March 29, 2017

The Troubling Financial Activities of an Ecuadorian Presidential Candidate

MARCH 27, 2017
by MARK WEISBROT


As Ecuador heads toward the second round of its presidential election on April 2, a scandal has broken out over the opposition candidate Guillermo Lasso’s financial dealings. The accusations are serious and largely based on public records, with most of it verifiable on websites such as the Panamanian Public Registry and Superintendency of Banks and the Ecuadorean Superintendency of Companies. The newspaper that broke the story was Página/12 of Argentina, with two articles there in the last week by journalist Cynthia Garcia, as well as on her website.

Yet, as of this writing, the major international media covering the election, as well as the big privately owned Ecuadorian media, have pretended for a week that the story does not exist. This is despite the fact that President Correa has publicly denounced Lasso for his dealings and called on him to resign from his campaign. And Lasso publicly responded without denying the accusations. It is difficult to explain this gap in reporting on the basis of what most people would consider journalistic norms.

It is as if the US and international media had failed to report on the controversy over Donald Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns during the 2016 US presidential election.

Lasso has been routinely described as a “former banker” who allegedly retired from banking activities five years ago. However, he remains a major shareholder in Ecuador’s largest bank, the Bank of Guayaquil, (through a trust named with his initials, GLM). And evidence from minutes of board meetings of Banco Guayaquil’s parent company indicate that he is still a key decision maker at the bank, where he has been Executive President for more than 20 years. This in itself would be big news in Ecuador, where banking interests ran the country in the years prior to the election of Rafael Correa in 2007, and are not held in high regard since they caused a severe financial and economic crisis in the 1990s. This crisis impoverished many Ecuadorians and sent large numbers of people out of the country to seek employment.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/27/the-troubling-financial-activities-of-an-ecuadorian-presidential-candidate/

March 29, 2017

Get Lost in Mega-Tunnels Dug by South American Megafauna

By Andrew Jenner | March 28, 2017 1:39 pm





Looking into a large paleoburrow in Brazil. (Courtesy: Heinrich Frank)




It was in 2010 that Amilcar Adamy first investigated rumors of an impressive cave in southern Brazil.

A geologist with the Brazilian Geological Survey (known by its Portuguese acronym, CPRM) Adamy was at the time working on a general survey of the Amazonian state of Rondonia. After asking around, he eventually found his way to a gaping hole on a wooded slope a few miles north of the Bolivian border.

Unable to contact the landowner, Adamy couldn’t study the cave in detail during that first encounter. But a preliminary inspection revealed it wasn’t the work of any natural geological process. He’d been in other caves nearby, formed by water within the same geology underlying this particular hillside. Those caves looked nothing like this large, round passage with a smooth floor.

“I’d never seen anything like it before,” said Adamy, who resolved to return for a closer look some day. “It really grabbed my attention. It didn’t look natural.”



More:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2017/03/28/paleoburrows-south-america/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20discovercrux%20%28The%20Crux%29#.WNsEXjvyvIU

Science:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/122851180

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Yippee, it's a Giant Ground Sloth statue.

March 28, 2017

"Pray to God that I will not be the candidate", Said Lula, Warning His Opponents

03/20/2017 - 13H34


BRUNO BOGHOSSIAN
SPECIAL ENVOYS TO MONTEIRO (PB)

In a rally in the backlands of Paraíba, using an emotional tone, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva launched himself into the 2018 electoral arena and publicly denounced an effort to prevent him from re-applying to the Presidency of the country.

After visiting for the first time a completed passage of the construction site for the transposition of the São Francisco river, the former president criticized the Michel Temer's government and said he is willing to "fight in the streets" against his opponents, referring to the electoral dispute.

"I do not even know if I'll be alive to be a candidate in 2018, but I know they want to prevent me from being a candidate, they're asking God that I will not be a candidate, because if I run, it's to win the election in this country." Said Lula, before thousands of people who crowded the central square of Monteiro, a municipality of 33 thousand inhabitants in the outlands of Paraíba, 305 km from the capital, João Pessoa.

Lula took the the stage alongside former President Dilma Rousseff, allied governors, deputies and senators.

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2017/03/1868054-pray-to-god-that-i-will-not-be-the-candidate-said-lula-warning-his-opponent.shtml?cmpid=newsEN

March 28, 2017

Bolivia's Morales to return to Cuba for throat surgery

Bolivia's Morales to return to Cuba for throat surgery
March 28, 2017, 11:38:00 AM EDT By Reuters


LA PAZ, March 28 (Reuters) - Bolivian President Evo Morales said on Tuesday he is returning to Cuba to have a small nodule in his vocal cords removed, in what would be the socialist leader's second trip to the communist-ruled nation for medical attention this month.

"Tomorrow night I will travel with urgency. I don't feel pain, it's hoarse," Morales, 57, told a group of coca farmers in the Bolivian capital La Paz. "I feel that everyday it's getting worse, and it's better to quickly have this minor surgery." Morales, who has led the Andean nation for 11 years, went to Cuba for treatment earlier this month after he was forced to cancel public appearances due to a severe sore throat.

[nL2N1GE2FM] He had initially planned to return to Cuba in April for minor throat surgery expected to last 15 to 20 minutes, Cuban state media reported during his visit earlier this month.[nL5N1GK172]

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/bolivias-morales-to-return-to-cuba-for-throat-surgery-20170328-00954#ixzz4ce4HhfK4

March 28, 2017

The very edge of a city: Mexico City's deepest hinterlands in pictures

Feike de Jong walked the entire perimeter of one of the biggest cities in the world, to capture the strange scenery of the fringes of Mexico’s capital

Feike de Jong is the creator of the app Limits: On Foot Along the Edge of the Megalopolis of the Valley of Mexico
Feike de Jong
Tuesday 28 March 2017 08.00 EDT

Images:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2017/mar/28/very-edge-of-mexico-city-hinterlands-in-pictures

March 28, 2017

Amazon tribe has the healthiest hearts ever studied

Katherine Martinko (@feistyredhair)
Living / Health
March 27, 2017





CC BY 2.0 Eli Duke
Heart attacks and strokes are virtually unknown among the Tsimane people of the Bolivian rainforest. What can we learn from this?

The Tsimane people of the Bolivian Amazon have the world’s healthiest hearts. A study published earlier this month in The Lancet says that heart attacks and strokes are virtually unknown among this population that follows a pre-industrialized lifestyle. Heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood glucose are also impressively low. When calcium plaque buildup is used as a measure of arterial age, Tsimane arteries look thirty years younger than ours. In other words, an 80-year-old Tsimane man has the heart of a 50-year-old American.

While much of the Western world struggles with sickly hearts and their consequences, this research is particularly relevant. It could hold valuable clues to improving the health of people in industrial nations, where more than 50 percent of the population is at moderate to high risk of heart disease.

Says senior anthropology author Professor Hillard Kaplan of the University of New Mexico:



More:
http://www.treehugger.com/health/amazon-tribe-has-healthiest-hearts-ever-studied.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+treehuggersite+%28Treehugger%29

March 28, 2017

The return of Colombias paramilitary nightmare

Organised criminal gangs — offshoots of the brutal groups that were formed to fight Farc — are taking over areas abandoned by their former enemy

By Reinaldo Spitaletta
Published: 17:52 March 26, 2017


Is paramilitarism finished in Colombia? Or did it simply change shape and morph into the so-called “bandas criminals” (criminal gangs) — Bacrim for short — which are known to involve old-guard paramilitary fighters and are responsible for a new wave of crime and terror?

These are just some of the questions being posed in light of recent reports about the forced displacement of civilians in the department of Choco, in western Colombia, where clashes have been reported between guerrillas from the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and members of the Gaitanista Self-Defence Groups, a criminal offshoot of the now defunct United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia paramilitary organisation.
The paramilitary phenomenon, that horrific project of the 1980s created in a backward country dominated by landowners, remains a threat, especially now that Colombia’s largest guerrilla army — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc — has agreed to dismantle. This is especially true is rural areas.

. . .

Paramilitarism as it exists in Colombia was cruel and blood-thirsty from the outset. The pretext for its creation was to fight the guerrillas. But beyond that, it was a political project designed to seize control of the country’s best lands. It used terror as a key mechanism of expropriation and, as it metastasized, resulted in wholesale massacres. Little by little, paramilitary groups formed alliances with state forces and politicians of the traditional parties, the Liberals and Conservatives.

‘Nobody dares report’

In his 1983 column, titled ‘Which country are we dying in?’, Garcia Marquez argued that the only point of clarity with regard to the violence was that “the material authors are gangs of mercenary gunmen who kill in broad daylight, sometimes with their faces uncovered and at other times painted, and whom everybody knows but nobody dares report”. The public prosecutor in the district of Aguachica, he added, “bluntly declares that the gangs are paid by big landowners to steal the lands of poor peasants”.

More:
Worldcrunch 2017/New York Times News Service
http://gulfnews.com/opinion/thinkers/the-return-of-colombia-s-paramilitary-nightmare-1.2000707

March 28, 2017

Palace remains in Mexico point to ancient rise of centralized power

Ruler ruled, lived in, maybe even performed ritual sacrifices in 2,300-year-old structure
BY BRUCE BOWER 3:10PM, MARCH 27, 2017




ROYAL DIGS An aerial view shows an excavated section of a ruler’s palace in southern Mexico that dates to as early as 2,300 years ago. This structure contained areas for conducting government business. The ruler’s living quarters, above and to the right of the exposed area, were filled in with dirt after being excavated.



Remnants of a royal palace in southern Mexico, dating to between around 2,300 and 2,100 years ago, come from what must have been one of the Americas’ earliest large, centralized governments, researchers say.

Excavations completed in 2014 at El Palenque uncovered a palace with separate areas where a ruler conducted affairs of state and lived with his family, say archaeologists Elsa Redmond and Charles Spencer, both of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Only a ruler of a bureaucratic state could have directed construction of this all-purpose seat of power, the investigators conclude the week of March 27 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The royal palace, the oldest such structure in the Valley of Oaxaca, covered as many as 2,790 square meters, roughly half the floor area of the White House. A central staircase connected to an inner courtyard that probably served as a place for the ruler and his advisors to reach decisions, hold feasts and — based on human skull fragments found there — perform ritual sacrifices, the scientists suggest. A system of paved surfaces, drains and other features for collecting rainwater runs throughout the palace, a sign that the entire royal structure was built according to a design, the researchers say.

El Palenque’s palace contains no tombs. Its ancient ruler was probably buried off-site, at a ritually significant location, Redmond and Spencer say.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/palace-remains-mexico-point-ancient-rise-centralized-power

March 28, 2017

Heiltsuk First Nation village among oldest in North America: Archeologists

RANDY SHORE
(Vancouver Sun)
Published: March 26, 2017
Updated: March 27, 2017 7:49 PM


A Heiltsuk village site on B.C.’s mid-coast is three times as old as the Great Pyramid at Giza and among the oldest human settlements in North America, according to researchers at the Hakai Institute.

The excavation on Triquet Island has already produced extremely rare artifacts, including a wooden projectile-launching device called an atlatl, compound fish hooks and a hand drill used for lighting fires, said Alisha Gauvreau, a PhD student at the University of Victoria. 

The village has been in use for about 14,000 years, based on analysis of charcoal recovered from a hearth about 2.5 metres below the surface, making it one of the oldest First Nations settlements yet uncovered. Dates from the most recent tests range from 13,613 to 14,086 years ago.

“We were so happy to find something we could date,” she said. What started as a one-metre-by-one-metre “keyhole” into the past, expanded last summer into a three-metre trench with evidence of fire related in age to a nearby cache of stone tools.

More:
http://www.theprovince.com/heiltsuk+first+nation+village+among+oldest+north+america+archeologists/13207628/story.html

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Sifting Evidence with BC's Ancient Civilization Sleuths
For people roaming 10,000 years ago, the Central Coast was a great place to settle down, as excited researchers are proving. Part of a series.
By Jude Isabella 30 Oct 2012 | TheTyee.ca

. . .

The landscape looks like a giant's bonsai garden. Gnarled trees twist out of the boggy ground; a shallow pond sits in what's left behind of the giant's footprint. The image grows more fantastical when a group of men glide into the picture hauling a canoe, another two trudge through carrying plywood, and a third lopes by shouldering a ladder.

Archaeology on British Columbia's coast is never dull. In this instance, the group is following Duncan McLaren, a University of Victoria (UVic) archaeologist preoccupied with the past of this remote and soggy place, costly to reach and formidable to researchers used to milder landscapes. But it's also a rich place, where the buried past presses close to the surface, evidence of a people's home since the end of the last glacial period over 11,000 calendar years ago.

The discipline of archaeology has traditionally viewed the islands and fjords of the Central Coast as a corridor to somewhere else, imagining it as the route out of Asia to the Americas, speeding travelers on their way to what would become California, Texas, and southern Chile -- a faceless service area on the turnpike heading south.

McLaren belongs to a group of scientists with a different perspective. Their question is not the familiar "Where did people come from and where did they go?" Rather, it's, "How did the people live here so well?"

More:
https://thetyee.ca/News/2012/10/30/Archaeology-on-BC-Coast/

March 27, 2017

AP Exclusive: Colombia 'panic buttons' expose activists

Frank Bajak, Ap Technology Writer Updated 5:47 pm, Monday, March 27, 2017


It is supposed to help protect human-rights activists, labor organizers and journalists working in risky environments, but a GPS-enabled "panic button" that Colombia's government has issued to about 400 people could be exposing them to more peril.

The pocket-sized devices are designed to notify authorities in the event of an attack or attempted kidnapping. But the Associated Press, with an independent security audit , uncovered technical flaws that could let hostile parties disable them, eavesdrop on conversations and track users' movements.

. . .

"This is negligent in the extreme," said Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, calling the finding "a tremendous security failure."

Over the past four years, other "distress alarms" and smartphone apps have been deployed or tested around the world, with mixed results. When effective, they can be crucial lifelines against criminal gangs, paramilitary groups or the hostile security forces of repressive regimes.

More:
http://www.chron.com/business/technology/article/AP-Exclusive-Colombia-panic-buttons-expose-11030877.php