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Javier E

Spanish colonization of the Americas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...h_colonization_of_the_Americas

Spain colonial Americas history latin america

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Colonial expansion under the crown of Castile was initiated by the Spanish conquistadores
  • The motivations for colonial expansion were trade and the spread of the Catholic faith through indigenous conversions.
  • The Spanish conquest of Mexico is generally understood to be the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–21) which was the base for later conquests of other regions.
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  • But not until the Spanish conquest of Peru was the conquest of the Aztecs matched in scope by the victory over the Inca empire in 1532.
  • A second (and permanent) settlement was established in 1580 by Juan de Garay, who arrived by sailing down the Paraná River from Asunción (now the capital of Paraguay). He dubbed the settlement "Santísima Trinidad" and its port became "Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires." The city came to be the head of the Governorate of the Río de la Plata and in 1776 elevated to be the capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.
  • Spain's administration of its colonies in the Americas was divided into the Viceroyalty of New Spain 1535 (capital, México City), and the Viceroyalty of Peru 1542 (capital, Lima). In the 18th century the additional Viceroyalty of New Granada 1717 (capital, Bogotá), and Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata 1776 (capital, Buenos Aires) were established from portions of the Viceroyalty of Peru.
  • During the Napoleonic Peninsular War in Europe between France and Spain, assemblies called juntas were established to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII of Spain
  • The Libertadores (Spanish and Portuguese for "Liberators") were the principal leaders of the Spanish American wars of independence. They were predominantly criollos (Americas-born people of European ancestry, mostly Spanish or Portuguese), bourgeois and influenced by liberalism and in some cases with military training in the mother country.
  • These began a movement for colonial independence that spread to Spain's other colonies in the Americas. The ideas from the French and the American Revolution influenced the efforts. All of the colonies, except Cuba and Puerto Rico, attained independence by the 1820s
  • In 1898, the United States won victory in the Spanish–American War from Spain, ending the Spanish colonial era
  • It has been estimated that in the 16th century about 240,000 Spaniards emigrated to the Americas, and in the 17th century about 500,000, predominantly to Mexico and Peru.
  • The population of the Native Amerindian population in Mexico declined by an estimated 90% (reduced to 1–2.5 million people) by the early 17th century. In Peru the indigenous Amerindian pre-contact population of around 6.5 million declined to 1 million by the early 17th century.[citation needed] The overwhelming cause of decline in both Mexico and Peru was infectious diseases.
  • The Spaniards were committed, by Royal decree, to convert their New World indigenous subjects to Catholicism. However, often initial efforts were questionably successful, as the indigenous people added Catholicism into their longstanding traditional ceremonies and beliefs. The many native expressions, forms, practices, and items of art could be considered idolatry and prohibited or destroyed by Spanish missionaries, military and civilians. This included religious items, sculptures and jewelry made of gold or silver, which were melted down before shipment to Spain.
Javier E

Virus Exposes Weak Links in Peru's Success Story - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eru-inequality-corruption.html

peru pandemic

shared by Javier E on 13 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • President Martín Vizcarra followed the best advice when the coronavirus arrived in Peru.
  • He ordered one of Latin America’s first and strictest lockdowns, and rolled out one of the region’s biggest economic aid packages to help citizens stay home. He shared detailed health data with the public, rushed to add hospital beds and ventilators and increased testing.
  • Yet instead of being lauded as a model of disease control, Peru has become one of the world’s worst coronavirus hot spots — its hospitals overwhelmed, its people fleeing the cities.
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  • The crisis has marred Peru’s veneer of economic progress, exposing the deep-rooted inequality and corruption that have thwarted its pandemic response.
  • “They asked us to stay at home, but a lot of people have no savings so that was impossible. They asked us to wash our hands, but one in three Peruvian households has access to running water,” said Hugo Ñopo, who works for a Peruvian research group, Grade. Only half of Peruvian homes have refrigerators, he said, forcing many families to return daily to crowded markets, a major source of contagion.
  • About 1.5 million people in Latin America have tested positive — and experts say the real number of infections is much higher.
  • In May, the death rate in Peru from all causes was twice as high as the average of recent years, according to data compiled by The New York Times, suggesting a coronavirus death toll two to three times the laboratory-confirmed figure.
  • “Results haven’t been exactly what we expected,” Mr. Vizcarra said last month. “This isn’t just a health or sanitary crisis, but a social and economic crisis without precedent.”
  • Peru’s swift descent from regional success story to calamity has demoralized its 32 million citizens and provoked national soul-searching.
  • Under a string of pro-business presidents, millions of Peruvians escaped poverty in this century, allowing them to send children to private schools, install running water or start small businesses.
  • Two decades of economic growth lifted many incomes but brought few stable jobs and little health care investment, reducing the effectiveness of President Vizcarra’s pandemic measures.
  • many Peruvians find themselves in the same situation as Mr. Domínguez — forced to risk catching the coronavirus, rather than stay at home and slide into poverty and hunger.
  • “Here we were congratulating ourselves in Peru for starting to be a middle-class country,” he said. “But it turns out our middle class is very vulnerable, very fragile.”
  • “Help didn’t arrive. It didn’t arrive. I was crying and screaming for help but no one would come,” Ms. Ponte said, weeping as her husband’s body lay in a bag outside the room where she sat on a bed with her 10-year-old son and 8-month-old baby.
Grace Gannon

US returns ancient artefacts to Peru - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-latin-america-29750832

Peru ancient artifacts US international relations

shared by Grace Gannon on 24 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 24 Oct 14
     
    The United States has recently returned about 20 ancient artefacts - some more than 1,800 years old - to Peru. Pottery and pieces that were obtained from ancient Peruvian graves have finally been returned to their homeland of Peru. These items were found by the US Customs Services, and have now been returned to their rightful owners in Peru.
Javier E

NASA Adds to Evidence of Mysterious Ancient Earthworks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...erious-ancient-earthworks.html

human origins archaology Asia neolithic

shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • High in the skies over Kazakhstan, space-age technology has revealed an ancient mystery on the ground.
  • Satellite pictures of a remote and treeless northern steppe reveal colossal earthworks — geometric figures of squares, crosses, lines and rings the size of several football fields, recognizable only from the air and the oldest estimated at 8,000 years old.
  • the Mahandzhar culture, which flourished there from 7,000 B.C. to 5,000 B.C., could be linked to the older figures.
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  • But scientists marvel that a nomadic population would have stayed in place for the time required to fell and lay timber for ramparts, and to dig out lake bed sediments to construct the huge mounds, originally 6 to 10 feet high and now 3 feet high and nearly 40 feet across.
  • these figures and similar ones in Peru and Chile were changing views about early nomads.
  • “The idea that foragers could amass the numbers of people necessary to undertake large-scale projects — like creating the Kazakhstan geoglyphs — has caused archaeologists to deeply rethink the nature and timing of sophisticated large-scale human organization as one that predates settled and civilized societies,”
  • she was dubious about calling the structures geoglyphs — a term applied to the enigmatic Nazca Lines in Peru that depict animals and plants — because geoglyphs “define art rather than objects with function.”
  • Dr. Matuzeviciute said she used optically stimulated luminescence, a method of measuring doses from ionizing radiation, to analyze the construction material, and came up with a date from one of the mounds of around 800 B.C. Other preliminary studies push the earliest date back more than 8,000 years, which could make them the oldest such creations ever found. Other materials yield dates in the Middle Ages.
  • ome of the figures might have been solar observatories akin, according to some theories, to Stonehenge in England and the Chankillo towers in Peru.
  • Dr. LaPorte said he, Mr. Dey and their colleagues were also looking into using drones, as the Culture Ministry in Peru has been doing to map and protect ancient sites.
jayhandwerk

Trump to Make First Visit as President to Latin America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tin-america-peru-colombia.html

Latin politics US trump

shared by jayhandwerk on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • President Trump will make the first visit of his presidency to Latin America next month, the White House said on Saturday, traveling to Peru for a summit meeting of Western Hemisphere nations where he will convene with a group of leaders who have criticized his statements and policies on immigration.
  • As he has moved the United States toward a more protectionist stance on trade, Mr. Trump has abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes Mexico, Peru and Chile. The United States is also engaged in difficult negotiations with Mexico and Canada over changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
  • American presidents have attended the Western Hemisphere meeting, known as the Summit of the Americas, in previous years — Barack Obama made history there in 2015 by meeting with President Raúl Castro of Cuba — but few have stoked as much indignation as Mr. Trump.
yehbru

Latin American Countries Struggle To Contain COVID-19 : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...19-still-ravages-latin-america

US Politics Latin America South Covid19 Pandemic Vaccine

shared by yehbru on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Government officials in Peru announced on Monday the country's official COVID-19 death toll had been far lower than the real number. Instead of 69,342 Peruvians perishing from COVID-19 as of May 22, as the Peruvian government previously reported, more than 180,000 actually have died from the virus.
  • Officials blamed the undercounting on "a lack of testing that made it difficult to confirm whether a person had died due to the virus or some other cause,"
  • CONMEBOL, the governing body of the tournament, announced on Sunday that they dropped Argentina as the host country with less than two weeks to go until the start of the event.
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  • Argentinian officials reported that the country had seen a total of 3.7 million confirmed coronavirus cases, with more than 77,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the World Health Organization
  • But in Brazil, Argentina, Peru and many other countries in Latin America, government and health officials are still struggling to contain the virus.
  • By early Tuesday, there have been more than 16.5 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 462,791 deaths recorded in Brazil, according to Johns Hopkins.
  • As of May 19, Etienne said only 3% of people in Latin America and the Caribbean have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The U.S. has fully vaccinated more than half of American adults.
  • Peru is set to get 1 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses from COVAX by June 4.
ethanshilling

As Virus Rages in South America, No End in Sight to Covid-19 Suffering - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-latin-america.html

pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • In the capital of Colombia, Bogotá, the mayor is warning residents to brace for “the worst two weeks of our lives.”
  • “I have tried to be optimistic,” he also wrote in a recent essay. “I want to think that the worst is over. But that turns out, I believe, to be counter-evident.”
  • Even Venezuela, where the authoritarian government is notorious for hiding health statistics and any suggestion of disarray, says that coronavirus deaths are up 86 percent since January.
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  • As vaccinations mount in some of the world’s wealthiest countries and people cautiously envision life after the pandemic, the crisis in Latin America — and in South America in particular — is taking an alarming turn for the worse, potentially threatening the progress made well beyond its borders.
  • Latin America was already one of the world’s hardest hit regions in 2020, with bodies sometimes abandoned on sidewalks and new burial grounds cut into thick forest.
  • But the region has another thorny challenge, health officials say: living side-by-side with Brazil, a country of more than 200 million whose president has consistently dismissed the threat of the virus and denounced measures to control it, helping fuel a dangerous variant that is now stalking the continent.
  • Inequality, a longstanding scourge that had been easing before the pandemic, is widening once again, and millions have been tossed back into the precarious positions they thought they had escaped during a relative boom.
  • “This is a story that is just beginning to be told,” Alejandro Gaviria, an economist and former health minister of Colombia who leads the nation’s Universidad de los Andes, said in an interview.
  • But with millions of people working in the informal sector, enforcing quarantines became unsustainable. Cases rose quickly and hospitals soon fell into crisis.
  • “The worst-case scenario is the development of a new variant that is not protected by current vaccines,” he said. “It’s not just an ethical and moral imperative, but a health imperative, to control this all over the world.”
  • Across the region, doctors say that the patients coming into hospitals are now far younger and far sicker than before. They’re also more likely to have had the virus already.
  • Official daily death tolls have exceeded previous records in recent days in most of South America’s biggest countries. Yet scientists say that the worst is yet to come.
  • The region is not prepared. Colombia has been able to issue a first vaccine to just 6 percent of its population, according to Our World in Data, a project at the University of Oxford. Several of its neighbors have achieved half that, or less.
  • By contrast, the United States, which bought up vaccines ahead of other countries, is at 43 percent.
  • The virus arrived in Peru in March last year, like much of Latin America, and the government moved quickly to lock down the country.
  • Uruguay, once lauded as a model for keeping the coronavirus under control, now has one of the highest death rates in the world, while the grim daily tallies of the dead have hit records in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru in recent days.
  • Last month was the deadliest of the pandemic by far, according to official data, with health experts blaming the increase on holiday gatherings, crippled health systems and the new variants.
  • Vaccines arrived in Peru in February, followed quickly by anger after some politically connected people jumped the line to get vaccinated first.
  • Rafael Córdova, 50, a father of three, sat on a square drawn in the sand that marked his claim to land overlooking the Pan-American Highway and the Pacific Coast.
  • in May, he became sick with Covid and was fired. He believes his bosses let him go because they feared that he would sicken others, or that his family would blame them if he died.
  • “I left the hospital with my daughter in a black plastic bag and got in a taxi and went to the cemetery,” he said. “There was no Mass, no wake. No flowers. Nothing.”
Javier E

The Columbian Exchange and the Real Story of Globalization - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3454504576486421307171028.html

exchange globalization history Columbian biological

shared by Javier E on 06 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • A growing number of scholars believe that the ecological transformation set off by Columbus's voyages was one of the establishing events of the modern world. Why did Europe rise to predominance? Why did China, once the richest, most advanced society on earth, fall to its knees? Why did chattel slavery take hold in the Americas? Why was it the United Kingdom that launched the Industrial Revolution? All of these questions are tied in crucial ways to the Columbian Exchange.
  • the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in North America before 1492.
  • Intoxicating and addictive, tobacco became the subject of the first truly global commodity craze.
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  • Sailors balanced out the weight by leaving behind their ships' ballast: stones, gravel and soil. They swapped English dirt for Virginia tobacco. That dirt very likely contained the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm. So, almost certainly, did the rootballs of plants that the colonists imported.
  • In worm-free woodlands, leaves pile up in drifts on the forest floor. Trees and shrubs in wormless places depend on litter for food. When earthworms arrive, they quickly consume the leaf litter, packing the nutrients deep in the soil in the form of castings (worm excrement). Suddenly, the plants can no longer feed themselves; their fine, surface-level root systems are in the wrong place. Wild sarsaparilla, wild oats, Solomon's seal and a host of understory plants die off; grass-like species such as Pennsylvania sedge take over. Sugar maples almost stop growing, and ash seedlings start to thrive.
  • Transported in the bodies of sailors, malaria may have crossed the ocean as early as Columbus's second voyage. Yellow fever, malaria's frequent companion, soon followed. By the 17th century, the zone where these diseases held sway—coastal areas roughly from Washington, D.C., to the Brazil-Ecuador border—was dangerous territory for European migrants, many of whom died within months of arrival
  • Initially, American planters preferred to pay to import European laborers—they spoke the same language and knew European farming methods. They also cost less than slaves bought from Africa, but they were far less hardy and thus a riskier investment. In purely economic terms, the historian Philip Curtin has calculated, the diseases of the Columbian Exchange made the enslaved worker "preferable at anything up to three times the price of the European."
  • At the time, England and Scotland shared a monarch but remained separate nations. England, the bigger partner, had been pushing a complete merger for decades. Scots had resisted, fearing a London-dominated economy, but now England promised to reimburse investors in the failed Panama project as part of a union agreement. As Mr. McNeill wrote, "Thus Great Britain was born, with assistance from the fevers of Panama."
  • Eighteenth-century farmers who planted potatoes reaped about four times as much dry food matter as they did from wheat or barley. Hunger was then a familiar presence in Europe. France had 40 nationwide food calamities between 1500 and 1800, more than one every decade, according to the French historian Fernand Braudel. England had still more. The continent simply could not sustain itself. The potato allowed most of Europe—a 2,000-mile band between Ireland and the Ukraine—to feed itself. (Corn, another American crop, played a similar role in Italy and Romania.) Political stability, higher incomes and a population boom were the result. Imported from Peru, the potato became the fuel for the rise of Europe.
  • The sweet potato played a similar role in China. Introduced (along with corn) from South America via the Pacific silver trade in the 1590s, it suddenly provided a way for Chinese farmers to cultivate upland areas that had been unusable for rice paddies. The nutritious new crop encouraged the fertility boom of the Qing dynasty, but the experiment soon went badly wrong. Because Chinese farmers had never cultivated their dry uplands, they made beginners' mistakes. An increase in erosion led to extraordinary levels of flooding, which in turn fed popular unrest and destabilized the government. The new crops that had helped to strengthen Europe were a key factor in weakening China.
  • European ships accidentally imported the fungus-like organism, native to Peru, that causes the potato disease known as late blight. First appearing in Flanders in June 1845, it was carried by winds to potato farms around Paris in August. Weeks later it wiped out fields in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and England. Blight appeared in Ireland on Sept. 13.
  • the Columbian Exchange, like a biological Internet, has put every part of the natural world in contact with every other, refashioning it, for better or worse, at a staggering rate.
Javier E

When Covid Hit, China Was Ready to Tell Its Version of the Story - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...beijing-coronavirus-media.html

china propaganda campaign influence press Culture Politics policy

shared by Javier E on 10 May 21 - No Cached
  • In the fall of 2019, just before global borders closed, an international journalists’ association decided to canvass its members about a subject that kept coming up in informal conversations: What is China doing?
  • What it found was astonishing in its scope. Journalists from countries as tiny as Guinea-Bissau had been invited to sign agreements with their Chinese counterparts. The Chinese government was distributing versions of its propaganda newspaper China Daily in English — and also Serbian. A Filipino journalist estimated that more than half of the stories on a Philippines newswire came from the Chinese state agency Xinhua. A Kenyan media group raised money from Chinese investors, then fired a columnist who wrote about China’s suppression of its Uyghur minority. Journalists in Peru faced intense social media criticism from combative Chinese government officials.
  • What is China planning to do with this new power?
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  • The answer comes in a second report, which is set to be released on Wednesday by the International Federation of Journalists, a Brussels-based union of journalism unions whose mission gives it a global bird's-eye view into news media almost everywhere. The group, which shared a copy with me, hired an author of the first report, Louisa Lim, to canvass journalists in 54 countries
  • The interviews “reveal an activation of the existing media infrastructure China has put in place globally,” Ms. Lim, a former NPR bureau chief in Beijing who is now a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, wrote in the report. “As the pandemic started to spread, Beijing used its media infrastructure globally to seed positive narratives about China in national media, as well as mobilizing more novel tactics such as disinformation.”
  • Both the media and vaccine campaigns are intertwined with China’s “Belt and Road” global investment campaign, in which Chinese support comes with strings attached, including debt and expectations of support in key votes at the United Nations.
  • “The accusation on China is what the U.S. has been doing all along,”
  • The report found that a new media push accompanied the intense round of Chinese diplomacy in the pandemic, providing protective equipment initially and then vaccines to countries around the world, all the while scrambling to ensure that things as varied as the pandemic’s origin and China’s diplomacy was portrayed in the best possible light.
  • China is fighting what is in some ways an uphill battle
  • Instead, the cultural power represented by companies like Netflix and Disney — vastly more powerful and better funded than any government effort — has been doing the work.
  • Its growing authoritarianism, its treatment of the Uyghurs and its crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong damaged global views of China, according to other surveys, even before the pandemic began in Wuhan.
  • much of China’s diplomacy is focused on places that, while they may not have the cultural or financial power of European countries, do have a vote at the U.N. And while they appear often to be improvisational and run out of local embassies, China’s efforts are having a global impact.
  • I spoke to journalists on five continents who participated in the report. Their attitudes ranged from alarm at overt Chinese government pressure to confidence that they could handle what amounted to one more interest group in a messy and complex media landscape.
  • the general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, Anthony Bellanger, said in an email that his view of the report is that while “China is a growing force in the information war, it is also vital to resist such pressures exerted by the U.S., Russia and other governments around the world.”
  • there’s little question of which government is more committed to this campaign right now. A report last year by Sarah Cook for the Freedom House, an American nonprofit group that advocates political freedom, found that Beijing was spending “hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spread their messages to audiences around the world.”
  • The United States may have pioneered the tools of covert and overt influence during the Cold War, but the government’s official channels have withered
  • Trump sought to turn those outlets into blunter propaganda tools, and Democrats and their own journalists resisted. That lack of an American domestic consensus on how to use its own media outlets has left the American government unable to project much of anything.
  • it is less the exposure of a secret plot than it is documentation of a continuing global power shift. China’s media strategy is no secret, and the Chinese government says its campaign is no different from what powerful global players have done for more than a century.
  • Erin Baggott Carter, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Southern California, said her research has found that American news organizations whose journalists accepted official trips to China subsequently “made a pivot from covering military competition to covering economic cooperation.”
  • In talking to journalists around the world last week about Chinese influence, I was also struck by what they didn’t talk about: the United States. Here, when we write and talk about Chinese influence, it’s often in the context of an imagined titanic global struggle between two great nations and two systems of government
  • from Indonesia to Peru to Kenya, journalists described something much more one-sided: a determined Chinese effort to build influence and tell China’s story.
  • “Americans are quite insular and always think everything is about the U.S.,” Ms. Lim said. “Americans and the Western world are often not looking at what is happening in other languages outside English, and tend to believe that these Western-centric values apply everywhere.”
Javier E

Reasons for COVID-19 Optimism on T-Cells and Herd Immunity - 0 views

nymag.com/...t-cells-and-herd-immunity.html

immunity Covid-19 research science

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Friston suggested that the truly susceptible portion of the population was certainly not 100 percent, as most modelers and conventional wisdom had it, but a much smaller share — surely below 50 percent, he said, and likely closer to about 20 percent. The analysis was ongoing, he said, but, “I suspect, once this has been done, it will look like the effective non-susceptible portion of the population will be about 80 percent. I think that’s what’s going to happen.”
  • one of the leading modelers, Gabriela Gomes, suggested the entire area of research was being effectively blackballed out of fear it might encourage a relaxation of pandemic vigilance. “This is the very sad reason for the absence of more optimistic projections on the development of this pandemic in the scientific literature,” she wrote on Twitter. “Our analysis suggests that herd-immunity thresholds are being achieved despite strict social-distancing measures.”
  • Gomes suggested, herd immunity could happen with as little as one quarter of the population of a community exposed — or perhaps just 20 percent. “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent,” she told Hamblin. “It’s very striking.” Such findings, if they held up, would be very instructive, as Hamblin writes: “It would mean, for instance, that at 25 percent antibody prevalence, New York City could continue its careful reopening without fear of another major surge in cases.”
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  • But for those hoping that 25 percent represents a true ceiling for pandemic spread in a given community, well, it almost certainly does not, considering that recent serological surveys have shown that perhaps 93 percent of the population of Iquitos, Peru, has contracted the disease; as have more than half of those living in Indian slums; and as many as 68 percent in particular neighborhoods of New York City
  • overshoot of that scale would seem unlikely if the “true” threshold were as low as 20 or 25 percent.
  • But, of course, that threshold may not be the same in all places, across all populations, and is surely affected, to some degree, by the social behavior taken to protect against the spread of the disease.
  • we probably err when we conceive of group immunity in simplistically binary terms. While herd immunity is a technical term referring to a particular threshold at which point the disease can no longer spread, some amount of community protection against that spread begins almost as soon as the first people are exposed, with each case reducing the number of unexposed and vulnerable potential cases in the community by one
  • you would not expect a disease to spread in a purely exponential way until the point of herd immunity, at which time the spread would suddenly stop. Instead, you would expect that growth to slow as more people in the community were exposed to the disease, with most of them emerging relatively quickly with some immune response. Add to that the effects of even modest, commonplace protections — intuitive social distancing, some amount of mask-wearing — and you could expect to get an infection curve that tapers off well shy of 60 percent exposure.
  • Looking at the data, we see that transmissions in many severely impacted states began to slow down in July, despite limited interventions. This is especially notable in states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas. While we believe that changes in human behavior and changes in policy (such as mask mandates and closing of bars/nightclubs) certainly contributed to the decrease in transmission, it seems unlikely that these were the primary drivers behind the decrease. We believe that many regions obtained a certain degree of temporary herd immunity after reaching 10-35 percent prevalence under the current conditions. We call this 10-35 percent threshold the effective herd immunity threshold.
  • Indeed, that is more or less what was recently found by Youyang Gu, to date the best modeler of pandemic spread in the U.S
  • he cautioned again that he did not mean to imply that the natural herd-immunity level was as low as 10 percent, or even 35 percent. Instead, he suggested it was a plateau determined in part by better collective understanding of the disease and what precautions to take
  • Gu estimates national prevalence as just below 20 percent (i.e., right in the middle of his range of effective herd immunity), it still counts, I think, as encouraging — even if people in hard-hit communities won’t truly breathe a sigh of relief until vaccines arrive.
  • If you can get real protection starting at 35 percent, it means that even a mediocre vaccine, administered much more haphazardly to a population with some meaningful share of vaccination skeptics, could still achieve community protection pretty quickly. And that is really significant — making both the total lack of national coordination on rollout and the likely “vaccine wars” much less consequential.
  • At least 20 percent of the public, and perhaps 50 percent, had some preexisting, cross-protective T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2, according to one much-discussed recent paper. An earlier paper had put the figure at between 40 and 60 percent. And a third had found an even higher prevalence: 81 percent.
  • The T-cell story is similarly encouraging in its big-picture implications without being necessarily paradigm-changing
  • These numbers suggest their own heterogeneity — that different populations, with different demographics, would likely exhibit different levels of cross-reactive T-cell immune response
  • The most optimistic interpretation of the data was given to me by Francois Balloux, a somewhat contrarian disease geneticist and the director of the University College of London’s Genetics Institute
  • According to him, a cross-reactive T-cell response wouldn’t prevent infection, but would probably mean a faster immune response, a shorter period of infection, and a “massively” reduced risk of severe illness — meaning, he guessed, that somewhere between a third and three-quarters of the population carried into the epidemic significant protection against its scariest outcomes
  • the distribution of this T-cell response could explain at least some, and perhaps quite a lot, of COVID-19’s age skew when it comes to disease severity and mortality, since the young are the most exposed to other coronaviruses, and the protection tapers as you get older and spend less time in environments, like schools, where these viruses spread so promiscuously.
  • Balloux told me he believed it was also possible that the heterogeneous distribution of T-cell protection also explains some amount of the apparent decline in disease severity over time within countries on different pandemic timelines — a phenomenon that is more conventionally attributed to infection spreading more among the young, better treatment, and more effective protection of the most vulnerable (especially the old).
  • Going back to Youyang Gu’s analysis, what he calls the “implied infection fatality rate” — essentially an estimated ratio based on his modeling of untested cases — has fallen for the country as a whole from about one percent in March to about 0.8 percent in mid-April, 0.6 percent in May, and down to about 0.25 percent today.
  • even as we have seemed to reach a second peak of coronavirus deaths, the rate of death from COVID-19 infection has continued to decline — total deaths have gone up, but much less than the number of cases
  • In other words, at the population level, the lethality of the disease in America has fallen by about three-quarters since its peak. This is, despite everything that is genuinely horrible about the pandemic and the American response to it, rather fantastic.
  • there may be some possible “mortality displacement,” whereby the most severe cases show up first, in the most susceptible people, leaving behind a relatively protected population whose experience overall would be more mild, and that T-cell response may play a significant role in determining that susceptibility.
  • That, again, is Balloux’s interpretation — the most expansive assessment of the T-cell data offered to me
  • The most conservative assessment came from Sarah Fortune, the chair of Harvard’s Department of Immunology
  • Fortune cautioned not to assume that cross-protection was playing a significant role in determining severity of illness in a given patient. Those with such a T-cell response, she told me, would likely see a faster onset of robust response, yes, but that may or may not yield a shorter period of infection and viral shedding
  • Most of the scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, and immunologists I spoke to fell between those two poles, suggesting the T-cell cross-immunity findings were significant without necessarily being determinative — that they may help explain some of the shape of pandemic spread through particular populations, but only some of the dynamics of that spread.
  • he told me he believed, in the absence of that data, that T-cell cross-immunity from exposure to previous coronaviruses “might explain different disease severity in different people,” and “could certainly be part of the explanation for the age skew, especially for why the very young fare so well.”
  • the headline finding was quite clear and explicitly stated: that preexisting T-cell response came primarily via the variety of T-cells called CD4 T-cells, and that this dynamic was consistent with the hypothesis that the mechanism was inherited from previous exposure to a few different “common cold” coronaviruses
  • “This potential preexisting cross-reactive T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has broad implications,” the authors wrote, “as it could explain aspects of differential COVID-19 clinical outcomes, influence epidemiological models of herd immunity, or affect the performance of COVID-19 candidate vaccines.”
  • “This is at present highly speculative,” they cautioned.
woodlu

A new low for global democracy | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...a-new-low-for-global-democracy

politics history

shared by woodlu on 10 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • LOBAL DEMOCRACY continued its precipitous decline in 2021, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index from our sister company, EIU.
  • The global score fell from 5.37 to a new low of 5.28 out of ten. The only equivalent drop since 2006 was in 2010 after the global financial crisis.
  • For the second year in a row, the pandemic was the biggest source of strain on democratic freedom around the world.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • North America fared only slightly better. Despite riots in the Capitol and attempts by the departing president Donald Trump to overturn the election results, the inauguration of Joe Biden proceeded smoothly and America’s democracy score only fell by 0.07 points.
  • Pedro Castillo’s narrow victory in Peru in June was contested for weeks by his opponent, Keiko Fujimori, and the Nicaraguan poll in November was a sham. Chile was downgraded to a “flawed democracy” partly because of low voter turnout in its deeply polarised elections, and Haiti is still in political crisis after the assassination of the president, Jovenel Moïse.
  • Through lockdowns and travel restrictions, civil liberties were again suspended in both developed democracies and authoritarian regimes.
  • Canada suffered a far bigger setback, of 0.37 points. Again, pandemic restrictions were the main cause of frustration and disaffection. According to the World Value Survey, which is used in some of the quantitative sections of the EIU’s survey, just 10.4% of Canadians felt that they had “a great deal” of freedom of choice and control. More alarming, 13.5% expressed a preference for military rule.
  • The fall in Canada’s index score reflected popular disaffection with the status quo and a turn to non-democratic alternatives.
  • The trucker blockade in Ottawa may presage more political upheaval. But the biggest challenge to the Western model of democracy over the coming years will come from China
  • After four decades of rapid growth it is the world’s second-biggest economy; within a decade the EIU forecasts that it will overtake America. If China’s absence from Mr Biden’s recent Summit for Democracy is anything to go by, the West is not looking to engage it. China’s response to being snubbed was to declare the state of American democracy “disastrous”.
izzerios

Trump's TPP withdrawal: 5 things to know - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...trump-tpp-things-to-know

shared by izzerios on 24 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump has begun carrying out his campaign pledges to undo America's trade ties -- starting Monday with executive action to pull the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
  • "Great thing for the American worker, what we just did," Trump told reporters
  • Trans-Pacific Partnership -- a 12-nation deal that had been negotiated under former President Barack Obama.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • TPP -- its fate was bleak on Capitol Hill no matter what the White House did
  • Nothing changes because of Trump's move.
  • in doing so, he ends all hopes for a deal Obama wanted as a major part of his legacy.
  • Trump's move to withdraw from the TPP is likely to be politically popular.
  • The deal's critics complained that it didn't directly address the issue of currency manipulation.
  • he'd start to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
  • is in position to reverse decades of American presidents pushing for lower trade barriers and an interconnected global economy.
  • through his negotiating prowess, force of will and willingness to walk away from the table, he can convince other countries to accept terms that previous presidents -- from George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton on NAFTA to Barack Obama on the TPP -- have not been able to achieve.
  • TPP -- which has also included Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Brunei -- would have slashed tariffs for American imports and exports with those countries.
  • Sen. Bernie Sanders -- a leading Trump critic -- praised it, saying he is "glad the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead and gone."
  • "Now is the time to develop a new trade policy that helps working families, not just multi-national corporations," Sanders said in a statement. "If President Trump is serious about a new policy to help American workers then I would be delighted to work with him."
  • Republicans have long supported free trade -- and now find themselves torn between a protectionist President and a business community that sees Trump's position as detached from the reality that new technology, rising wages and an increasingly interconnected world mean that many manufacturing and low-skill jobs won't return to the United States;
  • "I don't see any benefit in trying to crawl back into our shell as a country," Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, told CNN.
  • Because the TPP hadn't taken effect, there will be no immediate impact.
  • United States is foregoing by turning down what would have been a deal including countries that make up 40% of the global economy
  • Businesses will also lose access to potential new markets, though. US automakers hoped to see tariffs slashed in Asia. Farmers were set to see the removal of trade taxes that currently prevent them from selling products
  • from Google to cell phone providers, sought to lessen regulations and gain entry into some of the countries involved in the deal.
  • "This decision will forfeit the opportunity to promote American exports, reduce trade barriers, open new markets, and protect American invention and innovation," Arizona Sen. John McCain
  • "We must remain committed to promoting free trade and investment through opening up and say no to protectionism," Chinese President Xi Jinping
  • Obama had pitched the TPP as a way to counter China's growing influence by imposing US-backed labor, environmental and patent protections.
  • The 11 remaining TPP nations are now set to regroup.
  • the United States' withdrawal could mean a major rewrite, or an opening for another global superpower to pursue an alternative agreement.
maddieireland334

Argentine Court Confirms a Deadly Legacy of Dictatorships - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-legacy-of-dictatorships.html

Argentina Crisis Dictatorship History Trial

shared by maddieireland334 on 29 May 16 - No Cached
  • Mr. Molfino’s mother, Noemí Gianotti de Molfino, a 54-year-old Argentine, was a victim of Operation Condor, a plan devised by six South American military governments in the 1970s to hunt down and eliminate leftist dissidents across national borders.
  • In a landmark trial that spanned three years and involved the cases of more than 100 victims, a four-judge panel on Friday convicted and sentenced 14 former military officers for their roles in Operation Condor, a scheme of kidnappings, torture and killings.
  • For the first time, a court in the region ruled that the leaders of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay had worked together in a regionwide criminal conspiracy against opponents, some of whom had fled to exile in neighboring countries, during an era of military dictatorships in the 1970s and ’80s.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • South American military governments in the 1970s and 1980s kidnapped and murdered thousands of rebel guerrillas and dissidents. Operation Condor accounted for at least 377, according to a joint report by a unit of Unesco and the Argentine government in 2015.
  • In other South American countries, efforts to bring violators of human rights to justice have sputtered. But over the past decade, Argentina has carried out scores of trials in which at least 666 people have been convicted of crimes during Argentina’s “dirty war” of the 1970s and ’80s.
  • Judges received testimony from about 370 witnesses over three years, but some of defendants died during the trial, annulling the cases of their victims. For their relatives, the convictions on Friday were tinged with frustration.
  • Sara Rita Méndez, 72, a survivor of Operation Condor who was kidnapped and tortured in Argentina in 1976 and then detained for years in her native Uruguay, said: “These trials are fundamental. They generate confidence in society.”
  • Operation Condor was conceived in November 1975 during meetings hosted by the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who enlisted the leaders of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Peru and Ecuador joined later.
  • With President Obama’s recent order to declassify additional American records that could reveal what the United States government knew about Argentina’s “dirty war,” hopes of piercing the shroud of secrecy surrounding other atrocities of the era have been revived, although it is unclear when the documents will become available.
Javier E

Quinoa should be taking over the world. This is why it isn't. - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-the-world-this-is-why-it-isnt

quinoa industry

shared by Javier E on 13 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Demand started to ramp up in 2007, when Customs data show that the U.S. imported 7.3 million pounds of quinoa. Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods began carrying the seed soon after, and the U.S. bought 57.6 million pounds in 2012, with 2013 imports projected at 68 million pounds
  • And yet, prices are skyrocketing; they tripled between 2006 and 2011, and now hover between $4.50 and $8 per pound on the shelf.
  • Part of it is that Peru itself, already the world’s biggest consumer of quinoa, patriotically started including the stuff in school lunch subsidies and maternal welfare programs.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The Andean smallholders are trying to keep up with the demand. They’ve put more and more land into quinoa in recent years; Bolivia had 400 square miles under cultivation last year, up from 240 in 2009. The arid, cool land that quinoa needs was plentiful, since little else could grow there. And thus far, that trait has made it difficult to grow elsewhere.
  • U.S. industry has shown little interest in developing the ancient grain. Kellogg uses quinoa in one granola bar, and PepsiCo’s Quaker Oats owns a quinoa brand, but the biggest grain processors–Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland–say they’ve got no plans to start sourcing it. Monsanto, the world’s largest seed producer, has nothing either.
  • Instead, their research and development dollars are focused entirely on developing newer, more pest-resistant forms of corn, soybeans, wheat, sugar, and other staples. All of those crops have their own corporate lobbying associations, government subsidy programs, and academic departments devoted to maintaining production and consumption. Against that, a few researchers and independent farmers trying to increase quinoa supply don’t have much of a chance.
  • it’s hard for any new crop to make the transition from niche to mainstream.
  • For that reason, quinoa prices are likely to remain volatile for a long while yet. Brigham Young’s Rick Jellen says the lack of research funding for quinoa–relative to the other large crop programs–means that even if they come up with a more versatile strain, it won’t have the resilience to survive an infestation
Javier E

What Technology Wants - 0 views

www.carnegiecouncil.org/...0329.html

technology future Technium trends scaling culture evolution

shared by Javier E on 01 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Do you know what technology is? We commonly think about technology as anything that was invented after you were born. My friend Denny Hills made kind of a version of that through his statement, "It's anything that doesn't work yet."
  • Wired, which was not about the technology, but about the culture around the technology. We like to think of ourselves as a lifestyle magazine. We are a magazine about technology culture in the way that Rolling Stone is a magazine about music culture.
  • This book came out of a little bit of my own efforts to try to understand what technology meant and where it should fit into the realm of the world. When a new technology came along, should we embrace it, or hold off?
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • What's the theory behind technology? Do we just deal with each one, one by one, or was there a kind of a framework to understand and have a perspective on technology?
  • All these technologies that we have now made are interrelated, they are codependent, and they form a kind of an ecosystem of technologies. You might even think of it as if these were species, as if it was a super-organism of technology.
  • I'm interested in this super-organism of all the technologies. I gave it a name. I call it the Technium.
  • In the larger sense, the Technium is anything that we make with our minds.
  • all these things are connected together and they form an interacting whole, a kind of a super-organism, that has in many ways its own slight bit of autonomy, and its own agenda.
  • It wants in the way that a plant wants light and so it will lean towards the light. It has an urgency to go towards light. It's not intelligent, it's not aware of it, but that's what it wants.
  • If it does want things, it means that it wants it independent of our choosing. At the same time we are making it; it is there because we exist. It's not independent of us, but it has some slight bit of autonomy.
  • Biologists are slowly coming around to admitting that there are directions in evolution. The standard orthodoxy for many years was that it was completely random, and that there was no direction whatsoever. Any ordinary person found that shocking because they could definitely see a direction in evolution.
  • We see an arc of increasing complexity in the long journey of life.
  • Along the long history there is movement towards increasing diversity.
  • There is also increasing movement towards specialization.
  • There is a trend towards increasing structure. Things become more and more complicated.
  • There is a trend towards emergence
  • There are other trends—towards ubiquity, towards energy efficiency, towards degrees of freedom.
  • What I'm suggesting is that there is a continuum, a connection back all the way to the Big Bang with these self-organizing systems that make the galaxies, stars, and life, and now is producing technology in the same way.
  • The energies flowing through these things are, interestingly, becoming more and more dense.
  • The amount of energy running through a sunflower, per gram per second of the livelihood, is actually greater than in the sun.
  • The most energy-dense thing that we know about in the entire universe is the computer chip in your computer. It is sending more energy per gram per second through that than anything we know.
  • The other thing that is evolving over time is the evolvability of the system. One of the things that life is doing is it's evolving its ability to evolve.
  • Another way to think about this is that one of the things that life likes to do is make eyeballs. Life evolution independently invented eyeballs 30 different times in different genres and taxonomies. It invented flapping wings four times. It invented venomous stings about 20 times independently, from bees, to snakes, to jellyfish. It also has invented minds many, many times.
  • We are going to fill the universe with all different kinds of thinkings, because only by having many different kinds of minds can we actually understand the universe. Our own mind is probably insufficient to completely comprehend the universe.
  • The reason why we want to embrace it with our full arms is because what technology brings us is an opportunity for everybody's special mix of talents to be expressed. Just as we all have different faces, we all have a different mix of aptitudes and abilities. We use technologies to express those things.
  • The question is: Was Moore's Law inevitable? What drives Moore's Law? Where is this coming from?
  • Moore's Law, not in terms of transistors, but in terms of measuring computer power, was happening long before Moore or anybody even noticed it. The effect was happening before anybody believed it.
  • this suggests is that this is actually an inherent attribute of the physics, and it suggests that it is independent of the economy. Even if the silicon chip had been invented in Stalinist Russia under a command economy, it probably would still follow exactly the same kind of curve.
  • Geoffrey West at the Santa Fe Institute looked at a whole bunch of technologies, like solar and batteries and other kinds of things, and they show this this scaling law holds true in many industries.
  • It has something to do with the basic shape of the economy and of physics, and it's not really a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this way I suggest that these kinds of curves are inevitable. One of the characteristics of the Technium is it exhibits these scaling laws.
  • we do know that the media that we have does rewire our brains. We know this by studies of people who are literate. They took scans in Peru of people who were illiterate and those who could read and write. They found that in fact their brains work differently—not just when they're reading, but just in general. After having five, ten or twenty years of education and learning to read and write, it actually changes how your brain works.
  • It's also very clear that if you are spending five or ten hours a day in front of a computer, that is going to change how your brain works. It is going to rewire how we're doing things.
  • We have a dependency on the alphabet. That's how we think about things. We need reading and writing. We think in terms of words. We imagine it. We see it around us. It's ubiquitous. We are dependent on the alphabet. That doesn't seem to bother us very much.
  • As these technologies become more ubiquitous and as we become dependent upon it, that's what it is. We will be dependent upon it. It will be our exobrain. We'll use it to remember. It will always be around.
  • We invented the external stomach, it's called cooking, that allows us to digest stuff that could not otherwise increase nutrition. It changed our jaw and our teeth. We are physically different people because of our inventions. While we can live on a raw diet, it's actually very hard to breed on a raw diet.
  • What we have done is become dependent on our technology, and we will become ever more so. That's just the definition of who we are. We are the first domesticated animals. We are a technology ourselves.
  • What I'm saying is that there is only a little more good in technology than bad, but a little is all we need. If we create one-tenth of a percent more than we destroy every year, we can make civilization, because that tenth of a percent compounded over centuries is all that we need.
  • Every time there's a new technology that comes along, we have the possibility to use it for harm or for good. We also suddenly have a new possibility and choice that we didn't have before. That new choice is that little tiny tenth of a percent that's better, because we have now another freedom that we didn't have before. That tips it into the good side. It's not much better, but that's all we need over the long term. That's why over the long term it's good, because it increases choices and possibilities.
  • Technology is not powerful unless it can be powerfully abused. There is going to be a learning period. There are going to be phases that people go through and then become addicted. They don't know how to use it.
  • DDT is horrible. Don't give it a job as a pesticide, and spray millions of acres of cotton fields. That's a terrible job and causes all kinds of havoc. Yet used locally and sprayed around households, DDT eliminates malaria and saves millions of lives a year, and it has very little environmental impact that way. That's a better job for this technology.
  • We want to find the right jobs for these things and the right frame. Just like there are no bad children, there are also no bad technologies. You've just got to find the right place for them.
  • My research has shown that there are very few species of technology that ever go extinct. That's the difference between biological evolution and technological evolution; in technology things don't go extinct. They can be resurrected.
  • Very few people go backwards. Why? Because we have to surrender so many choices and options.
  • As wholesome and as satisfying as those lives are, the price of going back to these places is surrendering choices and opportunities. In general, the whole arc of evolution is towards expanding those, and that's why by embracing technology we can align ourselves with this long arc throughout the cosmos into the future.
  • I did a calculation that showed three-quarters of the total energy that we use on the planet right now, at least in the United States, is used in servicing technology. Roughly, three-quarters of the gasoline that you use in your car is used to move the car and not you. You're just a minor passenger in this whole thing. We have energy used to heat the warehouses that are holding the stuff that we have or to move the stuff that we have. Already this Technium is consuming three-quarters of our energy.
  • That is also where it's going. There will be more technology used to support more technology. Most of the traffic on the Internet is not people talking to each other; it's machines talking to other machines.
Javier E

Visiting Latin America's real success stories - Opinion - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

english.aljazeera.net/...2011322112136636199.html

latin america economy foreign policy US international

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • n the international arena, the new president, Dilma Roussef, has pulled back from Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva's many excesses (indifference to human rights abuses, support for Iran and its nuclear program, and rhetorical anti-Americanism) during his last year in office, and may even have a present for Obama.
  • South America is booming, as India and China swallow up its exports of iron, copper, soybeans, coffee, coal, oil, wheat, poultry, beef, and sugar. Its foreign trade and investment patterns are diversified and dynamic. With a few minor exceptions, migration is internal to the region, and a modus vivendi has been reached with the drug trade, mainly coca leaf and cocaine in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. Moreover, relations with the US, while important, are no longer paramount. South American governments can afford to disagree with the US, and often do. They have just elected a new president of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), whose headquarters are being built in Quito, Ecuador. As its name suggests, Unasur's main raison d'être is to exclude Canada, the US, and Mexico (in contrast to the Organisation of American States).
  • None of this holds true for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean islands – mainly the Dominican Republic, but eventually Cuba, too, and, in its own way, Haiti. These are not mineral-rich or bountiful agricultural nations: some coffee and bananas here, a little sugar and beef there, but nothing with which to sustain a boom. While Mexico is America's second-largest supplier of oil, this represents only 9 per cent of its total exports. Instead, these countries export low-value-added manufactured goods (Mexico does more, of course), and live off remittances, tourism, and drug-transshipment profits. All of this is overwhelmingly concentrated on the US: that is where the migrants are, where the towels and pajamas are shipped, where the tourists come from, and where the drugs are bought. For these countries, including Mexico, stable, close, and productive relations with America are essential.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • One area is freeing itself from US hegemony and is thriving, but may founder if Chinese and Indian growth slows. Another is increasingly integrated with the US and Canada. Despite its current travails, it will discover a path to prosperity when the US does.
Grace Gannon

A Mine Erodes an Andean City - 0 views

lens.blogs.nytimes.com/...a-mine-erodes-an-andean-city

Andes Peru mine erosion society environment disaster

shared by Grace Gannon on 13 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 13 Jan 15
     
    In the heart of Cerro de Pasco, a Peruvian city perched 14,000 feet in the Andes, a mile-wide mine pit smolders. For residents, the growls of heavy machinery are background noise. Just as ever-present is the hazardous cocktail of smoke and lead that seeps into their air and water.
Javier E

DNA Reveals the Hidden Jewish Ancestry of Latin Americans - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...578509

latin america jewish ancestry migration history

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Chacón-Duque and his colleagues pieced together the genetic record by sampling DNA from 6,500 people across Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, which they compared to that of 2,300 people all over the world. Nearly a quarter of the Latin Americans shared 5 percent or more of their ancestry with people living in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, including self-identified Sephardic Jews. DNA alone cannot prove that conversos were the source of this ancestry, but it fits with the historical record.
  • This pattern of widespread but low North African and eastern Mediterranean ancestry in the population suggests that its source is centuries old, putting the date around the early days of New Spain.
  • Geneticists have also noticed rare genetic diseases prevalent in Jews popping up in Latin America. “It’s not just one disease. It’s like, wow, this isn’t a coincidence,
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