Home Blog Page 307

Gonzalez, In about six minutes and 20 seconds…

0

 

~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.

bw donor button

vote final

vote

FB_2

Tweet

Editorials: Summit of the Americas; and Trump’s war thugs

0
Lima
Lima is fitting capital for an Americas summit, but events have conspired to make this an inconvenient time. Photo by the Peruvian Comptroller General’s office.

Postpone the Summit of the Americas

A sleazy Peruvian criminal, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, has been forced to resign as his country’s president for vote buying and bribe taking. PPK, as the disgraced former politician is popularly known in Peru, in the meantime had been scheduled to host the Summit of the Americas next month in Lima. In order to boost his standing with scandal-tainted greater powers, including US President Trump, Brazilian President Temer, Mexican President Peña Nieto and Colombian President Santos, PPK announced that embattled and also scandal-tainted Venezuelan President Maduro would not be allowed to attend. The region’s leftist heads of state all protested, leading to the very real possibility of a boycott.

This is a bad time for democracy in the Americas, with caudillos and crooks on different parts of the political spectrum tainting the politics of many of the countries in the region. Meanwhile, there is a transition underway in Cuba and in the next year or so there will be elections in Costa Rica, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Paraguay and Panama. Scandals, stolen elections or dubious mandates may force presidents in Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala and the United States to step down in short order.

Perhaps Peru’s new president, now in the process of finding a new cabinet, may be capable of organizing a Summit of the Americas worthy of the name, rather than the right-wing rump affair that PPK had contemplated. There is a need to for an all-inclusive summit of all those actually in charge of the various countries, as reprehensible and some of them may be.

There are too many uncertainties, including who is invited to attend and who is not, to hold the Summit of the Americas that PPK had planned. There are good arguments in favor of Lima – it’s their turn – but the last-minute changes implicit in a new administration taking charge make the contemplated time and place difficult. Better to postpone the summit, maybe for a year or more, and to see if the new government in Lima is up to revising PPK’s plans and hosting it in a proper fashion

 

 

peace flag
It may be a terrible and unlit night before the dawn’s early light.

America moving toward a war – and antiwar – footing

The Poles, egged on by the Jews, attacked a German radio station, they said. And for that reason, said the German government, notwithstanding the the “living space” argument that Hitler had been making for years, Germany HAD to invade Poland.

Hitler killed himself before being brought to trial for that. But for his part in that transaction the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was tried convicted, sentenced and hanged.

At the Tokyo war crimes trials after World War II, at least eight Japanese military officers were convicted of a variety of crimes, one of which was that each was found guilty of toture by waterboarding. Some of the convictions were based not on having personally tortured anybody but on having commanded prison camps where prisoners of war were tortured. Several of these captured officers were sentenced to death and executed.

Does Donald Trump make Americans nostalgic for the good old days of George W. Bush? Bush, with his Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton playing a leading role in concocting a story about Saddam Hussein having and hiding weapons of mass destruction, led America to war for a lie. That war for a lie destabilized the entire region, spreading and morphing into new conflicts. Now, 15 years later, the flames of war are still not extinguished. Hundreds of thousands have died and millions have been driven from their homes. As part of Bush’s no-borders, no war aim, no contemplated end “War on Terror,” Gina Haspel ran a clandestine prison in which people were routinely subjected to waterboard torture, and later supervised the destruction of information about torture there and at a string of other CIA, military and “civilian contractor” facilities.

Now Donald Trump would have John Bolton as the National Security Advisor and Gina Haspel as CIA director. As the evidence against the president’s, his campaign committee’s and his family’s criminal activities mounts, he apparently intends to lead America to war as a distraction. Bolton and Haspel are intended to be key players in a war cabinet.

Will there be Democratic support when Trump makes his move? Neocons who were in the Bush administration migrated to the Hillary campaign in 2016 and are putative Democrats now. Those folks never saw a foreign war that they didn’t like.

Will there be Republican opposition when Trump makes his move? There will be, and it won’t just be Rand Paul. True conservatives, of whom there are few left in Congress, are against doing reckless and expensive things. Reflexive backers of the US military who know the subject rightfully worry about asking the troops to go to war under the command of somebody who by all appearances got to where he is with the assistance of a rival foreign power.

A war president? This time it may be a matter of US national survival to mobilize the American antiwar movement. The starting point ought to be opposition to the appointments of war criminals John Bolton and Gina Haspel to positions in the government.


Correction: an earlier version if this erroneously stated that Bolton was proposed for Secretary of State. That appointment goes to Mike Pompeo. Thanks to a reader who played the role of proofreader / fact checker in this community effort that is The Panama News.
 

 

Bear in mind…
 

I hate war as only a soldier can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

I am not anti-gun. I am pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We’d turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don’t ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.
Molly Ivins

 

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Barbara Tuchman

 

~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.

bw donor button

vote final

vote

FB_2

Tweet

¿Wappin? La mortalidad

0

Felix

The death toll / La mortalidad

Sam Cooke – Live at Harlem Square Club
https://youtu.be/yBfsUCahFlo

Selena Quintanilla – The Last Concert in Houston
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITootLpeqXk

Marvin Gaye – Live At The London Palladium 1977
https://youtu.be/3DqiiGrsl2c

Kurt Cobain (Nirvana) – MTV Live And Loud 1993
https://youtu.be/i0g8toTz-ek

John Lennon – Live in Madison Square Garden
https://youtu.be/pyisavj9iV4

Peter Tosh – Live at Montreux
https://youtu.be/S7wLnP8X3ZI

 

~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.
Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.

 

little donor button

FB_2

Tweet

Tweet

FB CCL

vote final

Spanish PayPal button

La vaina de Jack Oliver

#MSDStrong – the Parkland kids’ documentary

0

 

 anti-gun vigil

 

~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.

bw donor button

vote final

vote

FB_2

Tweet

4° Festival de la Pollera Conga — 14 de abril en Portobelo

0

congo dancers

Festival para disfrutar la cultura afrocolonial en Portobelo

foto por Raquel Eleta, nota por Roberto Enrique King

La Fundación Portobelo y el Grupo Realce Histórico de Portobelo anuncian la próxima celebración del 4° Festival de la Pollera Conga, a realizarse el sábado 14 de abril en esta histórica población de la provincia de Colón, en lo que será un día familiar que permitirá a propios y foráneos disfrutar, acercarse y conocer mejor los cantos, bailes y tradiciones de un importante componente de nuestra nacionalidad como lo es la cultura afrocolonial.

Se trata de un proyecto cultural y turístico bienal, cuyo principal objetivo es reforzar un proceso de conservación, desarrollo y divulgación de las ricas tradiciones de la región, enfocándose especialmente en el invaluable aporte que ha tenido la mujer negra y cimarrona en la historia de estas poblaciones y en la supervivencia y preservación de todas las manifestaciones que componen la llamada cultura conga o congo, desde la época de la esclavitud.

En este sentido, el Festival de la Pollera Conga se complementa con el Festival de Congos y Diablos de Portobelo, que tiene un perfil mucho más dirigido a resaltar la presencia y aportes del hombre dentro de esta cultura, y que también se realiza cada dos años, por lo que se alternan permitiendo ofrecer cada año al público un festival de distinta especificidad, pero de una misma raíz. Mayor información al 6279-6896 y en Facebook: @fundacionportobelo

 

~ ~ ~
Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web

 

Spanish PayPal button

Tweet

Tweet

FB esp

FB CCL

Dudley: MS-13 is a street gang, not a drug cartel

0
MS-13
MS-13 tattoo. Photo by US Customs and Border Protection.

MS-13 is a street gang, not a drug cartel: and the difference matters

by Stephen S. DudleyAmerican University

In October 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that pursuing the Mara Salvatrucha, a Salvadoran gang also known as MS-13, was “a priority for our Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces.”

“Drugs are killing more Americans than ever before, in large part thanks to powerful cartels and international gangs and deadly new synthetic opioids like fentanyl,” Sessions told the International Association of Chiefs of Police on October 23. He concluded that “perhaps the most brutal of these gangs is MS-13.”

President Donald Trump also cites MS-13 to justify his administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration from Latin America. In his 2018 State of the Union address, Trump threatened to “destroy” the group, which is responsible for a spate of brutal, high-profile murders in Boston, Long Island, Virginia and beyond.

There’s a problem here — and it’s not just MS-13’s violent ethos. It’s that the Trump administration is getting this gang all wrong.

I spent three years at American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies chronicling the MS-13’s criminal exploits for the National Institute of Justice. Our study proves that MS-13 is neither a drug cartel nor was it born of illegal immigration.

That misconception is fueling failed US policies that, in my assessment, will do little to deter MS-13.

MS-13 is no Yakuza

The Trump administration is not the first administration to mischaracterize MS-13, which conducts vicious but rudimentary criminal activities like extortion, armed robbery and murder across Central America, Mexico and the United States.

In 2012, the Obama-era Treasury Department put the group on a organized crime “kingpin” list with the Italian mafia Camorra, the Mexican criminal group the Zetas and the Japanese mob known as the Yakuza.

That designation gave the group a rarefied status in the underworld, which must have pleased its leadership.

But our research found that MS-13 is hardly a lucrative network of criminal masterminds. Instead, it is a loose coalition of young, often formerly incarcerated men operating hand to mouth across a vast geographic territory.

MS-13 was born in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, when scores of Salvadorans, many of them fleeing the country’s civil war, arrived to California. Like other Latino immigrant groups, the new arrivals formed a youth gang of the sort proliferating in LA at the time.

Then as now, MS-13 acted as a surrogate family for its members, though not a benign one. MS-13 created a collective identity that was constructed and reinforced by shared experiences, particularly expressions of violence and social control.

It has since spread to at least a half-dozen countries on two continents and has become a prime source of destabilizing violence, particularly extortion, in Central American countries like El Salvador and Honduras.

Inept at drug dealing

What MS-13 has not done is establish any real foothold in the international drug trafficking market.

It’s not for lack of trying. Our study found that MS-13 leaders have made several attempts to get into the business of running illicit drugs.

In the early 2000s, one MS-13 boss named Nelson Comandari tried to use the gang’s national criminal infrastructure to establish a drug distribution network. Comandari was well positioned to do it. He was powerful in LA, had underworld family connections from El Salvador to Colombia and enjoyed strong ties to the feared Mexican Mafia, a US-based prison gang with connections to Mexican cartels.

Yet within a few years Comandari was frustrated. MS-13 members turned out to be inept at drug smuggling and resistant to the whole idea. Our research found that the gang frowns upon those who put their personal business above the collective’s.

Comandari eventually went into the drug business on his own and was captured along the Texas-Mexico border in 2006.

A few years later, one of Comandari’s former lieutenants also tried to establish an international distribution pipeline between MS-13 and the Mexican drug cartel La Familia. The deal was thwarted by US law enforcement in 2013.

Subsequent efforts have gotten nipped even sooner. In 2015, a midlevel MS-13 leader named Larry Naverete — spelled Navarrete in some federal documents — began smuggling small loads of methamphetamine into the United States via an MS-13 member operating from Tijuana.

Within two years, police on each side of the border had captured Navarete, who was operating from the California State Prison System, and his Mexican partner.

Why MS-13 fails at drug trafficking

One reason MS-13 has failed so roundly at becoming a drug cartel is that it is more of a social club than a lucrative criminal enterprise. Its members benefit from the camaraderie and support that comes with membership — not the heaping monetary rewards that never arrive.

Entrepreneurs who hope to leverage its network for their personal financial gain see the same strong resistance that scuttled Comandari’s plans.

Perhaps more critically, MS-13 is a decentralized organization with no clear hierarchy. The gang is broken into local cells called “cliques” — or “clicas” in Spanish — that are more loyal to each other than to the various leadership councils that operate around Central America and the United States.

Put simply, it has no leader. So what looks on paper like a tremendous built-in infrastructure for moving illicit products across borders is actually a disparate, federalized organization of substructures with highly local, even competing, interests.

Finally, MS-13 is mostly about immediate gratification. It helps members eke out a living and get some perilous criminal thrills. That’s why extortion is a staple. Complex supply chains? Not so much.

Failed US policies

These findings suggest that the United States could fight MS-13 by better protecting the vulnerable young Latino kids who become its recruits– funding social and educational programs in immigrant neighborhoods, for example, or financing more early child intervention programs.

Instead, the Trump administration has used MS-13 as a foil to push its political agenda.

To justify imposing draconian immigration restrictions, Trump and Sessions link MS-13’s crimes to the issue of illegal immigration. Their rhetoric suggests that the group is staffed with undocumented migrants, thus proving that migrants are dangerous. In fact, statistics confirm that immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than native-born US citizens.

Conflating the gang with the sophisticated cartels currently waging a bloody war in Mexico likewise serves the administration’s goal of tightening border controls. It makes MS-13 seem like a foreign invader, not a homegrown threat. I suspect this rhetoric may also help Trump make the case that the United States should impose longer jail sentences for drug trafficking-related crimes.

What harsh law enforcement tactics aimed at ending immigration and breaking up drug cartels won’t do is address the real problems posed by MS-13 and other very violent, very American street gangs.

 

Steven S. Dudley is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, American University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

 

~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.

bw donor button

vote final

vote

FB_2

Tweet

Savell, The cost of eternal war

0
display
US Marines with Task Force Southwest (TFSW) fire a 120mm mortar as a show of force at Camp Shorab, Afghanistan, March 10, 2018. US Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Melissa Karnath.

15 years after the Iraq invasion, what are the costs?

by Stephanie Savell — OtherWords

This March marked the 15th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq.
In 2003, President George W. Bush and his advisers based their case for war on the idea that Saddam Hussein, then dictator of Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction — weapons that have never been found. Nevertheless, all these years later, Bush’s “Global War on Terror” continues — in Iraq and in many other countries.

It’s a good time to reflect on what this war — the longest in US history — has cost Americans and others around the world.

First, the economic costs: According to estimates by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the war on terror has cost Americans a staggering $5.6 trillion since 2001, when the United States invaded Afghanistan.

$5.6 trillion. This figure includes not just the Pentagon’s war fund, but also future obligations such as social services for an ever-growing number of post-9/11 veterans.
It’s hard for most of us to even begin to grasp such an enormous number.

It means Americans spend $32 million per hour, according to a counter by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Put another way: Since 2001, every American taxpayer has spent almost $24,000 on the wars — equal to the average down payment on a house, a new Honda Accord, or a year at a public university.

As stupefying as those numbers are, the budgetary costs pale in comparison with the human toll.

As of 2015, when the Costs of War project made its latest tallies, up to 165,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a direct consequence of US war, plus around 8,000 US soldiers and military contractors in Iraq.

Those numbers have only continued to rise. Up to 6,000 civilians were killed by US-led strikes in Iraq and Syria in 2017 –– more civilians than in any previous year, according to the watchdog group AirWars.

In addition to those direct deaths, at least four times as many people in Iraq have died from the side effects of war, such as malnutrition, environmental degradation, and deteriorated infrastructure.

Since the 2003 invasion, for instance, Iraqi health care has plummeted — with hospitals and clinics bombed, supplies of medicine and electricity jeopardized, and thousands of physicians and healthcare workers fleeing the country.

Meanwhile, the war continues to spread, no longer limited to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria, as many Americans think. Indeed, the US military is escalating a shadowy network of anti-terror operations all across the world — in at least 76 nations, or 40 percent of countries on the planet.

Last October, news about four Green Berets killed by an Islamic State affiliate in the West African nation of Niger gave Americans a glimpse of just how broad this network is. And along with it comes all the devastating consequences of militarism for the people of these countries.

We must ask: Are these astounding costs worth it? Is the US accomplishing anything close to its goal of diminishing the global terrorist threat?

The answer is, resoundingly, no.

US activity in Iraq and the Middle East has only spurred greater political upheaval and unrest. The US-led coalition is seen not as a liberating force, but as an aggressor. This has fomented insurgent recruitment, and there are now more terrorist groups in the Middle East than ever before.

Until a broad swath of the American public gets engaged to call for an end to the war on terror, these mushrooming costs — economic, human, social, and political — will just continue to grow.
 

Stephanie Savell co-directs the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

 

~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.

bw donor button

vote final

vote

FB_2

Tweet

Cambio climático: nueva zona oceánica

0
strnge reef fish
Una de las nuevas especies de peces descubiertas en el Rarofótico, Haptoclinus dropi, fue nombrada en honor al Proyecto de observación del arrecife profundo del Smithsonian. Muy poco se sabe sobre los arrecifes profundos que solo son observables con la ayuda de sumergibles. Imagen cortesía de Carole Baldwin, Smithsonian.
La nueva zona incluye peces de arrecife –incluidas numerosas especies nuevas– que viven bien por debajo de los arrecifes de coral poco profundo

Investigadores del Smithsonian nombran
una nueva zona oceánica: el rarofótico

por STRI

Con base en la fauna única de peces observada, desde un sumergible tripulado en un sistema de arrecifes del sur de Curazao, los exploradores del Smithsonian definieron una nueva zona de vida oceánica, el rarofótico, entre 130 y 309 metros (alrededor de 400 a 1,000 pies) debajo de la superficie. El rarofótico ocurre justo debajo de una zona de arrecife previamente definida, la mesofótica, que se extiende desde aproximadamente 40 hasta una profundidad de hasta 150 metros (aproximadamente 120-450 pies). El papel de esta nueva zona como refugio para los peces de arrecifes menos profundos, que buscan alivio del calentamiento de las aguas superficiales o el deterioro de los arrecifes de coral, aún no está claro.

La motivación inicial para estudiar los ecosistemas de arrecifes profundos fue la disminución de la salud de los arrecifes poco profundos. Muchos investigadores se preguntan si las áreas más profundas de los arrecifes, a veces conocidas como la “zona del crepúsculo de los arrecifes de coral”, podrían actuar como refugios para los organismos de aguas poco profundas. A medida que los investigadores del Smithsonian intentaron responder a esta pregunta, se hizo claro para ellos que los científicos solo han arañado la superficie cuando se trata de comprender la biodiversidad de los peces de arrecife.

“Se estima que el 95 por ciento del espacio habitable de nuestro planeta está en el océano”, comentó Carole Baldwin, curadora de peces en el Museo Nacional de Historia Natural del Smithsonian, autora principal del estudio y directora del Proyecto de observación del arrecife profundo del Smithsonian. DROP, por sus siglas en inglés). “Sin embargo, sólo se ha explorado una fracción de ese espacio. Eso es comprensible para áreas que están a miles de millas de la costa y a millas de profundidad. Pero los arrecifes profundos tropicales están justo debajo de los arrecifes poco profundos, muy estudiados, son esencialmente nuestros propios patios traseros. Y los arrecifes profundos tropicales no son paisajes estériles en el lecho oceánico profundo: son ecosistemas muy diversos que merecen un mayor estudio. Esperamos que al nombrar como rarofótico a la zona de los arrecifes profundos, llamemos la atención sobre la necesidad de continuar explorándolos”.

Los autores definieron el rarofótico en base a observaciones en profundidad de unos 4,500 peces que representan 71 especies durante aproximadamente 80 inmersiones sumergibles a profundidades de hasta 309 metros. La mayoría de los peces en la zona del rarofótico no solo se parecen a los peces de arrecifes poco profundos (fotos), sino que están relacionados con ellos en lugar de los verdaderos peces de las profundidades oceánicas, que pertenecen a ramas bastante diferentes del árbol evolutivo. Esta investigación demostró que los conjuntos de los tipos de peces de arrecife que habitan en aguas poco profundas, de hecho, tienen el doble del rango de profundidad que anteriormente se pensaba.

Desde el 2011, cuando inició DROP, más de 40 investigadores, la mayoría del Museo Nacional de Historia Natural y el Instituto Smithsonian de Investigaciones Tropicales (STRI), han estudiado intensamente peces e invertebrados de arrecifes profundos frente a Curazao. Nombraron seis nuevos géneros y cerca de 30 nuevas especies mientras exploraban un área de arrecife de 0.2 kilómetros cuadrados (0.08 millas cuadradas), mucha de la cual es demasiado profunda para que penetre suficiente luz como para sostener a los simbiontes de algas de los que dependen los corales.

“Aproximadamente uno de cada cinco peces que encontramos en el rarofótico del Caribe es una especie nueva”, comentó D. Ross Robertson, biólogo marino de STRI y coautor del estudio. “Hasta ahora, mi favorito es Haptoclinus dropi” (ver foto). Fue nombrado por Baldwin y Robertson en el 2013 para el proyecto de investigación DROP del Smithsonian. Muchas más especies nuevas ya descubiertas por los investigadores de DROP esperan una descripción.

Mientras que los buzos pueden trabajar hasta unos 40 metros (120 pies), el mini submarino Curasub se sumerge a 309 metros (unos 1,000 pies), donde puede permanecer sumergido durante hasta ocho horas a presión atmosférica normal, lo que permite a los pasajeros pisar tierra firme sin complicaciones después de una inmersión. Esta tecnología ha ampliado significativamente la capacidad de los científicos para explorar los arrecifes profundos.

Con base en su investigación sobre peces de arrecife, los investigadores del Smithsonian y el coautor Luke Tornabene (profesor asistente de la Universidad de Washington y ex becario posdoctoral del Smithsonian) presentan una nueva clasificación de zonas faunísticas de arrecifes de coral:

Altifótico (luz alta): el nuevo nombre para los 0-40 metros (0-120 pies), sin identificar, la zona bien iluminada donde abundan los corales de arrecife, que se extiende tan profundo como los buzos convencionales normalmente van.

Mesofótico (luz media): de 40 a 150 metros (120-450 pies) de profundidad, la profundidad máxima a la que los corales constructores de arrecifes tropicales y sus simbiontes de algas pueden sobrevivir.

Rarofótico (luz escasa): zona de fauna recién descubierta de 130 a 300 metros (400 a 1 000 pies), debajo de la zona coralina que forma arrecifes, y tan profunda como el Curasub puede ir.

Afótico profundo (efectivamente sin luz): Por debajo de 300 metros (por debajo de 1,000 pies)

“Los ecosistemas de arrecifes justo debajo del mesofótico están globalmente infra-explorados, y la visión convencional basada en los pocos estudios que los mencionan, es que los ecosistemas mesofóticos pasan directamente a los de las profundidades del mar”, comentó Baldwin. “Nuestro estudio revela una zona previamente no reconocida que comprende arrecifes frente a los peces de aguas profundas que une ecosistemas mesofóticos y de aguas profundas”.

La investigación fue apoyada por el Smithsonian’s Consortium for Understanding and Sustaining a Biodiverse Planet, Competitive Grants for the Promotion of Science, el Museo Nacional de Programas de Investigación de Historia Natural, Herbert R. y Evelyn Axelrod Endowment Fund para ictiología sistemática y el Instituto Smithsonian de Investigaciones Tropicales, Comité de Investigación y Exploración de la National Geographic Society (Grant # 9102-12) y la Fundación Prince Albert II de Monaco (Grant # 1801).


Sub, only a little yellow
Carole Baldwin, bióloga marina en el Museo Nacional de Historia Natural del Smithsonian dentro del sumergible Curasub junto al propietario de Substation Curaçao Adriaan ‘Dutch’ Schrier. Imagen cortesía de Barry Baldwin.

 

sub on surface
D. Ross Robertson, biólogo marino del Instituto Smithsonian de Investigaciones Tropicales y creador de la aplicación para iPhone Peces del Gran Caribe, preparándose para una expedición en el Curasub. Imagen cortesía de Barry Brown, Subestación Curazao.

 

 

El Instituto Smithsonian de Investigaciones Tropicales, en ciudad de Panamá, Panamá, es una unidad de la Institución Smithsonian. El Instituto promueve la comprensión de la naturaleza tropical y su importancia para el bienestar de la humanidad, capacita estudiantes para llevar a cabo investigaciones en los trópicos, y fomenta la conservación mediante la concienciación pública sobre la belleza e importancia de los ecosistemas tropicales. Sitio web: www.stri.si.edu.

 

~ ~ ~
Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web

 

Spanish PayPal button

Tweet

Tweet

FB esp

FB CCL

Things simmer down, sort of, with mixed economic news

0
Gung Ho
The China card: this is the first batch of Panamanian students to get scholarships to study Mandarin in China. President Varela says that when they come back they will by and large get good jobs with Chinese-owned companies that are moving operations to Panama. Photo by the Presidencia.

Headache reductions

by Eric Jackson

Yes, the SUNTRACS folks were out on the streets of Panama City on Tuesday, March 20, most notably blocking traffic on Via España in front of Ricardo Martinelli’s NexTV television station. But that morning the same construction workers’ union also concluded a marathon negotiation with Minera Panama, the local subsidiary of First Quantum, to end a 12-day strike at that company’s copper mine in western Colon province.

The previous day, Colon teachers agreed to go back to work after a week-long strike, with government and community leaders beginning four sets of negotiations, about education, health, transportation and housing in the troubled Atlantic Side city. Matters were eased by two factors from the previous week. First, that nobody was killed in the protests or the burning and looting by people, many of them masked, who were not part of the protests. Second, that among Panamanians in general and Colon residents in particular there was a general consensus that the several dozen people arrested for looting or vandalism and the small group of people injured when the police moved in deserved it.

But also the previous day, it became internationally known (athough workers here had already been told) that Caterpillar’s regional training facility here was shutting down forever. At its peak it was a source of employment for about 800 people, who learned repair, assembly and sales skills and did bits of that sort of work in the process. The move was part of a general downsizing of the company that entails the loss of some 9,000 jobs in at least three countries, most of them in the United States.

Panama has new lines of credit from China and in the short term that calms foreign investors and ratings agencies. But Panama’s debt is at record levels and rising. Any reckoning for that probably happens after President Juan Carlos Varela leaves office in the middle of next year — unless other processes force him out earlier — but the strategy of a party retaining power via an election year spending spree has never worked in Panamanian politics.

Shipping is a mixed bag, with the Panama Canal becoming an important new route for liquid natural gas and some brighter prospects for Brazilian grain, but with container shipping and the import/export business in the doldrums. Plus the competing Arctic shipping routes are opening years before the Panama Canal Authority ever admitted was possible.

The political crises do not abate. Nor are there large howling mobs in the streets, looking to take governmental scalps. However, any compromise solution that the voters are likely to accept is not a matter of public discussion at this time.

The pressure goes down, but the heat isn’t turned off.

 

~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.

bw donor button

vote final

vote

FB_2

Tweet

Kiriakou, Gina Haspel should be in the dock at The Hague

0
Holy Inquisition
           Waterboarding isn’t new. The Spanish Inquisition called it the “tormenta de toca.”

Gina Haspel should be in the dock at The Hague

by John Kiriakou — Reader Supported News

Gina Haspel’s appointment as CIA director sends a message that is clear to the CIA workforce, to our allies around the world, and to our enemies. That message is that any CIA officer can break the law with impunity and still get promoted; indeed, one can even be promoted to director. The message is that, when push comes to shove, the United States doesn’t care about human rights. We pretend to. We insist that other countries do. But that’s all for show. If you are a strategic ally of the United States (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Ukraine immediately come to mind) you can do whatever you want and we’ll look the other way. The message is that we don’t care about international law, even though we know that our torture program and the illegal prison at Guantanamo are the leading recruitment tools for terrorist groups around the world.

But we should care. And we should start by rejecting the nomination of Gina Haspel as CIA director. Here’s why.

As has been reported widely in the press, Gina Haspel was the chief of a secret prison overseas where alleged al-Qaeda prisoners were tortured in violation of US law and the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Her supporters will tell you that reasonable people can agree to disagree on “enhanced interrogation techniques.” I say that that’s impossible. First, the US government executed Japanese soldiers after the Second World War because they had waterboarded American prisoners of war. Let me repeat that. Waterboarding was an executable offense in 1945.

Second, in January 1968, The Washington Post published a photo of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. On the day that photo was published, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested, charged with torture, convicted, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Between then and now, the law never changed. We changed. Why were waterboarding and other torture techniques illegal in 1945 and in 1968, but somehow magically legal in 2002? When we say that passage of the McCain-Feinstein Amendment in 2015 finally outlawed torture, that’s wrong. Torture has been outlawed for many decades. We just pretended that it wasn’t.

But that’s what the CIA does. It pushes the envelope as much as it can. That’s its nature. Only strong oversight committees on Capitol Hill can rein it in. And that hasn’t happened in many years.

Another reason Haspel must be rejected is her clear and well-documented disdain for the law. In 2005, her boss, the notorious former CIA Counterterrorism Center director and later deputy director for operations Jose Rodriguez, ordered her to destroy 92 tapes showing the CIA torture of alleged al-Qaeda prisoners Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The White House counsel and the CIA’s general counsel had both told Rodriguez not to destroy the tapes. They could have been evidence of a crime. At the least, they were a federal record that, by law, was supposed to be retained until it was properly declassified. But Haspel personally wrote the cable to the secret site ordering their destruction. Her defense, that she was “just following orders,” is reminiscent of Nuremberg and, in fact, is not a defense at all.

Constitutional scholar and former assistant attorney general Bruce Fein said it best: “An ethos honoring the rule of law is imperative in an agency shrouded in secrecy and thus undeterred by sunlight, the best of disinfectants. When a government official becomes a lawbreaker with impunity, it invites every man and woman to become a law unto themselves. If there are better ways to encourage lawbreaking at the CIA and popular disrespect for the law than by Ms. Haspel’s promotion, they do not readily come to mind.”

That brings us back to the oversight committees. Readers will know that I routinely criticize members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as lemmings and cheerleaders. I can’t begin to tell you how much I hope I’m wrong. Let’s assume that the Republicans are (nearly) unified in their support of Haspel. Then the Democrats also have to be unified. Republican Rand Paul already has voiced his opposition to Haspel and has said that he will filibuster the nomination. Republican John McCain has hinted at his opposition. But Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Mark Warner are wobbly. Feinstein, who blocked Haspel’s nomination as deputy director for operations in 2013, just because of Haspel’s torture history, commented recently that she had gotten to know Haspel in the interim: “We’ve had dinner together,” she said, as if that has anything to do with anything. Warner made an even worse statement: “My mind is very open on this nomination.” That doesn’t instill confidence.

In past opinion pieces, I’ve urged readers to “ride our elected officials.” I’ve never meant it as much as I mean it now. Please call your senators at 202-224-3121 and tell them to vote against Gina Haspel’s nomination. The ACLU, Expose Facts, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, and myriad other groups are doing the same. We only have a little bit of time. We have to organize quickly and not back down. We have to tell the CIA that it cannot violate US and international law and not have a price to pay. Gina Haspel should be in the dock at The Hague. She shouldn’t be in the CIA director’s office.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

 

~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.

bw donor button

vote final

vote

FB_2

Tweet