Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalStunned to see this last December's AP article at a Fox outlet!
AP International
by: DANIEL POLITI and PATRICIA LUNA, Associated Press
Posted: Dec 3, 2023 / 12:02 AM EST
Updated: Dec 3, 2023 / 12:02 AM EST
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SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — In Chile, leftists were tortured, tossed from helicopters and forced to watch relatives be raped. In Argentina, many were “disappeared” by members of the brutal military dictatorship that held detainees in concentration camps.
It all happened with the endorsement of Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. secretary of state who died Wednesday at age 100.
As tributes poured in for the towering figure who was the top U.S. diplomat under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, the mood was decidedly different in South America, where many countries were scarred deeply during the Cold War by human rights abuses inflicted in the name of anti-communism and where many continue to harbor a deep distrust of their powerful neighbor to the north.
“I don’t know of any U.S. citizen who is more deplored, more disliked in Latin America than Henry Kissinger,” said Stephen Rabe, a retired University of Texas at Dallas history professor who wrote a book about Kissinger’s relationship with Latin America. “You know, the reality is, if he had traveled once democracy returned to Argentina, to Brazil, to Uruguay — if he had traveled to any of those countries he would have been immediately arrested.”
There is likely no starker example of Kissinger’s meddling with democracy in the region and then supporting brutality in the name of anti-communism than Chile.
More:
https://fox59.com/news/national-world/ap-international/ap-kissingers-unwavering-support-for-brutal-regimes-still-haunts-latin-america/
Doña Lucía Hiriart, married to Pinochet
(Mrs. Bloody Dictator)
Justice Samuel Alito with Martha-Ann Alito (Doña Lucía Hiriart look-a-like)
Behind the Milei-Jorge Macri deal - and the influence of Mauricio
Yesterday 12:09
Meetings between President Javier Milei and PRO party chairman Mauricio Macri have served to calm tempers and put an administration which had become entangled back on track.
Pablo Varela
Buenos Aires City Mayor Jorge Macri, pictured with his wife María Belén Ludueña, and President Javier Milei, pictured with his sister, presidential chief-of-staff Karina Milei. | NA
The weekly meeting between President Javier Milei and PRO party chairman Mauricio Macri bore fruit on Tuesday at the head of state’s meeting with Buenos Aires City Mayor Jorge Macri confirming the transfer of 31 bus lines to the orbit of the capital. The conversations between the President and ex-president have served to calm tempers and put the La Libertad Avanza administration, which had become entangled, back on track.
Yet the fiscal impact on City Hall’s coffers will be heavy – almost 7.5 billion pesos monthly in order not to modify bus fares in the short term. The Mayor himself declared in a press conference that the main “effort” is being made by society. Jorge Macri is obliged to endorse the agreement in the Legislature.
The Mayor left Government House satisfied after a photo of himself working with the President, Cabinet Chief Guillermo Francos and the top national and municipal transport officials, Franco Mogetta and Pablo Bereciartúa respectively.
The objective for the national government is to continue adjusting and reordering its fiscal accounts by removing subsidies while at the same time transferring responsibilities. For the City, the announcements serve to show hands-on governance, empathy with the problems facing the middle and working classes and achieving a co-ordinated transfer after the Milei government’s untimely announcement.
More:
https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/opinion-and-analysis/behind-the-milei-jorge-macri-deal-and-the-influence-of-mauricio.phtml
Fascists: what a bunch of winners!
Ronnie Lessa Says He Killed Councilwoman Marielle Franco Out of Greed (Brazil)
'I was in a very calm phase of my life,' said the former police officer at the Supreme Court
Aug.28.2024 2:08PM
Italo Nogueira
Rio de Janeiro
Former military police officer Ronnie Lessa stated in a Supreme Federal Court hearing that he accepted to kill Councilwoman Marielle Franco out of greed. He described the crime, committed in December 2017 in Rio de Janeiro, as foolishness and expressed regret.
SÃO PAULO, SP - 27-08-2024 - The former military police officer Ronnie Lessa testifies before the Supreme Federal Court (STF). - Reprodução
Lessa, who made a plea bargain, reiterated that he was hired by the brothers Domingos and Chiquinho Brazão to carry out the crime.
He repeated that he was promised the exploitation of lands in Rio as a reward, which could yield him, according to his statement, R$ 25 million.
"That [possibility of getting rich] had an impact on me. It was greed, I let myself be carried away. I didn’t even need it. I was in a very calm phase of my life. And I fell into this foolishness."
https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2024/08/ronnie-lessa-says-he-killed-councilwoman-marielle-franco-out-of-greed.shtml
~ ~ ~
Marielle Franco
Driver and friend, Anderson Gomes, whose wife had just given birth to their son.
'Once-in-a-lifetime' photo: Perseid meteors, northern lights and rare glowing arc shine over 11th-century castle
By Daisy Dobrijevic
published 3 days ago
An astonishing scene featuring Perseid meteors and colorful auroras played out overnight on Aug. 12 and Aug. 13 above the U.K.'s 11th Century Corfe Castle.
a view of the night sky with an old castle ruin in the foreground. There is a pink hue on the left which is the northern lights and lots of streaks of light which are the perseid meteor and toward the center right of the image is a long red glow which is known as a SAR arc.
Perseid meteor shower, northern lights and rare SAR arc glow during the night of Aug.12/13. (Image credit: Josh Dury)
When photographer Josh Dury set out to photograph the peak of the Perseid meteor shower overnight on Aug. 12 and Aug. 13, little did he know he'd be treated to a truly special cosmic display.
The breathtaking image Dury captured shows not only Perseid meteors raining down through the sky but also northern lights and a rare atmospheric glow known as an SAR arc alongside the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies.
"To think that so much is going on in the astronomical scene that evening with the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies also visible, makes this definitely a once-in-a-lifetime photograph," Dury told Space.com in an email.
Dury chose 11th Century Corfe Castle as the setting for his image as he'd photographed from the location on May 10 during the epic G5 geomagnetic storm and captured some incredible scenes.
. . .
More:
https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/once-in-a-lifetime-photo-perseid-meteors-northern-lights-and-rare-glowing-arc-shine-over-11th-century-castle
Mexico's Kidnapping Treason Law Stems from Manhunt Following DEA Agent 'Kiki' Camarena's Torture & Murder
By Socalj 8/21/2024 11:50:00 PM
"Socalj" for Borderland Beat
The Mexican government says it is bringing charges against Joaquín Guzmán López, but not because he was one of the leaders in the Sinaloa drug cartel founded by his father, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Instead, Mexican prosecutors are bringing charges against the younger Guzmán for allegedly kidnapping Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in order to turn him over to US authorities when they landed in New Mexico.
Federal prosecutors issued a statement saying “an arrest warrant has been prepared” against the younger Guzmán for illegal flights, kidnapping, and illicit use of airports, with treason implicated as well. They cited the charge of treason “by those who illegally abduct a person in Mexico in order to hand them over to authorities of another country.”
The inclusion of that particular clause was apparently motivated by the 1990 abduction of a Mexican doctor wanted for allegedly participating in the 1985 torture and killing of DEA Agent Kiki Camarena. The Doctor had helped to keep Camarena alive while he was being tortured, ensuring his pain would continue longer.
Before Camarena’s kidnapping, torture and death, the DEA in Mexico destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of marijuana grown on farms for the Guadalajara Cartel.
Camarena, 37, who was known by the nickname “Kiki,” served in the U.S. Marine Corps before moving into law enforcement and becoming a DEA agent in 1975. He was kidnapped February 7, 1985.
More:
https://www.borderlandbeat.com/2024/08/mexicos-kidnapping-treason-law-stems.html
~ ~ ~
Special Agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena
How did Red Ribbon Week come about? It all started with one man
On Thursday, February 7, 1985, at 2:00 pm, Special Agent Enrique Camarena left the American Consulate in Guadalajara to meet his wife, Mika, for lunch. Known to his friends as "Kiki," Special Agent Camarena had been in Mexico for more than four years on the trail of Mexican marijuana and cocaine drug traffickers. Kiki was due to be reassigned in three weeks because he had come dangerously close to exposing the top leaders of a multi-billion drug pipeline.
As Kiki walked to his truck, he was approached by five men who shoved him into a beige Volkswagen. One of the men threw a jacket over Kiki's head, and the driver sped away. Kiki never saw his wife or family again.
About DEA Special Agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena
This is the story of DEA Special Agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena. He was born on July 26, 1947, in the small town of Mexicali in Baja California. In 1956, Kiki moved with his family to Calexico, California. After he graduated from high school, he joined the Marine Corps.
After serving in the Marines, he worked as a fireman for the City of Calexico and attended Imperial Valley College, where he earned an associates degree. Kiki joined the Calexico Police Department in 1970, and then later was assigned to El Centro, California, where he worked as a Narcotics Investigator for Imperial County.
More:
https://www.justthinktwice.gov/article/special-agent-enrique-kiki-camarena
The U.S. Hand in the Mexican Government's Massacre of Hundreds of Students at Tlatelolco
American Crime Case #27: October 2, 1968: The U.S. Hand in the Mexican Government’s Massacre of Hundreds of Students at Tlatelolco
February 4, 2019
Massive protest in Mexico City, 1968. Photo: AP
In July 1968, the Mexican government’s violent repression of students protesting police brutality led to a student strike that rapidly spread to universities. Here a great throng of demonstrators gathers in the Zócalo, or Constitution Square, in the heart of Mexico City, August 14, 1968, at the conclusion of a five-mile march through the city. (Photo: AP)
THE CRIME
On October 2, 1968—ten days before the start of the 19th Olympic Games in Mexico City—10,000 students and other supporters of a months-long student upsurge gathered for a meeting and rally in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City. The students had made clear they weren’t going to march on the Olympic Village, but some 5,000 soldiers, 300 government tanks, jeeps, and armored cars, and hundreds of police surrounded the plaza nonetheless.
At 6:10 pm, flares were fired into the sky from a helicopter. Suddenly, out of nowhere, shots were fired from the upper floors of the Chihuahua apartment building overlooking the crowd, where many students were gathered.
Mexican troops guard young men arrested after a night of protests on October 2, 1968. (Photo: AP)
The troops immediately responded by raking the crowd with machine-gunfire. Soldiers with fixed bayonets advanced from two sides—there was no escape. Tanks opened fire on the apartment complex, where student leaders had been speaking from a balcony. Inside the apartment building, a group of heavily armed men—each wearing a white glove on his left hand—detained the student leaders. The students were beaten, stripped to their underwear, and arrested.1
The Mexican government initially reported that four people had been killed and 20 wounded. The British newspaper Manchester Guardian reported that after careful investigation, it found that 325 probably died and the number could be much higher. Eyewitnesses described seeing “bodies of hundreds of young people being trucked away.” There were reports that bodies were burned or tossed into the sea. Thousands of students were beaten and jailed, and many disappeared.2
Ten days later, while 1,500 students in a military camp were being beaten and tortured, the Olympic ceremonies opened. Family members of the disappeared searched the prisons and morgues for missing loved ones, as tanks rumbled past billboards in a dozen languages proclaiming “Everything is possible with peace.”
More:
https://revcom.us/en/a/581/american-crime-case-27-1968-us-hand-in-massacre-of-students-at-tlatelolco-en.html
Inquiry into Mexico's 'dirty war' obstructed by military and other agencies, board says
Oscar Lopez in Mexico City
Fri 16 August 2024 at 6:00 am GMT-5·4-min read
An independent commission charged by Mexico’s president with documenting human rights atrocities committed by the state has accused the country’s military and other government agencies of obstructing their investigation and threatening the country’s transition towards justice and democracy.
A blistering report released on Friday details years of abuses committed by Mexico’s government and its armed forces between 1965 and 1990, a period known as the country’s “dirty war” when it was ruled by an authoritarian one-party system which violently repressed any form of dissent.
Efforts by students, peasant farmers and Indigenous groups to challenge the regime were violently repressed, particularly by the Mexican military. Hundreds were extrajudicially executed, with their bodies sometimes thrown from planes into the Mexican Pacific in what were called “death flights”. At least 1,000 people simply disappeared, their whereabouts still unknown.
Arguably the most well-known incident during that period was the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, when members of the military and the president’s personal guard mowed down hundreds of peaceful protesters in Mexico City.
More:
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/inquiry-mexico-dirty-war-obstructed-110016670.html
(US corporate media didn't feel obligated to inform the US public about this, of course, but it did pitch fits when 2 US athletes held their fists up in the air in 1968 at the Olympic games in Mexico City, and terrorized some who described it as their "black power salute!) 
Conscience of the Blues: How Howlin' Wolf Got Caged in Oregon
AUGUST 9, 2024
BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair
From his locked room, Chester Burnett could hear the trains rattling up the tracks, one every half hour. They reminded him of home, back on Dockery Plantation, when he played on the porches of old shacks with Charley Patton, blowing his harmonica to the rhythm of those big wheels rolling along the rails. Those northbound trains were the sound of freedom then.
Now he was in the madhouse, where grown men, their minds broken by the carnage of war, wailed and screamed all night long. Most of them were white. Some were strapped to their beds. Others ambled with vacant eyes, lost in the big room. Chester just stood in the corner and watched. He didn’t say much. He didn’t know what to say. Sometimes he looked out the barred window across the misty fields toward the river and the big mountains far beyond, white pyramids rising above the green forests.
The doctors came every day, men in white jackets with clipboards. They showed him drawings. They asked about his family and his dreams. They asked if he’d ever killed anyone—he had but he didn’t want to talk about that. They asked him to read a big block of words to them. But Chester couldn’t read. He’d never been allowed to go to school.
. . .
Chester Burnett, by then known throughout the Mississippi Delta as Howlin’ Wolf, had been inducted into the Army in April 1941. Wolf didn’t go willingly. He was tracked down by the agents of the Army and forced into service. Years later, Wolf said that the plantation owners in the Delta had turned him in to the military authorities because he refused to work in the fields. Wolf was sent to Pine Bluff, Arkansas for training. He was thirty years old and the transition to the intensely regulated life of the army was jarring.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/08/09/conscience-of-the-blues-how-howlin-wolf-got-caged-in-oregon
Uruguay's Church asks witnesses of dictatorship's crimes to find victims
Eduardo Campos Lima
By Eduardo Campos Lima
Aug 14, 2024
|
Contributor
An anthropologist working on the excavation of human remains at the Battalion 14 in Uruguay, an area where three victims of torture have already been found over the past years. (Credit: Gov. of Uruguay.)
SÃO PAULO, Brazil – Church leaders in Uruguay has joined the country’s institutions in charge of looking for people who disappeared during the 1973-1995 military dictatorship and hopes to receive information about the whereabouts of the human remains of dozens of victims of the regime.
The initiative had been discussed over the last six months by Observatorio del Sur (Observatory of the South or OBSUR), an association of Catholic priests and lay people that promotes humanitarian values, the Institución Nacional de Derechos Humanos y Defensoría del Pueblo (National Institution of Human Rights and Ombudsman’s Office, or INDDHH), an organ of the Uruguayan Congress that promotes human rights’ policies, and by prosecutor Ricardo Perciballe, who investigates crimes against humanity.
. . .
During the dictatorship, about 5,000 Uruguayans were detained for political crimes. Many of them were taken to clandestine military facilities that functioned like centers of torture. At least 197 of them were killed, but the number might be higher.
“Bodies may have been thrown from helicopters on the sea, others may be lost forever. But some of them were buried and covered by construction materials and still can be found,” Villareal said.
More:
https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-americas/2024/08/uruguays-church-asks-witnesses-of-dictatorships-crimes-to-find-victims
Solar energy breakthrough could reduce need for solar farms
Oxford scientists make new solar cell technology discovery which you could soon wear, stick on your mobile or coat your car with
PUBLISHED
9 AUG 2024
Scientists at Oxford University Physics Department have developed a revolutionary approach which could generate increasing amounts of solar electricity without the need for silicon-based solar panels. Instead, their innovation works by coating a new power-generating material onto the surfaces of everyday objects such as rucksacks, cars, and mobile phones.
Their new light-absorbing material is, for the first time, thin and flexible enough to apply to the surface of almost any building or common object. Using a pioneering technique developed in Oxford, which stacks multiple light-absorbing layers into one solar cell, they have harnessed a wider range of the light spectrum, allowing more power to be generated from the same amount of sunlight.
This ultra-thin material, using this so-called multi-junction approach, has now been independently certified to deliver over 27% energy efficiency, for the first time matching the performance of traditional, single-layer, energy-generating materials known as silicon photovoltaics. Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), gave its certification prior to publication of the researchers’ scientific study later this year.
‘During just five years experimenting with our stacking or multi-junction approach we have raised power conversion efficiency from around 6% to over 27%, close to the limits of what single-layer photovoltaics can achieve today,’ said Dr Shuaifeng Hu, Post Doctoral Fellow at Oxford University Physics. ‘We believe that, over time, this approach could enable the photovoltaic devices to achieve far greater efficiencies, exceeding 45%.’
More:
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-08-09-solar-energy-breakthrough-could-reduce-need-solar-farms
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