Wish I Voted for Sanders, Says Laid-Off Carrier Worker Duped by ’Con Man’ Trump
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/wish-i-voted-for-sanders-says-laidoff-carrier-worker-duped-by-con-ma
In November of 2016, then-President-elect Donald Trump touted a deal he negotiated with an Indianapolis Carrier plant that he claimed would keep jobs from moving to Mexico. On Thursday, that very...
Life Lessons From Chinese Children’s Books Differ From Those In The U.S. : Goats and Soda : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/01/06/573869099/whats-the-difference-between-children-s-books-in-china-and-the-u-s
For a taste of their findings, take a typical book in China: The Cat That Eats Letters.
Ostensibly it’s about a cat that has an appetite for sloppy letters — “written too large or too small, or if the letter is missing a stroke,” explains one of the researchers, psychologist Cecilia Cheung, a professor at University of California Riverside. “So the only way children can stop their letters from being eaten is to write really carefully and practice every day.”
But the underlying point is clear: “This is really instilling the idea of effort — that children have to learn to consistently practice in order to achieve a certain level,” says Cheung. And that idea, she says, is a core tenet of Chinese culture.
They created a list of “learning-related” values and checked to see how often the books promoted them. The values included setting a goal to achieve something difficult, putting in a lot effort to complete the task and generally viewing intelligence as a trait that can be acquired through hard work rather than a quality that you’re born with.
The results — published in the Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology: The storybooks from China stress those values about twice as frequently as the books from the U.S. and Mexico.
By contrast, Cheung says a typical book from the U.S. is one called The Jar of Happiness.
“A little girl attempts to make a potion of happiness in a jar,” explains Cheung. Only to lose the jar. She’s really upset — until all her friends come to cheer her up. “At the end of the story she comes to the realization that happiness does not actually come from a jar of potion but from having good friends.”
Cheung says this emphasis on happiness comes up a lot in the books from the U.S. In some cases it’s overt – central to the plot of the story. But often it’s more subtle.
“They’ll just have a lot of drawings of children who are playing happily in all sorts of settings — emphasizing that smiling is important, that laughing is important, that being surrounded by people who are happy is important.”
The same held true of the books from Mexico.
We’re suing the government over border wall spending records | Reveal
▻https://www.revealnews.org/blog/were-suing-the-government-over-border-wall-spending-records
Nearly 10 months after we asked the federal government for records detailing how much it has spent to build a border wall, Reveal from The #Center_for_Investigative_Reporting (CIR) is suing for that information.
Last March, reporter Andrew Becker asked U.S. Customs and Border Protection for records showing the costs of buying land and building fence along the country’s 2,000-mile southern border. After the government dragged its feet for months on our request, we filed suit in U.S. District Court this week seeking the records.
We sued because the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires the government to release records in a timely manner. There are a few narrow exceptions to releasing records and this case isn’t one of them.
President Donald Trump made building a wall along the border with Mexico a signature campaign promise, repeatedly vowing to make Mexico pay for it.
#mexique #états-unis #mur #frontière #trump #they_will_pay_for_it
What Happens When We Let Tech Care For Our Aging Parents | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/digital-puppy-seniors-nursing-homes
Arlyn Anderson grasped her father’s hand and presented him with the choice. “A nursing home would be safer, Dad,” she told him, relaying the doctors’ advice. “It’s risky to live here alone—”
“No way,” Jim interjected. He frowned at his daughter, his brow furrowed under a lop of white hair. At 91, he wanted to remain in the woodsy Minnesota cottage he and his wife had built on the shore of Lake Minnetonka, where she had died in his arms just a year before. His pontoon—which he insisted he could still navigate just fine—bobbed out front.
Arlyn had moved from California back to Minnesota two decades earlier to be near her aging parents. Now, in 2013, she was fiftysomething, working as a personal coach, and finding that her father’s decline was all-consuming.
Her father—an inventor, pilot, sailor, and general Mr. Fix-It; “a genius,” Arlyn says—started experiencing bouts of paranoia in his mid-eighties, a sign of Alzheimer’s. The disease had progressed, often causing his thoughts to vanish mid-sentence. But Jim would rather risk living alone than be cloistered in an institution, he told Arlyn and her older sister, Layney. A nursing home certainly wasn’t what Arlyn wanted for him either. But the daily churn of diapers and cleanups, the carousel of in-home aides, and the compounding financial strain (she had already taken out a reverse mortgage on Jim’s cottage to pay the caretakers) forced her to consider the possibility.
Jim, slouched in his recliner, was determined to stay at home. “No way,” he repeated to his daughter, defiant. Her eyes welled up and she hugged him. “OK, Dad.” Arlyn’s house was a 40-minute drive from the cottage, and for months she had been relying on a patchwork of technology to keep tabs on her dad. She set an open laptop on the counter so she could chat with him on Skype. She installed two cameras, one in his kitchen and another in his bedroom, so she could check whether the caregiver had arrived, or God forbid, if her dad had fallen. So when she read in the newspaper about a new digital eldercare service called CareCoach a few weeks after broaching the subject of the nursing home, it piqued her interest. For about $200 a month, a human-powered avatar would be available to watch over a homebound person 24 hours a day; Arlyn paid that same amount for just nine hours of in-home help. She signed up immediately.
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A Google Nexus tablet arrived in the mail a week later. When Arlyn plugged it in, an animated German shepherd appeared onscreen, standing at attention on a digitized lawn. The brown dog looked cutesy and cartoonish, with a bubblegum-pink tongue and round, blue eyes.
She and Layney visited their dad later that week, tablet in hand. Following the instructions, Arlyn uploaded dozens of pictures to the service’s online portal: images of family members, Jim’s boat, and some of his inventions, like a computer terminal known as the Teleray and a seismic surveillance system used to detect footsteps during the Vietnam War. The setup complete, Arlyn clutched the tablet, summoning the nerve to introduce her dad to the dog. Her initial instinct that the service could be the perfect companion for a former technologist had splintered into needling doubts. Was she tricking him? Infantilizing him?
Tired of her sister’s waffling, Layney finally snatched the tablet and presented it to their dad, who was sitting in his armchair. “Here, Dad, we got you this.” The dog blinked its saucer eyes and then, in Google’s female text-to-speech voice, started to talk. Before Alzheimer’s had taken hold, Jim would have wanted to know exactly how the service worked. But in recent months he’d come to believe that TV characters were interacting with him: A show’s villain had shot a gun at him, he said; Katie Couric was his friend. When faced with an onscreen character that actually was talking to him, Jim readily chatted back.
Jim named his dog Pony. Arlyn perched the tablet upright on a table in Jim’s living room, where he could see it from the couch or his recliner. Within a week Jim and Pony had settled into a routine, exchanging pleasantries several times a day. Every 15 minutes or so Pony would wake up and look for Jim, calling his name if he was out of view. Sometimes Jim would “pet” the sleeping dog onscreen with his finger to rustle her awake. His touch would send an instantaneous alert to the human caretaker behind the avatar, prompting the CareCoach worker to launch the tablet’s audio and video stream. “How are you, Jim?” Pony would chirp. The dog reminded him which of his daughters or in-person caretakers would be visiting that day to do the tasks that an onscreen dog couldn’t: prepare meals, change Jim’s sheets, drive him to a senior center. “We’ll wait together,” Pony would say. Often she’d read poetry aloud, discuss the news, or watch TV with him. “You look handsome, Jim!” Pony remarked after watching him shave with his electric razor. “You look pretty,” he replied. Sometimes Pony would hold up a photo of Jim’s daughters or his inventions between her paws, prompting him to talk about his past. The dog complimented Jim’s red sweater and cheered him on when he struggled to buckle his watch in the morning. He reciprocated by petting the screen with his index finger, sending hearts floating up from the dog’s head. “I love you, Jim!” Pony told him a month after they first met—something CareCoach operators often tell the people they are monitoring. Jim turned to Arlyn and gloated, “She does! She thinks I’m real good!”
About 1,500 miles south of Lake Minnetonka, in Monterrey, Mexico, Rodrigo Rochin opens his laptop in his home office and logs in to the CareCoach dashboard to make his rounds. He talks baseball with a New Jersey man watching the Yankees; chats with a woman in South Carolina who calls him Peanut (she places a cookie in front of her tablet for him to “eat”); and greets Jim, one of his regulars, who sips coffee while looking out over a lake.
Rodrigo is 35 years old, the son of a surgeon. He’s a fan of the Spurs and the Cowboys, a former international business student, and a bit of an introvert, happy to retreat into his sparsely decorated home office each morning. He grew up crossing the border to attend school in McAllen, Texas, honing the English that he now uses to chat with elderly people in the United States. Rodrigo found CareCoach on an online freelancing platform and was hired in December 2012 as one of the company’s earliest contractors, role-playing 36 hours a week as one of the service’s avatars.
After watching her dad interact with Pony, Arlyn’s reservations about outsourcing her father’s companionship vanished.
In person, Rodrigo is soft-spoken, with wire spectacles and a beard. He lives with his wife and two basset hounds, Bob and Cleo, in Nuevo León’s capital city. But the people on the other side of the screen don’t know that. They don’t know his name—or, in the case of those like Jim who have dementia, that he even exists. It’s his job to be invisible. If Rodrigo’s clients ask where he’s from, he might say MIT (the CareCoach software was created by two graduates of the school), but if anyone asks where their pet actually is, he replies in character: “Here with you.”
Rodrigo is one of a dozen CareCoach employees in Latin America and the Philippines. The contractors check on the service’s seniors through the tablet’s camera a few times an hour. (When they do, the dog or cat avatar they embody appears to wake up.) To talk, they type into the dashboard and their words are voiced robotically through the tablet, designed to give their charges the impression that they’re chatting with a friendly pet. Like all the CareCoach workers, Rodrigo keeps meticulous notes on the people he watches over so he can coordinate their care with other workers and deepen his relationship with them over time—this person likes to listen to Adele, this one prefers Elvis, this woman likes to hear Bible verses while she cooks. In one client’s file, he wrote a note explaining that the correct response to “See you later, alligator” is “After a while, crocodile.” These logs are all available to the customer’s social workers or adult children, wherever they may live. Arlyn started checking Pony’s log between visits with her dad several times a week. “Jim says I’m a really nice person,” reads one early entry made during the Minnesota winter. “I told Jim that he was my best friend. I am so happy.”
After watching her dad interact with Pony, Arlyn’s reservations about outsourcing her father’s companionship vanished. Having Pony there eased her anxiety about leaving Jim alone, and the virtual dog’s small talk lightened the mood.
Pony was not only assisting Jim’s human caretakers but also inadvertently keeping an eye on them. Months before, in broken sentences, Jim had complained to Arlyn that his in-home aide had called him a bastard. Arlyn, desperate for help and unsure of her father’s recollection, gave her a second chance. Three weeks after arriving in the house, Pony woke up to see the same caretaker, impatient. “Come on, Jim!” the aide yelled. “Hurry up!” Alarmed, Pony asked why she was screaming and checked to see if Jim was OK. The pet—actually, Rodrigo—later reported the aide’s behavior to CareCoach’s CEO, Victor Wang, who emailed Arlyn about the incident. (The caretaker knew there was a human watching her through the tablet, Arlyn says, but may not have known the extent of the person’s contact with Jim’s family behind the scenes.) Arlyn fired the short-tempered aide and started searching for a replacement. Pony watched as she and Jim conducted the interviews and approved of the person Arlyn hired. “I got to meet her,” the pet wrote. “She seems really nice.”
Pony—friend and guard dog—would stay.
Grant Cornett
Victor Wang grew up feeding his Tamagotchis and coding choose-your-own-adventure games in QBasic on the family PC. His parents moved from Taiwan to suburban Vancouver, British Columbia, when Wang was a year old, and his grandmother, whom he called Lao Lao in Mandarin, would frequently call from Taiwan. After her husband died, Lao Lao would often tell Wang’s mom that she was lonely, pleading with her daughter to come to Taiwan to live with her. As she grew older, she threatened suicide. When Wang was 11, his mother moved back home for two years to care for her. He thinks of that time as the honey-sandwich years, the food his overwhelmed father packed him each day for lunch. Wang missed his mother, he says, but adds, “I was never raised to be particularly expressive of my emotions.”
At 17, Wang left home to study mechanical engineering at the University of British Columbia. He joined the Canadian Army Reserve, serving as an engineer on a maintenance platoon while working on his undergraduate degree. But he scrapped his military future when, at 22, he was admitted to MIT’s master’s program in mechanical engineering. Wang wrote his dissertation on human-machine interaction, studying a robotic arm maneuvered by astronauts on the International Space Station. He was particularly intrigued by the prospect of harnessing tech to perform tasks from a distance: At an MIT entrepreneurship competition, he pitched the idea of training workers in India to remotely operate the buffers that sweep US factory floors.
In 2011, when he was 24, his grandmother was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a disease that affects the areas of the brain associated with memory and movement. On Skype calls from his MIT apartment, Wang watched as his grandmother grew increasingly debilitated. After one call, a thought struck him: If he could tap remote labor to sweep far-off floors, why not use it to comfort Lao Lao and others like her?
Wang started researching the looming caretaker shortage in the US—between 2010 and 2030, the population of those older than 80 is projected to rise 79 percent, but the number of family caregivers available is expected to increase just 1 percent.
In 2012 Wang recruited his cofounder, a fellow MIT student working on her computer science doctorate named Shuo Deng, to build CareCoach’s technology. They agreed that AI speech technology was too rudimentary for an avatar capable of spontaneous conversation tailored to subtle mood and behavioral cues. For that, they would need humans.
Older people like Jim often don’t speak clearly or linearly, and those with dementia can’t be expected to troubleshoot a machine that misunderstands. “When you match someone not fully coherent with a device that’s not fully coherent, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Wang says. Pony, on the other hand, was an expert at deciphering Jim’s needs. Once, Pony noticed that Jim was holding onto furniture for support, as if he were dizzy. The pet persuaded him to sit down, then called Arlyn. Deng figures it’ll take about 20 years for AI to be able to master that kind of personal interaction and recognition. That said, the CareCoach system is already deploying some automated abilities. Five years ago, when Jim was introduced to Pony, the offshore workers behind the camera had to type every response; today CareCoach’s software creates roughly one out of every five sentences the pet speaks. Wang aims to standardize care by having the software manage more of the patients’ regular reminders—prodding them to take their medicine, urging them to eat well and stay hydrated. CareCoach workers are part freewheeling raconteurs, part human natural-language processors, listening to and deciphering their charges’ speech patterns or nudging the person back on track if they veer off topic. The company recently began recording conversations to better train its software in senior speech recognition.
CareCoach found its first customer in December 2012, and in 2014 Wang moved from Massachusetts to Silicon Valley, renting a tiny office space on a lusterless stretch of Millbrae near the San Francisco airport. Four employees congregate in one room with a view of the parking lot, while Wang and his wife, Brittany, a program manager he met at a gerontology conference, work in the foyer. Eight tablets with sleeping pets onscreen are lined up for testing before being shipped to their respective seniors. The avatars inhale and exhale, lending an eerie sense of life to their digital kennel.
CareCoach conveys the perceptiveness and emotional intelligence of the humans powering it but masquerades as an animated app.
Wang spends much of his time on the road, touting his product’s health benefits at medical conferences and in hospital executive suites. Onstage at a gerontology summit in San Francisco last summer, he deftly impersonated the strained, raspy voice of an elderly man talking to a CareCoach pet while Brittany stealthily cued the replies from her laptop in the audience. The company’s tablets are used by hospitals and health plans across Massachusetts, California, New York, South Carolina, Florida, and Washington state. Between corporate and individual customers, CareCoach’s avatars have interacted with hundreds of users in the US. “The goal,” Wang says, “is not to have a little family business that just breaks even.”
The fastest growth would come through hospital units and health plans specializing in high-need and elderly patients, and he makes the argument that his avatars cut health care costs. (A private room in a nursing home can run more than $7,500 a month.) Preliminary research has been promising, though limited. In a study conducted by Pace University at a Manhattan housing project and a Queens hospital, CareCoach’s avatars were found to reduce subjects’ loneliness, delirium, and falls. A health provider in Massachusetts was able to replace a man’s 11 weekly in-home nurse visits with a CareCoach tablet, which diligently reminded him to take his medications. (The man told nurses that the pet’s nagging reminded him of having his wife back in the house. “It’s kind of like a complaint, but he loves it at the same time,” the project’s lead says.) Still, the feelings aren’t always so cordial: In the Pace University study, some aggravated seniors with dementia lashed out and hit the tablet. In response, the onscreen pet sheds tears and tries to calm the person.
More troubling, perhaps, were the people who grew too fiercely attached to their digital pets. At the conclusion of a University of Washington CareCoach pilot study, one woman became so distraught at the thought of parting with her avatar that she signed up for the service, paying the fee herself. (The company gave her a reduced rate.) A user in Massachusetts told her caretakers she’d cancel an upcoming vacation to Maine unless her digital cat could come along.
We’re still in the infancy of understanding the complexities of aging humans’ relationship with technology. Sherry Turkle, a professor of social studies, science, and technology at MIT and a frequent critic of tech that replaces human communication, described interactions between elderly people and robotic babies, dogs, and seals in her 2011 book, Alone Together. She came to view roboticized eldercare as a cop-out, one that would ultimately degrade human connection. “This kind of app—in all of its slickness and all its ‘what could possibly be wrong with it?’ mentality—is making us forget what we really know about what makes older people feel sustained,” she says: caring, interpersonal relationships. The question is whether an attentive avatar makes a comparable substitute. Turkle sees it as a last resort. “The assumption is that it’s always cheaper and easier to build an app than to have a conversation,” she says. “We allow technologists to propose the unthinkable and convince us the unthinkable is actually the inevitable.”
But for many families, providing long-term in-person care is simply unsustainable. The average family caregiver has a job outside the home and spends about 20 hours a week caring for a parent, according to AARP. Nearly two-thirds of such caregivers are women. Among eldercare experts, there’s a resignation that the demographics of an aging America will make technological solutions unavoidable. The number of those older than 65 with a disability is projected to rise from 11 million to 18 million from 2010 to 2030. Given the option, having a digital companion may be preferable to being alone. Early research shows that lonely and vulnerable elders like Jim seem content to communicate with robots. Joseph Coughlin, director of MIT’s AgeLab, is pragmatic. “I would always prefer the human touch over a robot,” he says. “But if there’s no human available, I would take high tech in lieu of high touch.”
CareCoach is a disorienting amalgam of both. The service conveys the perceptiveness and emotional intelligence of the humans powering it but masquerades as an animated app. If a person is incapable of consenting to CareCoach’s monitoring, then someone must do so on their behalf. But the more disconcerting issue is how cognizant these seniors are of being watched over by strangers. Wang considers his product “a trade-off between utility and privacy.” His workers are trained to duck out during baths and clothing changes.
Some CareCoach users insist on greater control. A woman in Washington state, for example, put a piece of tape over her CareCoach tablet’s camera to dictate when she could be viewed. Other customers like Jim, who are suffering from Alzheimer’s or other diseases, might not realize they are being watched. Once, when he was temporarily placed in a rehabilitation clinic after a fall, a nurse tending to him asked Arlyn what made the avatar work. “You mean there’s someone overseas looking at us?” she yelped, within earshot of Jim. (Arlyn isn’t sure whether her dad remembered the incident later.) By default, the app explains to patients that someone is surveilling them when it’s first introduced. But the family members of personal users, like Arlyn, can make their own call.
Arlyn quickly stopped worrying about whether she was deceiving her dad. Telling Jim about the human on the other side of the screen “would have blown the whole charm of it,” she says. Her mother had Alzheimer’s as well, and Arlyn had learned how to navigate the disease: Make her mom feel safe; don’t confuse her with details she’d have trouble understanding. The same went for her dad. “Once they stop asking,” Arlyn says, “I don’t think they need to know anymore.” At the time, Youa Vang, one of Jim’s regular in-person caretakers, didn’t comprehend the truth about Pony either. “I thought it was like Siri,” she said when told later that it was a human in Mexico who had watched Jim and typed in the words Pony spoke. She chuckled. “If I knew someone was there, I may have been a little more creeped out.”
Even CareCoach users like Arlyn who are completely aware of the person on the other end of the dashboard tend to experience the avatar as something between human, pet, and machine—what some roboticists call a third ontological category. The caretakers seem to blur that line too: One day Pony told Jim that she dreamed she could turn into a real health aide, almost like Pinocchio wishing to be a real boy.
Most of CareCoach’s 12 contractors reside in the Philippines, Venezuela, or Mexico. To undercut the cost of in-person help, Wang posts English-language ads on freelancing job sites where foreign workers advertise rates as low as $2 an hour. Though he won’t disclose his workers’ hourly wages, Wang claims the company bases its salaries on factors such as what a registered nurse would make in the CareCoach employee’s home country, their language proficiencies, and the cost of their internet connection.
The growing network includes people like Jill Paragas, a CareCoach worker who lives in a subdivision on Luzon island in the Philippines. Paragas is 35 years old and a college graduate. She earns about the same being an avatar as she did in her former call center job, where she consoled Americans irate about credit card charges. (“They wanted to, like, burn the company down or kill me,” she says with a mirthful laugh.) She works nights to coincide with the US daytime, typing messages to seniors while her 6-year-old son sleeps nearby.
Even when Jim grew stubborn or paranoid with his daughters, he always viewed Pony as a friend.
Before hiring her, Wang interviewed Paragas via video, then vetted her with an international criminal background check. He gives all applicants a personality test for certain traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. As part of the CareCoach training program, Paragas earned certifications in delirium and dementia care from the Alzheimer’s Association, trained in US health care ethics and privacy, and learned strategies for counseling those with addictions. All this, Wang says, “so we don’t get anyone who’s, like, crazy.” CareCoach hires only about 1 percent of its applicants.
Paragas understands that this is a complicated business. She’s befuddled by the absence of family members around her aging clients. “In my culture, we really love to take care of our parents,” she says. “That’s why I’m like, ‘She is already old, why is she alone?’ ” Paragas has no doubt that, for some people, she’s their most significant daily relationship. Some of her charges tell her that they couldn’t live without her. Even when Jim grew stubborn or paranoid with his daughters, he always viewed Pony as a friend. Arlyn quickly realized that she had gained a valuable ally.
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1/7Jim Anderson and his wife, Dorothy, in the living room of their home in St. Louis Park, Minnesota in the ’70s. Their house was modeled after an early American Pennsylvania farmhouse.Courtesy Arlyn Anderson
2/7Jim became a private pilot after returning home from World War II.Courtesy Arlyn Anderson
6/7A tennis match between Jim and his middle daughter, Layney, on his 80th birthday. (The score was tied at 6-6, she recalls; her dad won the tiebreaker.)Courtesy Arlyn Anderson
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1/7Jim Anderson and his wife, Dorothy, in the living room of their home in St. Louis Park, Minnesota in the ’70s. Their house was modeled after an early American Pennsylvania farmhouse.Courtesy Arlyn Anderson
As time went on, the father, daughter, and family pet grew closer. When the snow finally melted, Arlyn carried the tablet to the picnic table on the patio so they could eat lunch overlooking the lake. Even as Jim’s speech became increasingly stunted, Pony could coax him to talk about his past, recounting fishing trips or how he built the house to face the sun so it would be warmer in winter. When Arlyn took her dad around the lake in her sailboat, Jim brought Pony along. (“I saw mostly sky,” Rodrigo recalls.)
One day, while Jim and Arlyn were sitting on the cottage’s paisley couch, Pony held up a photograph of Jim’s wife, Dorothy, between her paws. It had been more than a year since his wife’s death, and Jim hardly mentioned her anymore; he struggled to form coherent sentences. That day, though, he gazed at the photo fondly. “I still love her,” he declared. Arlyn rubbed his shoulder, clasping her hand over her mouth to stifle tears. “I am getting emotional too,” Pony said. Then Jim leaned toward the picture of his deceased wife and petted her face with his finger, the same way he would to awaken a sleeping Pony.
When Arlyn first signed up for the service, she hadn’t anticipated that she would end up loving—yes, loving, she says, in the sincerest sense of the word—the avatar as well. She taught Pony to say “Yeah, sure, you betcha” and “don’t-cha know” like a Minnesotan, which made her laugh even more than her dad. When Arlyn collapsed onto the couch after a long day of caretaking, Pony piped up from her perch on the table:
“Arnie, how are you?”
Alone, Arlyn petted the screen—the way Pony nuzzled her finger was weirdly therapeutic—and told the pet how hard it was to watch her dad lose his identity.
“I’m here for you,” Pony said. “I love you, Arnie.”
When she recalls her own attachment to the dog, Arlyn insists her connection wouldn’t have developed if Pony was simply high-functioning AI. “You could feel Pony’s heart,” she says. But she preferred to think of Pony as her father did—a friendly pet—rather than a person on the other end of a webcam. “Even though that person probably had a relationship to me,” she says, “I had a relationship with the avatar.”
Still, she sometimes wonders about the person on the other side of the screen. She sits up straight and rests her hand over her heart. “This is completely vulnerable, but my thought is: Did Pony really care about me and my dad?” She tears up, then laughs ruefully at herself, knowing how weird it all sounds. “Did this really happen? Was it really a relationship, or were they just playing solitaire and typing cute things?” She sighs. “But it seemed like they cared.”
When Jim turned 92 that August, as friends belted out “Happy Birthday” around the dinner table, Pony spoke the lyrics along with them. Jim blew out the single candle on his cake. “I wish you good health, Jim,” Pony said, “and many more birthdays to come.”
In Monterrey, Mexico, when Rodrigo talks about his unusual job, his friends ask if he’s ever lost a client. His reply: Yes.
In early March 2014, Jim fell and hit his head on his way to the bathroom. A caretaker sleeping over that night found him and called an ambulance, and Pony woke up when the paramedics arrived. The dog told them Jim’s date of birth and offered to call his daughters as they carried him out on a stretcher.
Jim was checked into a hospital, then into the nursing home he’d so wanted to avoid. The Wi-Fi there was spotty, which made it difficult for Jim and Pony to connect. Nurses would often turn Jim’s tablet to face the wall. The CareCoach logs from those months chronicle a series of communication misfires. “I miss Jim a lot,” Pony wrote. “I hope he is doing good all the time.” One day, in a rare moment of connectivity, Pony suggested he and Jim go sailing that summer, just like the good old days. “That sounds good,” Jim said.
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That July, in an email from Wang, Rodrigo learned that Jim had died in his sleep. Sitting before his laptop, Rodrigo bowed his head and recited a silent Lord’s Prayer for Jim, in Spanish. He prayed that his friend would be accepted into heaven. “I know it’s going to sound weird, but I had a certain friendship with him,” he says. “I felt like I actually met him. I feel like I’ve met them.” In the year and a half that he had known them, Arlyn and Jim talked to him regularly. Jim had taken Rodrigo on a sailboat ride. Rodrigo had read him poetry and learned about his rich past. They had celebrated birthdays and holidays together as family. As Pony, Rodrigo had said “Yeah, sure, you betcha” countless times.
That day, for weeks afterward, and even now when a senior will do something that reminds him of Jim, Rodrigo says he feels a pang. “I still care about them,” he says. After her dad’s death, Arlyn emailed Victor Wang to say she wanted to honor the workers for their care. Wang forwarded her email to Rodrigo and the rest of Pony’s team. On July 29, 2014, Arlyn carried Pony to Jim’s funeral, placing the tablet facing forward on the pew beside her. She invited any workers behind Pony who wanted to attend to log in.
A year later, Arlyn finally deleted the CareCoach service from the tablet—it felt like a kind of second burial. She still sighs, “Pony!” when the voice of her old friend gives her directions as she drives around Minneapolis, reincarnated in Google Maps.
After saying his prayer for Jim, Rodrigo heaved a sigh and logged in to the CareCoach dashboard to make his rounds. He ducked into living rooms, kitchens, and hospital rooms around the United States—seeing if all was well, seeing if anybody needed to talk.
I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won
I Am Not a Tractor! celebrates the courage, vision, and creativity of the farmworkers and community leaders who have transformed one of the worst agricultural situations in the United States into one of the best. Susan L. Marquis highlights past abuses workers suffered in Florida’s tomato fields: toxic pesticide exposure, beatings, sexual assault, rampant wage theft, and even, astonishingly, modern-day slavery. Marquis unveils how, even without new legislation, regulation, or government participation, these farmworkers have dramatically improved their work conditions.
Marquis credits this success to the immigrants from Mexico, Haiti, and Guatemala who formed the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a neuroscience major who takes great pride in the watermelon crew he runs, a leading farmer/grower who was once homeless, and a retired New York State judge who volunteered to stuff envelopes and ended up building a groundbreaking institution. Through the Fair Food Program that they have developed, fought for, and implemented, these people have changed the lives of more than thirty thousand field workers. I Am Not a Tractor! offers a range of solutions to a problem that is rooted in our nation’s slave history and that is worsened by ongoing conflict over immigration.
#Justice for Florida Farmworkers: Q&A with #Susan_Marquis
In her new book, RAND’s Susan Marquis takes readers inside the fight to improve working conditions in the Florida tomato fields, once some of the most brutal workplaces in American agriculture.
▻https://www.rand.org/blog/rand-review/2017/12/justice-for-florida-farmworkers-qa-with-susan-marquis.html?adbsc=social_201801
#Trump Administration Considers Separating Families to Combat Illegal Immigration - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/us/trump-immigrant-families-separate.html
One of those parents, José Fuentes, presented himself to immigration officers at the border, along with his 1-year-old son Mateo, to claim asylum in November. The family had fled El Salvador with a caravan of asylum seekers because of gang violence, said Mr. Fuentes’s wife, Olivia Acevedo.
After four days of being held in custody together, Mr. Fuentes was transferred to a detention facility more than 1,000 miles away, in San Diego, Calif., while their son was held in a facility for children in Laredo, Tex.
For six days afterward, Ms. Acevedo said, she, her husband and their lawyers could not confirm where Mateo was. They were terrified. “Can you imagine?” she said in Spanish in a telephone interview from Mexico, where she remains with the couple’s other son, Andrée, who is 4. “It’s inhuman to take a baby from its parents.”
Mise en ordre, mise aux normes et #droit_à_la_ville : perspectives croisées depuis les #villes du Sud
Marianne Morange et Amandine Spire
Mise en ordre, mise aux normes et droit à la ville : perspectives croisées depuis les villes du Sud [Texte intégral]
Spatial reordering, norm production and the right to the city : a crossed perspective from cities of the South
Anna Perraudin
Faire place aux minorités dans le centre de #Mexico. Des #squats à la propriété, enjeux et limites d’une politique de résorption de l’#habitat_irrégulier [Texte intégral]
Making place for minorities in central Mexico City. From irregular settlements to property : issues and limitations of an irregular habitat resorption policy
Amandine Spire, Marie Bridonneau et Pascale Philifert
Droit à la ville et replacement dans les contextes autoritaires d’#Addis-Abeba (#Éthiopie) et de #Lomé (#Togo) [Texte intégral]
Right to the city and resettlement in the authoritarian contexts of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and Lomé (Togo)
Marianne Morange et Aurélie Quentin
Mise en ordre néolibérale de l’espace et fabrication de « bons commerçants » au Cap et #Quito : le commerce « de moins en moins dans la rue » [Texte intégral]
Out of place, out of the street ? Reordering urban space and the reshaping of “good” traders in neoliberalizing Cape Town and Quito
Francesca Pilo’
Les petits commerçants informels des #favelas face à la régularisation électrique : entre tactiques, ajustements et inadaptations [Texte intégral]
Small informal traders in the favelas and regularization of the electricity service : between tactics, adjustments and shortcomings
Emma Broadway
Informal Trading and a Right to the City in the Khayelitsha CBD : insights from the field [Texte intégral]
Commerce informel et droit à la ville dans le #Central_Business_District de #Khayelitsha : un regard ethnographique, au plus près du terrain
▻http://journals.openedition.org/metropoles/5491
#urban_matter #Le_Cap #Afrique_du_sud
In Asia’s Fattest Country, Nutritionists Take Money From Food Giants - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/23/health/obesity-malaysia-nestle.html
The research exemplified a practice that began in the West and has moved, along with rising obesity rates, to developing countries: deep financial partnerships between the world’s largest food companies and nutrition scientists, policymakers and academic societies.
Continue reading the main story
Planet Fat
Articles in this series are exploring the causes and the consequences of rising obesity rates around the world.
A Nasty, Nafta-Related Surprise: Mexico’s Soaring Obesity
DEC 11
She Took On Colombia’s Soda Industry. Then She Was Silenced.
NOV 13
The Global Siren Call of Fast Food
OCT 2
Obesity Was Rising as Ghana Embraced Fast Food. Then Came KFC.
OCT 2
As Global Obesity Rises, Teasing Apart Its Causes Grows Harder
SEP 17
See More »
Photo
Dr. Tee E Siong, in front of a restaurant menu at a mall outside Kuala Lumpur, heads the Nutrition Society of Malaysia, which is financed in large part by some of the world’s largest food companies. Credit Rahman Roslan for The New York Times
As they seek to expand their markets, big food companies are spending significant funds in developing countries, from India to Cameroon, in support of local nutrition scientists. The industry funds research projects, pays scholars consulting fees, and sponsors most major nutrition conferences at a time when sales of processed foods are soaring. In Malaysia sales have increased 105 percent over the past five years, according to Euromonitor, a market research company.
Similar relationships have ignited a growing outcry in the United States and Europe, and a veritable civil war in the field between those who take food industry funding and those who argue that the money manipulates science and misleads policymakers and consumers. But in developing countries, where government research funding is scarce and there is less resistance to the practice, companies are doubling down in their efforts.
But some nutritionists say Malaysia’s dietary guidelines, which Dr. Tee helped craft, are not as tough on sugar as they might otherwise be. They tell people to load up on grains and cereals, and to limit fat to less than 20 to 30 percent of daily calories, a recommendation that was removed from dietary guidelines in the United States in 2015 after evidence emerged that low-fat diets don’t curb obesity and may contribute to it.
Corporate funding of nutrition science in Malaysia has weakened the case against sugar and processed foods, said Rohana Abdul Jalil, a Harvard-trained diet expert based in the rural state of Kelantan, where obesity is as high as in the biggest cities.
“There’s never been an explicit, aggressive campaign against sugar,” she said.
Center for International Earth Science Information Network
▻http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/hrsl
The High Resolution Settlement Layer (HRSL) provides estimates of human population distribution at a resolution of 1 arc-second (approximately 30m) for the year 2015. The population estimates are based on recent census data and high-resolution (0.5m) satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe. The population grids provide detailed delineation of settlements in both urban and rural areas, which is useful for many research areas—from disaster response and humanitarian planning to the development of communications infrastructure. The settlement extent data were developed by the Connectivity Lab at Facebook using computer vision techniques to classify blocks of optical satellite data as settled (containing buildings) or not. CIESIN used proportional allocation to distribute population data from subnational census data to the settlement extents. The population data have been developed for 18 countries: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Ghana, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mexico, Mozambique, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Rwanda, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Thailand, and Uganda. Read more about the project here.
ici une image de Cape Town :
US-Mexico border - Domus
▻https://www.domusweb.it/en/news/2017/09/07/us_mexico_border.html
https://www.domusweb.it/content/dam/domusweb/en/news/2017/09/07/us_mexico_border/domus-us-mexico-border-03.jpg.foto.rmedium.jpg 
https://www.domusweb.it/en/news/2017/09/07/us_mexico_border/_jcr_content/image-preview.img.rmedium.jpg/1504789339960.jpg 
The Craft & Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) announces the group exhibition “The U.S.–Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility” with the work of approximately 40 contemporary artists who explore the border as a physical reality (place), as a subject (imagination), and as a site for production and solution (possibility). The exhibition is curated by Lowery Stokes Sims, curator emerita of the Museum of Art and Design in New York, and independent curator Ana Elena Mallet.
#mur #mexique #états-unis #trump #art
US Border Patrol eyes murals painted by deported veterans on Mexico border wall
An #upside-down American flag - a national distress signal - is painted on the south side of the US-Mexico border wall near San Diego as a symbol for the plight of deported veterans. Hector Lopez, a deported veteran in Tijuana who helped paint the mural, said U.S. Border Patrol called him in April and ordered him to remove it.
Street Artist JR Installs Massive Face of a Child on Mexican Side of US Border Wall
Street artist JR continues to use his art for social commentary with his latest installation on the Mexican side of the US/Mexico border wall. JR and his team constructed an enormous wood support for one of his signature posters, which shows a small child peering over the wall.
Organized together with renowned curator Pedro Alonzo—known for his previous work with Os Gemeos, Shepherd Fairey, Banksy, and Swoon—the piece uses a human face to strike a chord about immigration between the United States and Mexico. Given President Trump’s recent announcement to rescind DACA, which protects undocumented immigrants who were brought to America as children, the subject is all the more timely and powerful.
This isn’t the first time the French artist has used his art to explore the topic of immigration. In 2015, his Ellis Island street art project revealed what life was like for immigrants entering the United States in the 19th century. And, of course, he first gained international attention in 2005 with his wheat pasted photographs of rioters in the Les Bosquets suburb of Paris. These powerful images focused attention on issues of how first and second generation immigrants were integrated—or not—into Parisian society and the tensions it created.
At its core, JR’s work is about faces, and how if we look at one another without prejudice, the world would be a better place. His work on the separation wall between Israel and Palestine was envisioned with this goal in mind. Pasting Palestinian portraits on the Israeli side and Israeli portraits on the Palestinian side, he proved that people couldn’t distinguish one from the other.
Here, with his latest project, JR once again proves that he’s not afraid to tackle difficult topics. And maybe, by looking at this small child curiously peeking into the United States, further dialogue about what it means to immigrate and the relationship between these neighboring countries with be explored.
“I think there is no such thing as art trying to change the world,” JR shared in our exclusive interview. “But being an artist and creating art in tons of different contexts, no matter what the mood is and sometimes against the codes that stand around you, is a way of breaking society and changing the world—just by trying.”
JR and curator Pedro Alonzo are holding an open discussion on the artist’s practice and how immigration figures into his work on September 7, 2017 at 8 pm in Los Angeles at Blum & Poe.
▻https://mymodernmet.com/jr-street-artist-mexican-border-wall
A Nasty, Nafta-Related Surprise: Mexico’s Soaring Obesity - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/health/obesity-mexico-nafta.html
The phenomenon is not limited to Mexico. Research shows free trade is among the key factors that have accelerated the spread of low-nutrient, highly processed foods from the West, “driving the obesity epidemic in China, India, and other developing countries worldwide,” according to the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard.
#nutrition" #libre_échange" #etats-unis #santé #malbouffe #obésité
Artists attack Trump over Jerusalem move
Tunde Adebimpe Musician
Nick Broomfiel Film director
Caryl Churchill Playwright
Julie Christie Actor
Molly Crabapple Writer and artist
Angela Davis Writer
Brian Eno Musician
Eve Ensler Playwright
Peter Gabriel Musician
Mona Hatoum Visual artist
Aki Kaurismaki Film director
AL Kennedy Writer
Hari Kunzru Writer
Mike Leigh Writer, director
Ken Loach Film director
Liz Lochhead Poet, playwright
Emel Mathlouthi Musician
Thurston Moore Musician
Maxine Peake Actor
Michael Rosen Poet
Mark Ruffalo Actor
James Schamus Screenwriter, producer, director
Gillian Slovo Writer
Ahdaf Soueif Writer
Juliet Stevenson Actor
Tilda Swinton Actor
Marina Warner Writer
Roger Waters Musician
Vivienne Westwood Fashion designer
Robert Wyatt Musician
The Guardian, le 11 décembre 2017
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/11/artists-attack-trump-over-jerusalem-move
Autres signatures ici:
▻https://artistsletterontrumpandjerusalem.tumblr.com
#Humour :
Palestinians recognize Texas as part of Mexico
Alex Huntley, The Beaverton, le 6 décembre 2017
▻https://www.thebeaverton.com/2017/12/palestinians-recognize-texas-part-mexico
Traduction en français :
Des artistes attaquent Trump à propos de son coup sur Jérusalem
The Guardian, le 11 décembre 2017
▻http://www.aurdip.fr/des-artistes-attaquent-trump-a.html
Des artistes et des interprètes, dont Julie Christie, Peter Gabriel, Aki Kaurismaki, Mark Ruffalo et Tilda Swinton déplorent le mépris de Trump pour le droit international.
Economy—Not Trump Policies—Behind Falling Border Apprehensions
Immigration figures released this week show the lowest number of people trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in decades. Meanwhile, deportations of people living illegally in the United States are up significantly.
So are President Donald Trump’s immigration policies working or is there more behind the numbers?
Ev Meade, director of the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute, said the decline in apprehensions is part of a trend that began 17 years ago.
“It’s not something that has to do with this presidential administration over the last year, nor does it really have to do with the previous presidential administration,” Meade said. “It’s driven by larger social forces, not by the politics of the moment.”
For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, Border Patrol agents detained 303,916 people for trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southern border this past fiscal year, the fewest since 1971, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement also deported 81,603 people in fiscal 2017, a 37 percent increase from the previous year.
#statistiques #chiffres #murs #Etats-Unis #frontières #asile #migrations #réfugiés
Avec ce commentaire de Reece Jones sur twitter :
The decline in apprehensions at the border is part of a long term trend, not a one-time Trump effect (and # of apprehensions does not equal # of crossings)
Nothing Protects Black Women From Dying in Pregnancy and… — ProPublica
▻https://www.propublica.org/article/nothing-protects-black-women-from-dying-in-pregnancy-and-childbirth
A black woman is 22% more likely to die from heart disease than a white woman, 71% more likely to perish from cervical cancer, but 300% more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes.
Travail impressionnant ! Cette histoire m’a bouleversée.
C’est en comparant avec ce genre d’analyse systémique qu’on ne peut que regretter l’absence de statistiques mêlant race classe et genre en France. Interdire de dresser 1 éventuel constat sur ce genre de conséquences du racisme est un gros problème.
The disproportionate toll on African Americans is the main reason the U.S. maternal mortality rate is so much higher than that of other affluent countries. Black expectant and new mothers in the U.S. die at about the same rate as women in countries such as Mexico and Uzbekistan, the World Health Organization estimates.
What’s more, even relatively well-off black women like Shalon Irving die or nearly die at higher rates than whites. Again, New York City offers a startling example: A 2016 analysis of five years of data found that black college-educated mothers who gave birth in local hospitals were more likely to suffer severe complications of pregnancy or childbirth than white women who never graduated from high school.
The fact that someone with Shalon’s social and economic advantages is at higher risk highlights how profound the inequities really are, said Raegan McDonald-Mosley, the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, who met her in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University and was one of her closest friends. “It tells you that you can’t educate your way out of this problem. You can’t health-care-access your way out of this problem. There’s something inherently wrong with the system that’s not valuing the lives of black women equally to white women.”
For much of American history, these types of disparities were largely blamed on blacks’ supposed innate susceptibility to illness — their “mass of imperfections,” as one doctor wrote in 1903 — and their own behavior. But now many social scientists and medical researchers agree, the problem isn’t race but racism.
The midwives helping women on the US-Mexico border | Mexico | Al Jazeera
▻http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/midwives-helping-women-mexico-border-170906090026379.html
Tijuana, Mexico - Ximena Rojas drives through the streets of Tijuana, Mexico at the wheel of an old station wagon that can become a mobile ambulance if necessary.
She often gets lost, but she always arrives where she needs to be.
Rojas has just turned 35 years old. She wears her long hair tied in a braid and she speaks with a soft tone.
She is native of Veracruz, a port city located along the Gulf of Mexico, but she studied nursing and obstetrics at the National University of Mexico City (UNAM) and began assisting home births in 2010.
In 2013, she moved to Baja California, a Mexican state on the US border, to study sex education and she decided to stay.
“The border attracts me,” she tells Al Jazeera. “It is a complex area, but also very vital,” she says.
Rojas is a “partera”, a midwife, and her role is to accompany mothers during their pregnancy and to stand by their side when they give birth.
Midwifery was only officially recognised as a profession in Mexico in 2011, but Rojas says midwives are still not typically allowed to accompany their patients in the delivery room. In public hospitals, women are often not allowed to have anyone, not even a family member, present with them while they give birth.
But Rojas, who is determined to help those most in need, has assisted in more than 350 births.
She primarily helps Mexican women who decide to give birth in their homes to avoid public hospitals in Tijuana, and the obstetric violence, she says, pregnant women often face.
But she also has found that Haitian women who wait along the border with the hopes of getting to the US are in much need of care.
A border wall rises in Oceanside — but this one is an art project, by Tijuana artist Marcos Ramirez ’ERRE’ - LA Times
▻http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-undocumenta-marcos-ramirez-erre-20171107-htmlstory.html
On a rugged patch of the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego, news crews from all over the world have been documenting the rise of eight border wall prototypes that have materialized, like looming works of land art, in Otay Mesa.
Another wall, roughly 60 miles to the north, has received far less media scrutiny. It is crafted from 61 panels of corrugated metal bound together by steel beams. And in its crude, rusty aspect, it evokes the metal border fence that began to materialize along the international border near San Diego in the 1990s in an effort to curb illegal immigration.
Except this wall isn’t quite a wall, it is a work of art — and it is currently obscuring the Modernist facade of the Oceanside Museum of Art in downtown Oceanside.
#murs #frontières #mexique #métats-unis #art #activisme #résister
She Took On Colombia’s Soda Industry. Then She Was Silenced. - The New York Times
►https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/health/colombia-soda-tax-obesity.html
“If you don’t keep your mouth shut,” one man shouted, she recalled in a recent interview, “you know what the consequences will be.”
The episode, which Dr. Cerón reported to federal investigators, was reminiscent of the intimidation often used against those who challenged the drug cartels that once dominated Colombia. But the narcotics trade was not the target of Dr. Cerón and her colleagues. Their work had upset a different multibillion-dollar industry: the makers of soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages.
Their organization, Educar Consumidores, was the most visible proponent of a proposed 20 percent tax on sugary drinks that was heading for a vote that month in Colombia’s Legislature. The group had raised money, rallied allies to the cause and produced a provocative television ad that warned consumers how sugar-laden beverages can lead to obesity and diet-related illnesses like diabetes.
“The industry sees sugary-drink taxes as an existential threat,” said Dr. James Krieger, executive director of Healthy Food America, which tracks beverage tax initiatives. In the United States, the industry has spent at least $107 million at the state and local levels since 2009 to beat back soda taxes and beverage warning labels, a new study found. Compared to the domestic tactics, Dr. Krieger said, overseas, “it’s much dirtier, much more bare-knuckled.”
The beverage industry asserts that soda taxes unfairly burden the poor, cause higher unemployment by squeezing industry sales, and fail to achieve their policy goal: reducing obesity. Studies of soda taxes have shown they lead to a drop in sales of sugar-sweetened beverages — a 10 percent sales decline, for example, over the first two years of Mexico’s tax — however, such measures are so new that there is not yet evidence of their impact on health.
“Slapping a tax on our products and walking away won’t do anything about obesity in this country or globally,” said William Dermody, spokesman for the American Beverage Association, an industry trade group.
But public health organizations, including the W.H.O., cite soda taxes as one of the most effective policy tools for cutting consumption of what nutritionists call a “liquid candy” that has contributed to an epidemic of obesity and related health conditions around the world. Dr. Kathryn Backholer, an expert on the issue at Deakin University in Australia, said taxes on soda were “low-hanging fruit” in the fight against obesity, diabetes and other weight-related diseases because such drinks are easily categorized to tax and sensible to target because they “have little or no nutritional value.”
“In Colombia, the sugar industry and the main media companies belong to the same economic conglomerates,” Mr. Gaviria, the health minister, said. “They have an intimidating power. And they used it.”
That fall, at least 90 lobbyists worked to sway legislators, according to a tally of visitor logs obtained by Educar Consumidores. During committee hearings on the measure, lobbyists often sat next to lawmakers, a flagrant violation of congressional rules, said Óscar Ospina Quintero, a legislator from the Green Alliance party. Mr. Ospina said he protested the lobbyists’ presence in the chamber but was rebuffed by congressional leaders.
“The response was fierce,” Mr. Gaviria said. “I remember that, during one of the debates, a senator said to me: ‘In all my years in Congress I’ve never seen a lobbying effort like this.’”
Toute la suite est effrayante : intimidation, virus informatiques, pression, lobbies. Le sucre n’est pas doux.
A look at Trump’s border wall prototypes - Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/national/border-wall-prototypes
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/national/border-wall-prototypes/img/trump-border-walls-980.jpg?c=172 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_982w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2017/10/27/National-Enterprise/Graphics/promo-border-wall-prototypes.jpg 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/national/border-wall-prototypes/img/walls-980.jpg?c=864 A look at Trump’s
border wall prototypes
By Aaron Steckelberg, Chris Alcantara and Tracy Jan
Oct. 31, 2017
President Trump has preached his desire for a new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border: Build it “big” and build it “beautiful,” with Mexico footing the bill.
But Trump still does not have the funding from Congress, and Mexico has repeatedly said it will not pay for the wall. However, in this year’s budget, Congress has set aside $20 million for prototypes.
Any wall design must meet the following requirements:
#murs #frontières #mexique #états-unis #trump
Border Wall Prototypes Are Unveiled, but Trump’s Vision Still Faces Obstacles - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/us/politics/border-wall-prototypes-unveiled.html
SAN DIEGO — The Department of Homeland Security unveiled several border wall prototypes here on Thursday that the agency said was the first step in carrying out President Trump’s plan to build a barrier along the nearly 2,000-mile border that the United States shares with Mexico.
Agency officials said they would test the mock-ups over the next few months to determine which worked best in curbing illegal immigration and drug trafficking.
Immigration officials arrest 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy after surgery - World Socialist Web Site
▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/10/27/immi-o27.html
Comme en Israël, pratiquement.
The Gestapo-like tactics of the federal immigration police were on display this week when officials in Texas arrested a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, Rosamaria Hernandez, after she underwent gallbladder surgery, because she is undocumented.
On Tuesday at 2 a.m., officers of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) stopped Rosamaria’s ambulance at an immigration checkpoint as she was en routeto an emergency surgery at a hospital in Corpus Christi. Agents first tried to force Rosamaria’s cousin, who has legal status, to take the young girl to a hospital in Mexico. Rosamaria’s undocumented parents were not with her because they feared crossing the checkpoint. When her cousin refused, agents then followed Rosamaria to Driscoll Children’s Hospital.
Could Mexico Be the Next Panama Canal for Gas ? Drillers Think So - Bloomberg
(titre tout-à-fait trompeur, puisqu’il s’agit d’un éventuel tuyau, #gazoduc)
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-19/could-mexico-be-the-next-panama-canal-for-gas-drillers-think-so
Since the first shale gas export terminal opened in Louisiana last year, America’s drillers have seen at least 75 cargoes of their fuel sail through the Panama Canal bound for markets in Asia.
Now they’re looking for a cheaper and quicker route. And they’ve turned to Mexico for help.
Aldo Flores, Mexico’s deputy energy secretary, said Thursday that the government’s in talks with shale drillers in West Texas about a potential pipeline that would send their gas straight to Mexico’s west coast, where it could then be liquefied and shipped overseas.
Such a pipeline could eliminate the need for gas tankers to navigate the Panama Canal and hand the U.S. another outlet for the bounty of gas that President Donald Trump has vowed to “unleash” upon the world. It comes as at least one would-be U.S. gas exporter, Sempra LNG & Midstream, voices concerns about delays at the canal that threaten to cost gas traders thousands of dollars a day.
[…]
A pipeline from Texas to Mexico’s west coast could be a costly proposition, Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Anastacia Dialynas said Thursday. But it would also be easier to build in Mexico, where there are less regulations than in Oregon, she said.
John Carlos has one regret over Black Power salute at 1968 Mexico Olympics
▻http://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/john-carlos-has-one-regret-over-his-famous-black-power-salute/news-story/17ed6d7c13fec04c74c40eed8bac991c
▻http://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/a634d22c1b1595c80bb298fb104328f0
Yet for all the immediate backlash, over time the image of the two men on the podium — along with Aussie silver medallist Peter Norman, who wore a badge supporting equal rights at the medal ceremony — has become a symbol of black people’s quest for equality.
It was admirable and brave, to say the very least, but for all the good it did, Carlos has revealed he has one regret over the incident. In an interview with Forbes, the bronze medallist said his regret has nothing to do with how the ceremony unfolded, but how his actions had long lasting implications for his family.
“For anything I’ve ever done in my life — and I’ve done quite a bit — I’ve never been more proud than of what I did in that demonstration,” said Carlos.
“But the one regret I do have is that I didn’t think enough about safeguarding my family.
“I didn’t think people would strike out at my wife and kids. I thought that they would just come after me.
“I lost my wife in the process — she took her life — and my kids were scorned in school based on the fact that I was their father.”
His wife Kim died by suicide in 1977, and his family was regularly subjected to death threats.
In past interviews the now-70-year-old has often maintained he has no regrets about taking part in the protest, but clearly its effect on those closest to him has weighed heavily on the former sprinter.
Why two artists surveyed the U.S.-Mexico border ... the one from 1821 - LA Times
▻http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-ca-cam-border-marcos-ramirez-david-taylor-20160715-snap-story.html
merci elisabeth vallet
▻http://www.trbimg.com/img-579000f0/turbine/la-ca-cam-border-marcos-ramirez-david-taylor-20160715-snap
Two artists — one Mexican, one American — piled into a white Sprinter van stuffed with camping gear, photo equipment and art supplies for a 3,721-mile journey to mark the expanse of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Marcos Ramirez, known as “ERRE,” a Tijuana artist who tackles border topics in sculptural and conceptual works, and David Taylor, an Arizona photographer who has documented the border, began the first leg of their journey in July 2014 with a two-hour crossing from Tijuana into the U.S. at the international border.
Terremoto en México: Un seismo de magnitud 7,1 sacude el país
▻http://www.lavanguardia.com/internacional/20170919/431412890415/terremoto-mexico.html
Un fuerte terremoto de magnitud 7,1 sacudió este martes fuertemente la capital mexicana y causó al menos dos muertos, según la cifra provisional que dio el Gobierno de México, un saldo que podría aumentar ya que hay personas atrapadas bajo los edificios derruidos. Se produjeron muchas escenas de pánico justo cuando se cumplen 32 años del poderoso terremoto que dejó miles de muertes en la Ciudad de México.
El Servicio Sismológico Nacional (SSN) detalló que, según el reporte preliminar, se trató de un solo evento sísmico en los límites de Morelos y Puebla. El movimiento telúrico fue de magnitud 7,1 y su epicentro, registrado a las 13.14 hora local (18.14 GMT), se localizó a 12 kilómetros al sureste de Axochiapan, en el central estado de Morelos, a una profundidad de 57 kilómetros.
Un séisme de magnitude 7,1 au Mexique
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/article/2017/09/19/un-seisme-de-magnitude-7-1-au-mexique_5188049_3222.html
Un séisme de magnitude 7,1 a frappé le Mexique, a annoncé mardi 19 septembre l’Institut américain de géophysique (USGS). Ce tremblement de terre est survenu trente-deux ans jour pour jour après celui de 1985, qui fit plus de dix mille morts, et une semaine à peine après un séisme qui en a fait une centaine dans le sud du pays.
Selon les premières données de l’USGS, l’épicentre du séisme se situait dans l’Etat de Puebla, dans le centre du pays, à une centaine de kilomètres au sud-est de la capitale, Mexico. « On nous rapporte des immeubles endommagés », a également tweeté le gouverneur de l’Etat de Puebla, Tony Gali.
Dans la capitale de 20 millions d’habitants, des scènes de panique ont eu lieu. Dans le quartier central de la Roma, au moins un immeuble était effondré.
L’aéroport international de Mexico a annoncé sur son compte Twitter la suspension de son activité.
US Census report shows increasing social inequality - World Socialist Web Site
▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/15/cens-s15.html
US Census data from 2016 released on Tuesday shows increasing social inequality amid a small gain in household income that is offset by a massive growth of personal debt and rising living costs.
The data tracks the ongoing redistribution of wealth from the working class to the wealthy as a result of the pro-Wall Street policies of both the Republican and Democratic parties. It substantiates the oligarchic character of the United States.
Social inequality
The Gini index, used to measure social inequality, with higher figures indicating a wider economic divide, rose slightly from 2015 (.479) to 2016 (.481). The 2016 figure, according to rankings in the CIA World Factbook, makes the US slightly more equal than Madagascar and less equal than Mexico.
In terms of aggregate income share, the shift from 2015 to 2016 is as follows: