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nicosraf · 4 months

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The weird thing about the debate on Israeli's indigenousness is that "indigenous" doesn't mean... you're From somewhere. You can stop being indigenous; you can stop being indigenous while still existing in the place your ancestors were born. "Indigenous" isn't that you have the memory of belonging to a place or notice little cultural things in your family that tie into your ancestral homeland. I mean, there's a reason we don't call British people in Britan indigenous.

Indigenousness is about perpetual opposition to settler colonialism, which is about the complete uprooting of a pre-existing culture and forcing that land to accommodate an extractivist, export economy. That's what it is. It's not about being from a place or even having a """tie to the land.""" (The "tie to the land" is definitely an element of indigenousness but it's really just a romanticized simplification of indigenousness — a simple answer for why indigenous people are at the frontline of environmental movements.)

When the Spanish came to Mexico, they worked with the noble Nahua people to de-indigenize them. They did this by converting them to Catholicism, teaching them European writing (Latin) and academics, and relying on the Nahua nobility to help enforce the new political system. Fransicans are usually credited with converting Mexico to Christianity, but the ones who did most of the work were the young, Nahua "niños del monasterio" who marched into the villages and burned the idols of the gods — of both their own and other indigenous communities. (Nahua soldiers are credited with being the ones who helped the Spanish conquer the rest of Mexico's native people).

Indigenous/mestizo scholar Chimalpahin wrote about the history of the "Aztecs" by calling every Nahua god a demon, by positioning the Spanish like a good development and by arguing his specific Nahua city was better than the other by appealing to Spanish sentiments. ("But maybe he was just speaking to the Spanish!!!" He wrote in Nahuatl for presumably a Nahua audience.) (Academics don't agree on whether to call him indigenous).

"Chimalpahin and the noble Nahuas were violently forced into assimilating into Spanish nobility; you are sick for trying to argue that they weren't indigenous anymore." I'm not arguing that they weren't, but they were players in de-indigenizing Mexico, and it's important that it was forced.

De-tribalization and de-indigenization are always violent and ugly; you don't lose your indigenousness, usually, because you're evil. Chimalpahin and the noble Nahuas were still victims and horribly traumatized. They were also enforcers of de-indigenization.

Anyway, I'm mestizo and have ties to central Mexico and feel a sense of belonging there, at times. I'm not indigenous to it though. The memory of any indigenousness in my family is just a memory now. We visit, and I eat so so many poblano peppers. But we've detribalized, become borderline settlers by participating in capitalism, lightened our skin through generations, probably intentionally (many Mexicans have heard the phrase that we have to "better our race"). If I wanted to actually reconnect, it would be a lot of work; any reconnecting indigenous person can tell you how much work it is.

I know people get really prissy about how "You can't compare Israelis to white European settlers in America because we actually have a connection to the land!!!! We are actually from there!! >:/ some of us are not even white!"

Well let's think of the majority brown mestizo (mixed) population of Mexico. Are they indigenous because they might have "ties to the land" and because they have lineage from it?? Maybe they were once, but for the majority now — no. Without a mass effort to oppose settler colonialism and reconnect, mestizos are not indigenous and might never be again, no matter how much of their pre-colombian culture persists in our quieter traditions and language. And the Mexican state is happy to co-opt aesthetic representations of indigenousness, to talk about our glorious "Aztec" ancestry, while actively hurting indigenous populations.

So assume some, or lets say all!, Israelis have every possible connection to the land (lets say they love the olive trees and cry over the murder of all the Nile crocodiles), maybe they're visibly non-white, maybe they can trace their lineage to the exact spot where they stand. But if they're on the side of a settler colonial, capitalist state (say it was even forced on them!! say they were even made to move there!!! say they are like the Nahua nobles) — how indigenous are you?

How much longer will you remain " indigenous " ???

#would like to add that of course Jews have every right to live in Palestine (migration and returning to the homeland is always cool)#but the hijacking of indigenous sentiments by a nation state (capitalist & western-friendly) is not only well documented but pretty horrifi #sorry for this rant but i feel like im actually losing my mind with this talk #yeah we can make fun of the blonde and blue eyed Israelis (especially the South African converts) for larping but #genuinely the first step to de-indigenize is to align yourself with capitalist powers (even if forced)#palestine #mine #also i will lock this post if anyone starts bugging me too much because i dont really have the energy to spend the day debating #maybe ill even delete this

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morallyinept · 22 hours

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A full transcribe of JAVIER PEÑA'S dialogue/lines from the TV show NARCOS.

S3/E2 - THE CALI KGB

Includes full dialogue, and dialogue from any deleted/additional scenes available.

I've created this as a point of reference when writing for Pedro's characters, and I hope you find it useful. Even if you just want to read the dialogue. 🖤

FULL MASTERLIST OF PEDRO CHARACTERS DIALOGUE

☝🏻Dialogue has been fully transcribed by myself using reference to original scripts (if available), audio subtitles and using my own two ears. Therefore, mistakes can be made, however I have tried to be as fully accurate as I can. If you spot an obvious mistake, please kindly let me know. Where audio is not clear, I have marked with *inaudible* Scenes are separated for ease of reference.

FULL SCRIPT DIALOGUE:

(Narration) In its prime, the Cali cartel was moving 30 tons of coke a month into America… most of it through their New York operation and an alliance with Mexican traffickers out of Juárez that brought tons of product across our border. That means that in an average six-month period, they could put 180 tons on the street. But there was nothing average about this. These were the last six months in the life of the Cali cartel. They were going for it, making sure there were no loose ends.

__________________

(Narration) Like I said, they were going for it. While they were building up their retirement accounts, what were we doing about it? Jack shit.

Won’t happen again.

Colonel.

How’s your son?

Maybe I should join him. Not a lot of police work these days.

__________________

Duff, it’s been a long time.

Lopez.

Yeah. You guys are famous.

There isn’t going to be a next time. They’re rotating you home. The Colombians are pulling your visa. You’re outta here tonight.

They are.

__________________

Yeah.

What’s this?

What’s your name?

Feistl, what are you asking me?

It’s overstating it a little bit, wouldn't you say?

We’re not sending any personnel to Cali at the moment.

For now, there isn’t one.

I’m aware who runs the Cali cartel. Is there anything else, Agent Feistl?

Good.

Thanks.

__________________

(Narration) The Cali cartel came to New York for the cocaine market. It’s the largest in the world. But they stayed for the ether. You can’t make coke without ether. And while export restrictions had made it hard to come by in Colombia, it flowed freely in the States. But maybe not as freely as the Godfathers would have liked.

__________________

Looks like it’s going well.

You can call the press office if you want a comment, Miss Alvarez.

Have a nice day.

Looks like you said, it was an accident.

__________________

You got a partner, right?

Good. You’re going to Cali.

__________________

FULL MASTERLIST OF PEDRO CHARACTERS DIALOGUE

#pedro pascal #javier peña #javier pena #pedro pascal characters #javier pena narcos #javier pena dialogue #pedro pascal character dialogue

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the-cloud-code · 4 months

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mlp theories 2

my height headcanons:

Fluttershy is the tallest, coming in at 5'9 she's definitely Rarity's favorite customer. Rarity would sometimes ask her to play mannequin for emergencies, like a customer's deadline is coming up. Fluttershy is reliable on this, of course.

Applejack's up next at 5'7 -Big Mac is 6'2 and Applebloom is 5'2 already at such a young age.

Rarity and Sunset would be 5'6

Twilight at 5'4

Pinkie and Dash at 5'2, but then Pinkie being the youngest, finally hits that growth spurt and reaches 5'3 and a half.

my ethnicity headcanons:

Fluttershy's probably the bullied German kid, her parents aren't Nazis tho, which is why her parents moved away in the first place. Moving to Asia, almost every kid bullied her, except for Rainbow Dash -who's Japanese.

Rainbow Dash is Japanese and I have a reason why. Japan's got samurais with this notorious mindset that they'd rather commit seppuku than bring dishonor. Overbearing asian parents + pressure to bring honor = Rainbow Dash leaving home as soon as possible to get away from all of that. (she's either Japanese or Chinese ...or Filipino because I'm Filipino)

Applejack lives in Italy and Rarity lives in France, they're neighbors with a country border between them. They know of each other in passing, but they're not really friends until Twilight came to town. Italy's the world's top apple exporter because of the Apple family. While Rarity's love for fashion is partly because her parents travel all over France, bringing her (& Sweetie Belle) back some clothes and accessories every return.

Pinkie Pie can NOT possibly be black -did you see her make a song & dance about Zecora? She literally bullied an African-coded character because said character is different. Also, Maud Pie is too boring to be black, (I've encountered no boring black people because they're all witty and interesting. Black ppl have this presence that neither Pinkie nor her sisters have. Pinkie also doesn't fit the no-nonsense trait of poc people.)

Twilight Sparkle is black american, she's giving me Martin Luther King's second coming. This girl's got a dream, and she bout to make it come true.

Sunset Shimmer is a hundred percent Puerto Rican. And Starlight Glimmer is a Colombian -these two are definitely vibing right off the bat.

#my little pony #mlp friendship is magic #my little pony friendship is magic #mlp g4 #mlp headcanons #applejack #appledash #rainbow dash #rarity #rarijack #twilight sparkle

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see-arcane · 6 months

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Tricky tricky Halloween! I want candy just for me. Give give give me, give me candy, give give give me, the whole bag!

(btw, this is a chant that colombian children still use to this day when Halloween was exported here.)

All for you, friend <3

#don't eat it all at once!#happy halloween #:3

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zvaigzdelasas · 2 years

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ON A WARM, muggy morning in February 2021, masked men arrived at a dilapidated wooden shack in a remote Dominican Republic work camp without light or running water. Armed with 9-mm pistols and 12-gauge shotguns, and wearing masks to cover their faces, they were part of a private security force assembled by one of the largest exporters of sugar to the United States.

The armed force dismounted from their motorcycles and approached the tin-roof dwelling. It was the home of Flexi Bele, a Haitian sugarcane worker who had lived with his family in this distant corner of this Caribbean nation for decades. Now, he was facing a peril that many of his fellow cane cutters dreaded: The masked men, employed by the billion-dollar Central Romana Corporation, pounded on his door.

“They kicked me out of the batey,” said Bele, using the term for a sugarcane work camp in the Dominican Republic. After 40 years as a Central Romana cane cutter, Bele, 66 years old, had been told there was no more work for him. He was being laid off. “I worked, and worked, and worked, I gave them so much work.”

Bele lived in a camp known as Batey Lima, company housing owned by Central Romana. The armed men standing at his door had come to evict him.

“After they kicked me out of my job, they kicked me out of the batey,” said Bele, whose story was corroborated by a fellow cane worker who lived nearby.

“They were armed,” Bele said. “They are always armed. I didn’t argue with them.”

Instead, he gathered some belongings and climbed into the back of a Central Romana truck, to be driven off the plantation. He never received a pension.

The eviction at Batey Lima are part of a series of incidents involving Central Romana’s special security force: an elite, Colombian-trained motorcycle force, with their identities cloaked, often in the pre-dawn hours. [...]

Many of the residents in the bateyes hail from Haiti, the impoverished nation on the other side of the island of Hispaniola. These cane workers, most without Dominican citizenship, and often undocumented, are left vulnerable to wage theft and other labor abuses. An estimated 200,000 stateless Haitians live in the Dominican Republic[...]

The special sugarcane force, known to cane workers as “LINCE,” was formed in recent years by the billion-dollar company, according to multiple on-site observers, including two regular security guards. The force’s ostensible purpose was to protect sugarcane and the company’s livestock across its sprawling properties of a quarter million acres in the eastern Dominican Republic. [...]

A Central Romana spokesperson, Jorge Sturla, confirmed the existence of the special police detail, including its nocturnal nature. He said it was “false” that the unit is called LINCE, the name that many of the company’s employees use. Sturla said the unit is part of the company’s larger security force, known as the Guardiacampestre, or Country Guards. [...] Sturla insisted that the “sole purpose” of Central Romana’s security forces “is to protect the company’s property,” including its sugarcane and cattle operations.[...]

CENTRAL ROMANA IS often compared to a state within a state, a government unto itself, where local or federal law enforcement officials are rarely seen. The massive plantation is larger than all of New York City, with its own private roads, its network of bateyes, endless acres of cane, an international airport, a five-star tourist resort, and a port from which it ships its main product to the United States.

The company exported more than 240 million pounds of raw sugar from its sprawling plantation to the U.S. last year, much of it poured into bags of Domino Sugar or folded into Hershey bars and other U.S. confections. The 110-year-old company was bought by a team of investors led by Florida sugar barons Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul in 1984. In recent years, Fanjul family members are executives at both their own company and its subsidiary, Central Romana, according to official documents.

In the last year, U.S. Congress and American federal agencies have expressed alarm, largely as the result of reporting in Mother Jones and Reveal that exposed appalling living and working conditions. The House Ways and Means Committee asked the Biden administration to investigate evidence of forced labor by Dominican sugar companies.

14 Oct 22

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2goldensnitches · 7 months

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Colombian president Gustavo Petro threatens to break off diplomatic relations with Israel; Minister of Foreign Affairs Álvaro Leyva says Israeli ambassador Gali Dagan ought to apologise to Petro or leave Colombia after he and Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lior Hayat criticised Petro’s support for Gaza and the latter said Israeli security exports to Colombia should cease

#colombia #israel

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fatehbaz · 1 year

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November 1985 marks a before and an after in Colombia. [...]

[A] squadron of [...] guerillas stormed the Palace of Justice in Bogota. [...] A belligerent military response [...] resulted in at least one hundred deaths. [...] For two decades, Colombia’s civil war had been raging on mountains and in jungles. Now, it had arrived in the country’s capital. A week later, on November 13, a sleeping giant stirred some two hundred kilometers west of Bogotá. After lying dormant for over 140 years, the Nevado del Ruiz exploded in two eruptions. From the Andean volcano’s crater surged boiling lahars, which descended the mountain at speeds of one hundred kilometers an hour. [...] This monstrous debris flow decimated almost everything in its path, engulfing the regional cotton-producing town of Armero and killing the majority of its twenty-five thousand inhabitants. [...] The government’s ensuing response to the Armero disaster was characterized by inefficiency, miscommunication, and corruption. [...] [M]onetary aid went missing. Unidentified child survivors were taken by authorities and put up for adoption. No effort was made to locate their relatives. [...]

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In his 2016 book Endangered City, [...] Austin Zeiderman analyzes coverage of November 1985 in the Colombian print press. [...] [R]eporters used the language of forewarning to denounce the government for its failure to avert the convergent crises. Several columnists played with the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a pseudo-detective novel [...]. One 1985 headline [...] called the Armero landslide “a forecast apocalypse.” “We have become the land of tragedies forewarned,” so the article read [...]. Even as the siege and the eruption were treated as spontaneous catastrophes, so, too, were they framed as self-fulfilling prophecies. History was being written in the subjunctive. As the temporal breadth of the convergent crises expanded, they acquired the characteristics of “slow-onset disasters.” Rob Nixon, among others, has written of the difficulties in visualizing catastrophes that gradually unfold [...] over lengthy periods. [...]

In the context of the Anthropocene, artists are increasingly tasked with what Latin American studies scholar Joanna Page describes as “taking up the challenge of representing geological and cosmic time [...].” One such artist is Santiago Reyes Villaveces, who presently lives in the shadow of the Nevado del Ruiz, and whose work uses multimedia methods to explore the volcano. His video installation Orbit, currently on view at New York’s Instituto de Visión, tells a version of the November story.

The fall of 1985 is framed in an imperialist chronology, where disasters are continuities, not ruptures [...].

---

The protagonist of Orbit is a two-hundred-ton boulder that once sat at the heights of the Nevado del Ruiz. On the night of the eruption, it traveled over forty-five kilometers, and was deposited in the center of Armero shortly before midnight. Today, it is a landmark in a ghostly town that, like Herculaneum, stands in ruins. However, unlike its Italian counterpart, Amero receives no conservationist funding or legislative protection.

In the absence of state investment, the rock has become an unofficial monument to the dead. Every year, it attracts hundreds of tourists and mourners. [...]

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The disaster industry is one branch of the export economies that dominate life in this mineral-rich region known as the macizo.

Correspondingly, there looms the specter of another disaster: the European invasion of the Americas.

In its inaugural exhibition, Orbit appeared in 2019 alongside seven other sculptural installations named Anus, Puddle, Navel, Brick, Fever, and Room Temperature. These works are made with gold, silver, copper, limestone, and rubber -- the same raw materials that drove the expansion of the Spanish empire. Centuries later, they still fuel the competition for resources [...].

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Displayed in a museum setting alongside tools of measurement and unearthing, they create an “extractive viewpoint,” a phrase from scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris. [...] Gómez-Barris compares this vantage to the colonial gaze. Per her definition, it “facilitates the reorganization of territories, populations, and plant and animal life into extractible data and natural resources for material and immaterial accumulation.”

The macizo region is thus placed in a matrix of colonial relations that operates on an accumulative timescale.

Rather than regard the Conquest as a finite event, work like Reyes Villaveces’s urges us to think, instead, of a “colonial presence” that has endured throughout the postcolonial period. In conjuring this notion of history as perpetuity, anyone who sees such art is challenged, with Ann Laura Stoler, “to refuse the quick resort to ‘before’ and ‘after’ -- and even to work against the wooden, if all too common, conceptual containers of ‘past’ and ‘present.’” [...]

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[E]thnographer Beatriz Nates Cruz [...] argues that inhabitants of the macizo reside in multiple worlds that converge around symbolic landmarks and that operate according to their own discrete laws of space-time. [...]

Survivors of the Armero tragedy also return to the disaster site to stand awhile next to the departed. On each anniversary, the bereaved attend commemorations among the ruins and visit the rudimentary graves of their loved ones [...]. Darío Nova aims to foster reflection, spirituality, and healing. [...] More recently, he has led an initiative called Time and Memory that has seen participants use colorful string to frame features in derelict homes and place figurines on sills and mantles. These interventions make of Armero a museum curated by a grassroots collective that addresses a lack of governmental interest [...].

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Confronted with this institutional indifference, we might return to the concept of negative gravity. We have seen how this phenomenon shapes a history of extraction, occupation, and conflict that propels state-making in Colombia. [...]

One of the remarkable things about disasters -- perhaps even their defining feature -- is that they cause the convergence of temporalities that usually coexist, but that do not necessarily intersect, or at least not in ways that are easily discernible. The 1985 eruption of the Ruiz volcano created a collision between this dimension of geological time, which spans billions of years and the expanses of space; centuries of imperialist expansion, capitalist accumulation, and national development; and the infinitesimal scale of a single human life span. All of this took place in a matter of seconds [...].

Survivors attest that time stops as disaster strikes. As these crises climaxed, the clock stopped ticking. But these disasters also accelerated the juggernaut of history that predated that November. They spliced experiences of time into a before and an after, causing it to move in new directions.

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Images, captions, and all text above by: Rebecca Jarman. “Before and After? Temporalities of Disaster.” e-flux Journal Issue #135. April 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

#abolition #ecology #imperial #colonial #interspecies

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sorvete-de-pacoca · 9 months

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Quick question: do you think Luciano would check what coffee Afonso is buying? Namely, if he's drinking Brazilian coffee?

Absolutely! I have the headcanon that Luciano have been a coffee connoisseur since he started building his economy around producing and exporting coffee so he knows if it's his coffee or not, if it's good product or not. If you're someone close to him he will be very annoying if you're not drinking his coffee.

I can see Afonso having a cup in the morning and Luciano stop mid "bom dia" and he looks upset. Afonso asking "what wrong?"

"since when have you been cheating on me?"

"what?"

"is my coffee not good enough for you?! Why are you drinking Colombian coffee?!"

"it's Colombian? Antonio just gave me a bag to try it. And it's pretty good."

"pretty good?!?! Wow, wooow, okay. Fuck me I guess. Os de verdade eu sei quem são."

"😑"

#hetalia #hws brazil #lh brazil #hws portugal

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beardedmrbean · 6 months

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Colombia is to cull some of the 166 hippos descended from a herd owned by drug lord Pablo Escobar in the 1980s.

Environment Minister Susana Muhamad said that 20 would be sterilised, others would be transferred abroad - and "some" would be euthanised.

Experts have for years tried to control the hippo numbers.

Escobar imported the animals for his private zoo at Hacienda Nápoles. They were left to roam after he was killed in a shootout with police in 1993.

Authorities have tried various approaches to curb the population explosion in Colombia's main river, the Magdalena, including sterilisation and transferring individuals to zoos abroad.

Efforts failed to contain the herd's growth, however, with a lack of predators and the fertile and swampy Antioquia region providing perfect conditions for the native African animal to thrive.

Their fate was sealed when hippos were declared an invasive species last year, opening the door to a cull.

"We are working on the protocol for the export of the animals," Ms Muhamad was quoted as saying by local media.

"We are not going to export a single animal if there is no authorisation from the environmental authority of the other country."

She said the ministry was creating a protocol for euthanasia as a last resort.

Colombian experts have long warned that the hippos' uncontrolled reproduction poses a threat to humans and native wildlife.

Estimates suggest that the population could reach 1,000 by 2035 if nothing is done, but animal activists say sterilization entails suffering for the animals - and great danger for the vets doing it.

The hippo is one of the largest land animals, with adult males weighing up to three tonnes. They are also among the most dangerous, killing around 500 people a year.

Fishing communities along the Magdalena River have come under attack and some hippos invaded a school yard, although no one has been killed.

Escobar was the head of the Medellín cartel and dubbed the "cocaine king" who amassed an estimated $30bn (£25bn) fortune smuggling drugs into Miami and the southern United States.

His reign of terror spanned more than a decade and involved kidnappings, hundreds of murders, bribery, bombings and turf wars with rival drug barons - as well as a brief sojourn as an elected politician.

As one of the most-wanted men on the planet, he gave himself up to Colombian authorities in 1991 on agreement that he would spend five years in a prison he had built, known as La Catedral.

Escobar went on the run a year later amid government attempts to move him to a more secure jail.

With a $2m US bounty on his head, he met his end in his home town of Rionegro - he was shot dead on a rooftop on 2 December 1993 as he tried to evade police.

He left a legacy of violence but also the 5,500-acre Hacienda Nápoles, private citadel in Antioquia containing, among other things, a menagerie of four hippos, plus giraffes, camels and zebras.

The hacienda was given over to poor locals by the government after Escobar's death, and the hippos were left to roam free as they were deemed too difficult to seize.

#nunyas news #sad

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allthebrazilianpolitics · 7 months

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China opens its market to Colombia beef; Brazil concerned as export meat prices have fallen considerably

Brazilian meatpacker Minerva said on Monday it had received a notification from Colombia’s government saying that China has approved a sanitary protocol in order to open its market for Colombian beef exports.

Minerva, which owns two plants in Colombia, said in a securities filing only final bureaucratic procedures are now required for the exports to be effectively cleared.

“The Bucaramanga and Cienaga de Oro plants, once approved, will add to assets in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay and expand our exposure to China and maximize our arbitrage capacity,” Minerva added.

But despite Minerva's positive news for the company, Brazil’s strong performance in beef and chicken exports this year is highly conditioned to the decline in these product prices in the international market, and a growing point of concern for the animal protein sector.

#brazil #politics #brazilian politics #china #colombia #chinese politics #economy #farming #international politics #mod nise da silveira #image description in alt

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newstfionline · 9 months

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Saturday, August 5, 2023

Inflation Is Cooling. Food Inflation Could Get Worse. (WSJ) Inflation has cooled in many countries, but in most of them, food inflation remains rampant and there are reasons to fear it may accelerate. A combination of disrupted exports, unusually hot weather and Russia’s continuing pounding of Ukraine, one of the world’s largest grain producers, is likely to add fresh momentum to global inflation.

Missing From Your Facebook News Feed: Canadian News (NYT) It could be months before an escalating fight between Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, and the Canadian government gets resolved, but Matthew DiMera, publisher of a Canadian news organization, is already feeling the pain. Mr. DiMera tried to create an Instagram post featuring a news article by his outlet, The Resolve—something news organizations do routinely to promote their work. Instead, he said, he was greeted by the message: “People in Canada can’t see your content.” Meta this week began blocking news from appearing on its platforms in Canada, the latest twist in its standoff with the government over a new law that will require technology companies to compensate domestic publishers for using their content. The law comes at a time when the news industry in Canada, as in much of the world, is shrinking under the pressure of lower advertising revenues, and depends on social networks for much of its readership. The new law will not go into effect until January, but Meta has launched something of a pre-emptive strike with a news blockade that it said will roll out over a few weeks. Facebook and Instagram users in Canada will be unable to share links to news articles from local or international outlets anywhere on their accounts.

Colombia begins a six-month cease-fire with its last remaining rebel group in hopes of forging peace (AP) Colombia and the National Liberation Army, or ELN, formally began a six-month cease-fire Thursday as part of a process to forge a permanent peace between the government and the country’s last remaining rebel group. The cease-fire agreement, announced June 9 during talks in Havana, comes amid skepticism among some Colombians that the peace process can fully end an insurgency dating back to the 1960s or halt the alleged involvement of the group’s estimated 5,000 remaining members in drug trafficking. The ELN leadership denies involvement in the drug trade.

It’s midwinter, but it’s over 100 degrees in South America (Washington Post) It’s the middle of winter in South America, but that hasn’t kept the heat away in Chile, Argentina and surrounding locations. Multiple spells of oddly hot weather have roasted the region in recent weeks. The latest spell early this week has become the most intense, pushing the mercury above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, while setting an August record for Chile. In Buenos Aires, where the average high on Aug. 1 is 58 degrees (14 Celsius), it surpassed 86 (30 Celsius) on Tuesday. “South America is living one of the extreme events the world has ever seen,” weather historian Maximiliano Herrera tweeted, adding, “This event is rewriting all climatic books.” The most extreme conditions have occurred in the southern half of the continent, and particularly in the Andes Mountains region.

Pope, in Portugal, warns half a million young Catholics of social media snares (Reuters) One of the biggest crowds ever seen in Portugal mobbed Pope Francis on Thursday as he rode in an open vehicle to a rally where he told an ocean of young Catholics from all over the world to beware the false happiness lurking in social media. Seemingly energised by the crowd of young people singing and dancing, Francis warned them to beware “the illusions of the virtual world” where algorithms used their names for market research but could never understand a person’s uniqueness. “Many realities that attract us and promise happiness are later shown to be what they really are: vain, superfluous and surrogate things that leave us empty inside,” he said.

Russia doubles 2023 defence spending plan as war costs soar (Reuters) Russia has doubled its 2023 defence spending target to more than $100 billion—a third of all public expenditure—a government document reviewed by Reuters showed, as the costs of the war in Ukraine spiral and place growing strain on Moscow’s finances.

Russia accuses Kyiv of sea drone attack on naval base (Washington Post) Russia’s Defense Ministry accused Ukraine of using two sea drones to attack a naval base near Novorossiysk on Friday. The port city is a major hub for Russian exports. A Ukrainian government official said the “special operation” had been conducted by Ukraine’s Navy and security service, and damaged a large Russian warship, the “Olenegorsky Miner.” Russia, by contrast, said it had detected and destroyed the unmanned boats, and that there had been no damage.

This Party Is Moving Nowhere (AP) In May, the progressive Move Forward Party pulled off a surprise victory in Thailand’s general election. Now, it’s being excluded from talks to set up a coalition government despite coming up with an eight-party, 312-seat coalition earlier this year. Under the country’s constitution, any coalition governments must be approved by the sitting parliament, which has denied Move Forward’s coalition proposals twice so far. Now, the second-biggest party in the coalition, the Pheu Thai, will take over attempts to build a new government. One of Move Forward’s major selling points to voters was the proposed reform of a Thai law banning criticism of the country’s monarchy. Unfortunately, this was also a major obstacle for its coalition to gain support in parliament. Thai voters are becoming increasingly agitated with their legislature.

China Limits Smartphone Use for Children (Reuters) The Cyberspace Administration of China has announced that children under 18 will be limited to up to two hours of smartphone use per day, as well as forcing providers of smart devices to introduce a mode that bans users under the age of 18 from accessing the internet from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Under the plan, users 16 to 18 would be capped at two hours per day, users aged 8 to 16 would get one hour, and children under 8 are capped at eight minutes, though parents can opt out of the time limits. This led to a bloodbath among China’s internet titans, with their stocks falling.

China’s Latest Problem: People Don’t Want to Go There (WSJ) Half a year after China lifted Covid-19 restrictions and reopened its borders, few international travelers are coming—another sign of decoupling between China and the West that could have negative repercussions for a long time. Foreign travelers’ absence is particularly evident in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where the numbers of foreigners who visited in the first half of the year totaled less than a quarter of comparable figures in 2019, before the Covid pandemic.

3 years after Beirut port blast, intrigue foils an investigation and even the death toll is disputed (AP) Three years after Beirut’s massive port blast, attempts to prosecute those responsible are mired in political intrigue, the final death toll remains disputed and many Lebanese have less faith than ever in their disintegrating state institutions. As the country marks the anniversary Friday, relatives of some of those killed are still struggling to get their loved ones recognized as blast victims, reflecting the ongoing chaos since the Aug. 4, 2020 explosion. The blast killed at least 218 people, according to an Associated Press count, wounded more than 6,000, devastated large swaths of Beirut and caused billions of dollars in damages. Meanwhile, the blast anniversary brought renewed calls for an international investigation of those responsible, including top officials who allowed hundreds of tons of highly flammable ammonium nitrate, a material used in fertilizers, to be improperly stored for years at a warehouse in the port. Many in Lebanon have been losing faith in the domestic investigation and some have started filing cases abroad against companies suspected of bringing in the ammonium nitrate.

Strait and narrow considerations (Foreign Policy) The U.S. military is mulling over a plan to put armed guards on commercial ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, The Associated Press reports, in an effort to stop Iran from harassing or seizing vessels going through one of the world’s most important oil chokepoints. The move comes as the U.S. Defense Department is sending thousands of Marines and sailors on amphibious assault ships to the Persian Gulf, possibly in an effort to lead the guard mission.

Niger: Not Another Coup as Usual (NYT) At first, the coup in Niger resembled others that have roiled West Africa in recent years. On July 26, soldiers detained Niger’s president at his home in the capital, Niamey. Hours later, they declared that they had seized power. Foreign powers condemned the putsch but did nothing. Then the coup took a different course. The United States and France threatened to cut ties with Niger, endangering hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. The deposed president, Mohamed Bazoum, though detained, was able to speak with world leaders, receive visitors and post defiant messages on social media. Neighboring countries threatened to go to war—some to scuttle the coup, and others to ensure its success. What set off last week’s coup remains unclear. But in contrast with other recent takeovers in West Africa, which were largely greeted with shrugs, Niger’s coup has become a red line for many—including Western allies. Thousands of American and French troops are stationed in Niger to help fight a surge in Islamist attacks across the region. That military cooperation is now suspended, as the United States and France exert pressure on the junta to restore democracy. European countries began evacuating their citizens on Tuesday; a day later, the United States ordered a partial evacuation of its embassy.

US news coverage of wars in Yemen and Ukraine reveals a bias in recording civilian harm (The Conversation) War entails suffering. How and how often that suffering is reported on in the U.S., however, is not evenhanded. Take, for example, the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in March 2015 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The media attention afforded to the crises reveals biases that relate less to the human consequences of the conflicts than to the United States’ role and relationship with the warring parties involved. In Yemen, the U.S. is arming and supporting the Saudi-led coalition, whose airstrikes and blockades have caused immense human suffering. Meanwhile in Eastern Europe, the U.S. is arming and aiding Ukraine’s efforts by helping to counter missile strikes that have targeted civilian infrastructure and to retake occupied territories where horrific killings have taken place. As scholars who study genocide and other mass atrocities, as well as international security, we compared New York Times headlines that span approximately seven and a half years of the ongoing conflict in Yemen and the first nine months of the conflict in Ukraine. Our research shows extensive biases in both the scale and tone of coverage. These biases lead to reporting that highlights or downplays human suffering in the two conflicts in a way that seemingly coincides with U.S. foreign policy objectives.

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Colombia exports millions of cut flowers every year, and most of them end up in the US. But working in the flower business is not always rosy. Colombian flower-farm workers endure long hours, debilitating injuries, and workplace harassment to keep up with seasonal foreign demand. So does an ethical bouquet of flowers exist? We went to Colombia to find out.

Editor's Note: A previous version of this video showed two people who asked to be made anonymous for fear of retaliation from employers and insurers. The video has been modified to redact their names and faces.