The Mexican government has been waging war against drug cartels for over a decade with limited success. These cartels illegally procure modern military equipment from Western countries, making the fight comparable to those in Middle Eastern warzones.
On Wednesday, Mexican TV channel Milenio published an article titled "Mexican cartels prepare for a war; they have military grade ROCKET LAUNCHER" that shows a video of a Gulf Cartel (Cartel Del Golfo, CDG) member carrying a "military-grade grenade launcher during a checkpoint in Matamoros, Tamaulipas."
The war in Ukraine has forced Germany to boost coal imports from Colombia even as it seeks to phase out fossil fuels at home. Glencore is benefiting the most from the high demand, but the local people not nearly as much.
The bags were discovered as part of a search for seven young workers of a call center who have gone missing. Authorities have yet to confirm whether the remains are those of the workers.
Mexican police have discovered dozens of bags with human remains, during a search operation for seven young workers of a call center who went missing a week ago, Mexican prosecution said on Thursday.
Forty-five bags containing dismembered bodies were discovered in the Mirador del Bosque, in the suburbs of the western city of Guadalajara. The city is considered the cradle of the powerful cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG).
The Jalisco state prosecutor's office said it was not yet clear whether the remains belonged to the seven missing workers but declared that the search for them was ongoing.
Mexico has seen spiraling violence since the war on drugs began in 2006, with over 350,000 people having died since then.
Remains recovered from ravine
State prosecutors said the bags were recovered from a 40-meter-deep ravine in an area with difficult access. One black plastic bag containing human remains was first found on Tuesday, leading to the search that resulted in the discovery of the rest of the bags the next day.
Police coordinated with Zapopan city's civil protection forces and firefighters to extract the bags with the evidence.
Forensic personnel were also at the scene to determine the number of possible victims and to try and identify them, the prosecution added.
The preliminary report suggests the 45 bags contain the remains of both men and women.
Artillery and air strikes hit the Khartoum market after the Sudanese military said it was suspending talks. The US warned it wouldn't be able to mediate amid truce violations.
https://p.dw.com/p/4S4
At least 18 civilians were killed in a market in Khartoum on Thursday, after the military announced withdrawing from truce talks the day before.
Military shelling and aerial bombardments hit the capital's market, injuring over 100. The French AFP news agency cited a neighborhood group which organizes aid as saying the situation was "catastrophic."
The number of casualties was even higher than the initial tally, a member of a local neighborhood committee told the Reuters news agency. They said several people were either treated at the scene or buried at home by relatives who feared the perilous trip to hospital.
The Sudanese military, led by Abdel-Fattah Burhan, has been using its air force to attack members of its rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since the fighting started on April 15. The latter have nestled in the capital's neighborhoods, and the confrontation has left many Khartoum residents trapped in their homes to avoid the fighting.
What's the fate of the truce?
Clashes continued elsewhere in the capital and its surroundings, with residents of northern Omdurman and southern Bahri reporting heavy artillery fire.
"We are being terrorized by the sounds of heavy artillery around us. The house has been shaking," 49-year-old Nadir Ahmed in Omdurman told Reuters. "Where is this ceasefire we hear about?"
Sudan's army suspended talks with the RSF on Wednesday, accusing the paramilitary group of failing to implement "any of the terms of the agreement" and continuously violating the ceasefire.
The US acknowledged on Thursday "serious violations of the ceasefire by both sides." A State Department spokesperson warned that Washington would only mediate if the warring parties were "serious."
"Once the forces make clear by their actions that they are serious about complying with the ceasefire, the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are prepared to resume facilitation of the suspended discussions to find a negotiated solution to this conflict," the AFP news agency quoted the spokesperson as saying.
The fighting, ongoing since mid-April, has killed hundreds and displaced over a million, hundreds of thousands of whom crossed into neighboring countries to seek refuge.
It wasn’t just the upstairs neighbor who heard the child “screaming for her dear life” and yelling, “Stop, stop, stop!” Who told a reporter, “You could hear the thumps, bro.”
Nor was it the reports of her 8-year-old brother, who told a classmate that his mother was “whipping him, slapping him.”
Nor was it the school that reported long stretches of absences by the brother, that he was regularly picked up more than an hour late from school, that he wore the same clothes each day and smelled like urine.
Nor was it the brother who came to school with a bruised and swollen face and told a teacher his mother had punched and kicked him for drinking out of the sink.
It was also the worker at the Administration for Children’s Services who went to the home, heard the boy’s account and then listened as the mother explained she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder but was not being treated.
The Administration for Children’s Services is apparently trying to peddle a story that this tragedy is in part the result of an agency that is stretched too thin.
Jalayah Eason died after being found unconscious and unresponsive in an apartment with bruises to her wrists and body on May 26.Lynija Eason/Instagram
According to the New York Times, that neighborhood’s “caseworkers have an average load of 12.5 cases, ACS said — about 17 percent higher than the citywide average.”
Never mind that the average caseload nationwide is between 24 and 31 children. Or that it is well beneath the Child Welfare League of America recommendation of 15 children per social worker.
Just like smaller class size doesn’t guarantee a better education if the teachers are incompetent or spouting ideological nonsense, it has been clear for years that New York City’s child welfare problems do not stem from caseworkers being overwhelmed or children “falling through the cracks.”
Neighbors reportedly heard Jalayah “screaming for her dear life” and yelling, “Stop, stop, stop!” Robert Miller
Between 2008 and 2020 (the last year for which data are available), the number of deaths of children in families who had been previously reported and investigated by ACS increased from 49 to 52 even while workers’ caseload plummeted from 18 to fewer than six children per employee at one point.
These tragic situations are often the result of deliberate decisions by agency leaders to leave children in situations that are unsafe.
There are two narratives driving these decisions.
Jalayah’s 8-year-old brother told a classmate that their mother was “whipping him, slapping him.”Lynija Eason/Instagram
The first is that ACS is racist. Activists argue the reason black children are placed in foster care more often is structural bias in the system. They want to abolish child protective services the same way they want to defund the police.
In her speech to fellow CUNY Law graduates last week, Fatima Mousa Mohammed proudly mentioned her classmates had gone to court to reunite families “torn apart” by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services.
ACS has all but embraced this rhetoric, commissioning a survey of 50 black and Hispanic employees (in an agency with thousands of employees) that concluded child welfare is a “predatory system that specifically targets Black and brown parents.”
Lynija Eason, Jalayah’s mother, at her arraignment.Tomas E. Gaston
The other narrative is that families are investigated and children are removed from their homes simply because of poverty, and claiming a parent is engaging in neglect is really the same as just saying she’s poor.
While it is true families involved in the child welfare system are disproportionately poor, correlation is not causation. A recent study of almost 300 California case files that cited neglect, for instance, found 99% “included concerns related to substance use, domestic violence, mental illness, co-reported abuse or an additional neglect allegation (i.e., abandonment).”
Substance abuse and mental illness often lead to poverty. They also make it hard to properly care for children. But that doesn’t mean poverty is the root cause of child neglect.
ACS says its caseworker didn’t see visible signs of abuse on Jalayah’s brother.Lynija Eason/Instagram
Agency leaders say they make a distinction between neglect and abuse and understand there are circumstances in which children are not physically safe.
But in the case of Jalayah, the evidence for abuse was there. ACS says its caseworker didn’t see visible signs on Jalayah’s brother, but that’s probably just an indication it took too long to investigate.
It is time for the agency to stop taking its cues from activists driven by progressive ideology and start putting the safety of children first.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author of “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.”
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
Posts
