by the El Reportero’s news services

This week (August 25) marks the start of four weeks of campaigning for the September 26 legislative elections in which the opposition, which boycotted the last election in 2005, is hoping to secure up to 40 percent of the 165 seats up for grabs in the unicameral National Assembly (AN).

As ever, all elections in Venezuela effectively become a referendum on President Hugo Chávez himself. The ruling Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), which is not particularly popular as a party, is already calling on its supporters to ‘vote for Chávez’, despite the fact that he is not on the ballot – and despite the fact that pollsters have identified mounting voter fatigue with the president.

Colombia’s Farc call for Unasur summit A

Colombian guerrilla group, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc), released a public letter addressed to the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) in which it offered to “put forward our vision of the Colombian conflict in a Unasur summit”. The letter is the second call from the group for a dialogue since President Juan Manuel Santos was elected on June 20. On July 30, ‘Alfonso Cano’ (Guillermo Sáenz), the leader of the Farc, released a video message in which he asked Santos to “talk”. The administration, however, has refused to hold a dialogue with the guerrillas as long as the latter continue to refuse the government’s three preconditions to hold talks: the release of all hostages; the release of all child soldiers; and an end to the use of land mines.

Peru leader charged with rebellion eyes politics

A Peruvian protest leader facing rebellion charges stemming from deadly clashes last year announced Wednesday that Amazon Indians are looking to form their own political party, and he may be its presidential candidate.

Aidesep, an umbrella group representing 65 tribes across the Peruvian jungle, is collecting signatures to register the new party and could pick a candidate as soon as September for next April’s election, said Alberto Pizango, a Shawi Indian who is the group’s president.

“If the people propose that I be the political figure who can carry forward their grand ideals, their grand proposals, their grand projects, I will accept” the nomination,” Pizango said.

The new party is to be known as the Alternative Alliance of Humanity. It also intends to field congressional candidates.

Farc bomb attack and court ruling on US base accord could boost Santos

Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos announced during his investiture on August 7 that the successes of his predecessor Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010) on the security front had left him free to concentrate on economic issues and social justice. Within the first 10 days of his term, Santos was given two sharp reminders that he will not be able to switch off on security at  Any point.

Firstly the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) sent a stark warning to Santos that it remains a force by detonating a car bomb in central Bogotá. Then, the constitutional court (CC) ruled that the October 2009 Defense Cooperation Agreement between Colombia and the US was unconstitutional. Both developments could actually have tangible benefits for Santos. (Latin News and Associated Press contributed to this report.)

by World Natural Health Organization and news

The synthetic sugar used in a wide variety of consumer products, such as pastries and deserts cause cerebral damage, memory loss and confusion as affirmed by the Mexican Association of Studies for Consumer Defence ( AMEDEC ).

In a message, the Association indicated the sweetener substance, called “aspartame”, which is distributed in Mexico under various brands, to sweeten drinks and principally the drinks labled “light”.

According to AMEDEC, the english publication “New Scientist” and the Consumers International warn that this substance can contribute to the development of Alzheimer. They also indicated that the chemical components of “aspartamo” have other dire consequences for excessive use including damage to the retina and nervous system.

It explained that the substance is composed of two aminoacids, fenilalanina and aspartic acid plus alcohol and methanol. it states that on taking aspartame and spasms are suffered, sharp pains, numbness in the legs, vertigo, depression, anxiety attacks, difficulty in speech, blurry vision and memory loss is due to “aspartame sickness”.

The Association showed that there are more than 5,000 products that contain this sweetner whose patent has expired. Further it said that it is not a diabetic product in that it generally leads to a craving for carbohydrates that can cause a fatal loss of control over levels of blood sugar. In pregnant women aspartame can cause deformities and mental retardation in fetuses. Check all products before using, eating or drinking it. Chewing gum, diet sodas, candies, canned or frozen foods may have this substance hazardous to your health. Stay aways from all these products that even can lead to death.

There was a judicial suite in three separate California courts against twelve companies that produce or use this artificial sweetener. The suite has been filed in Shsta, Sonoma and Butte county in California.

The suites allege that the food companies committed fraud and violated guarantees by marketing to the public products like diet Coke, diet Pepsi, sugar free chewing gum, vitamins, yogurt and children’s asprin with complete knowledge that the artificial sweetener Aspartame is a neurotoxin.

­Out of work and sleeping in the fields.

by David Bacon

Near Reedley, on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, several men sleep in the field. They get creative in building their own shantytown.

Humberto comes from Zihuatanejo in Guerrero.

Pedro, who wears an earring in his ear, comes from Hermosillo in Sonora. Ramiro comes from a tiny town in the Lancandon jungle of Chiapas, about halfway between Tapachula on the coast, and Palenque, the site of the Mayan ruins.

None of the men has worked more than a few days in the last several months. The riteros (people with vans who give workers rides to the fields to work) won’t pick them up, because they say they live with the vagabundos (vagabonds). The men use bicycles for transportation.

The rancher who owns  the land has abandoned the orchard where they sleep. A number of other fields in the area are also abandoned.

by Michael Marcell

Federal and state governments spend more than $10,000 per pupil on elementary and secondary public education annually, but new desks and computers are not the Rosetta Stones needed to assist young, Latino students.

Forty-two percent of Hispanic 4th and 8th grade students in the U.S. public schools have below-basic English reading proficiency, according to a study presented at the National Press Club June 22 by the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators.

“Closing the Achievement Gap” was conducted by the Los Angeles- based Tomás Rivera Policy Institute.

It targeted states and school districts with high numbers of Hispanic middle- school students.

The results showed major achievement gaps between English Language Learners and non-ELL students. Seventy percent of ELL middle-school students have belowbasic reading levels compared to 15 percent and 24 percent for their 4th and 8th grade peers.

Delaware State Representative Joseph Miro said there is a uniform problem with the teaching ELL and ESL students. “Unless we dedicate the resources, not just money, and training of different educators, we are not going to be able to address the problem.” Miro said.

Sen. Melinda Romero (Puerto Rico), newly appointed chairwoman of the NAHCSL education taskforce, said teachers of ELL students need better professional development, assessments and resources.

“The ELL teachers are usually not up to par,” Romero said, stressing the vaue of parent involvement. “Usually the teachers are not Latino or Spanish speaking and the parents are afraid of being involved.

Much of the study focused on middleschool students. Romero said middle schools are where most Latino dropouts occur. She called them the “Wasteland of American education.”

“We have seen years where almost 65 percent  of the Latino community has dropped out in middleschool.” Romero said.

Consensus among the speakers was that ELL students fall behind early in their academic careers, starting in the first grade, and often drop out in frustration.

TRPI’s Wendy Charavia said most students who drop out do so as they are going into the 9th grade.

Charavia stressed the  mportance of college awareness as a goal and motivatorfor ELL students.

“If you’re in middleschool and have some idea of where you’re going to be after school, it’s a huge motivator to stay,” Charavia said. No clear strategy forparent involvement was put  forward at the presentation.

When asked by Weekly Report what was being done to increase parental participation, Miro, a former teacher, said “the expectation of schools at this point is to take the role to educate the kids with a decrease in the parents’ responsibility.”

Kansas State Rep. Mario Goico said the best way to begin the parental integration is by assigning students reading lists to be signed by their parents  acknowledging that they were, in fact, doing their work.

“You have to have a certain interaction between the teacher, the parent and the student in order to communicate the knowledge,” Goico said. Hispanic Link.

by the El Reportero’s staff

President Sebastián Piñera announced on July 25, that he would not issue a general pardon to retired members of the military convicted for violating human rights during the dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

That decision again demonstrated that Piñera is in no way a prisoner of the Right. Subsequent decisions (to restore diplomatic relations with Honduras and then to allow Ecuador to impose new terms on local  oil concessions operated by Chile’s state-owned Enap)mark Piñera as a pragmatist with principles.

Santos moves quickly to improve ties with Chávez and Colombian courts Within two working days of his inauguration on August 7, Juan Manuel Santos had addressed three of the most rancorous disputes that dogged the government of his predecessor Alvaro Uribe: institutional relations with the judiciary  and ties with Colombia’s neighbors, Ecuador and Venezuela.

Santos met 78 senior magistrates on August 9 in a bid to mend ties with the country’s top courts; he made an immediate, and important, gesture to Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, by  handing over the entire contents of the laptop of Raúl Reyes, the guerrilla leader killed during a cross-border raid by the Colombian military in March 2008; and then he entertained Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez on 10 August in Colombia’s Caribbean town of Santa Marta, where diplomatic relations were restored.

Compiled by the El Reportero’s staff

The State Assembly today approved and sent to Gov. Schwarzenegger SB 933, legislation authored by Sen. Jenny Oropeza to ban retailers from imposing surcharges on those who use debit cards. Assemblywoman Fiona Ma (D- San Francisco), a proponent of the measure, presented the bill on the Assembly Floor. The bill passed with a bipartisan vote of 45 to 24.

Senate Bill 933 would close a loophole in current law by prohibiting a retailer from imposing a surcharge on consumers who elect  to use their debit card or prepaid cards when making a purchase. A 1985 statue prohibits a retailer from charging a surcharge on a consumer who elects to use their credit card when making a purchase. Had debit or prepaid cards been in existence when the law passed, those forms of payment would have been included in the statute.

State-of-the-art technology to help California gambling addicts help themselves

The California State Attorney’s Offi ce unveiled this week, an innovative web-based computer program for all of California’s licensed cardrooms that is intended to help addicted gamblers break “their spiral of debt and addiction” by allowing them to voluntarily exclude themselves from gambling establishments.

“This system serves as a safety net for gambling addicts fi ghting to end their spiral of debt and addiction,” Brown said. “These are people who have chosen to help themselves, and we’ll assist them in keeping their pledges not to gamble.

An estimated one million Californians suffer from problem or pathological gambling, and more than 1,000 of them have signed up for the Attorney General’s Self Exclusion Program, which allows problem gamblers to voluntarily exclude themselves from licensed cardrooms. So far, the program applies only to card rooms and not to the California lottery, tribal casinos or horse racing, but if the cardroom program is successful, it can be expanded.

To join the Self Exclusion Program, a problem gambler fills out a form, has it notarized, attaches a photograph and chooses to be excluded for one year,five years or his or her lifetime. The Self Exclusion form can be found at http://ag.ca.gov/gambling/ exclusion_self.php.

In other state news, the State Attorney Offi ce also announced a half-milliondollar settlement with the operator of a sham nursing school in Los Angeles that created “the illusion it was training future nurses” by pretending to offer an accredited nursing program and tricking graduates into believing they had qualified to become registered nurses.

As many as 300 students paid $20,000 each to enroll and attend classes at RN Learning Center, which advertised its fast-track program for earning a bachelor of science degree in nursing in less than two years.

In the settlement negotiated by Brown’s offi ce on behalf of the Board of Registered Nursing, Junelou  Chalico Enterina, owner and operator of RN Learning Center, which operated on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, agreed to close his business and pay victims restitution of $500,000. He also agreed never again to open a nursing school in California.

by Ernesto López Hispanic Link News Service

With tempers flaring and emotions running high, members of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists packed a general meeting room in Denver during the group’s annual convention June 24, demanding answers to concerns about the organization’s financial woes and dwindling membership. Its officers tried to allay their fears, insisting the association is not exactly in debt despite raiding the scholarship and reserve funds to make ends meet. Leaders acknowledged that if an extra $125,000 is not raised by year’s end, NAHJ could indeed be in the red.

NAHJ asking members to dig deep into their own pockets — even in this recession in which many have lost or are in fear of losing their jobs — to sustain NAHJ’s future.

Members barraged NAHJ’s leaders with a series of concerns and criticisms. It had not adequately communicated its financial woes, they complained. NAHJ executive director Iván Román tried to calm the tense crowd.  “I am very hopeful that we are going to make it,” he said. “Please be patient.”

His answer echoes a concern cutting through the entire journalism profession as it tries to contend with the double whammy of a dragging national recession and changing public habits relating to how people choose to get their news.

Massive staffing cuts, financial balance sheets and increasing public indifference about affirmative action show that Hispanics, blacks and other racial and ethnic groups are taking the  biggest hits.

Overall, in a country that’s nearly a third nonwhite, whites still comprise 85 percent of newspersons working for daily newspapers. Hispanics, 15 percent of the population, make up less than five percent of journalists working for the daily press. NAHJ officials say the organization’s future in-  cludes a commitment to reaching ethnic parity in the business using their annual conventions as a major tool to recruit and train more Latinos but to depend on them no more as “cash cows.”

In past years, convention profits ranged as high as $300,000. This year, NAHJ will do well to break even after the final accounting. Corporate and foundation sponsors pitched in with only $400,000 to cover its program costs this year, just half of the $800,000 collected in 2007 during its San Jose, Calif., convention.

Attendance has declined consistently since 2006, when 1,800 people converged on the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., convention. This year, only 700 showed up. Founded in 1982, the association now counts 1,340 members, down several hundred from a few years ago. Forty percent of those are students, who pay only $35 in annual dues versus $75 for regular, associate and academic memberships. “I am going to cut to the chase,” said Dino Chiecchi, NAHJ financial officer who did not seek reelection at the convention. “We are in a difficult bind.” Chiecchi said the association had to borrow and cut “to survive.” The sum of $75,000 was borrowed from the student scholarship fund and another $75,000 from the association’s reserve account after a $300,000 shortfall in 2009.

NAHJ officials had hoped to return the funds, but the organization’s finances prevented that from happening.

Staff, already lean, was pressed to take three-week “furloughs” this year.

“We are screwed,” NAHJ board member Brandon Benavides said during a June 21 panel meeting

Executive director Iván Román framed the association’s dilemma more genteelly, but with no less urgency. “Having a profit from the annual conventions is what helps sustain NAHJ’s programs year-round. If there isn’t a profit, it makes it difficult to stay afloat.”

Ricardo Pimentel, who completed his two-year term as NAHJ president at the convention, maintained that the association is not in the red — yet. He urged members to contribute to the “Denver Challenge,” a fund drive to raise $25,000 to receive benefit of a matching grant. “We are not in the red. If we do nothing for the rest  of the year, then we will be,” said Pimentel, who is editorial page editor at the  Milwaukee Journal. “We are suffering as an industry. It has been two years  f people losing jobs and being fearful, but we will get through this.” Hispanic LInk.

(Ernesto López is a spring journalism graduate from Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, Calif. He wrote for theconvention newspaper Latino Reporter. Email him  at: mr.lopez@ymail.com)