Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Indigenous Mexicans find little cheer in independence bicentennial

Issued on: 22/09/2021

Mexican woman from the Otomi indigenous community are seen in the occupied National Institute of Indigenous Peoples building in Mexico City

PEDRO PARDO AFP

Mexico City (AFP)

Two centuries after their country won independence from Spain, indigenous Mexicans like Fidel Flores say that poverty, marginalization and territorial disputes mean there is little reason for them to celebrate.

Some even say that indigenous Mexicans suffer more today than during colonial times.

In the central state of Puebla, Flores and hundreds of indigenous Nahua residents last month took over a well operated by a foreign-owned bottling company they accuse of overexploitation.

The water coming up from the ground in the shadow of the majestic Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl volcanoes "is a divine gift" and not the property of a private firm, said the 74-year-old.

"Whoever tries to profit from the water will receive the punishment of the people!" a banner warns at the site, where protesters have put up barricades using car tires.

Flores said that before the "peaceful seizure" of the spring, the residents reported the case to the authorities because other wells were drying up, but they were ignored.

"We're suffering more than in colonial times," because at least then indigenous people did not have to fight to protect natural resources, he said.

Bottling company Bonafont, owned by the French group Danone, told AFP that the well's operation was not connected to the surface water sources used by the community.

- Chronic poverty -

Nearly 70 percent -- 8.4 million -- of Mexico's indigenous people live in poverty, and 28 percent are in extreme poverty, according to the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy.

That is far above the figure for the non-indigenous population, 39 percent of which lives below the poverty line and around five percent in extreme poverty, in a country of 126 million.

Members of Mexico's indigenous communities guard a bottling plant they have occupied in the central state of Puebla

PEDRO PARDO AFP

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who took office in 2018 with an indigenous ceremony, has apologized for historical wrongs and emphasizes that states with large indigenous populations receive more social investment than many others.

But some communities complain that their situation has worsened due to the president's mega infrastructure projects like the Tren Maya rail link through the Yucatan Peninsula.

"It will destroy the environment, but the president is determined. Our opinion doesn't matter to him," said indigenous activist Pedro Uc.

"All this talk of ending marginalization of the indigenous people is still just talk" because the people still face "poverty, marginalization, racism and contempt," he said.

Uc, who has received anonymous death threats in the past, is adamant that his people have "nothing to celebrate" during the government's bicentennial events this month.

Lopez Obrador has asked Spain and the Catholic Church to apologize for the abuses committed during the conquest and evangelization.

But the president's rhetoric "contradicts his search for economic development in conventional capitalist terms," said Federico Navarrete, an expert in indigenous issues at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

After the armed uprising of the Zapatista guerrillas in the impoverished southern state of Chiapas in 1994 to fight for more rights, reforms allowed the creation of autonomous indigenous governments.

Nearly 70 percent of Mexico's indigenous people live in poverty, according to the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy

PEDRO PARDO AFP

However, rights such as access to education in indigenous languages are still not recognized in some parts of the country.

To make themselves heard, hundreds of families from the Otomi community in need of housing have occupied the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples building in Mexico City for nearly a year ago.

The bureaucrats' cubicles now serve as dormitories, a tortilla oven has been set up in the parking lot and a handicraft workshop has been installed.

"The government has never wanted to listen to us," said 54-year-old Isabel Valencia from the town of Amealco in the central state of Queretaro.

No government spokesperson responded to AFP's requests for an interview about the matter.

"There have been years of waiting and knocking on their doors while they pretend to listen to us," Valencia said.

© 2021 AFP

Rare Australia eathquake causes panic in Melbourne

Issued on: 22/09/2021

Emergency and rescue officials examine a damaged building in the popular shopping area of Chapel Street in Melbourne on September 22, 2021.

Text by: NEWS WIRES

A rare quake rattled southeastern Australia early Wednesday, shaking buildings, knocking down walls and sending panicked Melbourne residents running into the streets.

The shallow tremor hit east of the country's second-largest city just after 9:00am local time (2300 GMT) and was felt hundreds of kilometres (miles) away.

The US Geological Survey put the magnitude of the quake at 5.8, later revised up to 5.9, and said it struck at a depth of 10 kilometres (six miles).

With Melbourne beginning its eighth week of pandemic lockdown and bracing for a third straight day of violent anti-vaccine protests, most residents were at home when the quake struck.

Zume Phim, 33, owner of Melbourne's Oppen cafe, said he rushed onto the street when the temblor hit.

"The whole building was shaking. All the windows, the glass, was shaking -- like a wave of shaking," he told AFP.

"I have never experienced that before. It was a little bit scary."

In a popular shopping area around Melbourne's Chapel Street, masonry debris tumbled from buildings and littered the roads.

Bricks and rubble surrounded Betty's Burgers and large sheets of metal hung off the restaurant awning.

"We were fortunate that nobody was in the restaurant at the time," the restaurant said in a Facebook post.

Sizable earthquakes are unusual in Australia.

"It was quite violent but everyone was kind of in shock," Melbourne cafe worker Parker Mayo, 30, told AFP.

'Very disturbing event'

At magnitude 5.9, this was "the biggest event in southeast Australia for a long time" Mike Sandiford, a geologist at the University of Melbourne told AFP.

"We had some very big ones at magnitude six in the late 1800s, though precise magnitudes are not well known."

A quake of this size is expected every "10-20 years in southeast Australia, the last was Thorpdale in 2012" he said. "This is significantly bigger."

Geoscience Australia reported the initial quake was followed by a series of four smaller ones, ranging from magnitude 2.5 to 4.1.

Sandiford said Australians should expect "many hundreds of aftershocks, most below human sensitivity threshold, but probably a dozen or more that will be felt at least nearby".

The quake "would have caused many billions of dollars in damage had it been under Melbourne", he added.

The mayor of Mansfield, near the quake epicentre, said there was no damage in the small town but it had taken residents by surprise.

"I was sitting down at work at my desk and I needed to run outside. It took me a while to work out what it was," Mark Holcombe told public broadcaster ABC.

"We don't have earthquakes that I am aware of -- none of the locals I spoke to this morning had that experience with earthquakes here before -- so it is one right out of left field."

Emergency services said they had received calls for help as far away as Dubbo, about 700 kilometres (435 miles) from the quake epicentre, with fire and rescue crews dispatched to help.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, speaking from New York, said there were no initial reports of injuries.

"It can be a very, very disturbing event for an earthquake of this nature," he said. "They are very rare events in Australia."

Recovery efforts may be complicated by the ongoing pandemic lockdown and ongoing protests.

Hundreds of demonstrators wearing work boots and hi-visibility jackets again rampaged through central Melbourne Wednesday in protest against vaccine requirements for construction workers.

Police on Tuesday fired pepper spray, foam baton rounds and rubber ball grenades to disperse the crowd and warned further protests would "not be tolerated".

(AFP)

UN agency: Innovation continued even as coronavirus emerged

Mon., September 20, 2021, 5:36 a.m.·2 min read

GENEVA (AP) — The U.N.'s intellectual property agency said Monday that innovation marched forward last year despite the impact of the coronavirus outbreak. Technology, pharmaceuticals and biotech industries boosted their investments, even as hard-hit sectors like transport and travel eased back on spending.

The World Intellectual Property Organization, which helps coordinate and approve international patents, trademarks and other intellectual property, also warned that change in the overall “innovation landscape” was happening too slowly, saying a broader array of countries should benefit from it as the world rebuilds after the pandemic ebbs.

The findings released Monday emerged from WIPO’s latest innovation index report for 2020, which ranked Switzerland, Sweden, the United States, Britain, and fast-climber South Korea — driven partly from creativity like K-Pop music — as the most innovative economies. China and France edged up in the rankings, which continue to be dominated by Asia, Europe and North America.

“Innovation is resilient — and even more resilient than we expected,” said WIPO Director General Daren Tang.

“What COVID has done is that it has disrupted certain industries, but it has accelerated certain industries,” Tang said in an interview in his office overlooking Lake Geneva. “It comes as no surprise that communications, hardware, software, ICT, these are sectors have done well” as well as the medical and biotech sectors.

The index ranks 132 countries, plus economies such as Hong Kong, and comes a year after WIPO said investments in innovation hit a record high in 2019 — an annualized rate of gain of 8.5 percent.

Top technology companies like Apple, Microsoft and Huawei increased investment on average about 10 percent last year, and venture capital investment surged — a trend that is continuing this year, WIPO said.

While the United States and China have largely driven the rise in R&D in recent years, other countries like Turkey, Vietnam, India and the Philippines — the so-called TVIP countries — have been rising consistently in the rankings over the past five years. Switzerland has consistently led the rankings for the past five years.

Overall, the WIPO report on the index said, “the global innovation landscape is changing too slowly. … There is urgent need for this to change.”

Jamey Keaten, The Associated Press

THE AUTHORITARIAN NATURE OF THE FAMILY

Parents in China laud rule limiting video game time for kids

Mon., September 20, 2021

Li Zhanguo’s two children, ages 4 and 8, don’t have their own smartphones, but like millions of other Chinese children, they are no strangers to online gaming.

“If my children get their hands on our mobile phones or an iPad, and if we don’t closely monitor their screen time, they can play online games for as long as three to four hours each time,” he said.

Not anymore.

Like many other parents, Li is happy with new government restrictions that limit children to just three hours weekly of online gaming time — an hour between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday most weeks.

The restrictions, which took effect earlier this month, are a tightening of 2019 rules that banned children from gaming overnight and limited them to 90 minutes most weekdays.

Experts say it’s unclear if such policies can help prevent addiction to online games, since children might just get engrossed in social media instead. Ultimately, they say, it’s up to parents to nurture good habits and set screen time limits.

The new rules are part of a campaign to prevent kids from spending too much time on entertainment that communist authorities consider unhealthy. That also includes what officials call the “irrational fan culture” of worshipping celebrities.

The technology restrictions reflect growing concern over gaming addiction among children. One state media outlet has called online games “spiritual opium,” an allusion to past eras when addiction to the drug was widespread in China.

“Adolescents are the future of the motherland, and protecting the physical and mental health of minors is related to the vital interests of masses, and in cultivating newcomers in the era of national rejuvenation,” the Press and Publications Administration said in a statement, alluding to a campaign by Chinese President Xi Jinping to cultivate a healthier society for a more powerful China.

Government reports in 2018 estimated that one in 10 Chinese minors were addicted to the internet. Centers have sprung up to diagnose and treat such problems.

Under the new regulations, the responsibility for ensuring that children play only three hours a day falls largely on Chinese gaming companies like NetEase and Tencent, whose wildly popular Honor of Kings mobile game is played by tens of millions across the country.

Companies have set up real-name registration systems to prevent young users from exceeding their game time limits, and have incorporated facial recognition checks that require users to verify their identities.

In some cases, companies will do sporadic facial recognition checks while people are playing, and they’ll be booted out of the game if they fail.

Regulators also ordered gaming companies to tighten examination of their games to ensure they don’t include harmful content such as violence.

And they've set up a platform that allows people who hold Chinese ID cards to report on gaming companies they believe are violating restrictions.

It’s unclear what penalties companies may face if they fail to enforce the regulations.

And even if such blanket policies are enforced, it is also unclear whether they can prevent online addiction, given that game companies design their products to entice players to stay online and come back for more, said Barry Ip, a senior lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire in England who has researched gaming and addiction. Children may just switch to other apps if they are forced to stop playing games.

“There are many forms of digital platforms that could potentially hold a young person’s attention just as well as gaming,” Ip said. “It’s just as easy for a young person to spend four hours on TikTok in the evening rather than play games if their time is uncontrolled.”

Short-video apps such as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, are extremely popular in China and are not subject to the same restrictions as games, though they do have “youth mode” features enabling parents to limit what children watch and for how long.

Douyin and TikTok developer ByteDance announced recently that users under 14 in China will automatically be in youth mode and limited to 40 minutes a day on Douyin. They also won't be able to access the app between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

“Many parents attribute their children’s suffering grades to gaming, but I disagree with this sentiment,” said Liu Yanbin, mother of a 9-year-old daughter in Shanghai. “As long as children don’t want to study, they will find some way to play. Games may be restricted now but there’s always short video, social media, even television dramas.”

Tao Ran, director of the Adolescent Psychological Development Base in Beijing, which specializes in treating internet addiction, expects about 20% of kids will find workarounds for the rules.

“Some minors are too smart, if you have a system in place to restrict them from gaming they will try to beat the system by borrowing accounts of their older relatives and find a way around facial recognition,” Tao said.

The new rules, he said, are a “last resort.”

Instead of relying on the government to intervene, parents need to take responsibility for limiting time spent on games, social media or the internet, experts say.

“The focus should be made on prevention, for example, informing parents about how games function, so that they are in a better position to regulate the involvement of their children,” said Joël Billieux, a psychology professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Li, the father of two young children, said he plans to arrange piano lessons for his daughter, since she has shown an interest in learning the instrument.

“Sometimes due to work, parents may not have time to pay attention to their children and that’s why many kids turn to games to spend time,” he said. “Parents must be willing to help children cultivate hobbies and interests so that they can develop in a healthy manner.”

___

Associated Press researcher Chen Si in Shanghai and video producer Caroline Chen in Beijing contributed to this story.

Zen Soo, The Associated Press

15-Wilhelm-Reich.-The-Development-of-the-Authoritarian-State-Apparatus-from-Rational-Social-interrelationships-1945.pdf (arteorg.com)

Photos: Ancient India through a geologist’s eyes

The secrets to how we got here lurk all around us. Finding and deciphering them takes time and a bit of luck. Thanks to the unrelenting work of geologists and archaeologists, both Indian and foreign, we know more each year, about how our nation took shape.

The ancients left behind their own clues that are both fascinating and revelatory. See how India has evolved over billions of year

UPDATED ON SEP 19, 2021 04:37 PM IST7 Photos

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