Tag Archives: OddBox

White Supremacist Refuses to Condemn White Supremacists, Tells the Proud Boys to ‘Stand By’

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In a debate full of terrible moments from our toddler-in-chief, the worst came when Donald Trump was asked if he was willing to condemn white supremacists, and he said, nope!

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After documenting land grabs in their reserve, 18 indigenous and black leaders detained in Nicaragua

The president of the autonomous indigenous government is still detained

Princess Barberena along with other Kriol community members. Photo taken by the author in November 2019.

Princess Barberena, a black Kriol environmental and feminist activist from Nicaragua has been detained by Nicaraguan soldiers on September 27, along with Kriol forest ranger Roger Joseph and 16 other black and indigenous leaders, lawyers, and forest rangers from the indigenous Rama-Kriol community. The 18 activists were held in a house near Boca de Sabalos, in the southeastern region of Nicaragua, and 17 were released later that same night. Jaime McCrea Williams, president of the Territorial Government of Rama and Kriol, has been taken by the army and not seen since. According to journalist Gerall Chavez, McCrea has been allegedly taken for investigation at Boca de Sabalos.

The Rama and Kriol leaders were deprived of liberty when they were documenting environmental degradation and land grabs in their Indio Maiz biological reserve, according to local environmental NGO Fundacion del Rio. 70 percent of the reserve legally belongs to the Rama and Kriol, who have political territorial rights over their land since 2002. Indio Maiz is one of the two Nicaraguan reserves recognized by UNESCO for its diversity. It is crucial to the Mesoamerican biological corridor. Since 2015, self-trained Kriol and Rama forest rangers monitor deforestation and land grabs in the biological reserve, as state forest rangers have become rarer and rarer.

In Nicaragua, pressure has been mounting on autonomous indigenous and afro-descendant communities on the Caribbean Coast in the last decade. President Daniel Ortega planned on receiving investments from Chinese company HKND to build an inter-oceanic canal through Nicaragua, thereby encroaching on indigenous land. This was met with widespread resistance by indigenous communities and the wider public. The plans of a canal are dormant for now, but for lawyers, scholars, and local Rama and Kriol people, it explains why the government of Daniel Ortega apparently is failing to stop deforestation in the reserve. The settlers are farmers, miners, and Christian pastors who put cattle, build communities, sell acres of land, or find natural resources to sell. Between 2000 and 2018, Indio Maiz lost 52 percent of its tree cover. The Nicaraguan environmental NGO Centro Humboldt warned in 2017 that if deforestation continues at this pace, Nicaragua’s forest would be gone by 2028.

Kriol forest rangers. Photo taken by the author in November 2019.

The Ortega government has intensified its repression against political opposition and NGOs since 2018. During anti-government protests, more than 300 youth died under the bullets of the state’s anti-riot security forces and paramilitaries. Daniel Ortega is accused of committing crimes against humanity. Since then, more than 50 journalists fled the country and 86 democracy activists and members of the political opposition remain behind bars, nearly a year after 96 political prisoners were released. Many have alleged to have suffered torture in Nicaraguan prisons.

The indigenous and Creole communities of Nicaragua have obtained legal rights over their land through the 445 Law in 2002, which lays out their Communal property regime. In the video below, Princess Barberena explains to the head of military barracks that they have legal rights over their land. This was during the detention.

Así llegó amenazante el jefe del cuartel militar de esa comunidad indígena, acuerpado por varios efectivos del Ejército, con fusiles AK para amedrentar a los líderes indígenas que intentaban documentar las invasiones de sus tierras, las cuales han sido alentadas por el FSLN. pic.twitter.com/coxwDnhZYA

— Artículo 66 (@Articulo66Nica) September 28, 2020

This is how the head of the military barracks arrived at this indigenous community, flanked with several members of the army, with AK rifles to intimidate the indigenous leaders who were trying to document the invasions of their lands, which have been encouraged by the FSLN. pic.twitter.com/coxwDnhZYA

Barberena and other afro-indigenous women demand the soldiers to stop pointing their AK-47 weapon on indigenous president Jaime Williams when they took him away. According to the press release later published by the Nicaraguan Army, the armed forces were doing a routine identification check on the people going through the reserve.

Una escuadra del Ejército Sandinista secuestra a líderes indígenas del gobierno territorial Rama Kriol. Aquí se observa el ademán agresivo de los militares que apuntan sus AK-47 contra el hombre desarmado y sin ningún gesto de resistirse. #Artículo66 #DerechoAInformar pic.twitter.com/Yf6uthU62D

— Artículo 66 (@Articulo66Nica) September 28, 2020

A contingent of the Sandinista Army [Army of the Government of Daniel Ortega, leader of Sandinista party] takes indigenous leaders of the Rama Kriol territorial government hostage. Here you can see the aggressive behavior of the soldiers who point their AK-47s against a disarmed man who does not have any gesture of resistance.

Written by Melissa Vida

Firefox 81 Released, Can Now Be Your Default Browser in iOS

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Engadget reports:
One big benefit of iOS 14 is that you can set non-Apple-made apps as your default, including for email and web browsing. Hot on the heels of you being able to set Chrome and Gmail as your clients of choice, Firefox is enabling you to make its browser the default on iPhones and iPads. Naturally, you’ll need to have both the latest version of the operating system and the apps, and then just make the switch inside settings.

Meanwhile, Bleeping Computer profiles some of the new features in this week’s release of Firefox 81, including:

The ability to control videos via your headset and keyboard even if you’re not using Firefox at the time
A new credit card autofill feature for Firefox users in the U.S. and Canada
A new theme called AlpenGlow
Firefox can now be set as the default system PDF viewer

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Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here’s More Proof Donald Trump Is a Big Weenie With An Incredibly Fragile Ego, In Case You Need It

Last year, the Finnish investigative journalist Jessikka Aro, who seems very cool and smart, was slated to receive the State Department’s International Women of Courage Award for her coverage of Russian troll farms. But then, as Foreign Policy first reported at the time, the State Department then took the award back after officials very belatedly found social media posts she had made that were critical of Donald Trump. Naturally, they then covered their asses by proclaiming that Aro was “incorrectly notified” that she was to receive the award. As a department spokesperson told reporters, “This was an error. This was a mistake.”

But now, even the State Department’s own internal watchdog has verified the news reports that Aro’s award was rescinded because she was too critical of Trump. umjeypukjmwlevxskyjq.jpg

Last year, the Finnish investigative journalist Jessikka Aro, who seems very cool and smart, was slated to receive the State Department’s International Women of Courage Award for her coverage of Russian troll farms. But then, as Foreign Policy first reported at the time, the State Department then took the award back…

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Once Again Trump Says, Out Loud, That He Wants to Steal the Election

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That President Trump hopes to steal the 2020 general election is no surprise to anyone paying attention to the administration’s anti-vote-by-mail propaganda, its casual disruption of the United States Postal Service, and the president’s endorsement of voter suppression tactics, like installing armed poll watchers in…

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Found: The Wreck of a Ship That Carried Enslaved Maya from Mexico to Cuba

On September 19, 1861, a steamboat caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, two nautical miles from the Yucatán port town of Sisal. There were dozens of confirmed casualties, passengers and crew alike. But the full death toll will likely never be known, because the enslaved Indigenous Maya people held on the ship were never counted in the first place—they were simply listed as cargo.

Archaeologists from Mexico’s Sub-Directorate of Underwater Archaeology (Subdirección de Arqueología Subacuática, or SAS) announced recently that they’d identified the underwater remains of this ship, La Unión. Between 1855 and 1861, the Havana-based vessel brought, on average, 25 to 30 enslaved Maya people from Mexico to Cuba every month. The enslaved persons were then sold upon arrival in Havana.

The shipwreck was first found in 2017, after researchers found an 1861 document in the Yucatán state archive describing the fire and the approximate spot where it occurred. Local fishermen, who had heard about the wreck in oral retellings, also helped guide the researchers toward the search area. In tribute to one of these fishermen, the researchers temporarily named the shipwreck “Adalio,” after his grandfather. While it was clear that the team had something significant on their hands, it took three years of interdisciplinary research to confirm that “Adalio” was, in fact, La Unión. It is now the first ship ever discovered known to have carried enslaved Maya people.

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Helena Barba Meinecke, director of the Yucatán Peninsula division of the SAS, outlined her team’s research process in an email. One key clue that “Adalio” might really be La Unión was that its technological and skeletal components—the propulsion machine, boiler, axles, paddle wheels, and chimney—dated to the first era of steamboat technology (1837–1860), and La Unión began operating in 1855. In addition, the archaeologists found that the ship’s boilers had exploded and that its wood had been damaged by fire. Perhaps most importantly, the location of the wreck matched what was reported in contemporary accounts and documentation. Perhaps the eeriest find, however, was brass cutlery used by first-class passengers on La Unión, who would have been unaware of the enslaved people on board. The cutlery was also branded with the name of the shipping company that owned La Unión.

The enslavement of Mexico’s Indigenous population began during the so-called Caste War of Yucatán, a long-running conflict that lasted from 1847 to 1901. Promised, and then denied, tax relief in exchange for military service—as they saw private estates rise throughout formerly public lands—Maya communities on the Yucatán Peninsula rebelled against Mexico’s European-descended government, and sustained enormous casualties in the process. According to the University of North Carolina, the combination of death and desertion cut the peninsula’s population in half within just a few years, by 1850. In a brutal 1848 decree, Meinecke writes, the Yucatán governor ordered the expulsion of all Maya captured in combat. They would be deported to Cuba, still a Spanish colony at the time, to toil in the island’s sugarcane plantations. It was irrelevant to these officials that Mexico had officially abolished slavery in 1829.

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Indeed, one illegal tactic put to use during the Caste War was the deployment of enganchadores. Sent with fraudulent documents into Maya communities ravaged by the violence, these kidnappers led people to believe that they would be settled on uninhabited Cuban land and live as farmers—though their true destination was a life of slavery. As late as October 30, 1860, La Unión was actually caught at sea carrying 29 enslaved Maya, including children as young as seven years old. Even this, however, failed to stop the trade. It wasn’t until the fire of September 1861, four months after President Benio Juárez issued a decree against further kidnappings, that the government crackdown became sufficient to prevent the deportations, even if the violence would continue in Mexico for decades to come.

Like other researchers of slavery, Meinecke points out a major gap in the otherwise rich historical record: In most cases, the identities of those who were enslaved remain unknown. At the same time, she writes, Maya descendants have been identified in various locales throughout Cuba, including Havana, Camagüey, and Pinar del Río, to name a few places. Meinecke is hopeful that continued engagement with these descendants, and the recording of their oral histories, might one day reveal just who their ancestors were.