she continued. “Currently, law enforcement can violate an American’s First Amendment right with complete anonymity. If an officer violates their agency’s policies, their victim should have the ability to report them to their agency and demand accountability.”
Ocasio-Cortez and Norton — the congresswoman for the District of Columbia — are expected to introduce the bill (pdf) later in the week.
As The Nation’s Ken Klippenstein, who broke the news of the bill, reported:
The bill would require on-duty federal agents to display not just the name of their agency but also the individual agent’s last name and identification number. It would also mandate a new form of oversight for the Justice Department, requiring its inspector general to conduct routine audits to ensure compliance with the legislation. The results of these audits would then be reported to Congress.
“It’s absolute insanity that this isn’t a basic requirement already,” tweeted journalist Adrian Crawford.
Government Accountability Project deputy director of legislation Irvin McCullough told Klippenstein that the lack of accountability is raising concerns as officers from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies are increasingly involved in domestic law enforcement.
“Lots of lawyers are asking the same thing: Where’s the transparency?” said McCullough. “Unidentified internal security forces are apprehending American citizens, and accounts allege these apprehension processes are more similar to overseas renditions than traditional arrests.”
“Citizens deserve to know who’s arresting them — or at least what entity — to report any abuses they suffer or witness,” McCullough added.
On Monday, acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf told Fox News that he was not going to be constrained by local officials who do not want his agents in their cities, as happened in Portland.
“I don’t need invitations by the state, state mayors, or state governors to do our job,” said Wolf. “We’re going to do that, whether they like us there or not.”
Attorney Max Kennerly welcomed the Ocasio-Cortez/Norton bill.
“We do not need nor want anonymous people asserting they have government authorization to use violence, and we do not need nor want a government that evades accountability by acting through anonymous agents,” tweeted Kennerly.
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.
The education minister can tweet stuff about “based on data and not on perceptions,” but the data show that she didn’t do her homework and has effectively cut off education for most of Panama’s poorest schoolkids.
Education: selfish advice trumps the nation’s future
When the pandemic first hit us, the advice that the Chamber of Commerce gave was not to invest in public education because that might interfere with their kids’ private education. Nito took that advice.
Now a school year begins, with “learning at a distance” online instruction and nothing at all done to make the Internet available to all school kids in Panama. None of the new infrastructure that would be needed, nothing to curb the rapacious telecom companies that have dramatically raised the price of wireless Internet service. Nothing to provide every student with a suitable computer.
The epidemic is far from having run its course, but the ferocious class confilcts about who bears the cost of this national disaster are well underway. They will get worse. This was the choice that the president made.
“Captain Portland,” US Navy veteran Chris David: “I felt these gentlemen were violating their oath of office, and I wanted to talk to them.”
Resisting paramilitary thugs and their boss
Donald Trump was a serial fraud artist – a racketeer within the meaning of the federal RICO statute – well before he ran for the presidency. Now he has graduated from stealing from a chlldren’s cancer charity, running a bogus university and cheating many of the people with whom he did business to more violent sorts of crimes.
And it took a calm US Navy vet in Portland, on a weekend when the nation mourned Congressman John Lewis and Reverend C.T. Vivian, to show us the way. Vivian got bloodied insisting on voting rights in Selma, Alabama. Lewis got his skull cracked in that same campaign. David has two broken bones in his hand.
No calls for burning, looting or sniper fire. Courageous nonviolent resistance. And the knowledge that despite broken bones, eyes put out, days spent in jail and some lives lost for the cause, the hoodlum Trump regime will fall. When it does, we need to be determined that it never happens again. That means removing and barring from federal employment every member of Trump’s goon squads. That means putting the men who beat Mr. David and the intellectual author of their crime, one Donald J. Trump, on trial for what they have done.
And more immediately, as the critical element of our nonviolent resistant, that all eligible US citizens register, vote and insist that our votes be counted.
In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.
Gro Harlem Brundtland
Bear in mind…
Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy those are who already possess it.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
Dorothy Parker
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
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.
It had been many years since I have seen this species. When I lived in Cardenas I would explore the forest with my camera where I found the Long-billed hermit for the first time. On more than one occasion, he would hover inches from my nose, his wings making a noise like a propeller driven with an elastic band. It was if he was saying, “you’re OK, you can some in.” So, I went in.
This hummingbird species ranges from central Mexico south to northern Colombia, western Venezuela and western Ecuador. In canopy forests it’s a substory bird and is also found in second-growth forests and at forest edges. It’s found on both side of the isthmus, from the lowlands up to 3,000 feet, except that it’s absent in the dry forests of the Pacific Side.
~ ~
Habían pasado muchos años desde que vi esta especie. Cuando vivía en Cárdenas, exploraba el bosque con mi cámara, donde encontré por primera vez al ermitaño de pico largo. En más de una ocasión, se movía a centímetros de mi nariz, sus alas hacían un ruido como una hélice impulsada con una banda elástica. Era si él estaba diciendo, “estás bien, puedes entrar”. Entonces, entré.
Esta especie de colibrí abarca desde el centro de México hacia el sur hasta el norte de Colombia, el oeste de Venezuela y el oeste de Ecuador. En los bosques de dosel es un ave de sotoboque y también se encuentra en los bosques de segundo crecimiento y en los bordes de los bosques. Se encuentra a ambas vertientes del istmo, desde las tierras bajas hasta 3.000 pies, excepto que está ausente en los bosques secos del lado del Pacífico.
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.
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.
Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
The EU Court of Justice ruled Thursday that the bloc will not share data with the USA under the Privacy Shield agreement, citing intrusive surveillance laws in the United States. iStock photo
In rebuke to US mass surveillance, EU court blocks data transfers by web corporations
A major ruling from the European Union’s top court on Thursday curtailed US authorities’ power to surveil the personal data of Europeans and is being called a victory for privacy rights and a call for US lawmakers to roll out sweeping surveillance reforms.
The EU Court of Justice invalidated a transatlantic data protection deal with the US, ruling that European data is not safe when shared with US tech companies via the 2016 Privacy Shield agreement.
The court ruled that US surveillance laws, including FISA and government watchlists, are too intrusive and don’t meet EU standards for privacy rights.
Privacy advocates at European Digital Rights (EDRi) called the ruling “a victory for us all.”
“Today’s European Court of Justice ruling is a victory for privacy against mass surveillance,” says Diego Naranjo, head of policy at EDRi. “This is a win both for Europeans, whose personal data will be better protected, and a call for US authorities to reform the way intelligence service operate.”
The decision upheld the use of Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs), which are instruments used to export data from the , but the court ordered the suspension of all data transfers to countries with privacy standards considered unacceptable in the bloc.
More than 5,000 companies have relied on Privacy Shield for the transatlantic transfer of data, and privacy advocates applauded a ruling which they say will apply pressure to US lawmakers to urgently reform surveillance laws in the United States.
“This ruling makes clear that no international agreement can adequately protect people’s privacy from the United States’ current mass surveillance programs and practices,” said Ashley Gorski, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “US surveillance violates fundamental privacy rights and continues to be a massive financial liability for US companies trying to compete in a global market. Unless Congress swiftly acts to enact comprehensive surveillance reforms, US businesses will continue to pay the consequences.”
The EU previously invalidated the Safe Harbor agreement in 2015 after Edward Snowden’s disclosures about NSA surveillance programs raised international alarm over US privacy laws. The Privacy Shield pact was put in place in 2016 to replace Safe Harbor.
Under the ruling, major companies which operate overseas, such as Facebook, will have to find alternate ways to access users’ data that comply with standards.
“In the short term, hundreds of billions of dollars in digital trade” are now in “legal limbo,” consumer advocacy group Public Citizen said.
Public Citizen expressed hope that the ruling will “force big tech companies to accept that privacy is a basic business requirement for transatlantic trade.”
Max Schrems, whose case against Facebook Ireland sparked the ruling by the Court of Justice, said he was “happy about the judgment.”
“It seems the Court has followed us in all aspects,” said Schrems. “This is a total blow to the Irish DPC [Data Protection Commission] and Facebook. It is clear that the United States will have to seriously change their surveillance laws, if US companies want to continue to play a major role on the EU market.”
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.
With the deaths of Rep. John Lewis and the Rev. Cordy Tindell “C.T.” Vivian, the U.S. has lost two civil rights greats who drew upon their faith as they pushed for equality for Black Americans.
Vivian, an early adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., died July 17 at the age of 95. News of his passing was followed just hours later by that of Lewis, 80, an ordained Baptist minister and towering figure in the civil rights struggle.
That both men were people of the cloth is no coincidence.
From the earliest times in U.S. history, religious leaders have led the struggle for liberation and racial justice for Black Americans. As an ordained minister and a historian, I see a common thread running from Black resistance in the earliest periods of slavery in the antebellum South, through the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s – in which Lewis and Vivian played important roles – and up to today’s Black Lives Matter movement.
As Patrisse Cullors, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, says: “The fight to save your life is a spiritual fight.”
For both men, activism was an extension of their faith. Speaking to PBS in 2004, Lewis explained: “In my estimation, the civil rights movement was a religious phenomenon. When we’d go out to sit in or go out to march, I felt, and I really believe, there was a force in front of us and a force behind us, ’cause sometimes you didn’t know what to do. You didn’t know what to say, you didn’t know how you were going to make it through the day or through the night. But somehow and some way, you believed – you had faith – that it all was going to be all right.”
Fellow civil rights activists knew Vivian as the “resident theologian” in King’s inner circle due to “how profound he is in both his political and biblical exegesis,” fellow campaigner Rev. Jesse Jackson recalled.
Rejecting ‘other world’ theology
Faith traditions inform the civil rights and social justice work of many Black religious leaders. They interpret religious teachings through the prism of the injustice in the here and now.
Speaking of King’s influence, Lewis explained: “He was not concerned about the streets of heaven and the pearly gates and the streets paved with milk and honey. He was more concerned about the streets of Montgomery and the way that Black people and poor people were being treated in Montgomery.”
This focus on real-world struggles as part of the role of spiritual leaders was present in the earliest Black civil rights and anti-slavery leaders. Nat Turner, a leader in the revolt against slavery, for example, saw rebellion as the work of God, and drew upon biblical texts to inspire his actions. Likewise fellow anti-slavery campaigners Sojourner Truth and Jarena Lee rejected the “otherworld” theology taught to enslaved Africans by their white captors, which sought to deflect attention away from their condition in “this world” with promises of a better afterlife.
Incorporating religion into the Black anti-slavery movement sowed the seeds for faith being central to the struggle for racial justice. As the church historian James Washingtonobserved in 1986, the “very disorientation of their slavery and the persistent impact of systemic racism and other forms of oppression provided the opportunity – indeed the necessity – of a new religious synthesis.”
‘Ubuntuism’
The synthesis continued into the 20th century. Religious civil rights leaders like Lewis and Vivian clearly felt compelled to make the struggle for justice a central part of a spiritual leader’s role.
C.T. Vivian leading prayer on the courthouse steps in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. AP Photo/Horace Cort
In 1965, Vivian was punched in the mouth by Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark in an incident caught on camera and carried on national news. Vivian later said: “Everything I am as a minister, as an African American, as a civil rights activist and a struggler for justice for everyone came together in that moment.”
Though their activism was grounded in Christianity, Lewis and Vivian both forged strategic and powerful coalitions with those outside of their faith. In some ways, they transcended theologically informed ideologies with a world view more akin to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s interpretation of “Ubuntu” – that one’s own humanity is inextricably bound up with that of others.
Lewis and Vivian personified this value in their leadership styles.
George Floyd
Racial justice remains integral to Black Christian leadership in the 21st century.
After the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, it was the Rev. Al Sharpton whose words were carried across the globe, calling on white America to “get your knee off our necks” at Floyd’s memorial service.
In recent years, the Rev. William J. Barber II has been such a vocal and powerful presence in protests that some Americans consider him to be a the successor to past civil rights greats.
In an interview in early 2020, Barber said: “There is not some separation between Jesus and justice; to be Christian is to be concerned with what’s going on in the world.”
John Lewis and Rev. C.T. Vivian lived those words.
Some of this information appeared in a previous article published on June 17
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.
The Martinelli Linares brothers in custody. Guatemalan National Civil Police image.
From the Mami Pact to the Mani Pact (II)
by Miguel Antonio Bernal V.
Let us remember that since the results of the 2019 elections, inter-party electoral pacts, as well as legislative pacts, have become commonplace, in the absence of absolute programs and principles. Hence we should not be surprised by the inter-presidential pacts, that is, between the current president and the former president(s) — bilateral, trilateral or quadrangular pacts. Without ruling out one or another pentagonal pact and now in this period, up to hexagonal.
Since May 2019, there has been no shortage of ententes among senior leaders and deputies of the PRD with members of the Cambio Democratico faction loyal to Martinelli. There have been direct communications and others via trusted intermediaries, between the current president and former poresident Martinelli.
Those media at Martinelli’s service, and many of those who work in them, have not been able to hide their proclivities in favor of the Cortizo-Carrizo government. This confirms the narrow, but interested, approach between the two figures, in a confused social and economic scenario. Their interests intersect. The relationship has its ups and downs, but with the sides always avoiding any possible breakup.
Thus, in the absolute absence of partisan opposition, the dominant parts of the MANI Pact achieve benefits for each one separately, while they accumulate forces. One side needs to maintain its fragile hold on power – in which ever fewer people trust every day. The other resorts to a thousand tricks to avoid criminal proceedings and hopes for a Public Ministry in which the influence of Cortizo and Varela would outweigh due process.
The entry onto the scene of tMartinelli’s sons, with serious charges filed by the US Department of Justice, with extradition requests for both before the Guatemalan authorities, opens new pages of the MANI Pact. Proposals for amendments and addenda necessarily seem to be coming. There may be reservations introduced into said pact at Washington’s behest. The tune and tempo of this song and dance might change under external pressures.
This forces us to include, in a future article, some considerations that some of the actors do not want to be seen – but which many viewers do.
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.
The big heart-shaped leaves are otoe greens. In the mainstream Panamanian cuisine, it’s the roots that are eaten. They are widely available in grocery stores and, when they allow informal commerce, from farmers and small vendors. Get the ones that are not coated in preservative wax and just stick them in the ground. They become perennials, and for some people, ornamentals. But when cooked, the greens are good to eat. Photo by John Douglas.
Eating weeds
by John Douglas
My Perezoso farm and I are on a learn green foods kick. With emphasis on the weeds, and normally unused parts of the plants.
You’re right — I am CHEAP. At this point this perennial wins. It is my favorite favor. In the same family of otoe.
It also goes by names like tahitian taro and belembe.
It is featured on the cover OF EDIBLE LEAVES OF THE TROPICS. With good reason. It is delicious.
Between the two main groups there are 102 varieties so trust your taste buds. Cook some up and check it out.
Unlike otoe/taro its corms are small and not very starchy.
Likes humid and rich soil and hates sand.
Most all of the wild greens should be cooked. First nod goes to the young and tender leaves and shoots.
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.
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.
