by the University of Michigan

ANN ARBOR, Michigan.— Violent video games and movies make people numb to the pain and suffering of others, according to a research report published in the March 2009 issue of Psychological Science.

The report details the findings of two studies conducted by University of Michigan professor Brad Bushman and Iowa State University professor Craig Anderson. The studies fill an important research gap in the literature on the impact of violent media. In earlier work, Bushman and Anderson demonstrated that exposure to violent media produces physiological desensitization – lowering heart rate and skin conductance when viewing scenes of actual violence a short time later. But the current research demonstrates that violent media also affect help offered to an injured person, in a field study as well as in a laboratory experiment.

“These studies clearly show that violent media exposure can reduce helping behavior,” said Bushman, a U-M professor of psychology and communications and a research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).

“People exposed to media violence are less helpful to others in need because they are ‘comfortably numb’ to the pain and suffering of others, to borrow the title of a Pink Floyd song.”

In one of the studies, 320 college students played either a violent or a nonviolent video game for approximately 20 minutes. A few minutes later, they overheard a staged fight that ended with the “victim” sustaining a sprained ankle and groaning in pain.

People who had played a violent game took significantly longer to help the victim than those who played a nonviolent game – 73 seconds compared to 16 seconds. People who had played a violent game were also less likely to notice and report the fight. And if they did report it, they judged it to be less serious than did those who had played a nonviolent game.

In the second study, the participants were 162 adult moviegoers. The researchers staged a minor emergency outside the theater, in which a young woman with a bandaged ankle and crutches “accidentally” dropped her crutches and struggled to retrieve them.

The researchers timed how long it took moviegoers to retrieve the crutches. Half were tested before they went into the theater, to establish the helpfulness ­of people attending violent vs. nonviolent movies.

Half were tested after seeing either a violent or a nonviolent movie. Participants who had just watched a violent movie took over 26 percent longer to help than either people going into the theater or people who had just watched a nonviolent movie.

The studies are part of an on-going research program into the causes and consequences of human aggression conducted by Bushman, who is also affiliated with VU University Amsterdam.

­­Text and photography by Luis Alonso Muñoz

Luis Alonzo -M-uñoz, sitting in front of the ruins of Tazumal, El Salvador, exposes the deterioration of the steps of the Piramids of Tikal, Guatemala. (photo courtesy of Luis Alonzo Munoz)

The ruins of the cradle of one of the most ancient civilization of the American continent could disappear if the care keepers of these treasures do not act immediately.

The Mayan civilization is the most sophisticated culture in the ancient history of the American continent. They are the inventors of the mathematical symbol of to be or not to be, with the power to create the infinite of anything and of the infinite to return to nothing: the zero.

They count with the research most perfect calendar that does not have any comparison in the history of humanity. Its literature, the Popol Vuh (Book of the People), is its maxim expression.

Its painting, including murals and sculpture, possess a diversity of styles and skills, like the crystal skull, which is almost a fantasy, a dream for perfection of its finished one that up to today there is no idea of how it was elaborated. Its exquisite architecture is unique in its design. This wonderful cultural treasure bequeathed to humanity, it gets lost for by the irresponsibility of the governments for whom the protection of the UNESCO and the help of other countries to preserve this invaluable patrimony, is canalized in another direction.

Archaeologists of diverse universities and countries have plundered everything what they find in the excavations, leaving only the architectural skeleton, and often unfinished works.

The magnificent and most beautiful objects found, are secret to the world in the cellars of the universities of many countries, or in private collections of collectors that they have had and have the consent of the governments that lack the responsibility with the ancestral wealth, which cannot be for sell or under any type of agreement.

In El Salvador, in Jewelry of Cerén, vessels of mud met skeletons doubled in his interior and: where are they?

In the pyramids of Tazumal, Chalchuapa, the corpse of a priest found with pieces of jade: where are they? When I asked the employees for these objects, they showed not to have the remote idea that these ever existed. Their response is of a timid one, ­shrugging the shoulders and looking the other way, because they cannot give an explanation, since they ignore their cultural roots.

And if they are asked in English or French, the situation is chaotic for the tourist. The $3 charge for entry does not do not allow to pay for better qualified employees, and even worse is that if the tourists ask for a fact sheet or a free pamphlet with a description of the ruins, the employees say that they are being printed.

Guatemala is not different, there history repeats itself. For example, the main pyramids in Tikal were white 20 years ago, and now they are black, covered with moss and probably with fungi, while the porous steps are crumbling into pieces, irremediably towards its final destruction.

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by the El Reportero’s staff

On Feb. 17 a joint Mexican army and federal police unit chased a criminal gang through the border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, killing five gang members. Local gangs have confronted the army and federal police more frequently this year and, as a result, the homicide rate is rising again, after a brief lull in December and January. Both the government and the gangs are positioning themselves for the mid-term congressional elections in July. Politicians from all parties maintain that the gangs have been behind a recent spate of demonstrations by masked youths against the deployment of the army in the fight against organized crime. Politically, this is a big worry for the government.

Only FARC scandal can dent Correa’s re-election bid in Ecuador

Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa will face three main challengers in the presidential elections on April 26: one from the right, one from the centre and one from the left, inasmuch as these political categories mean anything where populist policies tend to prevail. Opinion polls suggest that Correa should win re-election at a canter. There is, however, one nasty cloud on his horizon: the growing evidence that some members of his government were complicit with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc). This undermines one of Correa’s main preconditions for re-establishing diplomatic relations with Colombia: that Bogotá stop linking his government to the Farc.

Chihuahua shootout results in 21 deaths

At least 21 people were killed in a fi re-fight between the army and criminal gang members in Chihuahua, northern Mexico on Feb. 10. This was the biggest military incident so far this year. Although the military operation was not entirely successful, it does suggest that its intelligence operations are improving.

Guatemala Colom Appreciates Cuba

Havana, Feb 18 (Prensa Latina) Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom’s first ofi cial visit to Cuba, which concluded on Wednesday, has been marked by full gratitude for Cuban solidarity towards his people.

The president has been reiterating that feeling for two days until hours before his scheduled departure today.

Colom’s gratitude was not only expressed with words, but with the symbolic gesture of the Quetzal Order, Guatemala´s highest decoration, granted by his own decision upon the Cuban Revolution’s leader Fidel Castro.

Before handing over the distinction to Cuban President Raúl Castro, Colom explained it as proof of love, affection, and gratefulness for all the solidarity.

France to Train Bolivian Officials

The Bolivian press highlights Wednesday the new accords signed between President Evo Morales and his French peer Nicolas Sarkozy, after the former’s offi cial visit to Paris, which concluded February 17.

According to Radio Patria Nueva station and Cambio newspaper, France will create a managerial ­school to train officials of the new plurinational state, in accordance with the new Constitution.

Morales stated that the French head of State will visit La Paz in September, to open that professional center, media reported. (Latin News and Prensa Latina contributed to this report).

by Jose de la Isla

HOUSTON — Oh boy, did The Los Angeles Times pull a doozy. On Feb 2 they carried an innocuous looking screed by Ira Mehlman. In it he excoriated, without naming it, the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, a group of 26 top Latino organizations. More than three months ago, they put immigration at the top of their reform priorities to press on the new Obama administration.

Mehlman thought NHLA should have used instead the priorities from a Pew Hispanic Center study based on public-opinion polling.

There is no confusing the 26 groups making up the NHLA. They have a long history advising presidential candidates and administrations. John Trasvina, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, heads the group.

The Pew Hispanic Center, in Washington, D.C, produces research but takes no position nor makes recommendations based on their findings.

And Ira Mehlman is simply listed as the Los Angeles office media director of the Federation for Immigration Reform, or FAIR.

For those who don’t know, FAIR was founded by and is “part of a network of groups created by a man who has been at the heart of the white nationalist movement for decades,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center website, announcing the release of a new report, “The Nativist Lobby: Three Faces of Intolerance.”

SPLC is a reputable organization that has been fighting and exposing extremist groups since the civil rights struggle.

FAIR is hardly in the same category as NHLA or Pew or SPLC, nor is it a reliable (forget sensible) source to tell the Latino community what’s best for it.

The right for FAIR to have its ludicrous viewpoint is its business But regurgitating old and settled issues, criticism and bitter discussion to stimulate controversy over a closed ­matter in a public forum is something to ponder about this kind of agit-prop, to borrow a term from George Orwell.

Clearly we need to turn to a new page in discussing immigration. It is self-evident from a study, released in January, by The Americas Majority Foundation.

It definitively shows that in 90 competitive House races of 2008, where immigration was used as an issue, candidates with less restrictive positions did much better than those who favored more restrictive ways. ‘’[I]mmigration was a wedge issue benefiting the Democratic Party, but not the G.O.P.,” said their report.

So the public has already settled the matter, and all that remains to be done is to start coming up with perspective and good proposals about what to do next.

The other guys lost. We don’t have to replay their exaggerations and lies, unless of course newspaper editors never read their own papers.

That’s why there’s no need to regress back to the hours following the election more than three months ago to grouse about the people’s choice. It’s almost like arguing that John McCain really did win the election.

No he didn’t. And FAIR’s perspective lost decisively. Period.

Instead, there is a public need to provide a forum for those who do have something to offer Instead, “immigration” is now serving as the petty excuse for resisting change and denying we need to move ahead and create opportunities.

For starters, those who are interested in living in the future instead of trying to prevent it would from happening would benefit from looking at “Latino Metropolis,” a book by professors Victor Valle and Rodolfo Torres.

It helps put some of the history of migration into perspective. It implies how grand opportunities are forming and how global cities connect into new cross border networks.

Visionaries are needed. That’s the help wanted sign some newspapers, websites and think tanks should put up on their front windows. Tell the losers with their hearts of darkness they need not apply and to just keep on walking by. Hispanic Link.