Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalIt was late in coming, but I finally heard about a hip-hop group from Sao Paulo, Racionais MC's.
They've been around a very long time. They are the most famous hip-hop artists in Brazil. I'm glad to have learned about them, and watched some of their videos today.
This video concerns the vicious Brazilian military dictatorship, and has images from news clips of that time added.
- Mil Faces De Um Homem Leal (Carlos Marighella) O CLIPE OFICIAL
Mexican city rejects plans for giant US-owned brewery amid water shortages
Vote in border city of Mexicali is unlikely win for farmers and activists over wealthy maker of Corona, Modelo and Pacifico
David Agren in Mexico City
@el_reportero
Mon 23 Mar 2020 15.20 EDT
Voters in a Mexican border city have rejected the construction of a massive, US-owned brewery in an arid region rife with water shortages – an improbable victory for a collective of farmers and activists over a deep-pocketed company backed by state and local officials.
In a weekend plebiscite in the city of Mexicali, 76.1% of voters cast ballots against the $1.4bn brewery, being built by Constellation Brands to brew beer for export – including Corona, Modelo and Pacifico.
“There’s been an intense campaign [against the brewery] by a resistance movement for two years … protesting in the streets and going to the courts to hold a plebiscite,” said Daniel Solorio, a lawyer who has worked with the opposition.
“It’s surprising the president called a plebiscite on such short notice,” he said, “but we’ve been demanding a vote for two years.”
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/mexico-brewery-mexicali-constellation-brands
Also posted in Environment and energy:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127136966
Colombia's chief prosecutor implicated in plot to rig Duque's 2018 election
by Adriaan Alsema March 23, 2020
Colombia’s chief prosecutor closed his Twitter account on Sunday after evidence tied him to a mafia conspiracy to rig the 2018 elections in favor of his friend, President Ivan Duque.
Prosecutor General Francisco Barbosa closed his account after El Espectador columnist Yohir Ackerman published an image of him campaigning with Priscilla Cabrales, who conspired with the organization of Marquitos Figueroa, the jailed narco’s late money launderer said in a wiretap.
The photo Ackerman pulled of the Instagram account of far-right Senator Sergio Araujo was taken on April 18, 2018, while Cabrales with conspiring the rig the elections with money launderer Jose Guillermo Hernandez, who was murdered in Brazil last year.
The latest evidence implies Barbosa does not only have a conflict of interest, but could be complicit in the election fraud plot he is supposed to be investigating.
The chief prosecutor was asked to recuse himself last week after he lied about not receiving key evidence that proved Hernandez was coordinating vote-buying with Maria Claudia Daza, the personal assistant of Duque’s political patron, former President Alvaro Uribe at the time.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/colombias-chief-prosecutor-implicated-in-plot-to-rig-duques-2018-election/
Coronavirus: How Colombia's scientists may have prevented a presidential lynching
by Adriaan Alsema March 23, 2020
Colombia’s President Ivan Duque wasn’t too alarmed about the coronavirus until the National Health Institute (INS) told him on Friday he was heading towards a holocaust.
Before that, Duque only knew the coronavirus was going to be a costly affair, which he is probably why on Friday afternoon he met up with Colombia’s most famous quack, immunologist Manuel Elkin Patarroyo.
. . .
Duque finds out he could fall victim to a public lynching
Using the Health Ministry’s projections, this would means that Duque sooner rather than later would have to explain to the Colombian people why 515,000 people died, not even counting those dying for not having access to health care.
. . .
On his knees, he got the support from opposition leader Gustavo Petro and Bogota Mayor Claudia Lopez, who did know about the mortality rate and know Duque is a dead man walking.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/corona-virus-how-colombias-scientists-may-have-prevented-a-presidential-lynching/
Ancient Maya kingdom with pyramid discovered in southern Mexico
By Grant Currin - Live Science Contributor 2 days ago
This newly discovered Maya kingdom wasn't powerful, but its allies may have kept it safe.
A drawing (left) and a digital 3D model (right) of a stone slab found at the newly discovered kingdom.
(Image: © Stephen Houston/Brown University; Charles Golden/Brandeis)
After searching for more than a quarter century, archaeologists may have finally located the capital city of Sak Tz'i', a Maya kingdom that's referenced in sculptures and inscriptions from across the ancient Maya world. But it wasn't archaeologists who made the find. A local man discovered a 2- by 4-foot (0.6 by 1.2 meters) tablet near Lacanja Tzeltal, a community in Chiapas, Mexico.
The tablet's inscriptions are a treasure trove of mythology, poetry and history that reflect the typical Maya practice of weaving together myth and reality. Various sections of the tablet contain inscriptions that recount a mythical water serpent, various unnamed gods, a mythic flood and accounts of the births, lives, and battles of ancient rulers, according to a news statement from Brandeis University in Massachusetts.
Despite being surrounded by stronger neighbors, evidence suggests that the kingdom's capital city was occupied for more than a millennium after being settled in 750 B.C. The kingdom's longevity may be due to the fortifications that surrounded its capital city. The researchers found evidence that the city was protected by a stream with a steep ravine on one side and defensive masonry walls on the other.
The team members added that the kingdom may have benefitted from forming strategic peace deals with its more powerful neighbors. Even though this kingdom never achieved great power, "Sak Tz'i' was a formidable enemy and an important ally to those greater kingdoms, as evidenced by the frequency by which it appears in texts at those sites," the researchers wrote in the study, published online in December 2019 in the Journal of Field Archaeology.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/maya-kingdom-discovered-in-mexico.html?utm_source=notification
More details, Brandeis Report:
Ancient Maya kingdom unearthed in a backyard in Mexico
https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2020/march/maya-discovery-golden.html
Also, see a map, and fascinating photos of this area:
https://tinyurl.com/tsd52mr
Remote Alaska Villages Isolate Themselves Further in Effort to Shield Against Coronavirus
Alaskan communities that are accessible only by plane or snowmobile are cutting off the outside world in response to COVID-19 rather than risk elders’ lives.
by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News March 22, 5 a.m. EDT
Nulato, a village in Alaska, suspended passenger flights except in the case of medical emergencies in the hopes of delaying the arrival of the coronavirus. (Bob Hallinen/Anchorage Daily News)
Most small Alaska villages can be reached only by plane or snowmobile. Many still harbor the intergenerational scars from previous epidemics of influenza, smallpox and tuberculosis, all of which killed thousands of Alaska Natives.
Now, some of those villages are choosing to further isolate themselves in hopes of delaying the arrival of the coronavirus, tribal and village leaders say.
As of Friday, a number of villages said they were banning outright all nonemergency travel to and from their tiny, farflung communities. Others were asking that any visitors who might try to land via small propeller planes in the communities of 100 to 500 people first seek tribal permission.
“It’s scary,” said Jo Malamute, acting city administrator in the Yukon River village of Koyukuk, some 350 miles northwest of Anchorage. Tribal members met last week and decided to stop passenger travel to and from the village by planes and snowmobiles, she said.
More:
https://www.propublica.org/article/remote-alaska-villages-isolate-themselves-further-in-effort-to-shield-against-coronavirus
There Are Infinite Rings of Light Around Black Holes. Here's How We Could See Them
Artist's impression of photons veering around a black hole. (Nicolle R. Fuller/NSF)
MICHELLE STARR 19 MARCH 2020
A year ago, history was made. The long, painstaking work of scientists around the globe produced the very first direct image of the event horizon of a black hole, a supermassive monster called M87* 55 million light-years away. That glorious, golden, blurry image confirmed many of our ideas about black holes.
But the science didn't stop when the image came in. A team of scientists has now performed calculations based on what we learnt from M87* combined with the predictions of general relativity, to further predict how one day we could see this objects in much closer detail.
Black holes are incredibly gravitationally intense. Not only are they so massive that even light speed is too slow to achieve escape velocity against their gravitational pull, they also bend the path of passing light around them, beyond the event horizon.
If a passing photon is a bit too close, it will get trapped in orbit around the black hole. This creates what is called a "photon ring" or "photon sphere", a perfect ring of light predicted to surround the black hole, inside the inner rim of the accretion disc, but outside the event horizon.
More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/sending-telescopes-to-space-could-reveal-the-infinite-rings-around-a-black-hole
Astonishing landscapes of South America
18 March 2020 08:33 am
The diversity of South America’s landscapes is perhaps the greatest of any continent. It’s hard to fathom that both the driest hot desert in the world, the Atacama in Chile, and our planet’s most biodiverse region, the Amazon rainforest, can be found within the same landmass.
There's also the bright-white salt flats of the Salar de Uyuni in southwest Bolivia and the colourful ‘Rainbow Mountain’ in Peru, two very different landscapes with almost otherworldly beauty.
The latter forms part of the Andes, the world's longest continuous mountain range, which winds its way through seven countries and has a mythical appeal for many.
More:
http://www.dailymirror.lk/caption_story/Astonishing-landscapes-of-South-America/110-185187
Uribe managed Duque's illicit campaign funds, his former PA says loud and clear
by Adriaan Alsema March 17, 2020
Former President Alvaro Uribe was managing illicit funds to buy the 2018 election of President Ivan Duque in multiple parts of Colombia, his former personal assistant told their mafia associate.
Both Duque and his political patron are being investigated for election fraud after wiretap transcripts that revealed plans to use illegal funds for vote-buying in the northern Cesar and La Guajira provinces with the help of a late drug money laundering suspect.
But these transcripts contain only part of what appears to be an elaborate conspiracy to rig the elections with the help of the mafia.
. . .
The recordings also made it clear why Daza left Colombia earlier this month; people have been killed for a lot less than explicitly saying Uribe was coordinating election rigging and moving around illicit campaign funds.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/uribe-was-coordinating-duques-illicit-campaign-funds-his-former-pa-says-loud-and-clear/
2018 presidential election fraud: Colombia's chief prosecutor asked to step aside
by Adriaan Alsema March 17, 2020
Anti-corruption NGOs’, judicial experts and journalists asked Colombia’s chief prosecutor to stop pretending he’s investigating the allegedly fraudulent election of his friend, President Ivan Duque.
Evidence that Prosecutor General Francisco Barbosa and his two predecessors have been withholding crucial evidence and the chief prosecutor’s evident conflict of interest have made the chief prosecutor’s role all but an insult to justice.
Transparency Colombia, human rights NGO DeJusticia and journalist Gonzalo Guillen asked the chief prosecutor to separate himself from the investigation because of his 25-year-long friendship with Duque, who is investigated by Congress.
. . .
The request was made before weekly Semana found that Barbosa had been withholding 36,000 of 51,000 wiretaps, including crucial recordings that proves that the former personal assistant of Duque’s political patron, former President Alvaro Uribe, was conspiring with an alleged drug trafficker, allegedly on behalf of her boss.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/2018-presidential-election-fraud-colombias-chief-prosecutor-asked-to-step-aside/
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