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Woman and teenage unducumented immigrants pay thousands to cross U.S.-México border

Often get raped and sexually assaulted by guides

by Carlos Garcia
Latin Post

There is a booming business taking place on the U.S.-Mexico border: Human trafficking. Migrants who want to cross into the U.S. pay thousands of dollars to guides who use their knowledge of the land to bring them safely across while avoiding the border patrol.

“Coyote” is the name given in the trade for the human smugglers who are responsible for the majority of the undocumented immigration across the Southwest border.

One of these coyotes is a 29-year-old woman named “Paula”, who lives in the border city of Piedras Negras, across from Eagle Pass, Texas. She says she’s been a coyote since she was 17 years old. In the 12 years of doing this line of work, she says she has only been caught by the Border Patrol four times. Each time, her clients tell the federal agent that she is just another undocumented immigrant and she gets released instead of being prosecuted as a human smuggler.

Paula and other coyotes make a very good living compared to the other economic opportunities available to them. In her case, clients will pay $1,500 to San Antonio or $1,800 to Houston, $300-400 of which goes to Paula for each client she smuggles. She usually makes a couple of trips a month.

“I feel like I’m helping them. Things are rough here,” she says. “They can earn a lot better living there, and then send money back to their families in Mexico.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is using more agents, better technology, and tougher prosecutions to try and stop the constant wave of immigrants trying to enter the country illegally, but Paula the coyote says it won’t stop the trade: “We move them across the way we’ve always crossed them. This work never ends; there’s always demand.”

Paula’s group walks through the night, and after doing this for a dozen years she knows where the trails are, which fences to jump, and the locations of the tanks where they can refill their water bottles, as well as the cell phone towers to use as directional guides.

After the nine-hour hike to get past the Border Patrol checkpoint on Highway 57, Paula will call someone on her cell phone and he sends vehicles to pick them up and take them to San Antonio or Houston. The next day, Paula takes a bus back to her home on the Mexican side of the border and waits for her next trip.

Increasingly, however, there is an epidemic of rape going on at these border crossings where women are sexually assaulted by the men they pay to bring them across. “When they get tired and say they don’t want to walk anymore, there are the bad coyotes who say, ‘I’m not going to argue with you. You stay here.

We’re leaving.’ They don’t want to stop the trip because of one or two people. I won’t leave my clients. If they’re tired, I wait, let them rest a little, let the pain go away. Then we keep walking,” Paula revealed.

Pharmacist Maria Jaime Peña, in the smuggling town of Altar in northern Mexico, says women coming in her store, which is the last stop for many migrants before making the trek across the Sonoran desert into Arizona, often ask the same question: ‘What can I do in case I’m raped, and I don’t want to get pregnant?”

Females understand they are completely at the will of the people who are transporting so they prepare themselves with contraceptives before the journey.

Similarly, guides and coyotes advise their female clients to go on birth control because they know what goes on once the group goes into the desert.

One woman, a 43-year-old who recently tried crossing with her teenage daughter, started walking with the group but couldn’t keep up. One of the coyotes said he’d wait for her if he could have sex with her daughter. They refused so he abandoned them. She says they only survived because they were able to find the border patrol.

When a woman is raped in remote stretches of the border region between the U.S. and Mexico, it almost always goes unpunished. Women who are raped while crossing the border often won’t report the crime to anyone out of fear of retaliation from the crime networks who are responsible for the human trafficking trade. Victimized women are also afraid that they will get deported if they 5report the crime in the United States, something which is sad but true. Also, the coyotes might know where their families are back in Mexico, and they are afraid that their children or families would get killed.

Even if they do report the rape, there is a high likelihood that the culprit would still not be caught due to lack of evidence. A rape kit has to be administered by the hospital within 72 hours of the rape but if a woman is raped in the desert, by the time she gets to the hospital, it may already be too late to prove that she was raped, therefore making it impossible to identify who sexually assaulted her.

Some of the raped women will end up pregnant and try to get abortions after they have crossed over into the United States. The coyotes used to be someone that the family knew and trusted, but the industry has changed and now it is very dangerous, especially for women to cross. One woman from Nogales was brought across the border by a man under false pretenses then taken to the city of Atlanta and pimped as a prostitute for years.

Tony Estrada, a sheriff in Arizona’s Santa Cruz County, says rapes have likely increased since heightened border security has pushed migrants into remote areas of the desert and organized crime has taken over the smuggling routes. Contrary to popular belief, the US-Mexico border crossing is used by migrants from all over Central America, and even other regions. The overall number of migrants trying to cross illegally into the U.S. has dropped in the past few years, but the trip and border towns have gotten a lot more dangerous now that some of Mexico’s most brutal drug cartels are earning millions of dollars each year from the extortion and smuggling of migrants. Last year, hundreds of migrants went missing or were killed in Mexico, and more than 20,000 were kidnapped.

The drug cartels have turned the extortion of migrants into a highly sophisticated and lucrative criminal enterprise. Migrants are abducted and held for ransom until family members pay hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars. The old mom-and-pop operations have been pushed out by organized crime.

Last year alone, almost 400,000 undocumented immigrants were deported, many of whom are teenagers desperate to get across into the United States. Many of those who are sent back will try again and again until they succeed because they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Author Luis Alberto Urrea, who has written about the crime and brutality of the U.S.-Mexico border crossing, says that it’s not against Mexican law to leave Mexico at any time without papers. “You know, I was talking to one of the custodians at my university just this week, and she said: You know what’s so funny? I got here, and I had no idea I was illegal until somebody told me,” he says.

“When you think about it, a lot of the folks coming are very rural people from the deep south, you know, many of them illiterate, many people who — they don’t have access to the news. They’re just trying to get here. And they’re used to getting the better of their authorities because their authorities are out to get them.”

Simple ways to avoid GMO foods

[Author]by J. D. Heyes
[/Author]
Thanks to the efforts of Natural News and some other news sources, an increasing number of Americans are becoming more aware of just how damaging to the world’s food system genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have become. The rise in food allergies and gluten sensitivities are evidence that GM foods have impacted the global food chain in negative and dangerous ways.

As such, millions of Americans agree that, at the very minimum, GM foods ought to carry labeling designating them as such — just like the labeling requirements for ingredients in other foods.

Some states are beginning to get the message and are responding to demands by their citizens to require such labeling. As reported by Prevention magazine, Connecticut and Maine are two states that are moving in that direction; also, our editor-in-chief, Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, has reported extensively on recent efforts in California to require GMO labeling [http://www.naturalnews.com].

Why it is important to require GMO labeling

So far, the federal government has resisted requiring GM foods to be labeled, no doubt in part due to intense lobbying by the food industry (as happened in the defeat of a California labeling initiative), which does not want to label GM foods, for some reason. But such resistance to labeling means that Americans who want to avoid GM foods are basically on their own to figure out what to avoid.

As repored by Prevention: To the rescue: the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a pro-GMO-labeling environmental nonprofit, has just released a Shopper’s Guide to Avoiding GE Foods to make it a little easier for people to avoid GMOs (GMO and genetically engineered, or GE, are used interchangeably to describe these crops). The reason why it is so important to require GMO labeling is because of their potential to cause ill effects in those who consume them.

Besides the fact that such crops have never been adequately tested for safety, the EWG says that GM foods are increasing the amount of herbicide-resistant weeds that no longer die when they are sprayed with Monsanto’s Roundup, which the seeds were bred to resist.

As such, farmers are increasingly being forced to use more and more potent and toxic herbicides in order to compensate. Also, the widespread adoption of GM crops by American farmers has endangered organic farming due to unintended contamination of organic crops (mostly through agricultural run-off and crosspollination, when pollen blows from a GMO farm to an organic one).

EWG “cites one estimate from the Union of Concern Scientists that the potential lost income for farmers growing organic corn may total $90 million annually, all because their crops get unknowingly contaminated by nearby GMO farmers,” Prevention reported. So, without labeling, how do you avoid GM foods?

Here are some ways you can reduce your exposure:

–Stick with the organic stuff.

Under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Organic Program, farmers are prohibited from planting seeds that have been genetically engineered. Also, organic food producers are prohibited from using ingredients that come from GM crops — soy, corn and canola, for example. “Organic regulations also prohibit organic dairy and livestock operations from using GMO grains (again, corn and soy) to feed their animals,” Prevention reported. One thing to remember: Not all organic foods are good for everyone. As Natural News’ Derek Henry reported in January, five organic foods that may damage your digestive system include wheat, soy, peanut butter, cow’s milk and pork [http://www.naturalnews.com].

–Make sure you buy “Non-GMO Project Verified.

The Non-GMO Project begins where organic certification ends. The project certifies products that have less than 0.9 percent GMO contamination.

–Check labels and dodge the “Factory Four.

Corn, soy and sugar (the latter from GM sugar beets) and vegetable oils that are made from GM crops are the four most common GM ingredients you’ll encounter in your food. Another thing to remember: About 90 percent of all corn grown in the U.S. is genetically engineered. (by Natural News).

The intelligence bureaucracy that ate our world – Part 2

by Marvin Ramirez

Marvin J. RamirezMarvin Ramirez

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: Many of you, dear readers of El Reportero, might not have any idea of what the government is really doing with all the data accumulated in their databases – our information. How much information it has about all of us and what this means for the preservation of civil liberties in this world of super high technology, where almost everything – from the TV set on which you watch your favorite soap opera to every phone call you make on your cell phone – is being recorded. And our Congress – if we can call it our Congress – is an accomplice on this rape of our liberties. The following article, that was found hidden somewhere in the internet, brings a lot of fine information for you and me to know a little bit more how we are becoming their slaves in a more and more sinister way. Most of us live our lives just coming and going to our jobs or watching our favorite ball games – like zombies, looking dumbly at our iphones, doing nothing about it. Due that this article is too long for our space availability, we have split it into two parts. This is Part One.

by Tom Engelhardt

A system that creates its own reality

To leave the country, of course, I had to briefly surrender my shoes, hat, belt, computer – you know the routine – and even then, stripped to the basics, I had to pass through a scanner of a sort that not so long ago caused protest and upset but now is evidently as American as apple pie. Then I spent those nine days touring some of Spain’s architectural wonders, including the Alhambra in Granada, the Mezquita or Great Mosque of Cordoba, and that city’s ancient synagogue (the only one to survive the expulsion of the Jews in 1492), as well as Antonio Gauda’s Sagrada Familia, his vast Barcelona basilica, without once – in a country with its own grim history of terror attacks – being wanted or patted down or questioned or even passing through a metal detector. Afterwards, I took a flight back to a country whose national security architecture had again expanded subtly in the name of “my” safety.

Now, I don’t want to overdo it. In truth, those new guidelines were no big deal. The information on – as far as anyone knows – innocent Americans that the NCTC wanted to keep for those extra 4½ years was already being held ad infinitum by one or another of our 17 major intelligence agencies and organizations. So the latest announcement seems to represent little more than bureaucratic housecleaning, just a bit of extra scaffolding added to the Great Mosque or basilica of the new American intelligence labyrinth. It certainly was nothing to write home about, no less trap a fictional character in.

Admittedly, since 9/11 the U.S. Intelligence Community, as it likes to call itself, has expanded to staggering proportions. With those 17 outfits having a combined annual intelligence budget of more than $80 billion (a figure which doesn’t even include all intelligence expenditures), you could think of that community as having carried out a statistical coup d’etat. In fact, at a moment when America’s enemies – a few thousand scattered jihadis, the odd minority insurgency, and a couple of rickety regional powers (Iran, North Korea, and perhaps Venezuela) – couldn’t be less imposing, its growth has been little short of an institutional miracle. By now, it has a momentum all its own. You might even say that it creates its own reality.

Of classic American checks and balances, we, the taxpayers, now write the checks and they, the officials of the National Security Complex, are free to be as unbalanced as they want in their actions. Whatever you do, though, don’t mistake Clapper, Holder, and similar figures for the Gaudas of the new intelligence world. Don’t think of them as the architects of the structure they are building. What they preside over is visibly a competitive bureaucratic mess of overlapping principalities whose “mission” might be summed up in one word: more.

In a sense – though they would undoubtedly never think of themselves this way – I suspect they are bureaucratic versions of Kafka’s Joseph K., trapped in a labyrinthine structure they are happencontinually, blindly, adding to. And because their “mission” has no end point, their edifice has neither windows nor exits, and for all anyone knows is being erected on a foundation of quicksand. Keep calling it “intelligence” if you want, but the monstrosity they are building is neither intelligent nor architecturally elegant.

It is nonetheless a system elaborating itself with undeniable energy. Whatever the changing cast of characters, the structure only grows. It no longer seems to matter whether the figure who officially sits atop it is a former part-owner of a baseball team and former governor, a former constitutional law professor, or – looking to possible futures – a former corporate raider.

A basilica of chaos

Evidently, it’s our fate – increasing numbers of us anyway – to be transformed into intelligence data (just as we are being eternally transformed into commercial data), our identities sliced, diced, and passed around the labyrinth, our bytes stored up to be “mined” at their convenience.

You might wonder: What is this basilica of chaos that calls itself the U.S. Intelligence Community? Bamford describes whistleblower William Binney, a former senior NSA cryptomathematician “largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network,” as holding “his thumb and forefinger close together” and saying, “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

It’s an understandable description for someone who has emerged from the labyrinth, but I doubt it’s on target. Ours is unlikely to ever be a Soviet-style system, even if it exhibits a striking urge toward totality; towards, that is, engulfing everything, including every trace you’ve left anywhere in the world. It’s probably not a Soviet-style state in the making, even if traditional legal boundaries and prohibitions against spying upon and surveilling Americans are of remarkably little interest to it.

Its urge is to data mine and decode the planet in an eternal search for enemies who are imagined to lurk everywhere, ready to strike at any moment. Anyone might be a terrorist or, wittingly or not, in touch with one, even perfectly innocentseeming Americans whose data must be held until the moment when the true pattern of enemies comes into view and everything is revealed.

In the new world of the National Security Complex, no one can be trusted – except the officials working within it, who in their eternal bureaucratic vigilance clearly consider themselves above any law. The system that they are constructing (or that, perhaps, is constructing them) has no more to do with democracy or an American republic or the Constitution than it does with a Soviet-style state. Think of it as a phenomenon for which we have no name. Like the yottabyte, it’s something new under the sun, still awaiting its own strange and ugly moniker.

For now, it remains as anonymous as Joseph K. and so, conveniently enough, continues to expand right before our eyes, strangely unseen.

If you don’t believe me, leave the country for nine days and just see if, in that brief span of time, something else isn’t drawn within its orbit. After all, it’s inexorable, this rough beast slouching through Washington to be born. Welcome, in the meantime, to our nameless new world. One thing is guaranteed: it has a byte.

(Tom Engelhardt is the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s. His latest book is The United States of Fear).

“Obama’s military spending cuts equal military spending increases”

Submitted by the Libertarian Party

While the Libertarian Party strongly agrees with the need to downsize the U.S. military, the Obama plan recently announced by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel expands the military.

Both Democratic and Republican politicians routinely deceive taxpayers by portraying slight reductions in the growth of government as “cuts.”

When military spending cuts are involved, Republicans protest loudly, giving credence to the claim that the cuts are real.

Both Democrats and Republicans use these theatrics to disguise reckless government overspending — just as they did with the government “shutdown.”

“Elementary school arithmetic instructs us that if you grow spending at a slower rate — it still gets higher. It’s not a reduction; it’s an increase,” said Geoffrey J. Neale, chair of the Libertarian National Committee.
President Obama and Secretary Hagel propose creation of a new $26 billion “Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative” (read: slush fund) while keeping the 2015 Pentagon budget at the same level as 2014. That’s an increase of $26 billion.

They also propose wiping out what’s left of the so-called “sequester,” thereby sheltering the military from automatic spending cuts.

Democrats and Republicans already gutted a good portion of the sequester in the December round of budget negotiations.

Now they want to both increase military spending and take away the minimal spending controls that are still in effect — while pretending they want to cut military spending.

The sequester cuts were agreed to in exchange for higher spending and higher government debt passed under the deceptively-named Budget Control Act of 2011. One more illustration that politicians’ promises for spending cuts equal spending increases.

They propose reducing the total employment of the Army, National Guard, Reserves, and Marine Corps by a mere 3.9 percent — while touting it as “shrinking the Army to its smallest size in 74 years.” This tiny reduction in personnel — if it ever happens — is not backed by cuts in spending. No cost savings. No real reduction.

They call for slowing down the growth in pay raises and the growth of tax-free housing allowances for military personnel.

The only slight reduction they offer is an increase in contributions they pay for insurance deductibles and co-pays. Overall, they propose higher government spending for military personnel.

They propose a series of domestic base closures which, again, are not backed by spending cuts. Any savings will not go to taxpayers but to spending in other areas of the military.

In all likelihood, there will be little to no savings at all from base closures as proposed by President Obama. Few, if any, bases will actually close because congressmen and senators will lobby intensely to keep them open in their home states. No base closure initiatives in the last 25 years have resulted in savings greater than $1–3 billion per year, and some resulted in no closings at all.

Given that the U.S. government spends more than $1 trillion for military purposes every year, such savings are trivial and will be used as an argument not to close any bases, as they were during the last round of attempted military base closings in 2005.

It appears the administration is more interested in provoking lawmakers to ensure bases stay open than in closing them and cutting costs — while pretending to downsize the U.S. military.

The Libertarian Party and its candidates aim to substantially downsize the U.S. military.

Libertarians are lining up to run for federal office in 2014 on a platform to cut military spending immediately by at least 60 percent, close a substantial number of overseas military bases, and bring troops home.

Specific Libertarian proposals to downsize the U.S. military include:

• Immediately withdraw all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and bring them home to their families.

• Stay out of Syria, Ukraine, and every other foreign conflict.

• Close unneeded U.S. military bases and outposts in more than 130 countries around the world, and bring our troops home. First on the list are the massive deployments in Germany, Italy, South Korea, and Japan — countries that can fund their own military defense.

• Close at least half of the nation’s 4,402 domestic Department of Defense sites.

• Use 100 percent of operating cost savings to reduce the federal income tax, balance the federal budget, or both.

• Sell off all foreign and domestic real estate holdings of closed military bases and DoD sites while requiring that all proceeds be used to pay down existing government debt. None of it should pay for more government spending.

“Reducing and eliminating military bases in foreign countries will remove a major source of hostility towards the United States, reduce the threat of a terrorist attack, and reduce federal government debt by $300 billion,” Neale said.

“Cutting military spending by $600 billion every year will go a long way toward balancing the federal budget and ending the federal income tax,” he said. “This will give back $5,000 every year to each taxpaying family in the United States; stimulate investment in small businesses; and create millions of sustainable, private-sector jobs. Plenty of jobs for veterans and millions of others now out of work.”

Libertarian Party platform on National Defense:

“We support the maintenance of a sufficient military to defend the United States against aggression. The United States should both avoid entangling alliances and abandon its attempts to act as policeman for the world. We oppose any form of compulsory national service.”

Sources:

“Hagel Says US Military Must Shrink to Face New Era,” Associated Press, Feb. 24, 2014.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/hagel-propose-big-cuts-army-2015-budget.

“Military mystery: How many bases does the US have, anyway?” Occasional Planet, Jan. 24, 2011: http://www.occasionalplanet.org/2011/01/24/military-mystery-how-many-bases-does-the-us-have-anyway/.

“Base Structure Report: Fiscal Year 2007 Baseline,” Department of Defense
http://www.defense.gov/pubs/BSR_2007_Baseline.pdf.

“Op-Ed: How many bases does U.S. have globally and what is their cost?” Digital Journal, Dec. 16, 2012: http://digitaljournal.com/article/339184.

California farm workers to attend special preview of César Chávez biopic

by the El Reportero’s news services

César ChávezCésar Chávez

More than 1,000 farm workers who benefit from the legacy of César Chávez attended Tuesday, April 1 in California’s Central Valley a special preview of the film about the late civil rights activist and labor leader’s life.

The movie César Chávez will screen at what is now the National Historic Landmark of Forty Acres, outside Delano, where the United Farm Workers co-founder fasted for almost a month as part of his peaceful fight for field hands’ rights.

“We’re celebrating the legacy of César Chávez but we’re also acknowledging that we’re still active and working for a better life for farmworkers,” UFW Vice President Armando Elenes told Efe.

“In this case, field hands will be among the first to see the movie,” he said.

Director Diego Luna and América Ferrera, who plays César’s wife Helen Chávez, will be on hand Tuesday for the outdoor preview.

Also expected is Paul Chávez, son of the farmworkers’ leader and president of the César Chávez Foundation, along with UFW President Arturo Rodríguez.

“We keep working – the United Farm Workers and the rest of the movement – to improve farm Marrónhands’ working conditions.

According to NY Daily News’ Jordan Hoffman, beyond the speeches, however, this film lacks fire. The struggles of the exploited workers are too vague, as are the overall goals of Chávez’s union. Lacking specifics, we’re unenthused. That’s because we’ve seen this kind of film before.

America Ferrera is wasted as Chávez’s staunch wife, Helen, as is Rosario Dawson as Dolores Huerta, one of his top associates, adds Hoffman.

“The rising defiance and the rallies are indeed stirring, but the scenes of Chávez’s personal life are vague and flat. A subplot concerning his defiant eldest son feels shoehorned in. What should be a transformative drama about the drive toward social justice consuming an individual ultimately feels like a midbudget TV movie. Archival footage of then-Gov. Ronald Reagan and then-President Richard Nixon serves as a simplistic target for audience hissing,” Hoffman wrote in his review for the Daily News.

César Chávez (Michael Peña)César Chávez (Michael Peña)

“Some of Chávez’s strong character shines through, but this isn’t the movie he’s owed,” Hoffman concluded.

Celia Cruz joins Walk of Legends at Apollo Theater in NYC

Legendary salsa singer Celia Cruz has been honored with a place on the Walk of Legends at New York’s Apollo Theater.

The late Cuban-born singer was honored on Saturday, March 24, marking the 50th anniversary of her first appearance on the stage of the iconic New York Theater.

The concert was part of a series commemorating the 80th anniversary of the legendary Harlem Theater.

Cruz made her Apollo debut on March 22, 1964, sharing the stage with Cuban musician Machito and Joe Cuba, a Puerto Rican musician.

The “Queen of Salsa” is the first Latin artist to be honored with a place at the Apollo’s Walk of Legends.

Celia Cruz, who died of cancer on July 16, 2003, in her Fort Lee, New Jersey, home at the age of 77, is buried in a mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Guadalajara kicks off 29th Film Festival

The 29th Guadalajara International Film Festival, or FICG, which has the Canadian province of Quebec as guest of honor, was inaugurated at the Telmex Auditorium in this western Mexican city.

Sara Garcia (1895-1980), the “grandma of Mexican movies,” was dedicated the Posthumous Tribute, and was accepted in her name by Enrique Vidal, a personal friend of the unforgettable actress.

Countries with the greatest participation in the festival were Mexico with 370 films, Spain with 306, Argentina with 153, Brazil with 139, Chile with 55, and the province of Quebec with more than 60.

Saccho Dance Theater presents Dying While Black and Brown

Compiled by El Reportero’s staff

Marta LledoMarta Lledo

ZACCHO Dance Theatre and San Francisco’s Neighborhood Arts Collaborative presents two free performances of the 2011 work, Dying While Black and Brown.

A panel discussion will follow Friday’s performance with Ana Zamora, Senior Policy Advocate at ACLU and former Program Director at Death Penalty Focus, and James Bell, Founder and Executive Director of Burns Institute, a leading nonprofit in the field of juvenile justice and the reduction of ethnic and racial disparities.

First commissioned by the San Francisco Equal Justice Society, Dying While Black and Brown focuses on capital punishment and the disproportionate numbers of incarcerated people of color. The piece was created by ZACCHO’s Artistic Director, Joanna Haigood in collaboration with renowned jazz composer, Marcus Shelby.

“The piece Dying While Black & Brown impacted me in a very profound way, because it took me back to a place emotionally that allowed me to reconnect with the tragedy of the past 18 years of my life, and then it also reminded me of the triumph of winning back my freedom.” -Anthony Graves, Texas Defender, former death row inmate.

On Friday, April 4, at 8 p.m. & Saturday, April 5 at 2 p.m., at ZACCHO Studio, 1777 Yosemite Ave #330, San Francisco. For info call (415) 822-6744 or visit: www.zaccho.org. (Performance followed by panel discussion).

Marta Lledo Quartet Latin Moonlight in Oakland

Renowned Argentinean pianist, Marta Lledo (Argentine National Symphony), will be joined by Juan Escovedo (son of Pete Escovedo) on percussion, Paul Bonnel (has performed for the Dalai Lama) on bass, and Billy Johnson (former Santana drummer) on drums.

The musicians will present a fusion of Argentinean tango, Mexican boleros, Latin jazz, and classical pop. The program will consist of an array of popular classics, jazz standards, classical favorites, and tangos with a few creative twists. A wine reception will follow the show.

On Friday, April 4, at 8 p.m., at the intimate Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland, 1728 San Pablo Ave. (at 18th), Oakland, California.

Singer Rennea at the 27th Annual Sólo Mujeres

NikitaNikita

San Francisco-based Venezuelan singer, Rennea, will be singing an acoustic set as part of MAPP Mission Arts & Performance Project happening at The Mission Cultural Center in the Gallery space where “HOME, inside and out,” 27th Annual Solo Mujeres Show is happening.

This is a thoughtful, current and beautiful show worth giving it a close look. Curated by Susana Aragón e Indira Urrutia.

On Saturday April 4, 2014 6 to 6:45 p.m., at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission St., SF

Child singer, actress and model at Children Event

Nikita, the new promise of the children song in the Bay Area, will be participating with her voice and acting in the Children Event to celebrate 25 years of song writing written by Víctor Hugo Santos.

And although she interprets with ease other musical genres (in English and Spanish), Nikita, a singer, actress and children clothes model, has become the official interpreter of the songs of children troubadour Mr. Hugo Santos.

The event will be held on April 6 at 2 p.m. at the Plaza of the Mexican Heritage in San Jose, California.

For children of reentry, a new focus on family ties

by Anna Challet
New America Media

SACRAMENTO – While millions of children nationwide face extreme difficulties due to having parents who are incarcerated or under criminal supervision, State Senator Mark Leno thinks change is coming.

“The good news is that after many decades of building [more] prisons to incarcerate [more] of our citizens, and lengthening every sentence, and making [more] misdemeanors felonies, and of course selling it all under the auspices of being tough on crime, that it appears we have turned a corner,” he says.

Leno (who represents the state’s 11th District in the Bay Area) convened a policy forum earlier this month at the State Capitol to look at the impact of the criminal justice system on the families of those who enter it, particularly “children of reentry” – children and youth whose incarcerated parents have returned home.

Sponsored by the California Homeless Youth Project of the California Research Bureau and the California Council on Youth Relations (a project of New America Media), the forum also explored what can be done to change the system in ways that will support current inmates, the formerly incarcerated, and their families.

Leno cited Attorney General Eric Holder’s work at the national level to end mandatory minimum sentencing for low-level drug offenders. Law enforcement leaders who have been tough on crime, he said, are now realizing that the funding going to excessive incarceration is not money well spent, especially without reentry services that prevent recidivism.

In California, it costs about $50,000 a year to incarcerate one inmate. And in addition to state spending, advocates made clear that children have had to pay a huge price.

Nell Bernstein of the San Francisco Children of Incarcerated Parents Partnership said, “If we collectively don’t take responsibility … in whether or not we prepare people for reentry and in what barriers we do or don’t place in front of them … it falls to the kids.”

She points to “post-prison punishments,” such as laws that prohibit people with drug convictions from accessing public housing.

Leno agrees. “We scratch our heads and wonder [why we have] a 65 percent recidivism rate when we’re setting people up for an obvious opportunity to fail,” he said.

Bernstein says that the key variable is whether or not those released have family support. “The single greatest predictor of successful reentry is an ongoing connection with one’s family during incarceration,” she said. “If we do start supporting family connections, we’ll see success on a system level and on a family level.”

Sixteen-year-old Kmani Baxter spoke about how his father is currently incarcerated in Lancaster, in Southern California. Baxter lives in the Bay Area and was only able to see his father once last year by taking the train.

Brittany Rexford, 27, is a formerly incarcerated parent. “[My family] put forth the effort to help me stay connected with my daughter, to help me keep that relationship with her,” she said. “She was very young and I remember watching her through the glass and trying to teach her numbers and letters.” But Rexford was later moved to a penitentiary that was too far from home for her family to visit.

Rexford says it should be a priority to keep inmates “close to home so that the option of seeing their children is there. Don’t take someone from Shasta County and move them to Los Angeles.”

Alisha Murdock of Project WHAT! (an advocacy organization that trains service providers in how to meet the needs of children of the incarcerated) stressed the need for pre-release planning, especially for parents. Murdock’s mother was released from jail a month early and at night, over 100 miles from where Murdock lives, without money or identification – which Murdock says “jeopardized [her mother’s] sobriety.”

While she says that her mother is doing well now, she wishes the system had better prepared her mother “to come back, not just into society, but into my life.”

San Francisco Chief of Adult Probation Wendy Still highlighted ways that the city’s probation department is working to “break the intergenerational cycle of crime.” Still noted that 60 percent of parents in state prisons in California report being held over 100 miles from their children, and that children’s odds of delinquency increase dramatically when visits with parents are denied. She also says that regular visits with children lower rates of recidivism for parents after they are released.

Still says that San Francisco is in the process of implementing more robust pre-release planning for inmates, including individual risk and needs assessments, as well as individualized treatment plans that include services like parenting classes, substance abuse treatment, GED classes, and housing counseling. San Francisco, she says, is also moving toward alternative sentencing for mothers with young children, in addition to contact visiting for inmates and their children in more family-friendly environments.

Obama’s 2015 budget adopts contradictory stance on immigration

by the El Reportero’s wire services

Barack ObamaBarack Obama

The Obama Administration’s Fiscal Year 2015 budget proposal is of two minds about how to deal with the broken U.S. immigration system. On the one hand, the document calls for the creation of “a pathway to earned citizenship for hardworking men and women” who are in the United States without legal status. On the other hand, the budget would continue to devote significant sums of money to the detention and deportation of many of the same people for whom the administration would like to create a path to citizenship. In other words, the administration pledges that it will do its best to deport from the country the very same people it wants to help stay.

The budget’s commitment to continued deportations is evident from its proposed spending on immigration enforcement (found in the DHS Budget in Brief). Although the budget does contain little nuggets of pro-immigrant spending—such as “$10 million to continue support for immigrant integration grants that assist lawful permanent residents in preparing for naturalization and citizenship”— the fact is that a few million dollars spent on integration pales in comparison to the billions spent on enforcement: $2.6 billion for Enforcement and Removal Operation within Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). $124 million to expand the E-Verify employment authorization system. $24 million for ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local and state law -enforcement of – ficials to enforce federal immigration laws. A reduction of only 10 percent—from 34,000 to 30,539—in the controversial “bed quota,” which specifies how many immigration-detention beds must be filled every day.

Cuba allows users to access E-Mail on mobile devices

Cuba announced Saturday a new service that will allow access to a local e-mail account on mobile devices, a novelty on the island due to existing restrictions on Internet connections for cell phones and home computers.

“For now the only email that can be read on a mobile phone must arrive on a nauta.cu account, which is obtained by signing up for an e-mail account on the Nauta service,” the daily Juventud Rebelde said.

“It is still not possible for a mobile to access other services like free webmail or e-mail on the Internet, so it is recommended that messages received on them be redirected to the Nauta account,” the newspaper said.

According to the published rates, Cubans will pay 1 convertible peso (CUC, the equivalent of $1.00) for each megabyte of e-mail received or sent, a high price for most inhabitants of the island, where the average monthly wage is around $20. In Cuba, the government grants the “social” use of Internet in public centers.

Last June, 100 new state cyber-centers were opened where, through the national portal Nauta, permanent and temporary accounts are offered for navigating the Internet, among other services.

The appearance of these centers initiated a series of small steps by the government in recent months to improve Internet access in a country where the percentage of people with connections is around 15 percent, and where the great majority of inhabitaants are not allowed access to the Web at home.
Up to now, that possibility is only permitted for certain professionals like doctors, journalists, academics, intellectuals and artists.

Brazil discovers 17 Peruvians working in slave-like conditions in Rio

Officials of the Labor and Employment Ministry found 17 Peruvians working in conditions of slavery at a sewing workshop in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, officials told Efe on Saturday.

According to the consul general of Peru in Sao Paulo, Arturo Jarama, some of his compatriots had their documents confiscated and severe limitations imposed on going outdoors, particularly the ones who had been working there only a short time and had yet to win the trust of the owners, who are of Peruvian descent.
“I got the impression that some of the workers were kidnapped, above all those who have been there less time,” Jarama said, adding that “some had freedom and others didn’t.”

The complaint was filed by the Peruvian Consulate before the Justice and Defense of Citizens Secretariat after one of the workers escaped from the sweatshop and spilled the whole story.

Obama’s former foreign policy adviser said – in 1977 – that the U.S. had to gain control of Ukraine

The Grand Chessboard: Ukraine, the game key in the game of world control.
Neoconservatives planned regime change throughout the Middle East and North Africa 20 years ago. Robert Parry correctly points out that the Neocons have successfully “weathered the storm” of disdain after their Iraq war fiasco. But the truth is that Obama has long done his best to try to implement those Neocon plans.

Similarly, ever since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the U.S. has pursued a strategy of encircling Russia, just as it has with other perceived enemies like China and Iran.

In 1997, Obama’s former foreign affairs adviser, and president Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser – Zbigniew Brzezinski – wrote a book called The Grand Chessboard arguing that the U.S. had to take control of Ukraine (as well as Azerbaijan, South Korea, Turkey and Iran) because they were “critically important geopolitical pivots.”

A 2008 news report describes some of Zbigniew Brzezinski ideas in his book, to send the U.S. into war for world domination:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, once endorsed the creation and support of militant Islamic forces in Afghanistan, that were directed by accused 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden. Brzezinski had admitted to the provocation of a Soviet-Afghan war that claimed the lives of 1 million people in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Brzezinski also sanctioned the support of a southeast Asian regime that claimed the lives of up to 2 million during the 1970s, through execution, starvation and forced labor.

And in an interview, cites the same article, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser, admits that it was U.S. policy to support radical Islamists to undermine Russia. He admits that U.S. covert action drew Russia into starting the Afghan war in 1979. Asked if he has regrets about this, he responds, “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Then he is asked if he regrets “having given arms and advice to future terrorists,” and he responds, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

From the History Commons: October 1997: Brzezinski Highlights the Importance of Central Asia to achieving world domination:

American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, in which he portrays the Eurasian landmass as the key to world power, and Central Asia with its vast oil reserves as the key to domination of Eurasia. He states that for the U.S. to maintain its global primacy, it must prevent any possible adversary from controlling that region. He notes: “The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” He predicts that because of popular resistance to U.S. military expansionism, his ambitious Central Asian strategy cannot be implemented, “except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” [Brzezinski, 1997, pp. 24-25, 210-11] The book also theorizes that the U.S. could be attacked by Afghan terrorists, precipitating a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and that the U.S. may eventually seek control of Iran as a key strategic element in the US’s attempt to exert its influence in Central Asia and the Middle East. [Brzezinski, 1997]

Regarding Ukraine, Brzezinski said (hat tip Chris Ernesto):

Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.

However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.

And now Obama is pushing us into a confrontation with Russia over Ukraine and the Crimea.

As Ernesto notes:

Late last year when Ukraine’s now-ousted president Viktor Yanukovych surprisingly canceled plans for Ukrainian integration into the European Union in favor of stronger ties with Russia, the U.S. may have viewed Ukraine as slipping even further out of its reach.

At that point, with the pieces already in place, the U.S. moved to support the ousting of Yanukovych, as evidenced by the leaked phone conversation between US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland [arch-Neocon Robert Kagan’s wife] and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. When peaceful protests were not effective in unseating Yanukovych, the violence of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda party and Right Sector was embraced, if not supported by the west.
In today’s Ukraine, the U.S. runs the risk of being affiliated with anti-Semitic neo-Nazis, a prospect it probably feels can be controlled via a friendly western media. But even if the risk is high, the U.S. likely views it as necessary given the geopolitical importance of Ukraine, as Brzezinski mapped out in 1997.

In other words, Obama is following the same old playbook that the Neocons have been pushing for more than a decade.

(Aidan Monaghan’s 911 Blogger contributed to this report).

 

by Washington’s Blog

Chemotherapia-free cancer treatment uses body’s own inmune system to attack diseased cells

by J. D. Heyes

A revolutionary breakthrough in cancer treatment that is being described as a “game-changer” would see the body’s own immune system utilized to attack diseased cells, rather than rely on sickening chemotherapy, researchers announced lately.

Scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York say they have successfully experimented with the new procedure, using 16 people who had advanced leukemia and had otherwise run out of treatment options. The researchers said the patients underwent targeted T cell therapy, which then eliminated the cancerous cells in most of the patients, CBS News reported.

Dr. David Agus, a CBS News expert contributor who leads the Westside Cancer Center at the University of Southern California, called the team’s work “remarkable research.”

‘This was no fluke’

“They took 16 patients with advanced leukemia, who had failed chemotherapy or not responded at all to chemotherapy, so they classically have weeks to months to live. They took their own immune cells out… and inserted a homing mechanism to target the cancer cells,” said Agus.

“The cancer cells were growing on their own, unrelentingly, and these immune cells came in and they could target and kill them. They become assassins. So, making their own immune cells become assassins and it worked.”

Study senior author Dr. Renier Brentjens, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering, told HealthDay News: “First and foremost, we’ve shown that this isn’t a fluke. This is a reliable result. … We’re still very much in the early stages of development. … [T]his is potentially the first promising new therapy [for advanced B-cell ALL] in a long time.”

In additional comments to Agence France-Presse, Brentjens said, “Basically, what we do is re-educate the T cell in the laboratory with gene therapy to recognize and now kill tumor cells.” Following 15 years of study on the procedure, Brentjens said that “it seems to really work in patients with this particular type of cancer.”

Of the 16 patients who took part in the study, 14 achieved total remission. But, Agus said, the treatment does not cure cancer on its own.

“What we know is this cancer comes back and the only way to cure it is with a bone marrow transplant,” he said. “You can only go for a bone marrow transplant if you’ve first eliminated the cancer cells in the blood.”

The research oncologist said the therapy was able to remove cancer cells from the blood effectively, and that “most of the patients were able to go on to transplant.” At that point, he said, patients can actually be cured of the disease.

‘Treatment might work too well’

Some of the biggest problems with current cancer treatments such as chemotherapy are the side effects: The drugs involved in chemotherapy can make patients very sick and weak. And while Agus said all treatments will have some side effects, the new therapy might actually work “too well.”

“These cells kill all of the cancer at once and it’s actually the toxins from the dead cancer cells that cause the side effects,” he said, adding that, since the initial success among the 16 patients, between 60 and 80 in the U.S. have signed onto trials, which are also being launched in Europe. The oncologist said the breakthrough treatment was not possible even a decade ago, because it was built on years of prior trial-and-error involving gene therapy. At present, the therapy has not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Agus said the treatment can cost upwards of $100,000 per patient, but he said that cost should decrease as the therapy advances. (Natural News).

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/044254_chemotherapy_cancer_treatment_immune_system.html#ixzz2vjJdB8R1.

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