Members of the Azteca Dance group offer a ceremony during Obama’s visit in San Francisco.­ ­(PHOTOS BY LEYNER PARRA)

­­­The visit of President Obama to the San Francisco Bay Area sent hundreds of people to protest his failure to pass the so longed migratory reform. It was one of his electoral campaign promises.

For many of the participants the President Obama not only has not kept his campaign promises, but on the contrary it has increased racism, discrimination in our communities, as the one happening in Arizona.

The people asked for help to save their homes from the bank looting and a stop to the persecution of ICE, which has been causing painful family divisions.

Some of them suggest that the Obama plan is to recruit the undocumented people and enlist them into his civil militias that he is creating and use them against the civil population when protests start exploiting for the economic crisis.

by the University of Michigan

­ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Men die at higher rates than women across the lifespan. A new study shows that this excess mortality is the price of reproductive competition.

Researchers have long known that women outlive men on average, and more recently have discovered that men have higher mortality risks across the entire lifespan. University of Michigan researcher Daniel Kruger finally explains why: It is all about sex.

Women invest more physiologically in reproduction than men, thus men compete with other men for mating partners and try to make themselves attractive to women. This competition leads to strategies that are riskier for men both behaviorally and physiologically, and these result in higher levels of mortality.

“If mating competition is responsible for excess male mortality, then the more mating competition there is, the higher excess male mortality will be,” said Kruger, an assistant professor in the U-M School of Public Health. In the current study, Kruger shows that two factors related to the level of male reproductive competition contribute to higher rates of risk-taking and mortality.

The first factor is polygyny, the social situation in which one man maintains sexual relations with many women (the opposite is polyandry—one women and many men). Several species of primates show high levels of polygyny, where one dominant male mates with most of the females in the group, and other males are left out. Human cultures have varying degrees of polygyny, and Kruger found that the more prevalent the practice, the higher the rate of male mortality.

In a polygynous culture, men receive enormous evolutionary benefits from becoming dominant. Those guys get all the gals, almost literally. Non-dominant men are left with few, or none, to choose from. In a polygynous group, winning males reap huge rewards; everyone else gets next to nothing.

The second factor: the degree of economic inequality. In mate selection, men are valued for the resource investment that they can provide, bringing benefits their offspring. The wider the gap between rich and poor, the more likely men are to die young.In less egalitarian societies, a man with what scientists call “resource control”—money, property and economic security—is more likely to find sexual partners.

In both of these cases, there’s a yawning gap between climbing to the top of the heap–either as the dominant male or the wealthiest—and falling short. To lose position in polygynous or economically extreme societies is to lose almost any chance at finding a sexual partner.

What’s more, Kruger says, these two factors are related, because getting the lion’s share of economic wealth is often virtually the same thing as becoming dominant male.

And so the battle to be “king of the hill” turns deadly. When winners take all, men have very little to lose—and a whole lot to gain—by risking everything to get to the top.

Kruger is an expert in the field of evolutionary psychology, the study of how present-day human thinking and behavior has been shaped by past evolutionary adaptations. It turns out that some other primates display such winner-take-all behavior, and there’s a strong evolutionary reason behind it. By dominating most or all of the sexual encounters in a group, males who are higher on the social and economic ladder are more likely to pass their genes onto the next generation.

The opposite case, Kruger found, also holds true: The more egalitarian a society, and the more devoted to monogamy, the less extreme the risk taking. But no human culture, Kruger concluded, is perfectly free of such competition.

­­­by the El Reportero’s news service

Guillermo Fariña

­In May 23 a hunger striking journalist, Guillermo Fariñas, told several international news organizations that the Cuban government had agreed with the Roman Catholic (RC) Church a stepped process to deal with the island’s imprisoned dissidents whereby authorities would begin today (May 24) to transfer sick prisoners to hospitals and gradually re-locate others to facilities in their home provinces.

It suits the embattled Havana government to utilize the RC church to diffuse some of the internal tension on the island and deflect U.S.- and European Union-led pressure.

The question is whether President Raúl Castro views this as anything other than a one-time ‘gesture’. Certainly, the established dissident community, led by the likes of Marta Beatriz Roque and Elizardo Sánchez, remains fairly sceptical about his motives. The government may calculate that it can split the small dissident community by meeting some politically risk-free demands, like making a gesture on the issue of the prisoners.

Peru resumes oil auctions two years after corruption scandal

Peru reopened oil auctions this week, two years after the government was rocked by serious corruption allegations in the bidding process.

(Latin News, Pravda, and M&C news contributed to this report.)

by Luis Carlos López

Governor Jan Brewer stirred already troubled waters May 11 when she approved a bill that targets for elimination ethnic studies programs in the state’s public schools.

The measure comes less than a month after Brewer signed off on the toughest immigration law in the country.

Its framer, state school superintendent To­m Horne, contends that the measure in no way singles out Latinos, but rather promotes social and ethnic integration. In a May 14 interview with Weekly Report, Horne said he has worked tirelessly to distance the bill from SB1070, which is being challenged in court as anti-immigrant and unconstitutional by Hispanic and civil rights groups.

“I’m trying to get schools to treat students as individuals,” Horne said. “I don’t think it’s right to divide kids according to each race… School is a place to expand your horizons, not to narrow them.”

Also contacted by Weekly Report, Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, chair of Arizona State University’s Transborder Chicano/a Latino/a Studies, labeled the new law as an “antiintellectual” move to erase the state’s historical memory of its sometimes discriminatory actions. “We were not even in history books before the Chicano movement,” he said.

The legislation prohibits classes designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group or such that advocate ethnic solidarity instead of equality as individuals. It does not “prohibit the instruction of the Holocast, any other instance of genocide or the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on ethnicity, race or color.”

If a district or charter school is found in New Battlelines Are Forming in Arizona over Hispanic Ethnic Studiesviolation, consequences include withholding up to 10% of the monthly apportionment of state aid.

State Representative Steve Montenegro (R) claimed to Weekly Report that the bill does not ban ethnic studies entirely, but seeks to eliminate those which promote “sedition and racial prejudice.”

“The intent of this legislation is to ensure that pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals,” Montenegrosaid. “Ethnic studies will continue and this bill does not prohibit schools from discussing controversial aspects of history, including instances of historical oppression toward a race or class of people.”

Horne emphasized his approach to integrateall students by saying, “Students will learn about their culture at home.”

He began his campaign to terminate ethnic studies that promoted extreme “separatist” ideology in June 2007 with a five-page “Open Letter” addressed to residents of the  Tucson Unified School District. The letter attacked textbooks filled with “destructive  ethnic chauvinism,” use of the offensive term “Raza,” charter verbiage of the student group Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán  (MEChA), which promotes cultural solidarity and “an almost totalitarian climate of fear” that keeps TUSD employees from speaking out against ethnic studies.

Horne described an incident that he says he witnessed during a visit to Tucson Magnet High School by Dolores Huerta, United Farm Workers co-founder with César Chávez: “My Deputy, Margaret García Dugan, a Hispanic Republican, came to refute the allegation made earlier to the student body that ‘Republicans hate Latinos.’ Her speech was non-partisan and professional, urging students to think for themselves and avoid stereotypes. Yet a small group of La Raza Studies students treated her rudely, and when the principal asked them to sit down and listen, they defiantly walked out.

“By contrast, teenage Republicans listened politely when Dolores Huerta told the entire student body that ‘Republicans hate Latinos.”

Horne observed, “I believe the students did not learn this rudeness at home, but from their Raza teachers…”

Such actions prompted Horne to push for state legislation that would ban such studies to be taught in public schools, he said. Vélez-Ibáñez retorted, “If it hadn’t been for the fact of the persons who insisted in writing the history of groups in this country, we would still be erased. What they are trying to do is to erase historical memory from high school kids.”

He concluded, “Whether the instruction was done well or badly, that is another question, but to attack the notion that somehow this is a land of only American individuals…is anti-intellectual.”