POLISARIO Front warns that if Aminatu Haidar dies, the truce is over

Aminatu Haidar is a Sahrawi citizen and human rights activist who was expelled from the territory occupied by Morocco to Canary Islands (Spain) after she wrote down in her police file that her country of residence is Sahara (meaning West Sahara or the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, as is officially recognized by many countries).

Since then she has mantained a hunger strike for more than 20 days and her life now is at increased risk. However she refuses to be hospitalized on fear of Spanish manipulations or forced feeding. She has also rejected the offer of political assylum by Spain and demands to be returned to Moroccan-administered territory.

I have several times thought of covering the matter but, with so many things going on, I have failed to do it until now.

Aminatu Haidar is known as the Sahrawi Gandhi

Anyhow, the case is that the POLISARIO Front (acronym of Frente POpular para la LIberación de SAguía el Hamra y RÍO de Oro, names of the former Spanish provinces in West Sahara) has declared that if Aminatu Haidar dies, they will abandon their long standing UN-sponsored truce, that has given no results besides diplomatic blah-blah, and return to armed struggle. It was none less that Taleb Omar, leader of the Front and Prime Minister of the disputed Republic who made this warning to the Spanish state news station RNE, so it is something that must be taken very very seriously.

Oddly enough, Taleb Omar demands that the Law of Foreigners is strictly applied in this case, which would result in Haidar being expelled to Morocco immediatly (and Morocco would have to accept her because of the bilateral treaties on this matter). He had very rough words for Spain, which is accused again of being accomplice of the Moroccan tyranny (also a privileged ally of the USA and France) and compared disfavorably the role of Spain in the Sahrawi case with that of Portugal in the similar case of East Timor, where the former metropolis had a proactive commitment to the independence of its ex-colony.

Source: Rebelión.

Agriculture spread through cultural diffussion in SW USA

This should not be really surprising to those who have read for instance George Catlin's diary, who reports seasonal use of green maize as complement to an otherwise hunter diet among the Mandan (a people from further north anyhow). Some peoples in the early stages of transition to agriculture may have adopted only certain, more profitable aspects of the new technology, making a slow transition.

William R. Merrill et al., The diffusion of maize to the southwestern United States and its impact. PNAS 2009. Not open access yet, news article at Science Daily anyhow.

The authors conclude that the American staple crop was passed from forager group to forager group through the Southwest of the USA (Texas, etc.) and has no relation with the spread of Uto-Aztecan languages, which in fact pre-dates agriculture and was a north to south migration. SW peoples also show a gradual independent transition to making pottery.

Does testosterone increase generosity instead of selfishness?

An interesting experiment has been done on women. A group of female volunteers received an injection of testosterone, the male hormone, associated with aggression in rodents, while, as usual, a control group received a placebo.

Among the women who did not know what was all about, those under testosterone behaved more generously than the control group (offering an average of 50 cents more in the test's deals). However those women who were told that had been injected testosterone, whether true or not, behaved more aggressively and offering up to 1 dollar less in their bargains.

These results contradict an earlier experiment in which young men did behave stereotypically macho under the effects the hormone. This other test did not consider bias though.

Source: New Scientist (I could not find the original paper, though I know it's been published in Nature).

Yet another poor paper on Jewish ancestry

N.M. Koppelman et al., Genomic microsatellites identify shared Jewish ancestry intermediate between Middle Eastern and European populations. BMC genetics, 2009. Open access.

The first thing I looked at was whether they had sampled non-Jewish Turks as control group. They did not, hence, in my opinion, this is just another paper that totally misses the point of Jewish origins, which are probably more in ancient Anatolia than in Palestine.

However, my dad, who grew up under a fascist dictatorship where good information was scarce and camouflaged, taught me to read between lines: to go beyond what the authors are expressly saying and detect that way further implications. And there are some things we can learn from this paper too therefore.

They did not sample gentile Turks but they did sample Jewish Turks and Palestinians, as well as Tunisian and Moroccan Jews, Tuscan and Adygei gentiles, etc. Certainly Jews (who appear as a rather homogeneous cluster regardless of origin) do not cluster closely with Palestinians at K=6, which in itself suggests that they are not of Palestinian origin. Their Palestinian genetic levels are essentially the same as those of Europeans, or just slightly higher.

The "Jewish" (Anatolian?) cluster does appear instead to have some increased presence in some European populations: exactly those in which you would expect a greater Anatolian affinity: Sardinians, Tuscans and Adygeis.

This paper is essentially useless and is unable to question the Anatolian Diaspora hypothesis that I hold as the likely origin for Jews and very specially European Jews (Ashkenazim and many Sephardim).

Why do I hold this hypothesis? First, for historical reasons: the original Jewish community in Hellenistic and Roman times was the Anatolian diaspora (there were Jews in some other areas, notably Alexandria and Palestine but the vast majority lived in Asia Minor - and that's why Christianity began there). At that time Judaism (of which Christianity is just an offshoot) was proselytist (and that's why Christianity and Islam are proselytist) and logically absorbed many gentiles who found spiritual and/or materialist benefits in such conversion. There are clear medieval examples of full nations or at least their elites converted to Judaism: Yemen, Kurdistan, Berbers, Khazars... and nothing less than the whole Roman Empire (Christian subsect, then transformed in a separate religion). So this should not be surprising at all (but of course is taboo under the Zionist doctrine because it would imply that Judaism is just a religion, not a race or nation).

Secondly, Jews, specifically Ashkenazi Jews, have only clustered with someone else (as far as I know) when Greeks and Armenians were included in the sample (see Bauchet 2007). They are not Turks but close enough and anyhow these three peoples made up a unique cluster in this mostly European study.

So I am still waiting for the research paper that dares to deal with this issue from a honest perspective. Of course, I know that (sadly enough) one should not expect such honest approach from a Tel Aviv University researcher but I am always optimistic and truly believe in human good disposition and honesty. However I also know of cowardice and conformism.

I'm still waiting.

Demographics of Central-North European Neolithic

Thanks to a very friendly reader I have got now access to a large host of papers I would not probably have access to otherwise. One of them is S. Shennan & K. Edinborough, Prehistoric population history: from the Late Glacial to the Late Neolithic in Central and Northern Europe (Journal of Archaeological Science, 2007).

It is a very interesting research that links almost directly with what I wrote these last days on British Neolithic. Like in Collard's paper, they make use of archaeological density and C14 dates to build up an approximate reconstruction of the demographic history of Germany, Poland and Denmark in the Epipaleolithic and Neolithic periods.

I took this graph (fig. 2) and annotated it with references to the various cultures in order to get an improved vision, to make the comparisons more extensive, I also added Collard's graph for Britain (notice that Collard uses calBP, i.e. "years ago", while Shennan and Edinborough use BCE dates). The result is as follows (click to expand):


I used a color key: yellow-orange for Danubian cultures, red for Nordic cultures and blue for Kurgan cultures. All marked cultures are Neolithic (or Chalcolithic). The reference dates have been taken as carefully as possible from The Comparative Archaeology Web (a great site) and Wikipedia.


Early Neolithic rise and fall

My reader called my attention on the presence of a sharp peak similar to that found in Britain for Central European early Neolithic. There are some differences and they belong to very different periods (separated by almost 2000 years) but there is certainly a marked similitude (they are also similar in that they are both the first local farming cultures and that they both seem to be originated in migrations, although within very different cultural frames). I was suggested that maybe an epidemic caused it but I find that mass destruction epidemics like the Black Death are not known to destroy more than half the population and are certainly followed by a demic recovery soon afterwards. Also I'm too materialist to think than anything but economic reasons would have caused such abrupt decline.

What economic reasons? Of course, there might be climatic reasons: an increase in cold would surely cause a sharp decline but notice that, while continental farmers seem to have all suffered more or less sharp decline since 5000 CE, British hunter-gatherers seem mostly unaffected. In turn, the British Neolithic demic collapse has some less dramatic parallels in the continent (except Germany) but they are much less destructive. I would not totally discard hence that epidemics or cold periods might have helped in these Early Neolithic decays but there must be something else.

The key in this phenomenon (assuming it is no artifact) seems to be the fact that they are both immigrant cultures and the first Neolithic phenomenon locally. So I am considering that their practices were not sustainable and that in few centuries they may have destroyed the very ecological foundations of their initially buoyant economy. Slash-and-burn farming can be the key to a rapid success but also to a slower destruction of the environment that unavoidably has consequences in the long run. The fact that they were immigrant peoples, with imported crops and techniques, and largely ignorant initially of the local ecology, can only have helped to this lack of perspective and their eventual (partial) failure.

A partial exception in this picture is Denmark: this country appears, ironically, to have been more populated in the Epipaleolithic (fishing-based economy, which is quite productive) than in all the Neolithic prior to Funnelbeaker (TRBK) and Megalithism. There is nevertheless a decline around the same period as happened in Central Europe, but is not nearly as sharp.


Middle/Late Neolithic lows, Chalcolithic ups and downs

There are more interesting analysis to develop from this graph.

One is that the bottom of Germany's Neolithic population reached apparently a lowest point (not significantly higher than in the Late Epipaleolithic) with Rössen culture (Danubian regional development) and did not really recover until deep in the Chalcolithic in the Globular Amporae to Corded Ware transition, at the beginning of idoeuropeization (except for East Germany, which is much older - Baalberge). However Germany is large and was fragmented in many regional groups (some within TRBK too, not marked for this country), specially as time passed, so take this with some caution if you want take a more local perspective.

Quite similar is the case for Poland, though the recovery arrived earlier, again coincident more or less with Indeuropeization. But notice that the recovery belongs rather to the early Baden culture period (marked outside the graph in dark yellow), which barely reached Poland as such but did influence these early West Indoeuropeans into a process of some cultural "Danubization", which seems was beneficial.

But Denmark is the area that experienced an earliest and more sustained recovery with Funelbeaker culture and Megalithism. There is some decline by the end of this period (why?) and then a recovery with the Corded Ware (Indoeuropeization), which could well mean a colonization.


Indoeuropean decay

In all Indoeuropeanized areas (Central Europe, Denmark) there is a sustained decline after Corded Ware, that largely correlates with the complex Bell Beaker phenomenon (that I interpret as a trade network or multinational guild - it is not a true culture in any case but in most places a minority phenomenon).

However this is not the case in Britain, where this period corresponds to either a demographic plateau (without monuments) or a period of marked growth (with monuments). It is certainly a golden age for the Atlantic peoples (pre-Indoeuropean) for what I know of other contexts, when the first West European civilzations rise in Iberia, one of them even becoming temporarily the main center of the Bell Beaker trade network, and when mariner trade across the Atlantic (and Mediterranean) seems to be very high. It is therefore likely that the demographic decline of Indoeuropeans has no parallel but rather an opposite in the pre-Indoeuropean Atlantic cultural area, still Megalithic for a long time.


Update (Dec 10): take a look at this climate reconstruction graph:

(from Wikimedia Commons)

It would seem maybe that some of the more marked demic peaks could be coincident with some similar peaks in the average temperatures. Notably there was one after 6000 BP, coincident with the farmers' colonization of Britain and the great increase of population in Denmark, and another one at 8000 BP, coincident with the Danubian expansion. But otherwise the parallels are hard to find, so I still think that climatic fluctuations were only a co-factor and not the main driver of demographics.

Why did Evo win?

As you probably know from the mainstream media, Evo Morales and the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) won again by a landslide in the latest Bolivian elections. Atilio A. Boron explores why at Rebelión (in Spanish). Briefly:

1. Termination of illiteracy, following a Cuban program. In 2008 UNESCO declared the country to be officially free of this social handicap.
2. Improvement of healthcare, with the help of Venzuela and Cuba.
3. Improvement of public attention towards marginalized sectors like the elderly, handicapped and pregnant women.
4. Important advancements of the agrarian reform.
5. Recovery of the public control over natural resources (oil and gas).
6. Good macroeconomic management that has allowed the country to have solid reserves for the first time in history, which has in turn served the social and development agenda of the government.
7. Personal integrity and ascetic ("spartan") disposition of Evo, making of him a most charismatic leader.

There are also some moderate criticisms: that the development model is unoriginal and that there is certain contradiction between the eco-comunitarian discourse and the reality of this "extractivist" development style. However he argues that it would be too much to ask the government to make such titanic achievments in such a short time.

The demographics of British Neolithic (2)

I wrote yesterday on the new research by Collard et al. that suggests that Britain experimented a rapid population increase in the few centuries that followed the arrival of farming to the island. Afterwards a reader has sent me a copy of the paper (a million thanks again) and I can now comment a bit further with better knowledge of the matter.

But first of all the sequence:


This graph, which is central to the research, represents the archaeological findings with a C14 date for the whole island of Great Britain (I understand). As you can see the population explodes after c. 6000 calBP (calibrated C14 dates, our best equivalent to "years ago" since 1950 - equivalent to c. 3950 BCE in this case), even if we discard the monuments. The demic growth was some 400% in four centuries, maybe more.

Later, by the second half of the millennium, the population decreased very sharply again but, thanks to agriculture surely, remained higher than in the Epipaleolithic (250%?). Since then it remained stable, although it is difficult to interpret the growth in monumental sites in the second half of the 3rd millennium BCE in terms of demography.

As the authors argue this explosion is difficult to conciliate with a process of gradual incorporation of farming by the natives and fits best with the model of colonization from the mainland.


Regional differences

Most of the Neolithic colonization (or demic explosion) process happened in two specific areas: SW England and central Scotland. The rest of the island was unaffected or only affected in a secondary and less intense manner. Naturally (climate) SW England experienced a much more intense demic explosion than Scotland, which began slightly before and ended also somewhat later.

This is the situation at the apogee of SW English Neolithic, 5600-5700 calBP ("hotter" colors like white imply greater density, black implies same density as in Epipaleolithic):


The Scottish Neolithic apogee was apparently some 100 years early and here is shown already receding (but was not much more extense nor intense anyhow).


Armorican ('French') origins

The authors argue that the migrations were two, both originated in NW France but in different subregions.

The first wave was that affecting SW England and seems to have originated in the Megalithic area of Lower Normandy, with some elements also from the (non-Megalithic) Neolithic of Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

One hundred years later more or less, a second wave original from Brittany (also within the Dolmenic Megalithism cultural area) touched in coastal Wales and reached Scotland. There are no traces of any other migration.

Both Lower Normandy and Brittany, as well as the inland areas between the Seine and the Loire rivers, were a homogeneous cultural region that is only second in Europe to develop the Dolmenic Megalithic cultural set (earliest known are in Southern Portugal and nearby districts of Spain, soon after Neolithization, c. 7000 BP). In Celtic and Roman times it was known as Armorica, meaning the Sea Country, as a whole it has no other collective name so guess that talking of Armorican Neolithic or Armorican Megalithism makes full sense.

This ancient country would be in any case the main source of the Neolithic colonists that this paper suggests.


Questions

Why did the population decline so sharply after the initial explosion? Did they over-exploit their environment? Is the initial abrupt growth an artifact of archaeological research?

If the arrival of Neolithic to Great Britain (and NW Iberia at least) is product of the spread of Dolmenic Megalithism, does this imply that we should begin to consider Megalithic expansion as a demic phenomenon in general, with all the implications it would have in population genetics? I find this hard to believe but I am not totally sure. If so, should we consider Portugal as the origin?

What happened in the "black" (or even dark red) areas that are about half of the island? It does not look like there was any colonization there. How did they become Megalithic then?

Why did the people of Great Britain began building so many monuments since 2500 BCE? This is precisely a very hot period in Europe, when Indoeuropeans (Kurgan) took over West Germany and Scandinavia, but also just after the formation of the first West European civilizations in southern Iberia (VNSP and Los Millares) and not long before the increase in trade associated to the Bell-Beaker phenomenon. Does all this imply some sort of increase in political organization?


Source: Mark Collard et al., Radiocarbon evidence indicates that migrants introduced farming to Britain. Antiquity, 2009.

People lived in Norway 10,000 years ago

In line with other recent discoveries that push back the Epipaleolithic colonization of far Northern Europe (North Sweden, Scotland), Norwegians can now also claim a somewhat older history.

Human inhabitation remains have been located at Ekenberg heights, near the Norwegian capital, a place then would have been at sea level. They have been dated to c. 10,000 year ago (until now the oldest remains were only some 8000 years old).

Source: the Norway Post (via Archaeology in Europe).

Gruesome cannibal site of early Neolithic Rhineland

The westernmost branch of the Danubian Neolithic peoples were a strange bunch: they are typically buried with weapons, unlike all other Danubians, they might have been quite extensive consumers of opium (as far as I know theirs is the oldest evidence of this psychoactive crop) and now it seems they were also cannibals.

Bruno Boulestin et al. have excavated a site near Herxheim (Rhineland-Palatinate, just at the border with France) where they have found an extensive mass burial of what seem to be the remains of roasted and eaten people.

The paper is published at the latest issue of Antiquity (paywall) but, for those who do not have access, BBC also comments on the prehistoric mass murder.

Rapid population increase at the arrival of Neolithic to Britain

In a new paper published at the Journal of Archaeological Science (paywall), Mark Collard et al. argue that the arrival of agriculture to Great Britain, some 6000 years ago, was followed by a rapid increase of the population.

From that they conclude somehow that the process involves a migration. I am not so sure because in optimal conditions a population can even double in one or two generations, but certainly implies some sort of rapid expansion of the farming economy that maybe is best explained with some level of migration.

Another problem I have is apparent lack of continuity between continental and insular cultures. Clearly it was not the Danubian farmers with their homogeneous culture who made that colonization but there are several other less defined cultures in Atlantic Europe by that time, including one just south of the Channel that would soon become the second center of Dolmenic Megalithism (but with a rather peculiar drift) at Brittany and Midwest France (classical Armorica). There had been other distinct farmer cultures in NW France and Belgium but were about then absorbed by the Rössen culture (Danubian). There was also another non-Danubian farmer culture in Denmark and agriculture was also penetrating gradually into SW Atlantic Europe at that time.

From what I gather from the abstract and the short article at New Scientist, the population quadrupled in four centuries, which is quite fast, and they think that the immigrants arrived from France. They also say that the first increase of the population happened in South England and then in Middle Scotland, which may have a different origin altogether.

Sincerely, I would not mind reading this one because my understanding of Neolithic Britain is very fragmented and this seems a serious attempt to systematize the knowledge of this major historical change.

Cannabis highly effective against muliple sclerosis symptoms

The combined effect of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabibidiol (CBD) is very effective against the obnoxious symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS), while the side effect ("high") is low when compared with those of other costly and pretty much ineffective alternative treatments. Five out of six patients (more than 80%) report reduction in spasticity and improved mobility.

The use of cannabis as medicine has deep roots and is again being confirmed by modern science.

Shaheen E. Lakhan and Mary Rowland, Whole plant cannabis extracts in the treatment of spasticity in multiple sclerosis: a systematic review. BMC Neurology, 2009.

News article at Science Daily too.

First extrasolar planet ever imaged

This certainly deserves an entry here: for the first time ever, human eyes, aided with telescopes, have been able to image directly what seems to be a planet (or probably two) orbiting a star other than the Sun. We had detected them before by the slight decay of luminosity when a planet passes before its sun but never before had a planet outside the Solar System been taken a photo.

This is an extremely important event in space exploration. Never before now human eyes could see something like this:

The star GJ758 is artificially occulted at the center of the image (though it's light obviously hides most of its vicinity anyhow) and the possible planets are circled and tagged with the corresponding letter. They might be brown dwarves or hot Jupiters, otherwise we'd probably would not be able to see them.

C. Thalmann et al., Discovery of the Coldest Imaged Companion of a Sun-Like Star.

Found originally via Science Daily. Image credit: Max Planck Institute for Astronomy/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

The Great Western Imperial Firewall

Paul Marks writes at New Scientist:

"THIS is the kind of snooping you'd expect in China, not a modern western democracy. It raises huge questions over privacy invasion and freedom of expression." So says Andrew Heaney - who is not, as you might imagine, a civil liberties campaigner, but a senior executive at TalkTalk, one of the UK's largest internet service providers. Along with other ISPs, his company faces the prospect of being forced to spy on its customers' downloads for signs of potential copyright infringement.

>> Read more.

We supposedly enjoy the right to use our property the way we want, we supposedly enjoy the right not to be spied by the authorities without justified judicial intervention... but that does not apply to the Internet. While my phone or snail-mail conversations are protected by the right to privacy, whatever I do in the Internet is considered unprotected and open to be scrutinized by the police without any judicial supervision.

And if I happen to breach their corporativist laws, I won't even have a trial: I will be severely sentenced without any kind of guarantees.

And worst of all is that all their efforts to control intellectual property are futile. People will keep downloading and sharing one way or another, and they won't buy more because they just can't. Some will be punished but essentially piracy will just change its forms without any reduction. If anything people may feel even more justified to infringe copyright at any occasion because the mafioso style of this thought police is so annoying that you can't but choose to punish them whenever you can.

The whole project is going to fail (again). Their attempts to capitalize into even the most marginal sectors is essentially doomed. However it may have a good facet: that it will unavoidably open the debate on one of the central tenets of the late Toyotist capitalism: extremist intellectual property and how it makes impossible to do anything. And this kind of virtual property is the last hold of Capitalism: when we are done with it, this age will be over.

It is a fact that the labyrinth of patents and copyrights is hindering research, that fair use should be standard not any exception - even if just for the sake of science.

Imposed "Basque Government" pays 750 euros for flag!

It is well known that only goal of these imposters, imposed at gunpoint at undemocratic elections (Honduras: we do understand you), is to plant Spanish banners wherever they can. But the least they could do to demonstrate their Basqueness is to pay a reasonable price, even if it's an invasor's flag what they buy.

No way. They have paid them (with our taxpayer's money) at 754 euros a piece! So you can compare, an unskilled worker may earn 1000 euros monthly and the poverty subsidy is slightly more than 600 euros.

Similar interior banners can be purchased on the Internet at less than 10% what they paid. The usual Spanish flag is about 45 euros the unit, slightly more for other types.

The usurper "Basque Government" has spent 59,000 euros (our euros!) in flags and flagpoles in total. And this in a time of crisis, when the budget almost doesn't cover all needs.

I wonder who is the smart fascist who made such good money at our expense.

Source: Gara.

Colombia plans to attack Venzuelan territory

This is what the former Venzuelan vice-president, José Vicente Rangel, has denounced to Venezuelan media. The plan would be an operation similar in design as the one executed in Ecuador last year against a diplomatic camp of the FARC, fabricated presence of guerrillas in Venezuelan soil would be the pretext for this intervention, that would of course count with US support.

Rangel also denounced the presence of seven thousand Comlombian paramilitaries in Venzuela working to destabilize the republic.

Source: Rebelión.

The Hadza at National Geographic

Always wanted to know how was to be a hunter-gatherer? There is a very interesting visitor narration on one of the last hunter-gatherer nations of the world at National Geographic, just 13 pages well worth your time.

Found at Music 000001 (now in the process of reconstructing the hypothetical ancestral population of all Humankind in Africa).
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Mice without father live longer and other genetic news

Various genetic news have called my attention today.


From the latest PLoS ONE:

Bad prospects for genetic-association medicine.

Yudi Pawitan et al. throw cold water to the hopes of getting simple Mendelian gene-disease associations and even discovering them at all:

Assuming similar allele frequencies and effect sizes of the currently validated SNPs, complex phenotypes such as type-2 diabetes would need approximately 800 variants to explain its 40% heritability. Much smaller numbers of variants are needed if we assume rare-variants but higher penetrance models. We estimate that up to 50,000 cases and an equal number of controls are needed to discover 800 common low-penetrant variants among the top 5000 SNPs. Under common and rare low-penetrance models, the very large studies required to discover the numerous variants are probably at the limit of practical feasibility.

Eigenvectors versus Principal Components.

Jun Zhang et al. argue that Laplacian eigenvector analysis and their LAPSTRUCT method provides better analysis of population structure than the "classical" but somewhat limited Principal Components Analysis (PCA).


From Human Reproduction:

Two mothers, no father mice live even longer.

M. Kawahara and T. Kono found that two-mother (2M) mice live some 20% longer on average than normal mice, having smaller and more slender bodies and much better antioxidative processes. They argue that this may be caused by a gene at chromosome 9, which is generally activated at pregnancy to act by the father side, but in this case, without father, the epigenetics is activated differently resulting in these sturdier and smaller mice (all female, of course).

This story (found originally at Science Daily) made me recall the radical feminist S.C.U.M. Manifesto by the late Valerie Solanas and her defense of a female-only humankind. The technology for in vitro female-female reproduction is available (and has been for long) but illegal in humans for obvious ideological reasons (patriarchy, homophobia). On light of these results and the widespread desire for longer and healthier lives, one wonders if Ms. Solanas was not more correct than even she herself believed.

All three papers are freely available (links in text).
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Corruption as paradigm

I was reading to Martin Hutchinson at Asia Times Online and he makes a good an interesting analysis, pointing out some other hidden pockets of rot in the global economy after Dubai, namely: China, Britain and the USA. However, in spite of this rather sharp "discovery", he seems also outraged at the level of rot of the global economy and that I find extremely naive.

Probably Hutchinson is one of those liberal-conservatives who still believe in the promises of Capitalism, so his naivety is ideologically justified. Probably Hutchinson never bothered reading Deleuze and Guattari or any of the other Marxist authors.

So he has rosy glasses when looking at the reality of the liberal economic paradigm, even if he's naively critical of its corruption.

Following the Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism is a schizoid decodifying force, whose only morality is that it can borrow from pre-existent institutions such as religion and culture. In other words: Capitalism is a force of Chaos that spreads corruption and selfishness. And it does not spare those institutions that partner with it: these are also corrupted to the marrow.

Hence there is another more passive or resisting pole that they call paranoid, which is ideological and rooted in the old regime (the pre-bourgeois territorial system) which reacts cyclically in what D&G describe as a pendulum. This secondary pole is not really able to counter Capitalism but can maybe crop some of its excesses (and develop others of its own, as happens with Fascism or Islamism). But in practical terms it cannot escape or effectively counter the corrupting and demoralizing influence of Capitalism, which always persists and comes back with further disintegration once the misguided reactionary season is over.

There's no way out of this pendulum within the system. And there's no way outside the system but a socialist one, one that is also decodifying but creatively ethic. In fact there is a "thin red line" that goes through Capitalist society trying to make it more ethic, but obviously doomed to fail while selfishness and competion are the basic rules of the game.

But, well, the case is that we have a big rotten house, whose very pillars are deeply rotten and whose leaders refuse to cleanse for fear of catastrophe or rather self-perpetuating manipulations by the Oligarchy. The case is that there is no way out of the crisis with or without cleansing, the case is that we are facing a situation similar (but probably much worse) to that of the 1930s.

However now global war is rather unthinkable as an exit and some of the systemic problems are well beyond what they call economy, which is predating the planet to such unprecedented extent that has largely transferred brutal costs to the global ecosystem, making any standard liberal solution impossible.

There are many threads to pull from here, but what seems more striking to me is that in fact there is a serious possibility that the whole global system may implode with relatively low levels of institutional violence (aka war). Not just because of the nuclear threat but because no expansionist adventure would really solve anything anymore. There is many people in the high spheres thinking otherwise, of course, and this may cause some tragedies, but overall none of the problems will be solved that way - unlike what happened after WWII with the military-industrial complex meta-bubble, whose consequences are largely popping out right now.

There is no way and little purpose in securing global hegemony because the colonialist system is itself bankrupt at the very core and little can be done by mere control of some resources. Even a planetary empire would not be able to solve anything at all.

So what now? Considering the low levels of class and even species conscience that exist right now, I'd say that the system will collapse, with some painful outbursts, rather slowly... until an alternative can be built. However, as the system implodes uncontrolled in a chain reaction of sorts, the alternative will appear from the bottom, built on anger and desperation.

Interesting times these we live in.
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Scotland may have independence referendum next year

The ruling Scottish NationalParty has presented a plan to hold a referendum on independence in 2010. They need the support of the small Green Party to pass the law. There are also incognites on which options will the referendum ballot allow.

If successful, the Scottish process may herald the end of the United Kingdom as we know it. Together with other processes it may also signal the beginning of the "internal decolonization" in Western Europe, where many other nations are struggling for a long denied sovereignty.

Source: Gara.

Human presence in North Scandinavia since 10-11,000 years ago.

From Radio Sweden International and The Local via Archaeology in Europe.

Two settlements dated to c. 10-11,000 BP (very late UP or early Epipaleolithic in pan-European chronology) have been found in the northernmost reaches of Sweden, in the Tornedale region that borders Finland (and used to be of Finnish culture and language).

This new evidence adds up to similar dates for another distant Northern European colonization: that of Scotland, probably one or two milennia earlier.
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Nonviolent movememnt for a single state solution in Palestine

I believe it is very worth mentioning this Gaza group, new to me, that is launching a campaign to solve the problem of Palestine by the only means possible: the constitution of a multiethnic secular democratic unified state. The fact that they are also nonviolent makes them even more interesting in a context marked by violence and continuous crimes against humankind (very specially by Israel - there's no comparison!)

Link: The One Democratic State Group (ODSG).
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Israeli Apartheid: real and with legal implications worldwide

Similarly to the previous report by a South African committee, this new paper by Luciana Coconi ratifies the idea that what happens in Palestine has no other name than Apartheid, which is a crime against humankind and therefore Israeli officials and collaborators of all sorts can be prosecuted internationally anywhere on Earth.

The paper, titled Apartheid against the Palestinian people, has been published by ACSUR and is available in English, Spanish and Catalan (direct link to English PDF here).
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Massive abstention in Honduras illegitimate poll

The legitimate Honduran President, Manuel Zelaya, declared that the pseudo-elections, that the dictatorship has organized to perpetuate itself under a clout of legitimacy, managed to attract only 35% of voters.

The coupists are claiming that abstention was of only 30%, when actually reached 65%. We have 1400 of the total 5000 polling stations sampled and we also have the acts and voting numbers. That means: we have enough data to demonstrate that the dictatorship is falsifying the truth - declared the ousted President to the Bolivarian News Agency (ABN).

The USA and Panama have already declared they would acknowldege the result of these illegitimate elections. Colombia and Peru might do as well. Most other countries of America will surely keep their support for Zelaya, even if only nominally.

It is interesting to read imperialist media like the pseudo-prestigious BBC because they only mention the dictatorship's claims. It says a lot about the real "objectivity" of such media.

So we can say now that Honduras had fraud elections and that the dictators lost... though they claim otherwise.

With less than 35% of popular support (there were huge pressures on citizens to vote) the oligarchic tyranny has a problem to keep itself afloat. The conflict is likely to continue for some time until the coupists are ousted and a constitutional assembly can be elected with guarantees.

There were no neutral international observers in this election. Only far right US groups sent some but they are anything but neutral.

Amnesty International already denounced the "threatening atmosphere" in which this poll took place. There are reports that in some places armed troops in plain clothes rounded up the citizens forcing them to vote. The state of emergency in which the poll took place did not impede that demonstrators took to the streets again in San Pedro Sula, however the police repressed them violently. The repression against those who support the legitimate president is spreading up to the point that this jouney dressed of democracy has been dubbed the second coup in Honduras.

We'll see what happens but, unless a patriotic commander makes a counter-coup, the totalitarian situation can extend in time, bringing destabilization and potential increased conflict to all the region. But one thing I am sure about: the Honduran people will not submit.

Update: the National Front of Resistence Against the Coup in Honduras declared only 21.5% went to vote.
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Dozens Basque youths arrested in political round-up

Just another chapter of the thoughtless repression of the state against legitimate political activity by Basques. 34 people, allegedly holding responsability posts in the youth organization Segi, were arrested two days ago in various towns of the Southern Basque Country by orders of the Neoinquisition judge Grande-Marlaska.

On application of the anti-terrorist law they have been deprived of all legal guarantees and can be held incommunicated for two weeks. Yesterday the tribunal rejected the habeas corpus and the application of the anti-torture measures, which are only used at discretion of the judges (that means almost never).

The charges are unknown at the moment but it's likely that they will be accused of belonging to terrorist organization, as the inquisitorial judges have already ruled that "everything is ETA", and that certainly applies to Segi.

These measures are only applied against the Basque Left. Hence you can have someone punished with 10 years of prison for burning a cash machine and someone with 12 years for homicide (you can imagine who is a Basque patriot of the two, right?). You can have someone with incommunication and denial of the right to defense for just being member of a political organization and another with full rights and bail for being member of a terrorist organization that has made actual attacks (but the latter are Spanish nationalists, not Basques).

Source: Gara.
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Bilderberg rules EU

The hyper-secretive club of the powerful that is claimed to rule the World (or at least a good deal of it) from the shadows, the Bilderberg Group, paid for the secret dinner where the new EU Council's President was nominated.

The new office will be in the hands of Herman Van Rompuy, the Christian-Democrat Prime Minister of Belgium. In spite of his low profile, he frequents the secret meetings of the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, therefore he is an insider of the Western Imperial Senate (if not government) who will implement their obscurantist decissions.

Source: Peace Report (in Italian). Spanish version at Rebelión.
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Genes, brains and fractals (various brief notes)

I'm feeling intellectually saturated right now and don't feel like writing or even reading too much at the moment. However there are some interesting news I think I should mention. Therefore I'll just make a quick reference here... by the moment.


Genes:

Some of these news come from the new PLoS ONE issue:

D. López Herráez et al. have found several evolutionary markers that seem to define short height in Pygmies (as an adaptative response to low iodine diet) and cartilaginous tissue that may correlate with "racial" differences as shown in facial traits (facial features are largely defined by cartilages).

G. Resink et al. explore the parallels and differences between genetic structure in Sahul and language families. This report is also discussed at Dienekes' blog.

Also I have been reading Subramanian's paper on Penguin DNA and molecular clock (thanks to German again) but, sadly, it is not as clarifying as the press release would suggest. I need to re-read it in order to make up my mind.


Brains:

At Science Daily we are informed of the fact that larger brains are not necessarily correlated with greater cognitive power, that bees and dogs can essentially understand the same things about their surroundings.

Also at SD, it is mentioned that IBM has managed to recreate with supercomputers the wiring complexity of a cat-like brain.


Chaos:

For those interested in Chaos theory and fractal geometries (I love it but also beats me), New Scientist deals with the three dimensionalization of the classical Mandelbrot Set, gallery included.
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Liberal International attempts coup in Nicaragua

The President of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, has denounced that European MP and President of the Liberal International, Hans van Baalen, attempted to seduce Nicaraguan military officers into organizing a coup in the Central American country. However, according to Ortega, the reaction of the officers was patriotic and instead of joining such an anti-democratic plot, they reported the conspiration attempt.

Van Baalen, member of the Dutch VVD party, also managed to appoint recently Honduran coup leader, Roberto Micheletti, as one of the many vice-presidents of this global political bloc that sponsors Capitalism and supposedly also democracy and human rights, and that is mostly made up of small European parties.

Source: Tercera Información (found via Rebelión).

So, essentially, this "democrat" is trying to impose military regimes in Central America, surely acting as agent for other powers like the USA, and smash genuine democracy in the continent.

These maneouvers must be understood in the context of increased US-NATO intervention in Latin America, of which the occupation of Haití, the coup in Honduras and what has been called "the annexation of Colombia to the USA" (the new military treaty that gives full operative freedom to US troops and absolute impunity) are just the tip of the iceberg. There is increased tension in the continent and not just anymore between the USA and Venezuela: the interventionist attitude of the USA is also rising tensions with Brazil, which is naturally trying to counter the North American imperialism in its area of interests (for example supporting the legitimate Honduran President Manuel Zelaya).

Watch Latin America closely because I would not be surprised if the rumors of war could become true. However the Latin American peoples are pretty much tired of being treated as a colony and I doubt that these imperialist interventions will anymore have much effectivity.

And, on a side note, the brutal drought in Mexico can bring this crucial country one step further towards a revolution (it has been leaning to it for 15 years now) and shift the power balance in America still more against US hegemony.
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Molecular clock, two to six times slower than thought

Don't you just love it when you can say "I knew that!", "I told you!"

I did not have the hard evidence to prove it but I have been all the time arguing that the human molecular clock estimates (even by the standard Zhivotovski's compensated system) must be much older than normally claimed, at least twice.

Now penguins come to confirm my suspicion.

DNA from dead penguins that has remained frozen in Antarctica extreme conditions has demonstrated that the usual molecular clock age estimates are underestimated by 200 to 600 per cent.

In other words, a biological specimen determined by traditional DNA testing to be 100,000 years old may actually be 200,000 to 600,000 years old...

Source: Science Daily.

Original report: S. Subramanian et al., High mitogenomic evolutionary rates and time dependency. Trends in Genetics, 2009 (paywall).
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Moon has water

And apparently lots of it.

These are the results of a NASA probe (Centaur) that intently impacted on a Lunar crater in order to raise a plume of debris that could be analyzed by telescopes and the Lunar satellite LCROSS. The plume was smaller than expected but after due research in the last weeks it has been determined beyond doubt that a good deal of it was water vapor.

In fact, the water detected was more than 100 Kg. (100 liters at normal Earth pressures and temperatures, I guess). Future research will determine if this finding is confirmed and if there is water also in other spots.

If so, the path for space colonization would be a step closer to reality. However we must remember that the conditions in space and other planetary objects out there are highly hostile: extreme cold, radiation and lack of naturally breathable atmospheres make the whole affair still extremely difficult, much more than colonizing frozen Anctartica for example.

Source: BBC.
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Younger Dryas began in just few months

Research by scientists of the University of Saskatoon (Canada) has found that the arrival of the last cold phase of the late Ice Age, known as the Younger Dryas stadial, took place in few months.

Submilimetrical slicing of fossil sediments at Lough Monreagh in Ireland showed that biological activity stopped within months, a year at most. It would be like taking Ireland and moving it up to Svalbard, in the Arctic Ocean, said led researcher William Patterson.

This is even shorter than the time suggested by less precise measurements in Greenland's ice sheet, that suggested an onset of the big freeze in one to three years.

It is believed that this cold period was triggered by melting of ice sheets due to global warming at the end of the Ice Age, causing the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe quite warmer than normal for its latitude, to stop flowing. The Younger Dryas period lasted some 14 centuries, from 12,900 to 11,500 years ago.

Source: New Scientist.
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Stress in early life alters genes

Epigenetics is for real and babies should not be separated from their mothers at birth, as is still common in hospitals.

German researchers have demonstrated that even "mild" stress in early life can epigenetically damage mammals organisms, making them more stressed for life.

The experiment consisted in separating mouse pups from their mothers for three hours each day for ten days, while a control group had normal motherly care. This did not affect them nutritionally but the animals must have felt "abandoned" (which for a defenseless newborn mammal is the waiting room of death).

The "abandoned" group were less able to cope with stressful situations later in life and had worse memory than the control group.

The experiment did not stop here: they also analyzed the effects at molecular level. They found that the stressed pups produced high levels of stress hormones, which in turn tweaked the gene responsible for producing one of those hormones: vasopressin. This epigenetic alteration produced more vasopressin than usual through the mice's lives, keeping them perpetually stressed.

Using a drug that blocks vasopressin's effects, they tested that it was effectively this altered hormonal procedure which caused their behavioural and memory problems.

The scientists suspect that this also happens in humans, which are not that different from mice after all and on whom there is strong evidence that abuse and stress in infancy leads to later problems through life.

However I'd like to go a step further and again criticise the modern treatment of newborns in so many hospitals, which are often cruelly separated from their mothers for many hours after birth, precisely when they need most the reassuring company, after the heavy stress of birth. I am persuaded that this practice, along with other mistreatments largely product of the medicalization of birth are one of the causes, if not the main one, behind the growth of psychological disorders (psychosis, depression, etc.) among modern populations in the developed world, most of whom have gone through such unnatural hospital births.

Source: BBC.
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Banks do well... but the USA is in a depression

Again, Samah El-Sahat nails it: the USA is in a depression and so is the UK.

The awful policies of these weak governments, hostage of the corporations, mean that the banks have been saved from bankruptcy or nationalization and are now "doing well" thanks to taxpayers' money... but that does not translate in any improvement in the real economy.

The quote from Stephen Lewis is:

Depression is a prolonged period of sub-optimal economic activity in which policy measures are ineffective in improving performance on a substantial basis and based on this, then the USA is in depression

More than 10% unemployment and lack of purchasing power (because banks use the public money to patch leaks, not to lend) mean that the common citizen has lost and is still losing a lot. Still I think she's being way too optimistic when she says that the economy will begin recovering by summer 2010. Sincerely: I believe the economy will never again truly recover: capitalism is agonizing precisely because global leaders (and that means US leaders specially) are not brave enough to do the right thing: nationalize the banks and put them to work for the real economy.

How ironical that fear of "socialism" (nationalizing bankrupt banks to serve free market economy) is actually causing the fall or capitalism, right?
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Palestinians demolish part of the Wall of Shame on the anniversary of Berlin Wall

A group of Palestinian and foreign activists have demolished a small section of the Zionazi wall of shame that was built to enforce apartheid in Palestine.

In Qalandiya, some 50 masked activists demolished a section of the wall using a truck, then crossing the apartheid line and burning tyres at the other side. The slogan of the action was "Jerusalem we are coming" and was visible in some shirts.

Last friday another section at Nilin was almost demolished using a hydraulic car-jack.

The activities are directed to raise awareness on the apartheid wall, which is almost identical in design to the Berlin wall. Abdullah Abu Rahma, leader of the People's Campaign to Fight the Wall, declared:

Today we commemorate 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is the beginning of the activities, which we do, to express our hold on our land, and our refusal to this wall - the wall of torture, the wall of humiliation.

Activities through the world are scheduled for this week in order to raise awareness of the abuse this barrier is, to claim its demolition in agreement with the International Criminal Court sentences, and to demand the release of imprisioned anti-wall activists.

Source: Al Jazeera.
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Ancestral communism

I have the feeling that most of us, modern urbanites don't really have a good grasp on how hunter-gatherer societies are or used to be. I was just correcting someone who claimed that slavery existed among ancestral foragers, for example... but worst was the example given: the Vikings!

A lot of people don't seem to understand well the difference between agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies; in many other cases I have needed to object that Amazonian or Papuan natives are not true foragers but actually jungle farmers, and therefore have social structures that are more complex and quite different. But there are very few modern examples of real hunter-gatherers, mostly on the verge of extinction, but there are some, namely: Bushmen, Pygmies, Australian Aboriginals, Negritos, Andamanese and some Arctic peoples like the Inuit and the Nganasan (am I missing any?). These are diverse enough to constitute a good example of how real Paleolithic societies, our ancestors, might have been.

Victor Grauer has been exploring them in his latest posts at Music 000001 but yesterday's post is particularly insightful and synthetical. He makes clear that foragers like Bushmen and Pygmies have a set of values that are highly egalitarian and cooperative, while allowing for a great deal of individuality too. He makes a difference between these social values, transmitted generation after generation, that secure social cohesion and persistence, and the reality not always as idyllic as some would expect.

There are occasional problems in such "utopic" societies, like murder or wife beating or mere petty cheating. However the worst practices of "more advanced" societies are to be found nowhere:

What we do not see are evidences of: cannibalism, head-hunting, endemic warfare, female mutilation, prostitution, slavery, blood-feuds, raiding, etc.

We the people...

Almost one out of two members of the US Congress is millionaire, compared with less than 1% of all US citizens. The exact figure is 237 out of 500 representatives or 44%.

This is pretty worrisome because, in a democracy, one would expect their representatives in parliament to be more or less like oneself, maybe more brilliant or better educated and surely more charismatic but otherwise, if they have to represent the feelings of the people, they have also to feel their economic situation more or less, right?

Instead the US Congress is dominated by aristocrats, quite ironically.

This reminds me a question that former Democrat candidate John Kerry avoided to answer when asked in TV: what does it mean that both presidential candidates belonged to Yale's secretive society Skull and Bones?

The answer, regardless of whatever conspiracies the society may harbor, is that they both belong to the high elite. Sadly enough this is what democracy has become: a two party system not too different from a one party state (as there is hardly any substanctial difference between the two platforms), in which many or even most politicians are nobility and where the working class is unable to get organized effectively. At best they can get a populist patrician leader like Obama, who is also pretty rich.

Source: Politico. Found via The Angry Arab News Service.
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Most people think 'free market' needs at least major reforms

Interesting global survey the one published today by BBC on account of the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It shows that the world is divided between those that demand regulation and reforms for "free market" (an euphemism for Capitalism) and those that think that this system is a failure and something else is needed. The fraction that are happy with the economic system as it is are a minority everywhere, barely surpassing 20% in the hyper-Capitalist USA.

Among those more emphatic on a new system being necessary are the peoples of France, Mexico, and Brazil. Instead the nations among whom people mostly think that only reform is needed are Germany, USA, UK, Pakistan and Canada. But in all countries people is mostly unhappy with the system as it is now.

Another issue asked is whether the fall of the USSR was a good or bad thing. In this case, the dividing line is between the West (where nearly everybody believes it was a good thing) and the rest (where substantial numbers think it was something disgraceful). Egypt, Russia and Ukraine are the countries where there is more resentment for the fall of the USSR, while in Asia opinions are very divided.
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Inefficient selection behind complexity

In the pure Darwinian scenario of draconian selection that can exist for instance among microorganisms, which are numerous enough for drift and randomness not to be a factor, and among whom competence is maximized like in the ideal free market of liberal economists, all accidental extra copies of genes (paralogs) are eventually erased because they are inefficient.

But among a much smaller population, like humans, Darwinian evolution works inefficiently and these troublesome extra copies of genes do in fact persist. In principle paralogs are problematic and can cause degenerative diseases like Alzheimer because they produce less efficient proteins. But what Ariel Fernández and Jianping Chen of the University of Texas have found is that these paralogs also drive complexity, that it is the accumulation of these errors by drift what in fact generates complexity, that complexity can only arise when selective evolution becomes weak and drift (chaos) rules instead.

After all every order is just a subset of pure Chaos, right?

Source: Science Daily.
Original paper: Human capacitance to dosage imbalance: Coping with inefficient selection. Genome Research 2009 (paywall).
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9/11: eight years on and it's as murky as ever

Theirry Meissan reviews at Voltaire Network the details of the criminal insider job that was the 9/11 massacre, crime for which the actual culprits are still laughing. They are laughing at the world and laughing at the victims and laughing about being able to get away with such macabre scam.

However, as Lincoln said, you can't deceive everybody forever.
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Adaptative evolution does not alter neutral mutation rates

A new research paper appears to demonstrate that adaptative evolution happens along the lines of neutral stochastic evolution and is not accelerated.

Kryazhimskiy S, Tkacik G, Plotkin JB, The dynamics of adaptation on correlated fitness landscapes. PNAS 2009 (right now the PDF is freely available)

From the Press release:

A major conclusion of the work is that for some organisms, possibly including humans, continued evolution will not translate into ever-increasing fitness. Moreover, a population may accrue mutations at a constant rate –- a pattern long considered the hallmark of “neutral” or non-Darwinian evolution -– even when the mutations experience Darwinian selection.

(...)

According to the study, a population’s fitness and substitution trajectories —t he mutations acquired to achieve higher fitness — depend not on the full distribution of fitness effects of available mutations but rather on the expected fixation probability and the expected fitness increment of mutations. (...)

Researchers demonstrated that linear substitution trajectories that signify a constant rate of accruing mutations, long considered the hallmark of neutral evolution, can arise even when mutations are strongly beneficial.

If confirmed, this research should lay to rest the hypothesis that dismiss the informative value of genetic phylogenies based on presumpt adaptative selection: adaptative or not, mutations accumulate on similar rates, depending mostly on other factors, like population size (greater or weaker drift, possibly leading to fixation).
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Human lower jaw from China is 110,000 years old

Found at Mundo Neandertal, originally from Science magazine (paywall).

Chinese scientists have found remains of a lower jaw, including one full molar, at Guangxi Zhuang (country bordering with Vietnam). The remains have been dated by uranium isotopes to c. 110,000 BP.


This finding seems to add to the evidence in favor of an older out of Africa migration than the dates typically considered of c. 70-60,000 BP.

It is worth reminding that lithic tools that might be the work of Homo sapiens have been found recently at Japan, with a date not significatively different from this one. Also in this period there was some migration to North Africa (Aterian) and Palestine, and there are some lithic industries in India, dating to as early as 103,000 BP, that might also be attributed to H. sapiens (stone blades).
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Palestine: negotiations only a pretext for Israeli expansion

As I expected and feared, the US government has backed from its original position of total freeze of the Zionist settlements in occupied land.

All this was since the beginning, and I mean the beginning back at Oslo, more than a decade ago, just a maneouver to gain time in order to continue the genocide.

Let's be frank with ourselves: there is no two-states solution of any kind, all is just talking about nothing while the colony expands. Just as Israel has been doing since the very beginning. Negotiation in Palestine is a dead end, a mere waste of time unless it is negotiation of the details to achieve a single state inclusive of all.

And this is not going to happen while US politics are so subservient of Israel and Global Zionism.
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Sahrawis could face death penalty

Seven Sahrawi citizens are being subject in Morocco to military trials for "treason". Their crime, to meet with the refugees at the Tindouf camps in Algeria and therefore having contact with the Polisario Front.

They were originally kidnapped by the occupation forces upon their return to West Sahara. Other five people were similary kidnapped but abandoned then in the desert.

The seven activists are jailed in the infamous high security prison of Salé, near Rabat. They are being accused of "attack against territorial integrity, against national security and meeting the enemy, and could even face the death penalty.

Morocco is an authoritarian regime where the monarch's power is absolute. It is, together with Swaziland, the last monarchy of Africa. In the 1970s, Morocco annexed unilaterally the former Spanish colony of West Sahara against the will of the people, sparking the continuity of the anti-colonialist guerrilla. The annexation is not recognized internationally and Morocco is in fact an occupying power.

Source: Rebelión.
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Was the Madoff network Zionist laundry rather than a mere scam?

Joachim Martillo comments at EAAZI on the newly known ramifications of Madoff's network that involve two Jewish "philanthropists", one of them already "mysteriously dead":

What we're seeing is the tip of the iceberg of a network of Jewish 'philanthropists' whose job it was to funnel money into the Madoff organization, and then take the money back out mostly for the purposes of moving it to Israel for Zionist causes. The biggest 'victims' were anything but victims, and the focus on Madoff is an intentional diversion. The reason Bernie owned up so quickly was to protect the network. Picower had probably been talking about doing some sort of deal with the Feds, knew too much, and so had to die to protect the greater Zionist cause.

I have already mentioned in the past that I suspect that this "scam" is much more than it appears. Otherwise it would have not gone ignored for so long. An imperial-level mafia laundry makes much better sense: this is not a few people plot - it's just too powerful, too well connected... and too much money has vanished in it.

Palestinian and Latin American media already echoed back then rumors about all of Madoff's money having gone to Israel.
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