4,500 year-old mummy found in Peru

Discovery of 4,500-year-old female mummy sheds light on ancient Peru

The Guardian 

Archaeologists say the mummified remains, found near one of the oldest cities in the Americas, probably belong to a noblewoman aged 40 to 50

Archaeologists in Peru have discovered the 4,500-year-old mummy of a woman buried near one of the most ancient cities of the Americas.

Dr Ruth Shady Solís said the mummy was probably a noblewoman who died aged 40 to 50 years old and was buried in the coastal ruins of Aspero, about 14 miles away from Caral, a city with some of the most ancient pyramids in the Americas. Both sites stand about three hours north of the modern capital of Lima.

Peru harnesses ancient canal system to tackle Lima water shortage

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The mummy was buried with carved objects of monkeys and birds, which Shady Solís said suggested possible trade between the coastal town and Caral, a larger inland city. Shady Solís deduced the woman’s social status from the value and diverse origins of the objects around her: seashells, carved desert birds and designs of jungle monkeys.

Shady Solís’s team has dated the mummy to about 2,500BC, around the same time that people of the region began building pyramids, but has not offered a theory as to the woman’s death.

“In the settlements of the Caral civilization,” she said, “sacrifice of human beings was not regular. They were very rare.”

She also suggested to the Andina news agency that the objects revealed “gender equality, a kind that let both women and men hold leadership roles and achieve a high social status”.

“The place in which she was buried and the form of interment show the high social status that this person achieved about 4,500 years ago.”

The woman was found with a necklace of seashells, a Spondylus pendant, and four “tupus”, or bone broaches carved with designs of birds and monkeys.

Shady Solís also argued that music was an important part of life in these ancient cities, citing the recent discovery of four bone flutes found in the nearby excavation of Supe Puerto, to the north, and 32 flutes in Caral. Similarities between the instruments and their apparent origins from around Peru, Shady Solís argued, suggest trade in items and culture between cities of the Andes.

Although ancient Americans raised pyramids and cities around the same time that the Egyptians built the monuments of Giza, far less is known about the people of Norte Chico, as the ancient societies of arid northern Peru have become known, than their African counterparts.

It is not a question of scale: Caral has six “monumental platforms mounds” (better known as pyramids), three sunken circular courts and large, hive-like structures thought to be homes for upper, middle and low-class people. All suggest a complex society that could be organized to create huge city projects.

But archaeologists disagree about the origins and nature of this part of ancient America. Shady Solís posits that Caral and inland cities grew out of fishing communities like Aspero, while archaeologists such as Jonathan Haas, a curator emeritus at the Field Museum in Chicago, argue that the settlements came from valleys. Haas also said evidence does not support the idea that Caral stood at the center of an ancient American empire.

Haas declined to comment on unpublished findings, but noted that there are “equally large and monumental sites” in nearby valleys, and that there is no empirical evidence so far that binds some 30 ancient settlements to any central power.

Instead, he argued that the cities were part of a decentralized community that shared its culture, and which – like the Egyptians a world away – relied on canals and irrigation to grow corn and other foods. The people of Norte Chico “borrowed” this technology of agriculture, he said, but “were definitely the inventors” of their own kinds of governance, “ceremonial architecture and monumental constructions”.

Reuters contributed to this report.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/23/peru-mummy-woman-ancient-civilization?CMP=share_btn_fb

Yellow Water, Dirty Air, Power Outages: Venezuela Hits a New Low

By  Noris Soto and Fabiolo Zerpa
On Bloomberg News

To read the entire article go to Bloomberg News

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-18/yellow-water-dirty-air-power-outages-venezuela-hits-a-new-low

The tap in her apartment yields water only every two weeks. It comes out yellow. Her 8-month-old granddaughter is ill. And as Yajaira Espinoza, a 55-year-old hairdresser, made her way down the halls of Caracas university hospital on Friday, Zika cases evident in the rooms around her, a dense ash-filled smog enveloped the city.

"I am so sorry for my daughter, because I know she suffers silently," she said. "This situation is hard."

It has been an exceptionally painful year for Venezuelans, suffering from violent crime, chronic shortages, plummeting oil prices on which they depend, declining health and fractured government. Yet this past week it seemed to reach a new low. A kind of resigned misery spread across a city that had once been the envy of Latin America.

A sudden combination of natural disasters joined man-made failures. The smog, called calima, is a meteorological phenomenon that involves ash and dust clouds fairly common for this time of year. Meanwhile a prolonged drought blamed on El Nino and related forest fires has arrived. Levels at the Guri dam in the south, which produces 40 percent of the country’s electricity, fell to a record low of 242.33 meters on Monday.

Water Trucks Robbed

The lack of public order means attempts to alleviate the problems are going poorly. Water trucks dispatched to help reduce suffering from the drought, for example, are being routinely robbed.

“Two or three times a week a water truck we send out is robbed,” said Tatiana Noguera, a water official. “The trucks get stopped by gangs who make the driver change the route and discharge the water in an area they control.”

More than 3,700 cases of respiratory illness related to calima have been reported at state health centers around Caracas since March, said Dr. Miguel Viscuna, an epidemiologist. Medicine -- like toilet paper, chicken and other basic goods -- is increasingly hard to find.

To read more go to Bloomberg News

The 2009 Coup in Honduras

Hillary Clinton Justifies Her Support for 2009 Coup in Honduras

“We need to do more of a Colombian Plan for Central America,” said the presidential candidate in an interview.
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton did not express any regret Monday about her support for the 2009 coup in Honduras, despite the deteriorating human rights situation, recently highlighted with the murder of prominent Indigenous activist Berta Caceres.

Read the original story here

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Hillary-Clinton-Justifies-her-Support-for-2009-Coup-in-Honduras-20160411-0047.html


See Below:

Berta Caceres criticizes Hillary Clinton's role in the 2009 Honduran Coup

America's Role in Argentina's Dirty War

America's Role in Argentina's Dirty War

March 17, 2016
Editorial Board of the New York Times

To read the rest of the article, click here

Bernie Sanders Said Something We Weren't Ready to Hear Last Night

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE

MAR 10, 2016

www.esquire.com 

Well, at least I lived long enough to hear a presidential candidate from one of the major parties refer to "the so-called Monroe Doctrine."

It came during the most interesting passage in the debate Wednesday night between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sanders was asked if he regretted having once supported the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and having once paid some compliments to the Castro regime in Cuba.

Well, let me just answer that. What that was about was saying that the United States was wrong to try to invade Cuba, that the United States was wrong trying to support people to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, that the United States was wrong trying to overthrow in 1954, the government—democratically elected government of Guatemala. Throughout the history of our relationship with Latin America we've operated under the so-called Monroe Doctrine, and that said the United States had the right do anything that they wanted to do in Latin America. So I actually went to Nicaragua and I very shortly opposed the Reagan administration's efforts to overthrow that government. And I strongly opposed earlier Henry Kissinger and the—to overthrow the government of Salvador Allende in Chile. I think the United States should be working with governments around the world, not get involved in regime change. And all of these actions, by the way, in Latin America, brought forth a lot of very strong anti-American sentiments. That's what that was about.

A few minutes later, as an addendum to an answer about her solution to Puerto Rico's crippling economic crisis, HRC pounced and pandered.

And I just want to add one thing to the question you were asking Senator Sanders. I think in that same interview, he praised what he called the revolution of values in Cuba and talked about how people were working for the common good, not for themselves. I just couldn't disagree more. You know, if the values are that you oppress people, you disappear people, you imprison people or even kill people for expressing their opinions, for expressing freedom of speech, that is not the kind of revolution of values that I ever want to see anywhere.

OK, I wanted to yell, "What about the Saudis/Chinese?" at my TV, too, and it did occur to me that HRC might want to ask her lunch buddy Henry Kissinger about his human-rights record some time. But what most struck me is the depth of the denial still about the profound costs of U.S. intervention in the affairs of our closest neighbors, and our easiest proxies, in the various Great Games. The Monroe Doctrine might have made sense when England, France, Spain, and even Portugal still had imperial ambitions. But that was a very limited space in time. By the mid-1800's, the Monroe Doctrine, and the philosophy behind it, was an excuse for land-grabbing. As one prominent American politician once put it,

"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable—a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movement. Such a minority was precisely the case of the Tories of our own revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines, or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones."

Of course, as we know, those remarks cost that Lincoln rube his seat in the House and ended his political career.

The 20th century was even worse. We insistently meddled in Cuba throughout it, even though our meddling came dangerously close to blowing up the entire world. Within our own hemisphere, we backed dictator after dictator, oligarch after oligarch. We armed terrorists. We financed coups. We allowed bombings and drug smuggling. We sold missiles to the mullahs in order to finance our terrorists. Somoza. Pincochet. Batista. Rios-Montt. To paraphrase John Quincy Adams, we did not go far abroad to find monsters to support.

These are just some of the people who did not live long enough to rebut HRC's presumption of American innocence:

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Mexican-American War

Mexican-American War | 3 Minute History

Published on Oct 28, 2015