Somos Primos, "We are Cousins" October 2019

Greetings Mimi,

Love your comments on our Hispanic heritage and how it is perceived....totally agree. In my opinion, we shoot ourselves in the foot because we do exactly what we complain about when others do it....we try to put ourselves in one box, when in reality we all have our own unique box...based on the boxes of our ancestors.

I recently had a conversation with another "Californiano" who was talking about celebrating our "Mexican-ness"....my response was that it isn't that simple....in my case my ancestors left while it was still New Spain and considered themselves to be Spanish...despite our more developed understanding of their history, we still have to recognize their perception of their world and try to see it through their eyes as much as we can.

Bueno...gracias por todo lo que haces!

Con carino,  Tim
Timothy Crump crumpta@msn.com 

And this year, they hit another milestone.

They now officially represent the majority of the college-educated labor force in America. While men still hold the majority in the overall workforce, this is still a great feat.

This is because about 57% of all bachelor’s degrees earned in the past two decades have been by women. Also, the US has shifted in recent years from focusing the economy on manufacture-based companies to service- and knowledge-based ones.

This means the fields that women are typically more interested in like health and education are growing significantly, offering more and more jobs. In addition, the US employment rate is historically low. And as the number of jobs increases so to must the wages so that companies stay competitive with one another.

However, according to the left, women are still as oppressed as ever. One of their favorite past times is discussing just how much more men make than women do. Most likely you have heard the statistic they proport that says, “a woman makes 77 cents for every dollar a man earns.” And while this may have been true at one time, it hasn’t been for a quite a while now.

Firstly, you have to understand that they get this number from taking the average earnings of men and women across all careers. This means it does not consider the fact the differences in earning power such as the type of employment, number of hours worked, what they studied in college, or how much time they spend away from work.

So when Professor Marianne Bertrand from the University of Chicago conducted a study on this very issue, she made to take these factors into account. Her work looked at a group born in 1950 and then another who was born in 1985 and found that in both groups, women studied subjects in college that earned them less than those chosen by men.

According to this study, women tend to choose majors or degrees in things like family studies, child development, social work, and education. These are not known to be high paying jobs, primarily upon entry into the field. In contrast, men are more likely to pursue degrees that lead to higher-paying careers such as science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

In addition, Bertrand’s study also noted that women tended to migrate towards positions that allowed them to spend more time with their families or had a more flexible schedule than their male counterparts. And as you can imagine, posts that are either part-time or offer more time away from the job, don’t pay as much as full-time placements. Neither do they offer much in the way of career advancement.

However, in the instances where women and men majored and worked in the same fields, Professor Bertrand found a contradiction to the left’s statistic. According to her work, women who work the same number of hours, doing the same type of work as men typically make more.

And Time magazine confirms this. They reported that women who work full-time earn an average of about 8% more than men in their peer group. And the difference is even more significant in metropolitan areas.

“Young women in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Diego makes 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers, respectively.”

And not only do they make more, but more and more employers are changing their benefits and policies to attract women. The Journal says that only 24% of employers offered paid family leave in 2015. Now that number is up to 40%. Additionally, 66% currently provide fertility benefits and 17% will cover the cost of egg freezing.

So the fact of the matter is women no longer make less than men. And if the left were astute to that, they could stop their needless meddling with imposing regulatory employer burdens. Instead, they should turn their focus on improving the economy even more. As it grows, female workers will continue to be attracted to a workforce that respects and treats them fairly.

Such words can supercharge your kids and lets them know how much you support them and can change your relationships, Araceli Robles tells a room full of Santa Ana moms in Spanish.

It helps make your connection stronger, the mothers agree.

“Our words pack power,” says Robles, who leads the weekly Madres group component of the Confia en Mi, Confio en Ti program at Latino Health Access, a nonprofit organization dedicated to disease prevention and health promotion in underserved communities of Orange County. “We should celebrate and enjoy our kids and tell them how much they mean to us. Our kids remember how we treat them and we need to communicate with them.”

While the Madres program takes place, the mothers’ children take part in a Youth Engaged for Action (YEA) program, where they, too, are learning to express their frustrations and better communicate with their parents.

“We are implementing and evaluating an engagement program, focused on adolescents and their caregivers to strengthen relationships,” says Jessica Borelli, associate professor of psychological science.

The program is part of a larger effort to prevent youth violence among Latino boys and girls from low-income families in the most violent neighborhoods of Santa Ana.                                         
                                                                                                                                  Jessica Borelli

Through the school’s long-standing collaboration with Latino Health Access, Borelli explains, “we are expanding their youth promotoras (lay health workers) network into a comprehensive YEA program, and extending our effective Madres a Madres promotora-led family engagement program to focus on adolescents and their caregivers.”

As part of the grant, Borelli and her team of student researchers are conducting a randomized controlled trial of the integrated YEA/Madres program embedded in a larger 10-year Building Healthy Communities (BHC) initiative, funded by a $1 million California Endowment (2010-2020) in six Santa Ana neighborhoods where violence rates are about six times the national average.

Borelli, her research team, which includes fellow School of Social Ecology faculty members Kirk Williams, John Hipp and Dean Nancy Guerra, and Latino Health Access are delivering the YEA/Madres program in three of the neighborhoods and the other three neighborhoods are serving as comparison sites. “In this manner, we can evaluate empirically the impact of the YEA/Madres program on individual and neighborhood-level outcomes,” Borelli says.

Participating families report that they love the program and have expressed a desire to continue attending the sessions beyond the eight weeks.

Says one mom: "Me pareció muy bien porque aprendí mucho de mis compañeras y las experiencias que han vivido y también porque a mi hijo también le gusta venir. Poco a poco mi hijo esta agarrando más confianza en comunicarse conmigo. Si habido un cambio. (I learned a lot from my peers and the experiences they have lived and shared. I also enjoy this program because my son likes coming here. Little, by little, my son is gaining more confidence in communicating with me. There has definitely been a change.)"

Healthier parent-child relationships are associated with a host of better outcomes, including less anxiety, depression, aggression, and substance use in children and adolescents, Borelli stresses. “The bottom line is when youth feel that they can turn to their parents in times of need, they are less likely to turn elsewhere.”

Sun, Sep 15, 2019

Good morning Mrs. Lozano Holtzman,

I have some heartwarming stories about our Pocket Constitution to Schools Campaign that I hope will help start your day off right. As of this week, your support has helped to send over 390,000 pocket constitutions to students across the United States! And grateful teachers have asked us to share the stories of how they’ve been used. Here’s one of my favorites:

Mrs. Baldwin, an 8th grade teacher, said she uses pocket constitutions in her classroom as a “rite of passage” for her civics students. The national anthem is playing in the background as each student is presented with their own pocket constitution. Mrs. Baldwin says, “They are usually beaming with patriotic pride that they have a personal copy of a document that means so much for our great nation, and have themselves learned the Preamble and the nuts and bolts of constitutional principles. ”

Mrs. Baldwin even said she’s received comments from parents about how their students will pull out their pocket constitutions at the dinner table to contribute to family discussions of current events!

We hope that this kind of story gets you excited about the educational opportunities that you help provide to K-12 students across the county. Here’s another one I’d like to share.

This month we received 27 handwritten letters from fourth-grade students requesting a copy of the Constitution to study. Below are some pictures so you can see for yourself the sweet excitement of these kiddos. We had the opportunity to write each one back, and it literally was the best part of our day. I hope this note helps you share a little in that joy, knowing that you helped us fulfill their requests.

Without your support, this project, this kind of education, would be greatly diminished. Thank you for making these moments possible.

Have a lovely day!

Gina Gallutia, ‘07
Director of National Donor Outreach
Hillsdale College
Gina Gallutia onlinesupport@hillsdale.edu 
33 East College St, Suite 500, Hillsdale, MI 49242.

Today we honor the ratification of our Constitution. This great document was subject to an intense reviewal process that lasted for five months in 1787. The Constitution emerged in its final form in early September and was submitted to the Congress of the Confederation on September 17, 1787.

Let's reflect on the signatories that go unnoticed who were, nonetheless, heroes. Many, like John Langdon of New Hampshire, participated in death defying missions crucial to the patriots’ victory in the Revolutionary War. Others, like John Dickinson of Delaware, organized formal opposition to the Stamp Act. What must be emphasized is that the signers were not merely politicians but statesmen. These patriots worked as planters, lawyers, and merchants as they governed. Some owned slaves, many did not, but they all bled red, white, and blue.

In his September 17, 2017 proclamation, President Trump stated,

“Our Constitution is founded on a fundamental trust in America’s citizens. ‘We the People,’ the Constitution proclaims, are the source of all governmental authority. We are, as President Lincoln declared in the war torn fields of Gettysburg, a ‘Government of the People, by the People, for the People.’ Be particularly mindful of a would be ruling class that has lost sight of this foundational truth. In the drive for progressive reform, our Federal Government has grown beyond belief and has layered regulation on top of burdensome regulation. American citizens and businesses face an unrelenting onslaught of rules and regulations adopted by an army of regulators unaccountable to the citizens they seek to control.”

Trump is right. The ruling class has lost sight of this foundational truth. Their aversion of original intent, the only measure of the Constitution’s purpose, has led the United States astray. In the spirit of Trump’s proclamation, remember our forefathers who shouldered the burdens of revolution to compose this document. As the true custodians of the Constitution, conservatives have the obligation to preserve the country from its revolutionary detractors.

Sincerely, Larry Ward
Chairman - CRPAC

Celebrate Constitution Day by supporting the PAC that fights for your Constitutional Rights. Constitutional Right PAC
1750 Tysons Blvd
Suite 1500
McLean, VA 22102

©2019, All Rights Reserved

1– No Tenure / No Pension.  A Congressman / Woman, collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they're out of office.  No more perks go with them.

2– Congressman / Woman ( past, present & future ) participate in social security.  All funds in the Congressional Retirement Fund move to the Social Security System immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security System, and Congress participates with the American People.  It may not be used for any other purposes.

3– Congress must purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4– Congress will no longer vote themselves pay increases. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5– Congress loses their current Healthcare System and participates in the same Healthcare System as the American people.

6– Congress must equally abide by all the laws, they impose on the American people.

7– All contracts with past and present Congressman / Woman are void. The American people did not make these contracts with Congressmen /Women.

The Congress made all these contracts for themselves.  Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.  The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators should serve their terms, then go home and go back to work, and not get all kinds of freebies!

While there aren’t a lot of details being released about the training camp, it does contain what many consider to be a makeshift obstacle course built in a military-style.

The second facility was uncovered by researchers at WPMI-TV. This happened after going through a variety of legal documents. While it was reported to the FBI on April 29, the national media only picked it up in the past few days. Why such a big story is not getting the attention that needs is part of the problems with liberal media. They would rather complain more about what Trump is doing than uncovering the fact that there are Muslim terrorist training camps showing up around the country.

The court file that was uncovered connected a property to an allegedly terrorist training camp in New Mexico – nearly 1400 miles away. After following clues from the cryptic court filing, land records showed that the Alabama property belonged to the accused terrorist Wahhaj. Many of the items discovered on the property in Macon County was very similar to what was found in New Mexico.

It is believed that the group spent at least a few weeks on the property. Trash, tires, respirators, and even children’s toys were found left behind.

It is possible that federal authorities made the connection to the property in Alabama as early as 2017 when Wahhaj crashed a Ford Explorer in rural Alabama about an hour and a half away from the property. When this happened, the FBI found guns, a bag of ammunition, and a bulletproof vest. Wahhaj and a friend told the police that they were camping in New Mexico 1400 miles away. Eight months later, the compound in New Mexico was raided.

Five Muslims were indicted by a federal grand jury in New Mexico. These Muslims allegedly trained children to carry out various killing sprees. Additionally, they were formally charged with terrorism-related offenses as well as kidnapping and conspiracy to commit murder.

The list of defendants were all in their mid-30s to early 40s. They are related by blood or marriage to Wahhaj.

The five individuals were arrested when the military training compound was raised in Taos County, a remote part of New Mexico. 11 filthy, hungry children were found living in squalor at the compound. These were the children being trained to commit mass shootings. According to court documents, the shootings would have happened at schools. Additionally, the remains of a three-year-old disabled boy were also found on the property. Later, it was identified that it was the son of Wahhaj.

The indictment documents accused the defendants of kidnapping the disabled boy in Georgia and transporting him to New Mexico. Many of the defendants were previously brought up on conspiracy and weapons charges.

Wahhaj’s father is a notoriously holy man for the Muslim faith. Wahhaj St was close to the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, the same individual responsible for bombing the World Trade Center in 1993 leaving seven people dead. Wahhaj was responsible for testifying as a character witness for the Sheikh, identifying him as a respected scholar.

While Dems and the liberal news would like people to believe that mass shootings are happening around the country because Trump is spreading hate, the reality is that there are terrorist cells belonging to Muslims in a variety of different states.

Imam Wahhaj was once a member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ national advisory board. Leveille, one of the other five defendants, depicts herself as a prophet, claiming to receive divine messages from the angel Gabriel.

The investigation is continuing in Alabama to find out if the militant camp is still being used or if it has been moved to somewhere else in Alabama – or somewhere else in the country altogether. With this group seeking to recruit and train individuals, including a number of minor children, they are showing that armies of jihad will die as martyrs.

Why is this kind of news being covered up? It’s terrifying to know that this isn’t the first militant camp happening in the United States. This is the second one uncovered by the FBI, belonging to the same group. While many people want to think that it’s okay to practice any kind of religion, it isn’t okay when it puts millions of innocent Americans at risk of being mass murdered.

September 17, 2019 

A video published on YouTube over a year ago claimed that the Muslim population in Dearborn, Michigan, had reached almost 50 percent.

Life-long resident Brian demonstrated this point by driving a News Guru reporter to the east side of Dearborn. Brian said:

“You’ll see the culture shift where you won’t feel that you’re in the United States any longer.”

The change recorded on video was startling. Suddenly, every billboard and all commercial signage were written in Arabic. Buildings were adorned with Arabic architectural features, notably domed roofs. English letters spelled out “American Moslem Society” on the side of one building.

The video credited former U.S. President Barack Obama with taking in more Middle Eastern migrants than Mexico and Central American combined.

We know that some of these newly-arrived Muslims defrauded the Minnesota daycare and other public assistance programs a whopping $100 million a year. Whether they brought their money with them or robbed it from their unsuspecting host country, migrants are literally buying America out from under us.

“They come in to buy the strip mall. They move the previous owners out. They increase the rent dramatically to force people out. And then, they put similar businesses in but with an Arabic tone,” explained Brian.

Some Syrian migrant men have arrived in Dearborn with up to four wives accompanying them (Islam sanctions polygamy). The men file for public assistance with one and bring in the other three as extended family members.

Brian said migrants drive expensive cars (“Range Rovers” and others valued at $70 thousand) while paying for food with the state welfare department’s EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards. They lived in homes valued between $250,000-$300,000, wore designer clothes carrying Prada purses while shopping with coupons and accepting Medicaid benefits.

Immigrants from the Middle East represent the fastest-growing demographic in the U.S.

In 2016, nearly 85,000 refugees were settled in the U.S. by the State Department. In 2018, the number dropped to 45,000. The Trump administration announced plans in the fall of 2018 to further reduce that number to 30,000 for 2019.

As of the 2010 census, Dearborn, Michigan had a population of 98,153 and was home to the nation’s largest Muslim population.

Muslims are using their wealth and number to influence the U.S. educational and governing systems. Dearborn employed a Muslim refugee to welcome other Arabs from war-torn countries with a sympathetic “long journey on a cattle raft” story. Dearborn is a different kind of American community because “many of the students in the Dearborn Public Schools are refugees who have come from countries embroiled in devastating civil wars like Syria or Yemen.”

Further proof of the rise of Islam in the U.S. comes from St. Louis Park City in Minnesota which is located in Muslim Congresswoman Omar Ilhan’s district. On June 17, 2019, the city council there voted to do away with reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to Old Glory before each meeting.

Councilman Tim Brausen announced that the reasoning behind dispensing with this time-honored custom was the standard liberal feel-good refrain: to accommodate the religious, cultural, and political beliefs of a significant minority that is rapidly gaining ground in America:

“In order to create a more welcoming environment to a diverse community, we are going to forgo saying the Pledge of Allegiance before every meeting.”

In 2018, a middle school in Virginia banned all songs that mentioned “Jesus” from its annual Christmas concert. The reason given, according to the choir teacher at Robious Middle School in Chesterfield, was:

“We had a few students who weren’t comfortable singing a piece I have done many times in the past, but it is of a sacred nature and does mention Jesus.”

The unspoken cultural war between Christians and Muslims is going on abroad as well. An Australian city council voted to cancel funding for the annual Christmas event they had sponsored for 25 years. The reason given by Counselor Darren Kruse for putting an end to “Carols by the Creek” in Adelaide should be a familiar one by now:

“People of Muslim faith, and Sikh faith, and the multitude of other faiths we have in our community may not feel included.”

Chris Kenny, a local news reporter responded:  “What weak, self-loathing rot. People talk about the culture wars – this is cultural shame, cultural humiliation, cultural embarrassment, it’s even cultural vandalism. There’s no shame in continuing your culture, enjoying it, adding to it, and celebrating it.”

Kenny continued: “This episode just exposes the intellectual, moral, social, and cultural weakness of the virtue signalers and the green-left poseurs.”

Many in the United States agree that migrants who shun integration in favor of separatism and governmental overthrow need closer attention from the federal government. People who question the Leftist agenda to flood Muslims into every part of the western world are labeled “anti-Islamic” and “Islamaphobic.”

The fact remains that Muslims are instructed by their religious leaders from birth to follow their faith which preaches subjugation of and death to the infidel.

The information below was from a petition to stop putting tax dollars into the United Nations.
It is a National Petition ordering Congress to slash U.S. funding of this wasteful, bloated, anti-American bureaucracy.

The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste has been battling out-of-control spending and taxes since 1984. But nothing gets on our nerves more than the federal government wasting billions and billions of our tax dollars to prop up the den of bureaucrats, crooks, dictators, and thieves at the UN who propagandize and work against America’s security and economic interests.

With the current government, we continue to have an unprecedented opportunity to drastically slash U.S. funding of the corrupt and wasteful United Nations. In fact, beginning in 2017, the Administration scaled back the U.S. contribution to the UN’s peacekeeping budget, and the administration negotiated a $285 million reduction in the UN’s 2018-2019 operating budget.

Currently the U.S. spends more than $10 BILLION on the UN each year. The more than $10 BILLION Americans pay to the UN each year includes $3.5 billion in mandatory dues and about $7 billion in “voluntary payments” for special UN programs and funds.

American taxpayers pay as much as 25 percent of all UN expenses. In fact, we pay more than all of the other permanent members of the Security Council COMBINED!  

The five permanent are: China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The UN’s World Health Organization routinely has spent about $200 million a year on travel expenses – more than what it dedicates to fighting AIDS, hepatitis, tuberculosis, and malaria combined;

The late UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali admitted that “perhaps half of the UN workforce does nothing useful”;

Third World dictators routinely fly to UN headquarters in New York to attack our great country and undermine our national interests on our own soil; and,

UN-funded “peacekeeping” troops have abused the people they are supposed to be protecting and created a deadly and costly cholera epidemic in Haiti that sickened nearly 1 million people!

The leadership in Congress need to know that this issue is of the utmost importance to the American people. Especially right now, as our government continues to run massive deficits. 
Go to: https://secure.giveworks.net/ccagw/sign_the_petition_to_sl/CON7379 

If we don’t stand up now, Congress will continue sending billions upon billions to the UN year after year and wasting our tax dollars supporting our enemies abroad.

Thomas A. Schatz, President
Council for Citizens Against Government Waste

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” ~ John Adams

The wisdom offered by our founding father and Second President John Adams captures the spirit of Gun appreciation day in 2019.

Our constitution was crafted to provide checks and balances against government power. The government cannot deprive you of life, liberty, or property on a hunch.

That said, Americans are obliged to live moral dignified lives. If our fellow citizens fail to live pious lives, the Second Amendment provides us an insurance policy against the rise of an amoral irreligious people. Its importance cannot be overstated— just look at history.

In 1917, revolutionary forces overthrew the world’s last Christian emperor. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were vehement atheists that were among the first to establish state-atheism. Eradicating Christianity was an ideological goal for Marxist-Leninists.

Shortly thereafter, in 1918, the Bolsheviks decreed the surrender of all arms. The penalty for gun possession was up to 10 years in prison. It wasn’t long before militant atheists began constructing their desired society.

Philip Jenkins a Professor of History at Baylor University informs that “Between 1927 and 1940, active Orthodox churches all but vanished from the Russian Republic, as their numbers fell from 30,000 to just 500”. Millions of their own citizens were killed. Some scholars place that number north of twenty million persons.

Godlessness and gun confiscation were two important factors that helped facilitate one of the largest mass-murders in history.

Larry Ward, Chairman
Larry Ward news@usa.constitutionalrightspac.com 

Guns and God Coalition
Constitutional Right PAC
1750 Tysons Blvd
Suite 1500
McLean, VA 22102

US News

By Charlotte Cuthbertson
August 26, 2019 

WASHINGTON—The homicide rate in Mexico is rising at record-setting pace this year, with more than 30,000 murders in the first seven months.

It’s on target to hit almost 51,500 deaths by year’s end—about 1,000 more than in 2018 and 6,000 more than in 2017. That’s not accounting for the huge number of disappearances.

Cartel wars are causing bloodshed at the border, as well as in large port areas and major drug production areas.

Tamaulipas state, which borders Texas, has a U.S. State Department Level 4 travel advisory, which is a “do not travel” warning—the same as that given to Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan.

“Violent crime, such as murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault, is common,” the State Department website warns about Tamaulipas. “Gang activity, including gun battles and blockades, is widespread. Armed criminal groups target public and private passenger buses as well as private automobiles traveling through Tamaulipas, often taking passengers hostage and demanding ransom payments. Federal and state security forces have limited capability to respond to violence in many parts of the state.”

Derek Maltz, former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) special operations division, is advocating for the State Department to label some Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations. Such a designation, he said, would help focus resources and give broader legal authorities to target and prosecute cartels.

“Obviously, law enforcement authorities alone have not been sufficient to address the cartel threat to America,” Maltz said. “[Cartels] are causing more death and destruction than any other organization, in the history of my life, to America.”

Maltz argues that America’s drug crisis, fueled by the cartels, is not just a health emergency, but also an unprecedented national security threat. In 2018, almost 70,000 people died of drug overdoses in the United States.

“It’s almost like a jihad against our country,” Maltz said, adding that major heroin traffickers in Afghanistan have said that selling heroin to the West is a way to perform a jihad.

“They’re killing the citizens of our country, they’re destroying our country, they’re causing us to focus our resources on this problem, [and] it’s helping to destabilize our country.

“Now you have Chinese organized crime that are making mass amounts of fentanyl in these labs in China … selling it to the Mexican cartels. [They’re] combining the fentanyl with all the other drugs that they’re selling and dumping these chemicals into our country. Well, the chemicals are like a poisonous chemical attack.”

The Arizona DEA stated on Aug. 22 that more than 1 million fentanyl pills have been seized in Arizona so far this fiscal year. Seizures of fentanyl have tripled each year since 2016, when it first appeared in the United States.

In late August, the secretary of the Mexican navy announced the seizure of an estimated 23,000 kilograms (50,706 pounds, or 25 tons) of powdered fentanyl from China, bound for Sinaloa.

The fentanyl was found in a container ship traveling from Shanghai under a Danish flag, to Mexico’s largest port on its west coast, Lazaro Cardenas in Michoacan state.

“The majority of … cocaine, meth, heroin, fentanyl is coming from Mexico, and the cartels are controlling all of it throughout almost every city in America,” Maltz said. “They’re making billions and billions of dollars.”

Related Gang Violence

Maltz said the gang violence on the streets of cities such as Chicago and Baltimore can be directly tied to Mexican cartels “a hundred percent.”

“Jalisco cartel and the Sinaloa cartel have been fighting for territory in Chicago. The gangs are all receiving large amounts of drugs,” he said, adding that the former head of the Sinaloa cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, built up territory all over Chicago. But when El Chapo started to get weak, the Jalisco cartel gained ground.

“Now you have the allegiance between the gang members and they’re just fighting like crazy in Chicago.”

Roy introduced legislation in March to urge the State Department to designate three cartels as foreign terrorist organizations: the Reynosa/Los Metros faction of the Gulf Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and the Cartel Del Noreste faction of Los Zetas.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) testifies at a House hearing in front of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, in Washington on July 12, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

The State Department criteria for designating terror organizations is related to the Foreign Relations Authorization Act and requires that the group must be a foreign organization and that its “terrorist activity or terrorism must threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security (national defense, foreign relations, or the economic interests) of the United States.”

Current groups that have such a designation include Hezbollah, ISIS, HAMAS, Shining Path, Palestine Liberation Front, and al-Qaeda.

The Epoch Times asked the State Department if it had or was considering designating any Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations. A spokesperson said, “We don’t discuss deliberations or the potential deliberations of our designations process.”

The connection between terrorist groups and Mexican cartels has been proven.

A DEA investigation launched in 2008, called Project Cassandra, unraveled the cocaine trafficking operation between Hezbollah and the Los Zetas cartel into the United States and around the world. Hezbollah was sending huge amounts of laundered money back to Lebanon through cocaine shipments and used car sales.

However, the Obama administration derailed the investigation in its quest to sign the Iran nuclear deal, according to a 2017 Politico article.

Along the Border

Roy said the cartels are causing “enormous instability” along the border.

“I think that they’re carrying out activities that are deserving of characterizing them as foreign terrorist organizations for targeting American citizens across our border, they’re moving people into our country for profit to undermine our national security and sovereignty,” he said.

“You’ve got people getting beheaded, burned, buried. You’ve got people that are held captive, beaten. Border Patrol has videos that they intercept where people are being beaten and then they send those videos back and hold families up to give money, hold them for ransom. This is what we’re allowing to happen in the greatest country in the history of the world. It’s absurd that we’re allowing that to happen on our southern border.”

Roy said there are several possible reasons why the designation hasn’t gained more support.

“One, and maybe somewhat legitimate, is that there is always a question of sort of ideology, and what is driving the targeting and you don’t want to water down how we do terrorist organizations broadly,” he said. “But I believe that if you look at the intricate networks of these specific cartels and what they’re doing to target and terrorize our citizens, our country, and are destabilizing the region and so forth, I think that they would qualify.”

The second, and more likely, reason is that some people in the executive branch believe the new Remain in Mexico policy may become more difficult to implement, he said. Under Remain in Mexico, or Migrant Protection Protocols, the United States is sending asylum-seekers back to Mexico to wait out their asylum claim.

The White House didn’t respond to queries.

“At a minimum, we should be having a dialogue about what we need to do to target cartels,” Roy said. “What are we going to do to go knock the knees out from under the cartels? Sitting here while they take operational control of our border and cause chaos along our border is a complete nonstarter from my standpoint.”

Maltz said the lack of desire for a cartel terror designation is due to U.S. law enforcement agencies being territorial and parochial. But he thinks the Justice Department should set up an operational plan for the existing special operations division based out of Chantilly, Virginia. It was the group that ran Project Cassandra. The group’s primary agencies are the DEA, FBI, and Homeland Security, but it often pulls in the Treasurorganizations and subsidiary organizations.”

But, Maltz said, the cartels are stronger than ever and shouldn’t be underestimated.

“We’re talking about surface-to-air missiles, grenades. They have armored vehicles. They have big machine guns on the top of the vehicles,” he said. “I mean, these guys are brutal and ruthless. They have no shame in the world when it comes to death and destruction. They’re hanging people on fence posts, they’re cutting off heads, dropping people in acid—they’re relentless.”

Follow Charlotte on Twitter: @charlottecuthboy Department, and dozens of other agencies are represented.

Maltz suggested the administration’s Feb. 9 executive order on transnational criminal organizations isn’t enough. The executive order targets cartels and orders U.S. law enforcement to “give a high priority and devote sufficient resources to efforts to identify, interdict, disrupt, and dismantle transnational criminal
transnational criminal organizations and subsidiary organizations.”

But, Maltz said, the cartels are stronger than ever and shouldn’t be underestimated. 

“We’re talking about surface-to-air missiles, grenades. They have armored vehicles. They have big machine guns on the top of the vehicles,” he said. “I mean, these guys are brutal and ruthless. They have no shame in the world when it comes to death and destruction. They’re hanging people on fence posts, they’re cutting off heads, dropping people in acid—they’re relentless.” 

In fact, in Boston, over 280 ethnic and cultural groups are welcomed by the flying of their flags.

But as of today, Christians aren’t among them.  The city of Boston permits 284 different flags to be flown within its jurisdiction.  These flags include the LGBTQ rainbow flag, the Chinese communist flag, and the transgender flag.  But the city refuses to fly what one group calls “the Christian flag.”

Hal Shurtleff first asked the city of Boston to fly the Christian flag in September 2017. Not only did the city deny his request, but it also banned the flag – stating that flags with “non-secular” emblems could not be flown by the city.

Never mind that the city already flies the Turkish flag which carries Islamic symbolism in the form of a crescent and a star.

Shurtleff is the director and co-founder of Camp Constitution, an organization whose mission is to “enhance understanding of our Judeo-Christian moral heritage” as a nation.  “We want to motivate, inspire, and activate this generation of Patriots as well as the next generation,” says the organization.  Its leadership seeks to foster a sound appreciation for “God, home, and country.”

To that end, Shurtleff had organized a one-hour event “celebrating the link between Christianity and the United States.”

He intended for the Christian flag to be an integral part of the event when he asked the city of Boston to fly the flag in solidarity with Camp Constitution for that single hour.

The Christian flag itself is simple and unassuming – primarily white, with a red cross situated on a blue rectangle in the upper left-hand corner. It acknowledges the strong historic ties between Christianity and America as a nation.

The Christian flag isn’t a new idea, either. It was initially designed in the early 1900s to represent several Protestant denominations of the faith.

The city of Boston, however, considers it to be an inadmissible message in the public forum.

But this now begs the question of whether the city violated the Constitution in its decision.

“Censoring religious viewpoints in a public forum where secular viewpoints are permitted violates the First Amendment,” said Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, a law firm representing religious freedom cases.

“Boston city officials may not ban the Christian flag as part of a privately-sponsored event when they allow flags by numerous private organizations,” Staver continued.

“It’s time…to stop the city’s unconstitutional censorship.”

Shurtleff first filed a lawsuit against the city of Boston in a federal court and later continued the case in a court of appeals.

Both courts ruled against the flying of the Christian flag, but Shurtleff has continued the suit.

He and Staver are confident that “key facts” will “compel a result in Camp Constitution’s favor.”

Boston has flown many religiously symbolic flags in past years, including the Cuban flag and the Vatican flag. So the city’s ban on the Christian flag specifically seems to represent a stance on Christianity that is all too familiar.

“Despite all of these many flag raisings containing religious symbols and imagery…Camp Constitution’s proposed flag raising was denied because it was ‘religious,’” Staver stated in the suit.

“There can be no dispute that the City’s denial impermissibly discriminated between religion and non-religion, and discriminated between religious sects,” Staver continued. “Both violate the Establishment Clause.”

Shurtleff agreed. “There’s no question that it is an unconstitutional act and…was a violation of the First Amendment.”

Ironically, the city stated that it could not fly the Christian flag for fear of violating the First Amendment!

Shurtleff wondered if his request might have been answered differently if he had called the flag “the Camp Constitution flag,” but he remains committed to the ideal of the Christian flag.

And he’s ready to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court if he has to!

The city of Boston and others who oppose the raising of the Christian flag argue that it will only serve to divide people, but as Shurtleff duly notes, “You really cannot have a flag that represents all people unless you have a blank flag.”

And already too many people in our culture are trying to fly blank flags.

Pray for Shurtleff, Staver, and the rest of those involved in this lawsuit as they seek to honor God in a public forum.

Recently, when billboards showing Greg Laurie, author and senior pastor of Harvest Ministries, holding a Bible went up in a popular outdoor mall in Southern California, numerous people complained that the signs were offensive. As a result, the billboards advertising the upcoming SoCal Harvest Event, scheduled for August 17-19, 2018 at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, California, were removed.

Harvest Ministries has hosted the wildly successful SoCal Harvest gathering for the past 29 years. Referring to the exciting event, the Executive Director for Harvest America, John Collins, informed CBN News, “We meet in Anaheim Stadium. We have somewhere around 100,000 people that will come out over the course of the weekend and Pastor Greg Laurie will give a very simple gospel message and we’ll see eight or nine, sometimes 10,000 people make a profession of faith in Christ.”

Collins added, “So, leading into that we take out ads with billboards. We put bumper stickers on thousands of cars that people lend us their bumpers. And we have ads in bus shelters and wherever we can. And this year we decided to take out some ads in one of the cultural centers of Orange County, Fashion Island, and take out ads to put big banners in the mall where a lot of people congregate.”

When disgruntled members of the public complained about the billboards, the Irvine Company, the business contracted to market the event, allegedly ordered the evangelical outreach to modify the signs. Then, they decided to remove them entirely.

“Apparently people saw that and took offense to that, assuming it was a Bible. And they asked us if we would change the ad, so we wanted to comply and so we submitted something that just simply said Harvest and had some of the musical artists that are going to be with us on the poster or on the banner and submitted that,” Collins said. “But then we were told that they decided they didn’t want to have any of the banners up in the mall and we were asked to take them down.”

Collins viewed the action as an indicator of America’s increasing intolerance towards God and Christianity. He remarked, “It’s unfortunate that they’re getting pushback from a few. I think there are just a few intolerant folks that are really thwarting the opportunity of thousands of Christians that want to come and demonstrate their faith.” Talking about the past successes of the SoCal Harvest event, Collins stated, “In these 29 years, we’ve seen marriages restored. We’ve seen families reunited. We’ve seen people come off of drugs. We’ve seen people come who were suicidal and be able to receive help. We’ve seen thousands upon thousands, about half a million people have made professions of faith in Christ. And they’ve found peace with God.” He also noted, “And so, it’s just mystifying to us that we couldn’t advertise that. What’s wrong with that?”

While the billboards announcing the SoCal Harvest event were forced to be removed, numerous signs offensive to Christians, parents, and others ostentatiously litter the sides of interstates and highways across the country. Earlier this year, the company Roman Equipment put up a billboard of a naked women in Brooklyn, Ohio. In January of 2018, Ohio abortion provider Preterm made headlines with the launch of its “Abortion Positive” billboard campaign. Preterm signs depicted abortion as an act to be affirmed and celebrated.

Each advertisement began with “Abortion is” followed by different words and phrases. For instance, some of the billboards put up said:
 “Abortion is a family value,” 
“Abortion is a blessing,” 
“Abortion is hope,” 
“Abortion is necessary,” 
“Abortion is normal,”
 “Abortion is a second chance,” 
“Abortion is right for me.” 

At the time, Preterm’s Nancy Starner stated, “We want to push people to think about abortion in new, diverse ways with these billboards.”

~ 1776 Christian

Working with at-risk and abused women led SBC teacher Ann White to fill an unexpected need.

The Courage for Life (CFL) Bible is the first audio version of the Word recorded with multiple women’s voices. It features a diverse group of female voice actors reading the New Living Translation. While the New Testament portion launched this year, White is currently fundraising to help finish recording the Old Testament. She spoke with CT about why the female-voiced Bible speaks to both sexes and how CFL plans to reach inmates across the country.

My first thought when hearing about your project was, “This is so long overdue!” Part of me couldn’t believe this hadn’t been done already.

That was my first thought!

Why did you choose to record the New Living Translation, in particular?

In working with local missions in our own backyard, whether it’s women in homeless shelters, battered women’s shelters, safe houses, or incarcerated women, their reading levels are very low. We chose the New Living Translation because it’s a great translation for the women we work with. Even when you take a printed book to someone who doesn’t read a lot or struggles to read, they’re really intimidated by the Bible.

Why women’s voices?

In working with at-risk women, we know through research and our own experience that you want to use gender-specific treatment. You don’t have a man go in and work with a woman who has been victimized by a man. We thought the same thing could be true for teaching the Bible to a woman with past trauma. She can better hear Scripture from a woman’s voice.

So my first thought was, let’s find a women’s audio Bible and make it available. We started looking, and we couldn’t find one. We thought, “What in the world, why hasn’t this been done? Lord, are you calling us to do this?”

So we began fundraising, and our generous donors came alongside us and helped us get the New Testament done in less than a year. That was amazing. We had 12 professional voiceover actresses from Burbank, California. Our producer is a two-time Grammy-nominated recording artist and an incredibly godly man, and he auditioned close to 80 women before he chose 12 of them. We wanted different age groups and ethnic backgrounds.

These gals have just been on fire about this project—they’re chomping at the bit to get it done. We’re currently adding eight books of the Old Testament to the Bible app. That’ll be done in the next couple of weeks. The New Testament is already up. It’s being picked up all over the world, which is even more than I could have hoped for or dreamed of.

How can incarcerated women access this audio Bible?

There are a certain number of states that are issuing tablets to inmates in order to give them positive content to combat the negative content in their lives. The prisons make certain things available, and then the inmates can choose what they’d like. There’s educational content there or music, and then, of course, the audio Bible. It takes time to go through all the hoops, but it looks like we’ll soon be up and running in one state—where there are roughly 50,000 inmates, both men and women—and there’s also another state waiting. We’ll also be partnering with Megavoice to put it on audio players that can also go into prisons.

Have you seen your ministry impact men, as well?

That was another thing that surprised me. One of our partners was in a couple of men’s prisons and was asking some of the male inmates, “You know, would you want to have an audio Bible available on your tablet?”

“Yeah, that would be great,” they said.

He asked, “Would you want it in a male or female voice?” Unanimously, they said “female voice.”

And that was interesting to us. A large percentage of incarcerated men come from broken homes, fatherless homes, or they were abused by men in their life. So quite often, if anyone shared the Lord with them, it was a woman—their grandmother, their mom, or their aunt. So they’re excited to hear the Word of God in a woman’s voice.

Advertisers say that if you want to please 92 percent of the population in an ad, use a woman’s voice. So for various reasons, the female voice is preferred, and God has given us the privilege, the opportunity, and the resources to get this project done.

Have you heard any feedback from your listeners?

In the recording studio, our voiceover actresses and even our producers were often brought to tears from even reading God’s Word. There’s an emotional attachment that happens when you spend that much time with Scripture. You begin to really understand how God relates to the precious creation that he loves so deeply. That emotion begins to stir. Similarly with our listeners, we’ve heard back that this audio Bible has really provided them not only with the opportunity but a desire to be in God’s Word more often.

Conversely, have you faced any pushback to this project?

No, I have not had any pushback. I’m a Southern Baptist at heart, and we’re members of a Southern Baptist community, so I understand what you’re talking about. But even in asking my pastor, “Do you see any reason why anyone would have any objections to hearing God’s Word in a female voice?” he was like, “Absolutely not.” I have had nothing but encouragement, and I guess that’s by God’s grace and his protection.

I know without a shadow of a doubt that this is what he’s called us to do. Even knowing it’d be a half-a-million-dollar project, I never turned back.

Each book of the Bible has a special introduction. Is that your voice?

It is! I’m a teacher at heart. I loved recording the introductions and then the challenges at the end of each book. I want listeners to understand—this is who wrote this, this is who his audience was, this is the context of what was going on. So the who, what, where, when, and why questions. And then the how: How do I read this book of the Bible? I want to help them understand, for example, that the best way to read the Book of Romans is by breaking it down.

What’s next?

We’re working with Tyndale to have a print version of the Courage for Life Bible in the New Living Translation. It will be coming out after the first of the year. I worked with theologians and writers and even seminary professors, just making sure we were very theologically sound with the project.

What’s your ultimate hope for this project?

My ultimate hope would be two things: the healing of broken hearts, first, and then number two, a revival in our nation. And because we’re called into the prison system, I’d love to see a revival in our prison system, as well. I want to see hearts heal from past trauma so that when prisoners go home, the recidivism rate drops.

The work we’re doing is a true blessing. It’s a privilege to do what God calls us to do.

Courtney Ellis is a pastor and speaker and the author of Uncluttered (Feb. 2019, Rose Publishing). She lives in Southern California with her husband, Daryl, and their three kids. Find her on Twitter, Facebook, or her blog.

The Courage for Life audio Bible is available on iTunes, Android, or by texting the word BIBLE to 62953

Editor: Nancy Taylor
Real American Pundit, 
August 20, 2019

It should come as no shock that the modern welfare system is completely broken. The system was established to help people overcome the effects of the great recession. Since then, it has grown out of control – and many people are using and abusing it.

What used to be a temporary measure is now a generational problem, with many people being born into the welfare system and raising their children dependent upon it, too. The rise in costs has become a considerable taxpayer burden, too. Although many Republicans have looked to cut welfare benefits, Democrats rely on it as a way to get votes.

A Pennsylvania woman was recently arrested after stealing from the state welfare system. She has reportedly collected over $100,000 in benefits from the welfare system for children that she does not have.

Sabrina Strothers was receiving money from the Pennsylvania welfare system for herself and three children. The problem is that the three children do not exist. According to the Allegheny County Court District Attorney’s Office, she has been charged with two counts each of making false statements and of forgery as well as one count of theft by deception.

According to detectives, in 2008, Strothers became pregnant with triplets. For reasons that were not disclosed, the babies were never actually born. This means that she either had an abortion or miscarriage.

However, that didn’t stop Strothers from reporting that she had the triplets. She provided them with names and gave them the birth date of November 20, 2008. Soon after, she began receiving welfare benefits for all three of her children. She would have likely continued to receive the benefits, too, however it was her cousin that reported her to the authorities.

From 2008 until 2017, Strothers received over $89,000 in medical assistance funds, $37,000 in supplemental assistance program benefits, and another 2000 in temporary assistance for needy families grants. This totaled over $120,000 of illegal benefits that came from the Department of Human Services in Pennsylvania.

Strothers provided Social Security numbers for the triplets, and the investigation figured out how she was able to commit fraud when the cousin alerted authorities. The Social Security numbers were checked, finding out that the numbers belonged to individuals who were born as early as 1887.

Strothers had applied for benefits on six different occasions in 2012 until 2015. She lived in Maryland for 13 months, though she continued to receive benefits in Pennsylvania because of her false claim. When interviewed, she went as far as lying to Inspector General officials about the birth of her children and how they were supposedly living with her father in Atlanta.

There have been a number of fraudulent cases of welfare throughout the United States. It is entirely too easy for people to obtain welfare and to take advantage of the system. Strothers is proof that the system is broken and that more people need to be held accountable for who they are getting funds for and how the money is being spent.

The fraud committed by Strothers prevented real parents from being able to provide for their real children in times of need. She stole from taxpayers who would rather pay for countless other things than to give a woman money for kids that she does not have.

Depending on the state, welfare can provide a number of different benefits. This includes housing, education, food, childcare, and much more. In 2018, approximately $445 billion is being spent on welfare programs. This accounted for approximately 5.6% of total government spending. Local governments spend approximately $284 billion on poverty reduction programs each and every year. Since 1965, welfare program expenses have quadrupled – and much of this has to do with people taking advantage of the system.

Welfare spending in America has gotten out of control. While many Democrats fight to keep the system in place, Republicans take a look at the numbers. The federal welfare budget is spent in such categories as housing assistance, unemployment, Medicaid, Worker’s Compensation, and family and child assistance. This adds up to a considerable amount of money – and many people are completely capable of working to choose not to because the government is providing them with so many different things.

Sabrina Strothers was only 23 when she figured out how to commit fraud to such an extensive level. She is not alone, which demonstrates the complete breakdown of the welfare system. Something has to be done about it, otherwise, expenses are going to quadruple again over the next several decades.

.Cheaters and Liars Exposed Online

STOCKTON — Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang wants to give cash to every American each month.

Susie Garza has never heard of Yang. But since February, she’s been getting $500 a month from a nonprofit in Stockton, California, as part of an experiment that offers something unusual in presidential politics: a trial run of a campaign promise, highlighting the benefits and challenges in real time.

Garza can spend the money however she wants. She uses $150 of it to pay for her cell phone and another $100 or so to pay off her dog’s veterinarian bills. She spends the rest on her two grandsons now that she can afford to buy them birthday presents online and let them get the big bag of chips at the 7-Eleven.

“I’ve never been able to do that. I thought it was just the coolest thing,” said Garza, who is unemployed and previously was addicted to drugs, though she said she has been sober for 18 years following a stint in prison. “I like it because I feel more independent, like I’m in charge. I really have something that’s my own.”

Garza is part of an experiment testing the impact of “universal basic income,” an old idea getting new life thanks to the 2020 presidential race, although Stockton’s project is an independent one and has no connection to any presidential race.

Yang, a tech entrepreneur, has anchored his long shot bid with a proposal to give $1,000 in cash to every American, saying the payments will shield workers from the pain of certain job losses caused by automation. The idea has helped him win unexpected support and even muscle out some better-known candidates from the debate stages. His proposal isn’t too far off from one by U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, one of the top contenders for the Democratic nomination, who has a proposal to give up to $500 a month to working families.

Stockton, once known as the foreclosure capital of the country and for one of the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcies, is a step ahead of both candidates. In February, the city launched the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, a pilot program spearheaded by a new mayor and financed in part by the nonprofit led by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. The city chose 125 people who earned at or below the city’s median household income of $46,033. They get the money on a debit card on the 15th of each month.

“I think poverty is immoral, I think it is antiquated and I think it shouldn’t exist,” said Michael Tubbs, the city’s 29-year-old Democratic mayor.

Tubbs’ personal story includes a cousin who was killed, a father who is in prison and a mother who, as a teenager, raised him with the help of multiple jobs. He found his way to Stanford and public service, where he persuaded his beleaguered city to sign on to a provocative new idea: guaranteed cash.

Stockton residents, who have elected Republican mayors for 16 out of the last 22 years, were skeptical, worried about encouraging people not to work. Tubbs said he calmed their fears by noting the money came from private donations, not taxpayer dollars.

“I would tell people all that time that would be upset or would call angry, I would say, well, I’m just as angry as you are, but I’m angry about the problem. I’m not angry about possible solutions,” Tubbs said.

A team of researchers is monitoring the participants. Their chief interest is not finances but happiness. They are using what they call a “mattering scale” to measure how much people feel like they matter to society.

“Do people notice you are there? Those things are correlated to health and well-being,” said Stacia Martin-West, a researcher at the University of Tennessee who is working on the program along with Amy Castro-Baker at the University of Pennsylvania.

The money has made Jovan Bravo happier. The 31-year-old Stockton native and construction worker is married and has three children, ages 13, 8 and 4. He said he didn’t see enough of his children when he worked six days a week to pay the bills.

That changed when he started getting $500 a month. Now he only works one Saturday a month. He uses the other Saturdays to take his kids to the amusement park and ride bikes with them in the park.

“It’s made a huge difference,” he said. “Just being able to spend more time with the wife and kids, it brings us closer together.”

Stockton officials do not release the names of the program participants. They arrange interviews with journalists only for those who volunteer to discuss their experiences.

The idea of a guaranteed income dates back to at least the 18th century and has crossed ideological and cultural lines.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Republicans Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney oversaw four guaranteed-income experiments scattered across the country when Rumsfeld, later a defense secretary, was director of President Richard Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity and Cheney, the future vice president, was his deputy.

The program had some hiccups, including a woman who spent all the money on alcohol and a man who went into debt buying expensive furniture for his government-subsidized apartment, according to a 1970 New York Times story. But the experiment concluded that the money did not stop people from working and led Nixon to propose expanding the program, which ultimately did not pass Congress.

Since then, other studies have reached similar results. A 2018 study in Alaska, where residents have gotten a share of the state’s oil revenue every year since 1982, found the money has not shrunk the state’s labor force. The same was found in a 2010 UCLA study in North Carolina, where the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians has shared casino revenue with its members since the mid-1990s.

The latest momentum comes with the help of the technology industry, which is grappling with how to prepare for the job losses likely to come with automation and artificial intelligence.

The tech connection has drawn criticism from left-leaning labor unions skeptical of the industry’s motives.

“We think the future of work should be defined by working people, not tech billionaires,” said Steve Smith, spokesman for the California Labor Federation, a group of 1,200 unions and a reliable ally for some of the state’s most liberal policies. “If there are no jobs available, you are pretty much stuck with your $1,000 a month check while the CEO of the tech company that automated you out of a job is being paid a billion dollars a year.”

Other critics note that the programs can chip away at the social safety net. Yang’s plan requires recipients to decline food stamps and some other government assistance.

There’s also the question of how to pay for it.

Stockton’s program, giving 125 people $500 per month for 18 months, will cost just over $1.1 million. Harris’ plan, which covers working families making up to $100,000 annually, would cost about $275 billion per year, according to the Tax Policy Center. To pay for it, she says she would repeal some of the 2017 GOP tax cuts and impose new taxes on corporations.

Yang’s plan, which covers every adult in the United States, would cost $2.8 trillion per year. He would impose a new tax on businesses’ goods and services while shrinking some other government assistance programs. Representatives for Yang and Harris did not respond to interview requests.

The Stockton experiment runs through July 2020. Researchers expect to release their first round of data this fall, when the presidential campaigns are preparing for the Iowa caucuses and state primaries.

Tubbs says he already sees success in making the city a focal point in the discussion about the future of capitalism and the U.S. economy. But once the experiment is over, he’s not sure what’s next. He says guaranteed income would need to be much bigger — at least statewide — to really have an impact.

Garza does not know what’s next for her, either. She relies on her husband for most things, and he recently lost his job. The extra $500 a month was so helpful, it left her wondering how she was lucky enough to get it — a question she posed to the program’s director.  “She goes, ‘Because you’re blessed,’” Garza said. “And I just left it at that.”

In this photo taken Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2019, Susie Garza displays the city provided debit card she receives monthly through a trial program in Stockton, Calif. Garza is participating in the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration. The program, which started in February, gives $500 a month to 125 people who earn at or below the median household income of $46,033. They can spend the money with no restrictions. Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs, who initiated the privately funded program, says it could be a solution to the city’s poverty problem. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Sent by Gil Sanchez gilsanchez01@aol.com 

A boy with one hand met a soccer player with the same limb difference, and the photo went viral

The arm bump happened when Pickett, 25, jogged over to Joseph’s family after hearing them cheer at a home game. She repeatedly tapped her arm against his as he shrieked with glee, said Joseph’s mother, Colleen Tidd, who scrambled to take pictures as her husband held Joseph, decked out in a purple Pride T-shirt.

“In those situations, I want to be in the moment,” Tidd said in an interview Tuesday about the photo that’s gotten a lot of attention. “But then I realized, ‘Well, this is adorable.’ ”

Joseph spent the whole car ride home from the stadium looking at his arm and giggling, Tidd said, because he knew he had a friend.

About 2,250 babies with limb defects are born in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children with arms or legs that failed to form completely during pregnancy may need help with daily tasks and sometimes feel self-conscious about their appearance.

Joseph, however, is a bundle of confidence — a fact that Tidd attributes to his meeting other people with the same limb difference. In addition to Pickett, Joseph has met Seattle Seahawks linebacker Shaquem Griffin and Amy Alamillo Siesel, a member of Lucky Fin Project, a nonprofit that celebrates people with limb differences.

Tidd, 28, said she found out when she was pregnant with Joseph that he would be born without one of his hands. She cried at first, but she said Lucky Fin helped her believe her son would be fine.

So we're launching a new website -- EndBorderCrisisNow.com -- to update and inform you with key facts that show just how serious the crisis is and how we fix it. Here are just some examples that the mainstream media and their allies in Congress typically ignore.   As of June 2019 . . . . .

FACT 1: 353 MS-13 gang members have been apprehended nationwide by Border Patrol.

FACT 2: Unaccompanied minors (UAC) coming into the U.S. illegally is set to more than double.

FACT 3: Illegal aliens apprehended along the southern border (694,229) had already surpassed the number for all last fiscal year by June of this year.

Sent by Chip Roy info@chiproy.com 

Es una historia bien conocida, y una aún palpable a día de hoy: todos los países sudamericanos excepto Brasil cuentan el español como su lengua principal, y la herencia hispánica es visible en cualquier gran ciudad por debajo del estrecho de Panamá.

¿Pero qué hay de América del Norte? La huella española en los territorios más septentrionales del continente es a un tiempo muy visible y apenas perceptible. La colonización fue especialmente intensa en México uno de los virreinatos más importantes para la Corona por su potencial económico y demográfico. Su halo e influjo se extendió hasta lo que hoy conocemos como el southwestestadounidense, los estados lindantes con los actuales Estados Unidos Mexicanos. ¿Pero significa que la herencia hispana terminó allí?

MAP: Toda la historia de América del Norte y del Sur, resumida en dos fantásticos vídeo-mapas

No. Este mapa elaborado por Nagihuin, editor de Wikipedia, es el mejor ejemplo de ello. Una detalladísima cartografía que cubre cinco siglos de exploración y conquista colonial y que ilustra las infinitas rutas comerciales, expediciones militares y trazados marítimos que el Imperio Español emprendió a lo largo y ancho de América del Norte. Desde el vivero político y civilizatorio de Ciudad de México hasta los rincones remotos de Alaska y el Yukón. Un compendio de actividad colonial que ayuda a comprender por qué América del Norte es como es a día de hoy.

Se puede contemplar a tamaño completo aquí.

MAP: España en Norteamérica

Publicado el pasado 2 de agosto, el mapa divide América del Norte en dos colores: por un lado, la América reclamada y controlada por la Monarquía Hispánica bajo la Casa de Austria (en verde), y por otro la América gestionada y gobernada desde los virreinatos borbónicos (en azul). Es una distinción importante. El alcance y el enfoque de los españoles bajo los Habsburgo fue muy distinto, por medios y ambición, al efectuado bajo los Borbones. Hay rincones de América sólo hollados por expediciones pre-borbónicas, y otros sólo reivindicados a partir del cambio de dinastía.

Un ejemplo significativo son los territorios por encima de la Línea Adams-Onís, asentada en 1819 entre el Imperio Español y Estados Unidos. Allende aquella frontera se extendía el Oregón y la costa pacífica de América del Norte. Fueron estos territorios reivindicados, reclamados y explorados en gran medida por marinos y aventureros hispanoamericanos. Gonzalo López de Haro tomaría posesión de puntos tan remotos de la geografía mundial como el Canal de Camacho, Unalga Pass, en las Islas Aleutianas. Entre 1770 y 1791, España reclamaría para sí el Territorio de Nutka, en esencia todo el oeste de lo que hoy es Canadá.

Pero hay una gran diferencia entre clavar una bandera en una porción de suelo y controlar de facto ese territorio. Nutka y la costa pacífica americana serían objeto de constantes disputas entre España, Reino Unido, Rusia y los Estados Unidos de América. No se puede decir lo mismo de las regiones más meridionales al norte del Río Grande. Entre California, Nevada, Arizona y Nuevo México extendió su control efectivo el Imperio Español durante siglos, a través de nodos comerciales y centros de poder como Santa Fe, Albuquerque o San Antonio.

Marcados en azul oscuro en el mapa, esto es, colonizados y desarrollados, son territorios donde la herencia hispánica sigue siendo hoy muy nítida. Desde sus nombres (San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Ángeles, Colorado, San Diego) hasta sus hitos. Aventureros como García López de Cárdenasllegarían al Gran Cañón tan pronto como en el siglo XVI, y las misiones de distinto carácter se extenderían hasta el norte de la actual California. Bajo los Borbones, numerosas expediciones reconocerían terrenos tan poco accesibles como Utah o el nacimiento del Misouri.

El desarrollo de la América hoy anglosajona sería especialmente intenso en el sur. De Ciudad de México, centro burocrático desde el que se gestionaban los territorios más norteños de la corona, partirían dos vías de comunicación principales en el Nuevo Mundo: el camino hacia Santa Fe, pasando por Albuquerque, en una región conocida entonces y hoy como Nuevo México; y el dirigido hacia San Antonio, en Texas, nominal y efectivamente bajo control español hasta bien entrado el siglo XIX.

A lo largo del Golfo de México se extenderían otros dominios, incluyendo la Luisiana, parte de Alabama y Mississippi, y la Florida. El Imperio Español llegaría a controlar la mayor parte del territorio de América del Norte merced a los tratados de Fontainebleau y París, a través de los cuales Francia cedería la Luisiana a España. Aquella Luisiana se extendía más allá de Nueva Orleans y ocupaba la totalidad de las Grandes Llanuras. Un vasto terreno inexplorado y muy poco desarrollado al que la Monarquía Hispánica accedería a partir de 1762.

El mapa es un potosí de referencias. Desde explotaciones mineras hasta figuras consagradas al imaginario popular (como los Dragones de cuera o los Mesteñeros), pasando por las expediciones realizadas por aventureros en el siglo XVI (y que llevaron al imperio hasta territorios tan distantes como Kansas o Carolina del Norte, gracias a hombres como Vázquez de Coronado y Juan Pardo). Caminos, puertos, fuertes, ciudades, poblados, regiones administrativas y, por supuesto, los pueblos nativos con los que se toparon a su paso. Un grado de detalle vertiginoso.

Se trata de un trabajo ambicioso, que incluso referencia las empresas estadounidenses o mexicanas donde los españoles o sus descendientes tuvieron un rol primordial (como los trabajadores españoles en las plantaciones de azúcar de Hawai, a partir de 1907, las múltiples colonias urbanas hispano-americanas en Estados Unidos, las expediciones balleneras de los marineros vascos en el norte de Canadá o las misiones peleteras de Manuel de Lisa y Benito Vázquez en la boca del Misouri). Una historia completa de España en América del Norte, en un sólo mapa.

MAP: Ciudad De Mexico
MAP:  Cuba y la Florida.
MAP: Nueva Vizcaya 
MAP: Nueva Navarra y la Baja California.

La cartografía además es útil para entender la naturaleza de la presencia española en América del Norte. Fue en ocasiones irregular y tibia, limitada a meras exploraciones del terreno; pero también fue extremadamente intensa en los territorios mexicanos y nuevomexicanos, al sur de Estados Unidos, en Texas y en la costa Pacífica. España contaría con pretensiones y reivindicaciones territoriales en puntos tan lejanos como Alaska hasta el siglo XIX, cuando el acuerdo entre la corona y Washington (el ya mencionado tratado Adams-Onís) fijó la frontera por debajo de Oregón.

El carácter determinante y hoy invisible de la influencia hispana en Estados Unidos y Canadá, por ejemplo, se puede percibir en la frontera entre ambos países hoy en día: si EEUU controla Oregón es porque pudo reivindicar aquellas tierras frente a Reino Unido, al considerarse heredera de las legítimas aspiraciones españolas cedidas por la monarquía a cambio del control efectivo y reconocido de Texas. Un minúsculo ejemplo de los muchos que se pueden extraer de tan fantástico trabajo.

© 2019 Verizon Media

La lectura cura la peor de las enfermedades humanas, "la ignorancia".

América nunca fue colonia de España. La Junta de Burgos recopila la legislación sobre las Indias dictadas para la defensa y el buen regimiento y tratamiento de los indios, más conocidas como Leyes de Burgos (27 de diciembre de 1512)

El estatuto jurídico de América tras su conquista por España (Las Indias) era la de unión real a la Corona de Castilla, es decir que eran territorios estaduales independientes de Castilla, que acceden a este Reino por la persona del Rey y por otros órganos gubernamentales comunes, como el Consejo de Estado creado por Carlos I en 1520 (común para Castilla e Indias) encargado de dirigir la política general y exterior, el Consejo de Hacienda creado en 1523, el Consejo de Guerra y el Consejo de la Inquisición.

Por tanto, jurídicamente hablando, las Indias nunca fueron colonias de España. De hecho, la expresión “Colonia” no apareció hasta fines del siglo XVIII por influencia francesa. Nunca se habló de las Indias como colonias, ni en el período de los Reyes Católicos ni durante los reinados de la dinastía Habsburgo. Se hablaba de los “Reinos de Ultramar”, “de aquellos y estos Reinos”, etc., dando a las Indias idéntica calidad, jerarquía, cultura y personalidad que el Reino de Castilla. Tanto es así que los Reyes crearon un órgano de la misma importancia que el Gran Consejo de Castilla, que es el Real y Supremo Consejo de Indias.

La importancia de la determinación de este estatuto jurídico estriba en la argumentación jurídica utilizada en el proceso de emancipación americana: esto es porque al ser apresado Fernando VII, el titular de la Corona Castellana y de las Indias, desaparece el factor de unión entre la Península y las Indias.

Tras el descubrimiento de América se va perfeccionando el estatuto jurídico de los indígenas americanos. Desde el primer momento se hace presente a la corona de Castilla que son vasallos libres de ésta.

Desde el primer viaje de Cristóbal Colón, cuando llevó a los indios en presencia de los Reyes Católicos, estos ordenaron que una junta de teólogos dijese si eran esclavos o no y esta junta determinó que eran libres. En el testamento de Isabel I de Castilla, entre muchas otras cosas, le encarga encarecidamente a Fernando de Aragón y a Juana I de Castilla, que los indios sean protegidos.

Esta protección que solicitaba Isabel la Católica, se aplica a los indígenas comunes (los caciques eran asimilados a nobles) aplicando por analogía el estatuto de los “rústicos y miserables” de Castilla que recogen las Siete Partidas.

En suma, los indígenas de Indias eran a su vez considerados “vasallos libres de la Corona” y a la vez “rústicos y miserables”, considerando que la generalidad de las veces que los indígenas no entendían el andamiaje jurídico español.

En ese tenor, en España, la Junta de Burgos recopila la legislación sobre las Indias dictadas para la defensa y el buen regimiento y tratamiento de los indios, más conocidas como Leyes de Burgos, solventando el problema jurídico creado en el Nuevo Mundo donde el derecho común castellano no podía ser aplicado.

Las Leyes de Burgos recogieron en ordenanzas las conclusiones adoptadas por una reunión de teólogos y juristas, que había sido convocada por el rey Fernando el Católico como respuesta al famoso sermón pronunciado por el fraile dominico Antonio de Montesinos, quien en 1511 denunció las condiciones sociales y los abusos a que eran sometidos los indígenas del Nuevo Mundo por parte de numerosos encomenderos de La Española. Estas leyes establecieron una serie de principios que fueron el basamento del derecho indiano:

Los indios son hombres libres.

Los Reyes Católicos son señores de los indios por su compromiso evangelizador.

Se podía obligar a los indios a trabajar con tal de que el trabajo fuese tolerable y el salario justo, aunque se permitía el pago en especie, en lugar de en dinero.

La Ordenanza XVIII prohíbe el trabajo, a partir del cuarto mes de gravidez, en minas y labranzas y, en atención a la crianza subsiguiente, se amplía el plazo hasta que el nacido haya cumplido tres años. La mujer embarazada y posteriormente lactante sólo se ocuparía en tareas caseras.

Exime igualmente del trabajo a los menores de catorce años, de ambos sexos, ocupándose tan sólo en tareas apropiadas a su edad.

Las indias casadas sólo podían trabajar en la mina por propia voluntad u orden de sus maridos, aunque habitualmente se ocupaban de las labores domésticas de las haciendas que habitaban.

Dedican varios de sus preceptos a los indios caciques y a sus descendientes, ya que su situación social era respetada, por lo que la Ordenanza XXII les autoriza a tener cierto número de indios servidores proporcionalmente a la tribu que señoreaban, por lo que el cacique debía permanecer en la colectividad donde estuviera el mayor número.

Las Leyes de Burgos y su aplicación

El ámbito de implantación de las Leyes de Burgos comenzó por la isla de La Española, para extenderse más tarde a las islas de Puerto Rico y Jamaica. Posteriormente se aplicarían en tierra firme (actual Venezuela) por iniciativa de Fray Pedro de Córdoba.

Si bien las ordenanzas autorizaron y legalizaron la práctica de los repartimientos de indios en encomienda a los colonizadores españoles a razón de un mínimo de 40 y un máximo de 150 individuos, se esforzaron en establecer una minuciosa regulación del régimen de trabajo, jornal, alimentación, vivienda, higiene y cuidado de los indios con un sentido tuitivo, altamente protector y humanitario.

Las leyes prohibieron terminantemente a los encomenderos la aplicación de todo castigo a los indios, el cual se reservaba a los visitadores establecidos en cada pueblo y encargados del minucioso cumplimiento de las leyes. Las mujeres embarazadas de más de cuatro meses eran eximidas del trabajo.

Este conjunto de leyes tuitivas que la corona de España dictó hacia los naturales fue un importante adelanto y también precedente para el derecho del trabajo.

Las ordenanzas, imbuidas del catolicismo imperante en la corte española, impulsaron la evangelización de los indios y ordenaron su catequesis, condenaron la bigamia y les obligó a que construyeran sus bohíos o cabañas junto a las casas de los españoles. Los indios debían trabajar 9 meses al año para los españoles y los 3 restantes en sus propios terrenos.

A pesar de las ordenanzas la población indígena de las Antillas siguió disminuyendo principalmente a causa de las enfermedades; sin embargo, algunos sacerdotes -como Bartolomé de Las Casas- hicieron creer que ello se debió a las condiciones de trabajo a las que eran sometidos los indios, teoría que utilizaron para lograr el respaldo de sus tesis protectoras. La situación resaltó aún más la polémica en la época, mantenida especialmente por los componentes de la Escuela de Salamanca, especialmente fray Francisco de Vitoria, en su obra De indis, quien en 1532, expresó los Justos Títulos de la conquista y que más adelante fueron precisados en la Junta de Valladolid.

Consecuencias: Las Leyes de Burgos fueron las primeras ordenanzas de la corona castellana que normaron el status jurídico de los indios, debate que fue continuado en una siguiente generación que profundizó sobre la misma cuestión y que fue conocido con el nombre de polémica de los naturales o justos títulos, que la Junta de Valladolid materializó a través del dictado de las Leyes Nuevas, en 1542.

Found by: C. Campos y Escalante (campce@gmail.com)

While times were tough, most people just made do with lesser quality foods, including selection of lower quality meats. Soups and stews made up most of the meals, because it could stretch the food budget. Casseroles stretched the budget, too. During the Great Depression, people changed their eating habits to help their budget.

Food production changed too; Crisco was a less expensive option to butter. Oscar Meyer Wieners replaced more costly sausages. Maxwell House Sanka coffee was an option to whole bean coffees. Heinz Ketchup was used as the base for a simple tomato soup.

Underwood Deviled Ham substituted fresh lunch meat. Carnation evaporated milk replaced fresh milk. Ground acorns became a substitute for coffee; or people added chicory to extend the coffee supplies. Honey, molasses and corn sweeteners replaced sugar as sugar was at a premium, and later rationed by World War II.

Meals during the great depression included; Grandmas Great Depression Cake (no eggs, no butter, no milk), creamed chipped beef on toast or waffles, creamed chicken on biscuits, as a variation of chipped beef, hash (potatoes and corned beef or sliced hot dogs), and Depression soup: this was simply 1/3 cup ketchup 2/3 cup boiling water, molasses and cornbread.

Foods that debuted during Great Depression include; Bisquick, Good Humor ice cream bars, Kraft macaroni and cheese, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Kool-Aid, Toll House chocolate chips, Ritz Crackers and Spam.

Did you know Rocky Road ice cream was "invented" during the Great Depression?

It was indeed a "Rocky Road" ahead when the stock market crashed on October 29, 1929 and started the Great Depression. Poverty hit the masses for a decade, but hit its peak in 1933 when around 40% of the nation’s farms were on the auction block. Since that time, people have been preparing for the next Great Depression.

Always Safe, Always Prepared,
Frank Mitchell, Founder Family Survival 
support@familysurvivalsystem.com  

“Gus was an incredibly special man, and this is a tremendous loss not only for San Diego State, but for the entire San Diego community,” said Interim Vice President for Student Affairs Christy Samarkos.

Equality movement

Chavez was part of a generation who pushed for social and legal equality that would include access to a college education for underrepresented and first-generation students and support services to help these students earn their degrees.

"We often tell our students that we stand on the shoulders of giants. I can humbly say that I definitely stand on Gus Chavez's shoulders as he will always be one of those giants,” said EOP Director Miriam Castañón. “He advocated and opened doors that provided our students and department the much-needed access and services that we continue to improve upon today."

Chavez was born in 1943 in Sonora, Texas, one of seven children in a one-bedroom home.

After graduating from high school, he joined the U.S. Navy and served as a hospital corpsman from 1962 to 1966 at Naval Medical Center San Diego. After leaving the Navy, he attended San Diego City College from 1966 to 1968 and then transferred to what was then San Diego State College, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1971. He was appointed director of Student Support Services upon his graduation.

It was at a MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) meeting at San Diego State in 1968 where he met Enriqueta Valenzuela, who had helped found MEChA and Las Chicanas at the university. The two married on Dec. 18, 1969. Enriqueta would go on to teach at SDSU, work as counselor at Sweetwater Union High School District and continue as a leader in the Chicano movement.

In 1969, Chavez joined students and faculty inspired by the civil rights and Chicano movements to found what is now called the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies. That year, the university established its Office of Educational Opportunity Programs and Ethnic Affairs to aid students from low-income backgrounds and historically underserved communities with services that helped recruit them to San Diego State and support their academic success once here.

To those who knew him personally, Chavez was a funny, warm character who often had a joke at the ready and a word of encouragement following close behind. He would need all those traits to succeed.

Rojas said Chavez’s combination of inclusivity, fairness and administrative savvy made him the ideal person to lead the restructuring.

“There probably would not have been the EOP we all know without Gus,” Rojas said. “The concept of EOP was still very new, and it was a difficult path that was set in motion.”

Chavez took the lead in working with student leaders, key staff, faculty and administrators to overcome misperceptions about the program’s worth, mistrust of the people running the program and misgivings about the loss of the different groups’ identities and autonomy.

In 1978, Chavez established the Chicano Collection/Colección Chicana, a collection of nearly 17,000 documents of Chicana and Chicano-related materials at San Diego State.

After nearly three decades as EOP director, Chavez retired in 2003 but continued to advocate for the university to better recruit and retain students from the area’s historically underserved communities. Today, EOP serves about 2,500 students each semester.

Chavez also co-founded various university organizations, including RAZA Advocates for Chicanos in Higher Education (RACHE) and the CSU EOP Directors Association.

Chavez was an advocate for social reform and equality beyond his work at the university.

He was the lead co-founder and organizer of the Defend the Honor Campaign, an organization dedicated to preserving and acknowledging the contributions of Latino and Latina veterans who served in WWII, Korea and Vietnam by advocating for the inclusion of their military experiences and civil rights struggles in documentaries, books and school curricula.

Chavez served in a number of professional and community organizations, including MEChA Central de San Diego County, the Brown Berets of San Diego and the American G.I. Forum.

Undocumented Resource Area Coordinator Cynthia Torres, hired by Chavez in 2001, said she is a living embodiment of his efforts to mentor hundreds of students, employees and others who now spread his message through their words and works.

“I entered SDSU as a Mexican American and transformed into an empowered Chicana who became empowered by my mentors, including Gus Chavez, and realized that the fight for social justice is constant,” she said. “To many of us involved in MEChA, he was like our father who guided us and taught us to give back to the community.”

Chavez is survived by his wife, Enriqueta; three sons, Enrique, Augustine, Emiliano; a daughter, Juanita; and four grandchildren.

SDSU plans to establish a scholarship in Chavez’s name. 
Details of a military service at Miramar National Cemetery are pending. https://newscenter.sdsu.edu/sdsu_newscenter/news_story.aspx?sid=77733 

Her five-decade fight inspired at least two aldermen and so many more. "She couldn’t see someone being bullied, put down or exploited without feeling a need to do something."

PILSEN — Armed with a megaphone, Magda Ramirez-Castañeda had a message for anyone who passed her on Election Day as she sat for hours across from a polling place in Pilsen.

A tireless critic of retiring — and disgraced — Ald. Danny Solis, she told voters that for too long Pilsen had been misrepresented as a result of Solis’ reign. The “future of Pilsen was at stake,” Ramirez-Castañeda said, and Byron Sigcho-Lopez, a community organizer who headed Pilsen Alliance, was the answer. Putting Sigcho-Lopez in political office would “protect” the gentrifying neighborhood, she said.

Four months after Sigcho-Lopez’s victory and Solis’ fall, lifelong activist Ramirez-Castañeda died last week following a heart attack, her family confirmed. She was 69.

Ramirez-Castañeda, former president of Pilsen Alliance, committed her life to fighting social and economic injustices. From discriminatory hiring practices and prejudicial immigration policies to fair housing and farmworkers’ rights, she was on the front lines of many struggles until the very end of her life, family and friends said.

She was also known for co-authoring the book Chicanas of 18th Street: Narratives of a Movement From Latino Chicago, which documented the testimonies of six female community activists who lived and worked in Pilsen.

“She was a warrior,” her daughter Julissa Castañeda said through tears. “She was an amazing human being. She cared about the world …and everyone so much.”  For Ramirez-Castañeda, the movement to protect and advocate for her people wasn’t a hobby.  “It was her life,” her daughter said. “She wanted to let people know that they had the power to change things if we worked together. The power to change the system and make it better for everyone,” Julissa Castañeda remembered.

                                                                                   


Born in Coahuila, Mexico, Ramirez-Castañeda immigrated to Chicago with her family when she was a young child. They first settled in the Tri-Taylor area before moving to Lincoln Park, then a predominately Latino, working-class neighborhood in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Ramirez-Castañeda attended Catholic school at St. Michael’s in Old Town. Back then, she was a “goody two-shoes” who wanted to be a nun, her longtime friend and fellow activist Cristina Vital recalled. In high school, Ramirez-Castañeda eventually introduced her to the Chicano/a movement.

“She gave me direction,” Vital, 67, said. “Because it was hard being a brown kid at the time. You didn’t know where to fit in. You are neither from Mexico and you’re not welcome here.”

                                                                                         Magda Ramirez-Castañeda speaks to a crowd. 
 

A trip to the first Chicano movement conference in Denver in 1969 inspired Ramirez-Castañeda to mobilize her own community back in Chicago. But the seed to fight social and economic inequalities was planted even earlier by her father.

Her father, Chuy, was a dreamer who would tell her “poor people carried the rich on our backs.” His own involvement in a miners’ strike led him to pack up his family and move from Mexico to the United States, her family members said.

“He helped build and ignite that fire,” her daughter Julissa Castañeda said.

“The system is corrupt. We have to fix it. It’s our duty. We can’t give up,” was her father’s battle cry.

In the late ’60s at age 18, Ramirez-Castañeda moved to Pilsen where she became ingrained in the Chicano/a and Civil Rights movements. She was among the few Latino or Latina students at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In college, Ramirez-Castañeda co-founded the Latin American Student Union and fought for more students of color to be admitted to the school, her nephew Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th) said. And she met another young Latino activist — Danny Solis.

“I think when she would see Danny Solis later on in life, she would get so angry because … she had memories of Danny, when he was someone fighting the good fight,” Ramirez-Rosa said.

Ramirez-Castañeda had a name for Solis: “Sell out,” her daughter said.

After graduating from UIC, she went on to co-found La Raza Unida chapter in Illinois in the ’70s. And she worked to help elect Mayor Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor in Chicago in the ’80s, Ramirez-Rosa said.

Shortly after, she became a caseworker for the city’s Department of Family Support Services. More recently, she worked in emergency services to help people who are homeless. Even as she worked full-time with the city for 26 years, she remained engaged in the fight for equality, her daughter said.

Magda Ramirez-Castañeda at a rally.

In 1971, Leonardo Ramirez, co-author with Ramirez-Castaneda of “Chicanas of 18th Street,” first heard Ramirez-Castañeda speak at an anti-Vietnam war rally downtown.

Over their 40-year friendship, Ramirez said Ramirez-Castaneda was at the frontline of countless struggles including a ’70s battle exposing the Chicago Transit Authority’s discriminatory employment practices, where she was among protesters who commandeered a CTA bus in Pilsen.

During the protest, she marched on the bus and she convinced the riders and driver to leave, he said.

“Only Magda could do something like that. She was not afraid,” Ramirez said.

Magda Ramirez-Castañeda marches with My Block, My Hood, 
My City founder Jahmal Cole (left) and others in Pilsen in 2014.

Ramirez-Castaneda later co-wrote “Chicanas of 18th Street” in 2011 to preserve the history of Latinas who were activists in Chicago. All that was written about the Chicano/a movement previously focused on the movement in California, Ramirez said.

Vital, who was among the co-authors and contributor to the book, said the book was critical in highlighting what people, in particular, women, were doing as activists.

“Women played an active lead in the activism history in Pilsen,” and Magda was among the leaders, Vital said.  ‘She couldn’t see someone be bullied’  Even as she fought for justice in the streets, Castañeda-Ramirez never lost sight of her role as a mother and wife.

At home, Saturday mornings were special — an eclectic mix of music from Alejandra Guzman, Gloria Trevi, Janis Joplin and Carol King would fill the house as she cleaned, her daughter remembered.

Magda Ramirez-Castañeda and her daughter, Julissa Castañeda. She loved music and was a big supporter of the arts, Julissa Castañeda said. “She loved to dance and sing. …We would have movie nights watching ‘Bye, Bye Birdie,’ ‘Grease,’ ‘West Side Story,’ ‘Gone with the Wind,’ the ‘Wizard of Oz,'” her daughter said.

Her nephew Ald. Ramirez-Rosa said Ramirez-Castañeda led family talent shows at birthday parties and Christmas.

“She was very much full of life,” the 35th Ward alderman said. “As angry as she would get at injustices, she was filled with a lot of love and joy for her family and her community.”

Ramirez-Castañeda battled diabetes for a number of years and ultimately lost one of her legs, Ramirez-Rosa said.

“Despite losing her leg, she remained at the forefront of so many fights,” he said.

Magda Ramirez-Castañeda and her nephew Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th).Provided

“She spoke very loudly and forcefully against injustice. In many ways, it was part of her personality. … She couldn’t see someone being bullied, put down or exploited without feeling a need to do something and do something at that moment,” Ramirez-Rosa said.

On Aug. 8, Ramirez-Castañeda and her husband were watching the 5 o’clock news when a story about the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raid in Mississippi that led to the detainment of more than 600 undocumented immigrants flashed across the screen. She became so angry she started to cry, her husband remembered.

She went to put her fist in the air but instead it fell to her chest. She started to scream: “Aye, mi duele, mi duele. Aye, Diosito, mi duele,” her husband Mario Castañeda said: “It hurts. It hurts. Oh, God. It hurts.”

She was a fighter to the very end, her husband of 46 years said.

Even after 50 years on the front lines of Pilsen’s battles, she felt the fight against inequality must continue — and young people would carry that mantle. She mentored many young activists, including Pilsen’s new alderman, Sigcho-Lopez.

Magda Ramirez-Castañeda and Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez pose for a photo. Provided

“She gave us courage, clarity and guidance,” said Sigcho-Lopez, who first met her in 2012 while working for Pilsen Alliance. “Through her own experiences and her own struggles, she led by example.”

“She’s had a tremendous influence on me, and in part, is one of the reasons why I’m an alderman,” he said. U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” García called Ramirez-Castañeda a “once-in-a-generation” kind of leader. “She dedicated her life to empowering Latinas,” the congressman said.

Like many other activists, former Pilsen Alliance board president Victoria Romero said Ramirez-Castañeda’s passing represents a call to action.

“This leaves us with this sense of duty and responsibility” to continue to fight and work to hold elected officials and those in power accountable to honor her legacy, Romero said.

Magda Ramirez-Castañeda at a rally in 2017.

On Friday, Aug. 30, Ramirez-Castañeda’s family will host a Celebration of Life at the National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St. Doors open at 5 p.m. and the event will run from 6-8 p.m. in the auditorium.

Anyone with photos or who would like to perform a tribute, can email magdacelebration@gmail.com by Aug. 23.

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For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Pfc. Lozada, U.S. Army, distinguished himself at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty in the battle of Dak To. While serving as a machine gunner with 1st Platoon, Company A, Pfc. Lozada was part of a four-man early warning outpost, located 35 meters from his company's lines. At 1400 hours a North Vietnamese Army company rapidly approached the outpost along a well-defended trail. Pfc. Lozada alerted his comrades and commenced firing at the enemy who were within 10 meters of the outpost. His heavy and accurate machine-gun fire killed at least 20 North Vietnamese soldiers and completely disrupted their initial attack. Pfc. Lozada remained in an exposed position and continued to pour deadly fire upon the enemy despite the urgent pleas of his comrades to withdraw. The enemy continued their assault, attempting to envelop the outpost. At the same time enemy forces launched a heavy attack on the forward west flank of Company A with the intent to cut them off from their battalion. Company A was given the order to withdraw. Pfc. Lozada apparently realized that if he abandoned his position there would be nothing to hold back the surging North Vietnamese soldiers and that the entire company withdrawal would be jeopardized. He called for his comrades to move back and that he would stay and provide cover for them. He made this decision realizing that the enemy was converging on three sides of his position and only meters away, and a delay in withdrawal meant almost certain death. Pfc. Lozada continued to deliver a heavy, accurate volume of suppressive fire against the enemy until he was mortally wounded and had to be carried during the withdrawal. His heroic deed served as an example and an inspiration to his comrades throughout the ensuing four-day battle. Pfc. Lozada's actions are in the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the U.S. Army.

Sent by Ben Alvillar benalvillar@OUTLOOK.COM 
Has very interesting information. I hope it get disseminated widely just like the book, “Among the Valiant,” about Latino war heroes in WWII and beyond. What I want to know is why is America so reluctant to honor these men.

Distributed by Roberto Franco Vazquez
LARED-L@LISTSERV.CYBERLATINA.NET
Foro de comunicacion para Latinos del suroeste de los EEUU

Please let your friends and family know about this worthy cause and about the troops who need our help today. Some of these troops won't receive a single letter or care package from home through their entire 9-12 month deployment.

Unfortunately some troops come from families who simply don't have the means or capability of sending a care package to their loved ones. This can make for a lonely deployment - but we can step in and make a difference!

We continually hear from our troops that they truly appreciate the great items included in these boxes. It's hard to imagine that our troops aren't given everything they need as provided free by the military, but the vast majority of troops are responsible for getting necessities from PX stores like a mini shopping market on bases.

The magnitude of this accomplishment, inspired one of my favorite films, director Phil Karlson’s 1960 film "Hell to Eternity" starring Jeffrey Hunter, as well as my documentary "East L.A. Marine". 

If anyone would like one of these lithos (poster size) free of charge, please send me an email at stevejayrubin@gmail.com The bonus is that they are signed by the late Guy Gabaldon -himself. The only thing I’ll request is you send me a mailing tube and postage. It’s a real piece of history!

Steve Rubin 

stevejayrubin@gmail.com  

For nearly a decade, researchers have puzzled over what the Denisovans looked like. 
Now, we have our best model yet of the species' skeleton.

What a Denisovan might have looked like. Genetic research that created a model of a Denisovan skeleton suggests that these mysterious human relatives were similar to Neanderthals in many ways, including having low foreheads and robust jaws., Maayan Harel

EARLIER THIS YEAR, David Gokhman summoned a ghost.

Gokhman, then a Ph.D. student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was attempting to piece together the skeleton of an enigmatic ancient human known as a Denisovan. But while the Denisovans likely lived in Asia for tens of thousands of years, researchers have only found meager fossil traces—a pinky bone, a skull fragment, a fractured jaw, and a few teeth.

To give these specters form, Gokhman instead turned to the most compelling trace of their existence: their ancient DNA.

Now, in an impressive feat, Gokhman and his colleagues have mapped out a proposed Denisovan skeleton using information for 32 skeletal features encoded in DNA that was extracted from a pinky bone. The research, published today in the journal Cell, doesn’t give exact values for Denisovan proportions, but it does offer a comparative look at how this mysterious kind of hominin measured up against Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.

“Using this [method] to reconstruct the past is so exciting,” says María Martinón-Torres, the director of Spain's National Research Center on Human Evolution. “It’s a scientific wonderland.”

JASON TREAT, NG STAFF. SOURCE: LIRAN CARMEL AND OTHERS, CELL, SEPTEMBER 2019.

Funded in part by the National Geographic Society, the new research yields tantalizing hints that more Denisovan remains might be hiding in plain sight. Over the years, scientists have unearthed a number of fossils across Asia that don’t neatly sit on the branches of the hominin family tree. Yet with scant Denisovan bones for comparison—and the heat in much of Asia dashing most hopes for DNA extraction—many of these fossils languish in a kind of paleo-purgatory, assigned to hazy categories like “archaic Homo.” (Learn more about ancient teeth found in China that have scientists scratching their heads.)

Many of the newly proposed features might help with at least tentative identification for some of these remains. Already, the work points to Denisovan identity for a pair of fragmented skulls found near the city of Xuchang, China.

The work also probes the bigger question of what makes us human, says Liran Carmel from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who led the new study’s research team. While a dazzling array of hominins once fanned across ancient lands, only our species survived—and no one knows why.

“This is a big step to answer this question,” Carmel says.

Genetic ducks in a row

The discovery of the Denisovans, announced in 2010, relied on DNA extracted from a pinky bone and a hefty tooth unearthed in Denisova cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains.

“It was the first time in the history of science that a new group of humans was discovered based on only DNA,” Carmel says. “There was a lot of mystery.”

Continued genetic study has slowly drawn the Denisovans out of the shadows. They split from their Neanderthal relatives at least 400,000 years ago, and while Neanderthals put down roots across Europe and the Middle East, Denisovans headed east throughout Asia. Along the way, they interbred with our ancient ancestors and left genetic fingerprints still seen in modern populations of Asian descent. (Learn more about how multiple lines of these mysterious ancient humans interbred with us.)

NEANDERTHALS 101 Who were the neanderthals? Do humans really share some of their DNA? Learn facts about Neanderthal man, the traits and tools of Homo neanderthalensis, and how the species fits into our evolution story.

Traditionally, paleoanthropologists use fossil skeletons of ancient hominins to look for features that set them apart. But without more physical evidence for the Denisovans, there was no way to put a face to the name. That’s where Carmel and his team came in. The string of chemical “letters” that make up DNA encodes instructions for creating proteins that play into physical characteristics. This genetic material can’t simply be read like a book, though, in part because scientists must not only know which strings connect to which proteins, but also how active each gene is.

One way evolution tamps down on gene activity is methylation, or the attachment of chemical tags to specific parts of the DNA. For example, loss of methylation on certain parts of the genome results in the runaway growth of many types of cancer cells.

A year or so after the Denisovan discovery was announced, Gokhman and his team were studying methylation patterns for ancient humans, which are fortuitously preserved in ancient DNA as tweaks to the genetic alphabet soup. They mapped out these patterns in the genomes of Neanderthals and modern humans, tying some methylation differences to anatomical features or disease. But they wanted to take it a step further. Using methylation, could they predict the mysterious Denisovans’ physical features?

“We weren’t sure at all what we were going to get, because it was never done before,” says Gokhman, who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.

To determine how methylation might play a role, the researchers pored through a modern database that lays out the genetic mutations underlying a slew of human diseases. In these cases, mutations cause certain genes to become inactive in a presumably similar fashion to what happens due to methylation. The database even helped them understand the direction of change, like whether a mutation might cause longer or shorter fingers.

The team took precautions to only attempt to predict aspects of the skeleton that they could reasonably tie back to genes. For example, if multiple genes controlled a feature, they only included it in the model if the direction of change for each gene was the same.

“If gene A says it looks like a duck, and gene B says it looks like a duck, and gene C, and so on, then our prediction was it looks like a duck,” Gokhman says. If even one genetic goose was mixed in, the feature was excluded from the proposed skeleton.

Finally, with all their ducks in a row, they tested the method by predicting the known skeletal differences in Neanderthals and chimpanzees compared to those of modern humans, and they were successful with 85-percent accuracy.

Denisovans’ spritely form

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the results overall suggest that Denisovans were close in appearance to their nearest known relatives, the Neanderthals, including a low forehead and robust jaws. But there were some key differences.

“What we’re looking at here is not just another Neanderthal,” says Massey University’s Murray Cox, who was not part of the study team. “We’re really looking at a third group that looks quite different from both modern humans and Neanderthals—that’s really interesting.”

One particularly intriguing feature is the width of the skull between the parietal bones, which make up the sides and upper rear of the skull. This measure, known as the biparietal width, was strikingly large for a pair of fragmented skulls between 100,000 and 130,000 years old discovered in Xuchang—one of which had the largest biparietal widths yet measured for its time. Many experts thought the fossils could be Denisovan, but without DNA, nothing definitive could be said.

The new study predicts that the broad biparietal width—larger than that of both modern humans and Neanderthals—points to a Denisovan identity. Of the eight predicted Denisovan skull traits present in the Xuchang fossils, seven align with the team’s predictions.

“It was very revealing for us to see this,” Carmel says, describing his feeling at the time as “a great joy.”

Another test for the model came in May of this year, when researchers announced the discovery of a Denisovan jaw in a cave nestled at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, the first definitive Denisovan remains yet found outside of Siberia. As soon as he heard the announcement, Gokhman ran to his profile to check the prediction. He was thrilled to find that all of the newly described traits matched, from the height of the front jaw to the elongated arch under the teeth.

Hominin family portrait

The study is already sparking excitement among hominin researchers, who are avidly comparing the predicted measurements to other remains. Xiujie Wu, a researcher at China’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, says in an email that the proposed Denisovan features seem to line up with unidentified remains found at Xujiayao in northern China.

We know essentially nothing about Denisovan morphology, so every new little bit of insight is a big deal.

MURRAY COX, MASSEY UNIVERSITY, NEW ZEALAND

Not all of the proposed features fit with the few Denisovan remains yet found, like enamel thickness and fingertip width. But focusing on these traits misses the bigger picture, says Bence Viola, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto and the leading expert on Denisovan fossil morphology.

“I find it absolutely awesome they can do this stuff,” he says, emphasizing that the team did the best they could with limited information. The model isn’t accurate enough to make definitive Denisovan IDs for small fossils based only on this data, he says, but it does serve as a helpful guide for future research.

“This is exciting work, pushing the boundaries of what can be gleaned from ancient genomes,” Chris Stringer of London's Natural History Museum says via email. But the work "relies on a complex chain of extrapolations," he adds, and those must now be assessed by the scientific community.

For one, it’s unclear how much variation the study overlooks across the Denisovan population, Cox notes. Genetic studies of Denisovans, including Cox’s own research, suggest that the group was incredibly wide-ranging, with some populations evolving separately for tens of thousands of years. One Denisovan line was almost as different from other Denisovans as it was from Neanderthals.

There are also still many uncertainties in how methylation patterns relate to skeletal features, says Genevieve Housman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago studying primate genetics and epigenetics.

Mutations that cause a gene to lose function are like light switches—the gene is either on or off, says Nicholas Banovich, an expert in human genomics at the nonprofit Translational Genomics Research Institute. Methylation, however, is like a volume knob that fine-tunes the amount of gene activity. Thus, as the study authors themselves stress, the predicted skeletal features can only be considered distinct when compared with those of modern humans or Neanderthals. Quantifying the change remains out of reach.

Still, Cox and others are excited about the research: “We know essentially nothing about Denisovan morphology,” he says, “so every new little bit of insight is a big deal.”

Maya Wei-Haas is a science staff writer for National Geographic.

Jordana Cepelewicz
August 29, 2019
Quanta Magazine

We carry genes from our ancestors’ encounters with ancient people like the Neanderthals, but the Neanderthals already carried some modern human genes from even earlier encounters with vanished groups., Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine.  

Humans today are mosaics, our genomes rich tapestries of interwoven ancestries. With every fossil discovered, with every DNA analysis performed, the story gets more complex: We, the sole survivors of the genus Homo, harbor genetic fragments from other closely related but long-extinct lineages. Modern humans are the products of a sprawling history of shifts and dispersals, separations and reunions — a history characterized by far more diversity, movement and mixture than seemed imaginable a mere decade ago.

But it’s one thing to say that Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of modern Europeans, or that the recently discovered Denisovans interbred with some older mystery group, or that they all interbred with each other. It’s another to provide concrete details about when and where those couplings occurred. “We’ve got this picture where these events are happening all over the place,” said Aylwyn Scally, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cambridge. “But it’s very hard for us to pin down any particular single event and say, yeah, we’re really confident that that one happened — unless we have ancient DNA.”

You think you’re just looking at a Neanderthal, but you’re actually looking at a mixture of Neanderthal and modern human.

Adam Siepel, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

The events that do get pinned down therefore tend to be relatively recent, starting with the migration of modern humans out of Africa 60,000 years ago, during which they interacted with hominin relatives (like the Neanderthals and Denisovans) they met along the way. Evidence of interbreeding during any migrations before then, or during events that transpired earlier within Africa, has been elusive.

Now that’s starting to change. In part because of greater computational power, “we’re starting to see the next wave of methods development,” said Joshua Akey, a professor of genomics at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. “And that’s allowing us to start making new inferences from the data … that the previous generation of methods couldn’t make.”

As scientists peer further back in time and uncover evolutionary relationships in unprecedented detail, their findings are complicating the narrative of human history and rescuing some formerly missing chapters from obscurity. Clues are emerging about the unexpected influence of gene flow from ancient hominins on modern human populations before the latter left Africa. Some researchers are even identifying the genetic contributions modern humans might have made to those other lineages, in a complete reversal of the usual scientific focus. Confusing and intertwined as these many effects can be, all of them shaped humanity as we now know it.

Old Humans, New Tricks

When researchers first recovered DNA from Neanderthal bones, the available techniques for making sense of it were powerful but relatively simple. Scientists compared ancient and modern sequences, tallied up shared sites and mutations, and conducted bulk statistical analyses. That’s how they discovered in 2010 that Neanderthal DNA makes up approximately 2% of the genome of people today of non-African descent, a result of interbreeding that occurred throughout Eurasia beginning 50,000-60,000 years ago. That’s also how they discovered that Denisovan DNA makes up approximately 3% of the genome of people in Papua New Guinea and Australia.

“But that kind of very simple approach isn’t very good at sorting out the complexity” of how those lost populations interacted, said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Nor does it allow researchers to test specific hypotheses about how that interbreeding unfolded.

Population geneticists could backtrack through the DNA data to identify common ancestors from hundreds of thousands of years ago, and they could detect recent incidents of gene flow from the past few tens of thousands of years. But discerning interbreeding that occurred between those periods, from events “old enough not to be recent but young enough not to be ancient,” Hawks said, “that actually takes an extra trick.” That’s because the more recent events smear their footprints over the older ones; the DNA sequences left behind from those older events are so fragmented and mutated that they are difficult to recognize, and even more difficult to label with a date and location.

The quantitative biologist Adam Siepel and his team at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory campus searched through contemporary and fossil DNA for signs of gene flow from modern humans into Neanderthals. Constance Brukin/CSHL

Adam Siepel, a quantitative biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, and his colleagues decided to focus on such gaps in the narrative. They were particularly interested in looking for signs of gene flow from modern humans into Neanderthals. That flow of genetic information is harder to study than the reverse, not only because of how long ago it happened, but also because there are fewer genomes to refer to: Think of all the present-day genomes at researchers’ disposal, versus the handful of Neanderthal genomes left intact, or the single genome recovered from Denisovan remains. The challenge again prompted the need for new methods.

Using one such new technique, first in 2016 and then again in a preprint posted earlier this summer, Siepel and his team found that around 3% of Neanderthal DNA — and possibly as much as 6% — came from modern humans who mated with the Neanderthals more than 200,000 years ago. The same group who gave rise to modern humans throughout the world also furnished Neanderthals with (at least a little) more DNA than the Neanderthals would later give them. “You think you’re just looking at a Neanderthal,” Siepel said, “but you’re actually looking at a mixture of Neanderthal and modern human.”

“That’s cool,” Hawks said. Such a high level of genetic admixture, he added, “is like saying 6% of the cars on the road that you see are red, but somehow you never noticed any red cars. You ought to notice that.” And yet the methods in general use had not. To Hawks, the omission suggests that there may be a lot more shared genetic material still to find even if it can’t yet be quantified accurately. More advanced techniques may change that.

More Than a One-Off

The finding also adds to the already compelling body of evidence that there were multiple migrations of modern humans out of Africa, stretching back over hundreds of thousands of years. Modern humans were thought to have evolved in Africa after the departure of Neanderthals and Denisovans, and to have remained on the continent until their well-known out-of-Africa diaspora 60,000 years ago. But recently, fossil evidence has indicated otherwise: A human jawbone in Israel, reported last year to date back to 180,000 years ago, and a skull fragment in Greece that’s even older, indicate earlier human migrations.

In fact, with that piece of skull, archaeologists may have stumbled across a possible member of the long-ago exodus that Siepel and his team inferred in their genomic study. The fossil, which was classified as Neanderthal when it was unearthed in Greece in the 1970s, was analyzed last month by the paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen and her colleagues. Structurally, it looked somewhat like a modern human skull, but it was estimated to be about 210,000 years old — supposedly too old to be modern at that location. (Because the structural similarities to modern skulls show up in reconstructive models of the Greek fossil, the conclusion is controversial and will probably continue to be until DNA can be recovered for a genetic study to confirm it.)

The Apdima 1 skull fossil found in Greece has many modern structural features but is 210,000 years old — too ancient to be from any of the modern humans who left Africa only 60,000 years ago. It may have come from a hypothesized earlier exodus that left no survivors. Photograph by Nicholas Thompson, ©️ Katerina Harvati, University of Tübingen

Now the DNA evidence seems to back up this revised migration narrative as well. In retrospect, “it seems quite natural,” Scally said, “to say that human populations and evolution were just as messy 200,000 years ago, and just as subdivided and structured … as they are today.”

“It makes it hard to argue that there was ever some … special evolutionary event or genetic event that triggered the evolution of humans as we know them,” he added. Humans have been continuously evolving through the mixing of varied populations for hundreds of thousands of years. (In fact, Scally posits that our species did not originally evolve from a single population in Africa, but rather from many interconnected populations spread out across the continent.)

“This is telling us, ‘Oh, this is not a weird one-off,’” Hawks said. “It’s a continuing interaction.”

Clues are emerging about the unexpected influence of gene flow from ancient hominins on modern human populations before the latter left Africa.

What is curious is that the only migration that seems to have left modern human descendants in Europe and Asia was the one from 60,000 years ago. The groups that migrated earlier apparently all died out or got absorbed into Neanderthal or other ancient populations. “If there were earlier events,” Scally said, “they left essentially no ancestry or negligible ancestry in us today.”

This could mean, he said, that “this Neanderthal legacy could be the only descendants that those people had.” Furthermore, when the Neanderthals then interbred with modern humans during later migrations, perhaps some of that DNA got mixed back into the modern human genome, embedding older signals of Homo sapiens history into the genetic material of individuals alive today.

According to Siepel’s analysis, that sort of nested mixing seems to have been exactly what happened with the Denisovans. When the team looked at the Denisovan genome, they found fragments of DNA in it from an even earlier hominin, vestiges of some population whose own genome has not been found or sequenced. It might have been Homo erectus, which split off from the ancestors of modern humans and spread across Eurasia about 1 million years ago. The contribution from this unidentified group “was at the limits of our detection power,” according to Siepel, because it constituted only about 1% of the Denisovan genome. During later interbreeding events, tiny pieces of that 1% got passed on to modern humans in Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea and some parts of East Asia. “A small set of extremely divergent DNA sequences present in modern humans, if our analysis is correct, would have been passed through two interbreeding events,” Siepel said.

A Return to Africa

“Basically,” Akey summed it up, “the lesson is that when populations meet, they mix.” Serena Tucci, a postdoctoral researcher in Akey’s lab, said the work shows “the need that we have for more sophisticated computational approaches, for a computational framework to make inferences about our past.”

In Siepel’s case, that meant testing a vast number of hypotheses by inferring the branching inheritance patterns of various genes. Other scientists are starting to rely on different probabilistic approaches. “As computational power continues to become more sophisticated, these types of methods will become increasingly accessible and feasible to do,” Akey said. “And really, you can’t do better than these models. They use all the features of the data.”

It suggests that maybe Neanderthals actually are us. As different as they are, maybe they’re just another version of us.

John Hawks, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Siepel now hopes to apply his approach to other elusive aspects of history. He’s particularly interested in prehistoric population dynamics on the African continent. How ancient genetic admixture events affected modern African genomes has been little studied — although a pair of researchers recently reported in PLOS Genetics that humans in Africa interbred with another ancient hominin group both before and after the ancestors of European and Asian populations split off and migrated away. By the scientists’ estimates, DNA from that unknown group now makes up somewhere between 4% and 8% of modern human ancestry.

That said, Siepel’s technique could perhaps provide deeper insights into those statistics and what they mean: For example, researchers studying how that ancient DNA made its way out of Africa into other populations might follow its trail to map out, if only sketchily, migrations as yet unknown.

“I think Africa is one of the areas that’s going to give a lot more data in the future,” said Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London and a member of the research team that studied the Greek fossil.

Siepel is also using his algorithm to look for signs of natural selection acting on these DNA sequences: Were ancient hominins any better or worse off for carrying more genes from modern ones? So far, his team has found no evidence for either positive or negative selection in the flow of genes from modern humans into Neanderthals 200,000 years ago, which indicates that “most of this gene flow … is just a signature of populations in contact,” according to Hawks.

“It suggests that maybe Neanderthals actually are us,” he said. “As different as they are, maybe they’re just another version of us.”

That’s something that can be studied in other species as well: Siepel has already started to look into the forces at work in the speciation of certain birds. “What we should be doing is taking these more complicated models that we have now, this messy picture … and applying that to other species,” Scally said.

Of course, inferring these population histories is a complicated process. “There is a limit to what genetics can infer, too,” Akey said. Sometimes, alternative historical scenarios have basically the same effects on the genomic record, and in those situations, even better methods of genetic analysis will be hard-pressed to squeeze answers out of the data. Still, he added, we’re a long way off from reaching that limit.

Scally agreed. “There is an enormous amount of information in human diversity today,” he said. “There’s plenty of stuff still for us to discover.”

Jordana Cepelewicz is a staff writer at Quanta Magazine who covers biology. Her writing about mathematics, neuroscience and other subjects has also appeared in Nautilus and Scientific American. Before entering the world of science reporting, Jordana did editorial work at Harper’s Magazine, Politico and Tea Leaf Nation. She graduated from Yale University in 2015 with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and comparative literature.

Carl Camp campce@gmail.com

Recent polls have shown that most Americans believe that homosexuals are “born that way” rather than become gay as the result of environmental factors. In fact, perpetuating the belief that sexual orientation is innate has been crucial to the gay rights movement. According to the most recent Gallup Poll on the subject, 88 percent of people who believe homosexuals are “born that way” support the legality of same-sex marriage, while only 39 percent of those who believe homosexuality is the result of environmental factors support the legality of same-sex marriage.

So, what happens when science proves that homosexuals aren’t “born that way”? Perhaps we’ll find out. A new comprehensive scientific study of the biological roots of sexual orientation released Thursday proved that there no “gay gene” and that genetic factors are insignificant in determining sexual orientation.

The research, which analyzed data on DNA and sexual experiences from almost half a million people, found there are thousands of genetic variants linked to same-sex sexual behavior, most with very small effects.

Five of the genetic markers were "significantly" associated with same-sex behavior, the researchers said, but even these are far from being predictive of a person's sexual preferences.

"We scanned the entire human genome and found a handful - five to be precise - of locations that are clearly associated with whether a person reports in engaging in same-sex sexual behavior," said Andrea Ganna, a biologist at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Finland who co-led the research.

According to Ganna, these genetic variances have “a very small effect” on sexual behavior, and combined, only explain “considerably less than 1% of the variance in the self-reported same-sex sexual behavior.” This means that non-genetic factors, including environment, upbringing, personality, and nurture “are far more significant in influencing a person's choice of sexual partner, just as with most other personality, behavioral and physical human traits,” according to the researchers.

There have been many other studies conducted in the past that have attempted to resolve the nature vs. nurture debate, but due to their small sample sizes were considered inadequate. “Previous studies were small and underpowered," according to Ganna. "So we decided to form a large international consortium and collected data for (almost) 500,000 people, (which) is approximately 100 times bigger than previous studies on this topic.” This new study “analyzed survey responses and performed analyses known as genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on data from more than 470,000 people who had given DNA samples and lifestyle information to the UK Biobank and to the U.S. genetics testing company 23andMeInc.”

Will the release of this comprehensive study finally put this issue to rest? Doubtful. Past studies have done little to shift public opinion on this. But, the size and comprehensive nature of this new study ought to crush the “born that way” myth. What is the LGBT lobby to do? It appears they are trying to spin this study as reaffirming to their beliefs. “This new research also re-confirms the long-established understanding that there is no conclusive degree to which nature or nurture influence how a gay or lesbian person behaves," said Zeke Stokes, the chief programs officer of the gay rights group GLAAD. Clearly, there will be a lot of denial from groups like GLAAD and the left that this new study completely undermined the foundation of the gay rights movement.

Sharon Litton of Shreveport, La., is baptized by immersion in the Jordan River, where Jesus is said to have been baptized. Such baptisms are a staple of evangelical tours of Israel.

President Trump's evident desire to identify who's most "loyal" to Israel has a clear winner: U.S. evangelicals.

Not only do they outpace U.S. Jews in their support for policies that favor the Israeli government, but U.S. evangelicals have also become the fastest-growing sector of the Israeli tourism market. The developments may even be related.

"I'd say close to 100% of our travelers come back extremely pro-Israel in their political views," says Andy Cook, a pastor who leads evangelical tours of the Holy Land twice a year.  Back to its roots

Tourist travel to Israel is growing about 10% a year, according to Eyal Carlin, the incoming North America director of the Israeli Tourism Ministry, with evangelical Christians a growing share of U.S. visitors.

"More and more companies are entering each year with faith-based or evangelical packages," Carlin says. "The evangelical world is going back to its roots."

The trend coincides with growing evangelical support for Trump's embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-line policies, even as U.S. Jews have grown more critical.

To Some Zionist Christians And Jews, The Bible Says Jerusalem Is Israel's Capital

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 42% of U.S. Jews say Trump "favors the Israelis too much," while just 15% of U.S. evangelicals agreed with that statement.

Evangelical leaders of the Christian Zionism movement, from Jerry Falwell Sr. to John Hagee, have attributed their fervent support for the state of Israel to their own Holy Land travel, according to Daniel Hummel, author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations.

"They say visiting Israel was a key part of their political awakening," Hummel says, "and this goes down to the rank-and-file people in their organizations."

Pilgrims gather on the banks of the Jordan River at Galilee for baptisms. Israeli authorities are eager to accommodate tourists' interest in ancient Israel, according to author Daniel Hummel.

A prime Israeli selling point for evangelical tourism is the opportunity "to walk where Jesus walked." The highlight for Robert Bowman, who visited Israel on an evangelical tour in 2017, was a visit to the dungeons in Jerusalem where Jesus is said to have been imprisoned while he awaited crucifixion.

"We saw the rooms where he was flogged, and it was very emotional for us," Bowman says. "We were all in tears, thinking about what the Lord Jesus went through and seeing the actual place where this happened."

Bowman, who pastors a small church in Riverside, Calif., said the trip made the Bible come newly alive for him. "I read about it all my life, and then I go there and it's, 'Oh, this is what it means!' " he says. "You can see it, which you can't do when you just read it, except in your imagination."

For Sharon Litton of Shreveport, La., the most memorable moment of her 2018 tour was the opportunity to be rebaptized by immersion in the Jordan River, where Jesus himself is said to have been baptized.

"When that was offered to us, something inside of me said, 'You got to go,' " she says. "It was just so dear to me, to be able to get in the water and be baptized, in the same water that Jesus was. It was incredible." 

The Holy Land tours may have the effect of deepening the visitors' Christian faith, according to evangelical-tour leader Cook, who says he has taken 22 trips to Israel.

"The location of all those Bible stories is always right where they're supposed to be," he says. "When people come home, they want to read more of their Bible. They've seen the locations, and they see the stories in the Bible as what they are, as history."

It's not just the New Testament stories that come alive for the evangelical visitors. Many want to see the places mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, and tour packages that are custom designed for evangelicals now include a larger share of those sites.

Israeli authorities are especially eager to accommodate this interest in ancient Israel, according to Hummel, knowing that it supports their territorial claims.

"Most of these tours are very highly controlled and curated to convey a particular sense of Israel," Hummel says, "and that's to emphasize the Jewishness of the land, that this is the homeland of the Jewish people, that the history that matters is the history that's in the Bible."

Hummel, who spent a year in Israel researching his book and now teaches in the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the tours designed for evangelicals generally have minimal contact with Palestinians, even with Palestinian Christians. Most tours include a stop in Bethlehem, which is in Palestinian-controlled territory, but it's only a day trip.

The tours that Cook leads also include a stop in Jericho, also in a Palestinian area, but Cook acknowledges that outreach to Arab Christians is not a high priority

"You may be talking about Orthodox Christians, or Catholics, or Christians for whom it's a national identity," he says. "It's so, so different. At times it does not even appear to be the Christianity we would recognize at home."

Not surprisingly, many evangelical tourists return to the United States with greater sympathy for Israelis in their conflict with Palestinians.

"I tend not to trumpet the political part of the trip. That's not our purpose," Cook says. "But it's invariable that people are going to come away feeling something. When you're in the land and you hear the stories, it's hard not to admire the fact that this country has survived, surrounded by so many people that would not like them to survive."

Only a small percentage of U.S. evangelicals have traveled to Israel, but the views of those who make the trip apparently resonate with evangelicals at large. A 2017 survey of evangelicals by LifeWay Research found that 80% believe that "God's promise [of land] to Abraham and his descendants was for all time." By a 46% to 19% margin, the surveyed evangelicals disagreed with the notion that Palestinians have any such "historic right."

Notably, LifeWay found that 80% of the surveyed evangelicals believe that the modern rebirth of Israel and the return of millions of Jews to that land are a fulfillment of Bible prophecy and show "we are getting closer to the return of Jesus Christ." Some evangelicals say that prophecy includes a belief in a final battle of Armageddon that concludes with Jews accepting Jesus Christ as their savior.

Notwithstanding such apocalyptic evangelical visions, Israeli authorities have welcomed evangelical tourism.

"There is definitely an understanding on the Israeli government side that tourism is a key way to connect with American evangelicals," says Hummel, "and a lot of the pro-Israel groups in the United States see tourism as a key way to shape evangelical attitudes toward Israel."

As evangelical attitudes toward Israel grow increasingly positive, the views of U.S. Jews are cooling. Recent surveys by the American Jewish Committee showed a decline in the share of U.S. Jews who say that "caring about Israel is a very important part of my being a Jew," down from 70% in 2018 to 62% in 2019.

Christians United for Israel, an evangelical group, now claims to have 7 million members. That's about the size of the entire U.S. Jewish population.

Hadassah Carter was a licensed real estate agent in 2017 when the Virginia Real Estate Board filed a complaint against her for her faith-themed messages in her public correspondence, according to the lawsuit.

Specifically, her email signature read, “For Faith and Freedom, Jesus loves you, and with God all things are possible.” Her website included this message: “For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.’ John 3:16. I am available to you when you need me.”

Both messages, the board said, violated the Virginia Fair Housing Code, which states the “use of words or symbols associated with a particular religion” shall be “evidence of an illegal preference.”

The board reached an agreement with Carter’s employer that prevented her or any employee from posting religious statements on any communication or advertising material. Although Carter resigned, her employers warned her the board had said it would track her license and would “file another complaint against her if she re-adds her previous religious statements to her communications and website,” the lawsuit says.

Carter has not actively practiced realty since 2017 and “fears making religious statements in connection with her realty practice because of possible action by the Board,” the suit says.

The American Center for Law and Justice filed suit in state court against the board, alleging violations of free speech and religious liberty guaranteed under the Virginia and U.S. Constitutions.

“No one should have to justify their free speech or their religion to a regulatory body,” Jordan Sekulow of the ACLJ wrote. “To threaten someone’s job because they express their faith makes free speech unfree, and so we must fight these assaults on religious liberty aggressively whenever they arise.”

Copyright © 2019, ChristianHeadlines.com. All rights reserved. Article Images Copyright © Getty Images unless otherwise indicated.

Recently, a group of high school football students defied a politically correct change to the way school games were opened in epic fashion.

Todd Starnes reports: The school district had replaced the traditional pre-game prayer with a moment of silence. The prayer was eliminated after a group of out-of-town atheists had complained.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Wisconsin-based gang of atheists, agnostics and freethinkers, sent a threatening letter to the school district: “It is illegal for a public school to sponsor religious messages at school athletic events and for public school coaches to lead their teams in prayer,” FFRF attorney Christopher Line wrote to the school district.

The school district responded by dropping the the traditional prayer: “The Supreme Court has specifically struck down invocations given over the loudspeaker at public school athletic events, even when student led,” Supt. Mark Neighbors said in a statement to the Opelika Observer. “Our students are allowed to pray, but our coaches are not allowed to participate.”

On September 13, they replaced the prayer with a moment of silence. But instead of remaining silent, the students rose up and with a mighty voice they recited The Lord’s Prayer. You can watch the video below.

We could all learn a lesson from the students at Opelika High School. When freedom is under assault, you take a stand. Opelika students in the @OHSdawgpound recite the Lord’s Prayer prior to kickoff tonight pic.twitter.com/5nsS1Ly23D OA News Preps (@oanewspreps) September 13, 2019

This is exactly what we need to do to show these atheists exactly how the First Amendment works.
We have the freedom, and the liberty, and the right to practice our faith wherever we wish.

The First Amendment does not protect their right to force atheism on anyone, at all. Rather, it protects the government from preventing the faithful from practicing their faith. If entire school districts see fit to allow their students to pray to the Christian God before games, so be it!

The only way Atheists can win is if we let them.

Under the old policy, football games at Lowndes High School in Valdosta, Ga., began with student-led prayer. That changed last week, when the high school omitted the prayer due to a complaint from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which wrote in a letter that the district “must take immediate action to end the practice of scheduling prayer at school-sponsored events and end the use of district equipment to project prayers to the public.”

Under the new policy, football games will begin with a student presenting whatever he or she desires, from a song to a poem to a prayer, WCTV-TV reported.

The Lowndes County Schools Board of Education adopted the policy on its first reading Monday night in a crowded meeting. Parents and boosters cheered as the new policy was passed, WCTV reported.

It still must be approved in a second reading next month, although the board said it could go into effect immediately.

“We knew coming in after our meeting last week that we had to put some work on it because our constituents were not going to let us say no way,” said Dave Clark, board chairman.

One of those constituents, Joe Copeland, applauded the board for not backing down.

“God won,” Copeland told WCTV. “That was the whole plan all along. I think it's awesome that we've got kids in school that want to pray to God and attend church.”

Students will be chosen “based on academics and program,” WCTV said.

“South Georgia is in the middle of the Bible Belt,” said Darrell Presley, president of the Viking Touchdown Club. “Religion is a very strong thing in this part of the country and it's one of the things that you do.”

It is unclear if the new policy will be challenged.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against student-led, student-initiated prayer in its 2000 decision, Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe. But the court’s makeup has changed dramatically since that 6-3 decision and appears more open to permitting religious expression in the public square. Of the six justices who voted in the majority in that decision, only three are still on the bench.

The school is known for its success in football, having won five state championships, including in 2004, 2005 and 2007.

It’s no secret that the ultimate goal of Islam is global domination. They are spreading throughout the Western world like wildfire despite the fact that they despise our way of life. Now liberals, in their infinite “wisdom” with their perpetual bleeding hearts, have created an atmosphere in which Muslims are victims and therefore Islam is untouchable from scrutiny and criticism.

America seems to be growing more and more lukewarm when it comes to religion, period. Christians are straying from the word of God and Biblical convictions which is paving the way to an apathetic attitude towards ideologies that are opposed to God, like Islam. This is leading to Christian churches bending to the will of Muslims and caving in, rather than boldly standing for truth in the face of adversity.

The latest victim to fall under the pressure of Islamic bullying is Bloomfield Hills Baptist Church in Michigan. According to Clothesline DC, the church was set “to host a two-day event called ‘9/11 forgotten? Is Michigan surrendering to Islam?’ on Wednesday and Thursday.” Unfortunately, CAIR got ahold of the church and intimidated them into canceling the event.

WND reports:

A Michigan church canceled a 9/11 event critical of the interfaith movement and Islamic supremacism after complaints from the Council on American-Islamic Relations and politicians.

Bloomfield Hills Baptist Church (pictured below) was to host a two-day event called “9/11 forgotten? Is Michigan surrendering to Islam?” on Wednesday and Thursday.

A former Muslim who has become a popular speaker, Shahram Hadian, was to speak Wednesday on “How the Interfaith Movement is Sabotaging America and the Church.” And on Thursday, Jim Simpson, a former Office of Management and Budget economist to three presidents and an investigative reporter, was to speak on “How Islam is Destroying America from Within.”

The event was planned by a group called the Detroit Coalition for Freedom.

In response to the cancellation, the organization United West will feature the two speakers in a webinar on Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern time that can be viewed online through registration.

Last week, the Baptist church’s pastor, Donald McKay, defended the event in an interview with WJBK-TV.

“Islam is a growing threat in the United States of America,” he said. “We don’t hate Muslims, we hate the ideology they are identified with.

This is how all Christians should feel. We don’t hate Muslims as people, we should want to see them meet Jesus and turn from the wicked ideology that is Islam. That being said, we should absolutely hate what Islam represents and that would be the destruction of Christianity and Israel.

They do believe in world domination and they have proven time and time again that they will resort to violence when needed. They believe in conversion or death for the infidels; us being the infidels. Sure, there are Muslims who are not “devout,” just like in Christianity the same can be said about Christians but by-and-large, Muslims agree with the superiority of Islam and the need for Sharia law to be implemented worldwide.

Americans are blindly and naïvely voting Muslims into office, Muslims who are even openly anti-Semitic (we’re looking at your Ilhan Omar). This will be to our peril if we continue down this path. We’ll leave you with the words of Robert Spencer, of Jihad Watch, who perfectly explains the hypocrisy in American when dealing with Islam versus Christianity:

“The jihad threat can emanate from anywhere the Qur’an and Sunnah are preached and believed. But saying that in America eighteen years after 9/11 won’t result in any public consternation or calls for the monitoring of mosques; it will only get you defamed as a ‘racist’ and an ‘Islamophobe,’ to be dismissed and shunned by all decent people. Meanwhile, one imam in Georgia recently stated: ‘There has not been another 9/11-such attack in America because Islam is winning.’”

Be vigilant, fellow Americans. Islam is winning.

The new provost will work closely with WSU President Kirk Schulz to provide overall direction and leadership for the WSU statewide system. The provost is the university’s chief academic officer, responsible for all aspects of WSU’s academic mission.

“Mitzi’s proven leadership skills, experience, and vision promise an exciting future for the university,” Schulz said. “Her expertise in creating innovative and collaborative partnerships with campus and stakeholder communities will play a pivotal role in advancing our goal of becoming a top 25 public research university by 2030.”

“I am very excited to be joining WSU,” Montoya said. “I look forward to contributing to the university’s commitment to serve communities statewide and supporting the faculty and students in their pursuits of excellence and opportunity.”

One of Montoya’s first priorities will be to assist Schulz with the creation of WSU’s next five-year strategic plan. The effort will include development of a plan that addresses the future of all of the university’s campuses and locations as well as a plan for the WSU Pullman campus.

“We will build the next chapter in WSU’s future together. President Schulz and I will emphasize listening, teamwork, and shared governance during the strategic planning process,” Montoya said. “The Drive to 25 will include a persistent commitment to student success and advancing diversity and inclusiveness.”

Montoya’s field of research, teaching and industry expertise is innovation process and strategy. She has published more than 35 papers and served on the boards of dozens of civic, economic development and university organizations. She has served as an advisor and consultant to a wide variety of industries around the world.

An international scholar, Montoya has taught courses on innovation and marketing strategy at the undergraduate, graduate and executive levels around the world. She has received research funding from numerous organizations, including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Education, USAID, and many private and corporate foundations.

Montoya will begin her new duties August 1. She will replace Dan Bernardo, who is stepping down as provost after more than five years in the position to work on special projects for Schulz.

A native of Texas, Montoya holds two degrees from Michigan State University: a doctorate in marketing and statistics and a bachelor’s degree in applied engineering science. She is a former American Council on Education Fellow.

Latino students are underrepresented in college enrollment and degree attainment at public institutions in most states, according to a report released Wednesday by the Education Trust. The report, "Broken Mirrors II: Latino Student Representation at Public State Colleges and Universities," analyzed public institutions in 44 states with at least 15,000 Latino adults who are residents. It follows another study by the group that found similar underrepresentation for black adults.

The study found that, when compared with states' proportions of Latino residents, Latino students are underrepresented at both community and technical colleges and at four-year institutions in most states. States with the largest Latino populations didn't provide Latinos the same access as white students to selective public four-year colleges. Fewer Latino students earned bachelor's degrees compared to white students, as well.

The report concludes that public institutions should commit to serving more Latino residents to improve both equity and states' economies as the demographic grows. It recommends thinking about assessment, transitioning strategies, costs and more.

Gilbert Sanchez gilsanche01@gmail.com

1952: Began studying engraving under Arturo Garcia Bustos at the Bellas Artes school, Oaxaca, Mexico
1957: Studied in the free engraving workshop 
at Escuela de Artesania y Diseno of Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico.                                                                                    Photo: Francisco Toledo, L.A. Times

In the early 1960s, Toledo traveled throughout Europe and eventually settled in Paris, France. Soon, he set himself up in the workshop of artist Stanley William Hayter (British, 1901–1988).

In 1965, Toledo returned to Mexico and began using what he had learned in Europe to create a new style of Mexican Art. In 1973, he had a show in the Carl Finkler Gallery in Paris, and, in 1975, he had a show at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. By 1980, his work was extensive enough for the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City to hold a retrospective. His work is concerned with the cultural traditions of his birthplace, the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The myths, people, flora, and fauna of Oaxaca play major roles in many of his works. He has illustrated numerous books based on the ancestral stories of his people. These books include Chilam Balam, Guachi, and Sahagún. Works such as Chivo and Shoe and Toads show Toledo's use of Oaxaca and animals. He has also created a series of 15 prints inspired by Franz Kafka's Report For an Academy. Toledo has spent much of his life promoting the arts in Oaxaca. In 1988, he founded the Instituto de Artes Graficas de Oaxaca, which currently holds roughly 12,000 books dealing with numerous art forms and Mexican Art. He also founded the Museum de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Mexico.

For his social work and devotion to his home state, Toledo has received numerous awards including the Mexican National Prize in 1998, the Prince Claus Award in 2000, and the Right Livelihood Award in 2005. He is the father of the poet Natalia Toledo (Mexican, b.1968) and artists Dr Lakra (Mexican, b.1972) and Laureana Toledo (Mexican, b.1970). Toledo was living and working Oaxaca, Mexico when he passed away.

• Born: July 17, 1940, Juchitán de Zaragoza, Mexico

• Died: September 5, 2019

• Spouse: Trine Ellitsgaard

• Children: Natalia Toledo
  en.wikipedia.org

Bueno, en Portugal, por lo general, primero se utiliza el ultimo apelido de la madre y luego el ultimo del padre ... lo contrario de España.

Por ejemplo: José Silva Santos, y Maria Cunha Machado> el niño sería Manuel Machado Santos

Hoy en día por lo general siempre es así, pero hasta hace unas décadas no era raro las hijas quedaremse con el apellido de la madre y los niños con el del padre, o quedaremse solo con el apellido más importante, o no tener cualquier apellido , o adoptar el apellido de un antepasado diferente de los des padres... es decir, con la excepción de las familias nobles, no había ninguna regla fija.

En el caso de este mi antepasado, los ancianos de mi familia piensan su nombre era sólo Inácio de Loyola, los ancianos de mi familia piensan así, su nombre era sólo

Inácio de Loyola, así sin apellido.  Perdona que antes he dijo Ignacio y no Inácio ... el google traductor también me tradujo el nombre genealhispana-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

Carl Camp campce@gmail.com 

Hello Mimi,

This is Part Three and the last of three essays on my experiences with literature. I am happy to report that I went to the Johnston Branch Public Library to return four books and left empty-handed. The following were the four books: The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, by David Kertzer; The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by Martin Booth; The Train to Crystal City, by Jan Jarboe Russell, and Shakespeare In America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now, by James Shapiro (ed.). The one-story brick building, which is less than three miles from our home, has ample parking. When I stand close to the two folding glass doors, the sensors detect my presence and open automatically. This modern technological innovation makes it quite convenient in case both of my hands are full of books. Once inside the air-conditioned place and after I dropped the books in the slot marked, "Return." I take a few steps to the right of the check out counter, and I am now facing the book shelves that contain the used books for sale. I always make a mental note to stop by and quickly browse through the titles of novels, nonfiction, how to books, manuals, travel books, biographies, etc. I am keeping my eyes open for those elusive books I always wanted to read. And for a measly one dollar for hardbound copies and fifty cents for paperbacks! Nobody can beat that price! And most of the time, I end up buying several books.

The habit of acquiring books is hard to die and the pleasure derived from reading a book is a euphoric feeling of mental and intellectual satisfaction. And, whenever we visit the flea markets around San Antonio, I have my eyes wide open for the booths that sell used books. You will be surprised to find out what literary treasures are hidden in the flea markets. I am looking for first editions of fiction and nonfiction tomes, and other books that I would like to read. Some of them are worth a lot of money, not that I plan to sell the ones I have found. If you have any of these books, and this is just a very small sample, you may want to hold on to them.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road, (1957) $5,000. 
Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, (1964) $5,000.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952) $3,000.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961) $4,000.
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, (1952) $2,500.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, (1960) $20,000.
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, (1943) $5,000.
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men, (1946) $5,000.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, (1929) $3,000.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, (1925) $20,000.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, (1922) $25,000.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, (1929) $50,000.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, (1934) $25,000.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (1925) $100,000.
Ian Fleming, Casino Royale, (1953) $30,000.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies, (1954) $7,500.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, (1932) $5,000.
J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, (1951) $20,000.
B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, (1934) $7,500.
Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, (1936) $12,500.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, (1934) $30,000.
John Le Carré, Call for the Dead, (1961) $10,000.
James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake, (1939) $4,000.
James Joyce, Ulysses, (1922) $75,000.
A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young, (1924) $7,500.

Sylvia Plath, The Colossus, (1960) $2,500.
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, (1961) $4,000.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, (1970) $5,000. 
James A. Michener, Tales of the South Pacific, (1947) $4,000.
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, (1970) $3,500.
Bernard Malamud, The Natural, (1952) $5,000.
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, (1947) $5,000.

I already have an extensive library, with bookshelves, from floor to ceiling, in almost every room in the house, and I must confess there are some books that have remained unread. So, why do I still stop and check the used books for sale? I mean, for a dollar and for fifty cents, for Pete's sake, how can I let this bargain go by unchecked. Many of these used books I do read. The problem I have is that whenever I buy these books, I never get rid of the ones I already read. Once I place these tomes in our library, they became like part of the family and I become emotionally and intellectually attached to them. My estimated guess is that we have in our private library over 900 books. And, we do not loan books out, not to friends or family members. Whenever they want to borrow a book or books, I quote them from the writer Seymour Durst--"When you leave, please leave this book because it has been said everything comes to him who waits except a loaned book."

But, among serious bibliophiles, the size of our private library is chump change. One of my dear friends, Al Lowman, who passed away four years ago, lived in San Marcos, Texas, and he built a big, one story building, well-lit, with bookshelves all along the walls and in the center of the room, to accommodate his extensive collection. His library was located in the backyard. After his death, his library went to archives and for public auction. The late retired Air Force Colonel Ernest Montemayor, and a very dear friend, had a private library of more more than 10,000 books and about 5,000 CDs, journals, quarterlies, newsletters, and microfiche. Many of the books are rare and out of print. He acquired his monumental collection when he traveled extensively throughout the United States, Spain, Mexico, and South America.

Another method that I used to add books to our private library, and in this case, they were new books, was to do book reviews for the different scholarly journals. When my good friend and mentor, Dr. Hubert J. Miller, was alive, he sent me an email asking if I had read a book by John Staples Shockley entitled, Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town, published by the University of Notre Dame Press. He was interested in knowing if it mentioned the involvement of T.E.A.M.S. during the students' walkout in Crystal City. Back in 1991, I did a book review for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly (the scholarly journal of the Texas State Historical Association), on a tome by Armando Navarro entitled, The Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control (University of Wisconsin Press). I have vivid recollections of what was going on in Crystal City with the student walkouts during the late 1960s. Dr. Miller kept me abreast of all the developments and I remember his keen observations after he had spent a weekend in Crystal City providing classes for the students on the city park! At that time, I was working in his office when he was the chairman of the History Department at St. Mary's University. I was a member of T.E.A.M.S. (Texans for the Educational Advancement of Mexican Americans), and I attended several meetings where this topic was discussed, and I believe some members went with Dr. Miller to Crystal City. And, every Friday at noon time, Dr. Miller would drive me in his Ford Falcon to Mario's Restaurant for lunch and for the weekly think tank sessions, where he made weekly updates on the students' walkouts.

In 2002, I did another book review for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly on a book by Ernesto B. Vigil entitled, The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government's War on Dissent (University of Wisconsin Press). This book presented a broader discussion of the Chicano Movement during the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, Chapter Nine--"La Raza Unida Party: Fights About Ideology and Structure," discusses the Texas Chicano leadership, from the standpoint of the La Raza Unida Party, headed by José Angel Gutiérrez. Over the years I did many book reviews for the quarterly, for instance, Ignacio M. García, the author of Viva Kennedy: Mexican Americans in Search of Camelot, did a superb job of consulting the Héctor P. García Collection and oral interviews to reconstruct an important period, from 1960 to 1964, in the political history of Mexican Americans. In an attractive three cloth bound volumes, entitled, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. And, in six concise chapters and an epilogue, embellished with ten illustrations and eighteen exquisite drawings by the late Ricardo M. Beasley, Andrés Tijerina in his book, Tejano Empire: Life on the South Texas Ranchos, did an excellent and meticulous job of explicating how the Spanish and Mexican heritage gave character and identity to the Tejano ranching empire in South Texas.

For the New Mexico Historical Review, I reviewed, among other books, an interesting and very pertinent topic to today's immigration issues, edited by Frank D. Bean, Rodolpho O. de la Garza, Bryan R. Roberts, and Sidney Weintraub, entitled, At the Crossroads: Mexico and U.S. Immigration Policy. And, for the Western Historical Quarterly, among other books, I reviewed a fascinating book, Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States, by Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, that offers a fresh perspective for studying the Spanish borderlands from two anthropological points of view--one from south to north and another from north to south.

Shortly after I received a handsome monetary award for the book making the most significant contribution to knowledge from the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL) for Border Boss: Manuel B. Bravo and Zapata County, I was asked by Carolyn Osborn, President of TIL, to serve as one of three judges for the following year and for the same award that my book had garnered. Of course, I gladly accepted because I would be adding these books to our private library. I had about eight months to read and evaluate twenty-three books. The book that we selected to receive the award was The Cast Iron Forest: A Natural and Cultural History of the North American Cross Timbers, by Richard Francaviglia. Some of the other tomes were:

Elena Zamora O'Shea, El Mesquite
Barrie Scardino & Drexel Turner, Clayton's Galveston: Architecture, Nicholas J. Clayton & Contemporaries.
Casey Edward Greene & Shelly Henley Kelly, Through Night of Horrors: Voices, 1900 Galveston Storm.
F. Todd Smith, The Wichita Indians: Traders of Texas and the Southern Plains, 1540-1845.
Sara R. Massey, Black Cowboys of Texas.

Teresa, A. Sullivan, et.al. The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt.
Thomas Torrans, Forging the Tortilla Curtain: Cultural Drift and Change Along the United
States-Mexico Border From the Spanish Era to the Present.
Dr. Nicolás Kanellos, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960.
Thomas T. Smith, The Old Army in Texas: A Research Guide to the U.S. Army in 19th Century Texas.

Judith Valenza, Taking the Waters in Texas: Springs, Spas, and Fountains of Youth.
Rodolfo Rosales, The Illusion of Inclusion: The Untold Political Story of San Antonio.
Nancy Baker Jones and Ruthe Winegarten, Capitol Women: Texas Female Legislators, 1923-1999.
Elizabeth Hill Boone, Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs.
Robert Veselka, The Courthouse Square in Texas.

A few weeks ago, I checked out two books from the Johnston Branch Public Library; namely, the first one was by Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, but I never knew that she was a well-known and respected American author during the early part of the twentieth-century. The other book was by Andew Jewell and Janis Stout and is titled, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. Both are good reads. And then, before I left the library, I veered to the right to check out the used books section. And lo and behold, I found another book by Willa Cather entitled, My Antonia. Then, I kept looking and I ended up buying six more books; namely, Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina; Agatha Christie, By The Pricking Of My Thumbs; Joyce Carol Oates, Give Me Your Heart; Ralph Walton, Texas Law in Layman's Language; Ted Morgan, Maugham; and Mary Higgins Clark, Nighttime Is My Time. On other occasions, I have stopped to buy, The Murder At The Vicarage by Agatha Christie, Digging Up Texas: A Guide to the Archaeology of the State by Robert Marcom, HemisFair '68 and the Transformation of San Antonio by Sterlin Holmesly.

Here is a list of some website if you are interested in purchasing second hand books: 
www. abebooks.com

www. addall.com

www. bookfinder.com

www. alibris.com

www. bibliofind.com

www. abaa.org (home page of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America)

www. amazon.com

www. ilab-lila.com (home page of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers)

www. booksalefinder.com (contains a state-by-state listing of all forthcoming library

discard and donation sales in the United States)

www. bookfairs.com

www. worldbookdealers.com

www. bookhunterpress.com

www. trussel.com/f books.

www. resinets.com/topic/books

www. book-sales-in-america.com/.

www. thebookcollector.co.uk

www. bookpricescurrent.com

www. virginia.edu/old books (rare books website)

www. bookbrowse.com/.

www. cygnus.uwa.edu.an/amgraham/girlsown/clublist.html

www. winstonchurchill.org/

www. churchillbooks.com

www. eBay.com

Google (click URL-Universal Resource Locator)

I started reading at a very early age, before my enrollment in the first grade at St. Augustine School in Laredo. Mamá would sent me to the escuelitas in the Barrio El Azteca in Laredo, Texas, when I was three years old. I was a precocious child. My parents lit the dormant intellectual fire within me by having books available in a crudely hand-made wooden bookcase that Papá built for me. When I was five years old, Mamá enrolled me in a coed orphanage school operated by a group of nuns called, "Las Monjitas del Obrero." The institution was surrounded by a high stone wall and had three one-story buildings situated along the periphery, creating a wide open dirt patio for recreational purposes, and was located about two blocks from our house. Over the years, I discovered the Laredo Public Library, and this fire, fanned by the discovery of new worlds, people, and neologisms that existed outside the boundaries of the Barrio El Azteca, exploded into a voracious appetite for reading and writing. When I was in junior high school, I joined the Book of the Month Club and continued until I left Laredo to attend St. Mary's University. And, in high school at St. Augustine, I received the Texas Readers Club Award from the Texas Education Agency for having read the required number of books. My passion for reading was reinforced when Sister Casilda proudly put up a sign in the high school library that read: "Good Readers Make Good Leaders." I did, however, modify it for my own purposes to read: "Good Readers Make Good Writers." And, this aphorism has remained with me all throughout my professional career and even into my halcyon years. While an undergraduate student at St. Mary's University in the late 1960s, I joined the History Book Club. My major was history so I wanted to read as many well-known works about American and European History, a reading habit I learned from Paul Farrier, my history professor at Laredo Jr. College. He was definitely an influence in my formative years as a fledgling historian.

Before, I buy more books, perhaps, I should reread some of the books I have in our private library, the ones that I read many years ago, but now, with maturity and insight on my side, I should understand them from a better perspective. On my next trip to the Johnston Branch Public Library, I am still going to veer to the right and check out their used books for sale, just in case, I find that elusive tome or tomes that I have always wanted to read. These books and others will be a joy to read, whether in full, at a gallop, or in pleasurable installments. As John Milton once said, "A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."

So, what am I, a bibliophilia or a bibliomania?

Gilberto

Hello Mimi,

One day while Jo Emma and I were staying in our small cottage in Zapata, a very dear friend, Belinda Rangel Bravo, stopped by for a short visit. Her home is just a few yards away from our place. In the discussion we were having, she brought up the subject of something new she had learned and wanted to share it with us. Question: "What do you call a racoon in Spanish?" Jo Emma and I quickly answered, "Why, a tejón." She looked at us and smiled and said, "No, that is not the right word." We looked at each other with a puzzled countenance. Our reply was based on our experience that since we were kids, Jo Emma in Zapata, and I in the Barrio El Azteca, grew up knowing that a racoon was a tejón and vice versa.

Well, Belinda informed us that she also grew up with the same understanding, and that she just found out from two young men who belonged to the Church of Latter Day Saints. Dressed in a short-sleeved, while shirt with a black tie and black trousers, they ride their bicycles all over the town of Zapata and happened to stop by her house. And, in their conversation, they mention to her that the correct Spanish translation for a racoon is a Mapache. And the correct English translation of a tejón is a Badger. To verify what they had said, Jo Emma and Belinda looked up the term in the Internet and I checked with my old reliable New Revised Velásquez Spanish and English Dictionary. We all came to the same conclusion that the two young men were right.

All through our lives growing up in South Texas we had always called a racoon a tejón and vice versa. Nobody corrected us, not even the adults. Even as adults in the 21st century, we still went by that nomenclature of calling a tejón a racoon and a racoon a tejón. Well, now, we know better and will use the correct translation from this day forward. The sage aphorism that one is never too old to learn certainly applies to us.

With profound respect and affection,  Gilberto

JQUEZADA@satx.rr.com 

33% of High School Graduates never read another book the rest of their lives.
42% of college graduates never read another book after college.
57% if new books are not read to completion.
70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore the last five years.
80% if US families did not buy or read a book last year.
The more a child reads, the better they are able to understand the emotions of others.

Fill your bookshelves with used books, the latest bestsellers, rare books such as first editions and signed copies, new and used textbooks, and forgotten out-of-print titles from years gone by.

Decorate your home with fine art, ranging from vintage posters and prints to etchings and original paintings. Add to your collection with vintage magazines and periodicals, comics, photographs, maps and manuscripts, and paper collectibles ranging from autograph letters to movie scripts and other ephemera.

Millions of books and other objects are listed for sale on our marketplace by thousands of sellers located in more than 50 countries. Our epic selection stretches from manuscripts created before the invention of the Gutenberg Press to the latest signed bestsellers. We have customers in almost every country of the world, who are buying books and other printed matter published in multiple languages.

The magic of AbeBooks is filling your shelves with affordable books, discovering that long-lost title, finding an out-of-print or collectible book that's become hard to find, or discovering something magical from the past that you simply did not know existed - perhaps a letter from a famous author, a 19th century postcard or a copy of a long-defunct magazine.

WHAT IS ZOCALO?

“Zócalo”, in many Latin American countries, is the town square, a place where people gather to share resources and socialize.

Similarly, Delhi Center has been a “Zócalo” for the Santa Ana community since 1969 and acts as a gathering place for local residents, businesses, and organizations. It is well-known and well-respected for its history of serving the community.

WE ARE DELHI

Delhi Center was incorporated in 1969 as a nonprofit organization by local residents, the local Catholic Church, and the Junior League of Newport Beach. The National Armory donated two WWII era quonset huts that served as the center’s first headquarters on land donated by the Manuel Esqueda family situated on the corner of Center and Halladay.

In 2001, center leaders achieved an historic milestone and constructed the largest community center of its kind in Santa Ana. With the support of elected officials, community residents, and private sponsors, Delhi Center opened its doors at its current location on December 17, 2001.

Delhi Center’s mission is to advance self-sufficiency through sustainable programs in health, education, financial stability, and community engagement. People of all ages and all walks of life are served at Delhi Center, which continues to improve the quality of life for residents of Santa Ana and the surrounding communities. Its history, perseverance, and impact is a testament to the work ethic of those it serves and the hope that defines its legacy.

Sent by Ruben Alvarez
President/OnLine Publisher
StayConnectedOC@Gmail.com 
714-661-9768

CONTRERAS EARNS SUPPORT OF UNITE HERE LOCAL 11 IN OC SUPERVISOR BID

Westminster Councilmember Sergio Contreras Backed by UNITE HERE Local 11 in District 1 Contest

Sergio Contreras worked in high school and college at Disneyland as a cook, dishwasher, and busser. He spent 10 years as a member of Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees UNITE HERE Local 681 before Local 681 merged with UNITE HERE Local 11. In addition to being a UNITE HERE member, Contreras also worked as an Organizer and Assistant to the President at Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees UNITE HERE Local 681.

In a statement released following the endorsement, Ada Briceño, Co-President of UNITE HERE Local 11, stated:

"Sergio is the fighter we need on the Orange County Board of Supervisors. From his experience as a member of UNITE HERE, to his work as an organizer, to his commitment to the community as a local school board member and city councilmember, Sergio has tirelessly advocated for working class families. As a supervisor, he will advance economic opportunity and work to strengthen Orange County's middle-class economy. The working women and men of UNITE HERE Local 11 give Sergio Contreras our strong support and endorsement. We are proud to stand with Sergio."

Upon receiving the UNITE HERE Local 11 endorsement, Contreras commented:

“I’m honored to have the support of UNITE HERE Local 11. These working men and women are the backbone of our local economy, and give a voice to the many voiceless working people in our communities fighting for better treatment and higher wages. As a former restaurant employee, dishwasher, and busser who was a UNITE HERE member, I am deeply grateful for their support of my campaign for Supervisor and look forward to uplifting working families as an Orange County Supervisor.”

Previously Councilmember Sergio Contreras announced the following endorsements:
SEIU - USWW
AFSCME Local 1734
National Union of Healthcare Workers
United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers & Allied Workers Local 220
Painters & Allied Trades District Council 36
UNITE HERE Local 11
U.S. Congressman Alan Lowenthal
U.S. Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez (Ret.)
Garden Grove School Board Trustee Walter Muneton
Garden Grove School Board Trustee Teri Rocco
Garden Grove Councilmember Kris Beard (Ret.)
Westminster School Boardmember Jamison Power
Westminster School Boardmember Amy Walsh (Ret.)
Costa Mesa Mayor Katrina Foley
Costa Mesa Councilman Manuel Chavez
Rancho Community College Trustee Lawrence Labrado
Santa Ana Unified School District President Valerie Amezcua
Santa Ana Councilmember Sal Tinajero (Ret.)
Santa Ana School Board Trustee Alfonso Alvarez
Anaheim Elementary School Boardmember Juan Gabriel Alvarez
Anaheim Elementary School Boardmember Ryan Ruelas
Anaheim Elementary School Boardmember Dr. Jose Pablo Magcalas
Anaheim Elementary School Boardmember D.R. Heywood (Ret.)
Anaheim Union High School District Clerk of the Board, Annemarie Randle-Trejo
Huntington Beach Union High School District Trustee Duane Dishno
Fullerton School Boardmember Aaruni Thakur
Oceanview School District Vice President Gina Clayton-Tarvin
Midway City Sanitary District Director Margie L. Rice

The first Supervisorial District includes the cities of Garden Grove, Santa Ana, Westminster, the unincorporated community of Midway City, and parts of Fountain Valley. The first Supervisorial District is 42% Democratic and 24% Republican by registration – making it one of the most flippable major local offices in California.

Sergio Contreras, a husband, father, homeowner, and registered Democrat, has served on the Westminster City Council since 2012, where he successfully championed the largest upgrade to Westminster’s park system since 1996, encompassing 22 park facilities and representing a $10.4 million investment in the community. Contreras oversaw the city’s first general plan update in decades. He also placed emergency call boxes in all Westminster parks to enhance public safety, and fought to place outdoor exercise equipment in local parks to improve public health.

Contreras previously served on the Westminster School Board from 2004 to 2012, including serving as president of the board in 2012. On the School Board, Contreras helped pass a $130 million school bond to modernize Westminster’s school facilities and make them safer. In that role, he established an all-day kindergarten system, making Westminster School District the first in Orange County to provide day-long kindergarten at all school sites. Contreras also increased access to music and arts programs districtwide, while expanding after-school programs.

Now, Contreras works as the Senior Director of Education and Healthy Schools for the Orange County United Way where he creates strategic community partnerships to empower students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. Contreras lives in Westminster with his wife Adriana, where their children Sergio III and Chloe attend local schools.

The Classic reveals the overwhelming pressure faced by Garfield and Roosevelt coaches and athletes to defeat their rivals and claim the cross-town title.

The pressures experienced by the players extend well beyond the football field. They come from families struggling to makes ends meet, and some deal with the worry of what may happen to undocumented loved ones. Hanging over the kids, and the community, are the politics of immigration, issues of inclusion and isolation, and who qualifies as American. 

The picture, which is being backed by Nike, is slated for a theatrical release across the country timed to the annual East L.A. Classic November 8.

About the film

VIVA BOYLE HEIGHT AND ROUGHRIDERS!

At the close of UCLA’S first century, the university’s portfolio belies its relative youth — from the $1 billion it receives in annual research funding to its perch as the most applied-to university in the nation, not to mention its consistent ranking among the world’s top public universities.

There is indeed much to celebrate. But the yearlong series of programs and events planned for the centennial is about the future as much as the past.

“This is much more than a celebration, and more than about ourselves,” says Andres Cuervo, director of operations and strategic partnerships for the UCLA centennial celebration. “It’s an opportunity to showcase and deepen our commitment to advancing knowledge, creating opportunity through education and connecting with Los Angeles and the world.”

To that end, the centennial year features four initiatives designed to expand access to UCLA’s scholarly resources and build on the university’s commitment to serving the community. The initiatives, developed through partnerships among academic units campuswide, bring to life the themes of the centennial: UCLA’s coming of age; its role in promoting opportunity for all; its leadership in technology, medicine, athletics and the arts, among other areas; and its ascension alongside Los Angeles’ rise as one of the world’s leading cities.

As an elite research university, UCLA produces, houses and consumes massive amounts of scholarship. The UCLA Library system holds 12 million print and electronic volumes and logs 3.5 million in-person visits per year, along with more than 15 million online visitors. But a portion of these vast resources remains hidden behind subscription pay-walls or prevented from public view by ever-increasing prices for journals and books. OpenUCLA, an initiative led by the UCLA Library, accelerates ongoing efforts to remove barriers to the university’s scholarship.

“The open access movement has sought to make materials more widely available,” says Virginia Steel, university librarian. “We have a long tradition of trying to make our collections as accessible as possible, so it’s appropriate that we would take the lead in embracing the concept in a new way.”

The effort will include digitization of more than 5,000 library resources and a dramatic expansion of the library’s open repositories. Wikipedia edit-a-thons will create new entries for publicly accessible collections to increase the likelihood of users’ finding them through a Google search. Partnerships with the Los Angeles Public Library and the Los Angeles County Public Library will link resources on common topics, such as the history of Los Angeles, in new ways. Says Steel: “Our goal is to transform not only what we do at UCLA, but the thinking on how knowledge needs to be shared with the world.”

University Librarian Virginia Steel in Powell Library’s Main Reading Room.

What may be more surprising is the wealth of physical knowledge on campus, in the nearly 14 million art objects, texts, crafts and antiquities under UCLA’s care. A group of campus institutes has formed UCLA Collects, which will produce a major exhibition at the Fowler Museum, along with a course for UCLA undergraduates, K-12 outreach, public programming and new digital resources linking the collections.

“Since we began this project, there have been many ‘I did not know we had that’ statements,” says Matthew Robb, chief curator of the Fowler Museum, which leads the effort in partnership with the Hammer Museum, UCLA Library and 11 campus units that oversee the artifacts. “UCLA students and faculty who use the library all the time don’t necessarily know that UCLA Library Special Collections has the RKO studio collection, which tells part of the history of the film industry in Los Angeles, or that we have a meteorite gallery on campus.”

UCLA Collects aims to raise awareness of the campus-held objects while making them more accessible. The Fowler exhibition will use some of the most visually engaging objects to weave new narratives that illuminate both the diversity of UCLA’s collections and the rich and diverse history of the university and Los Angeles. “We have more than we can possibly include in one exhibit, but we hope to stimulate people’s enthusiasm for learning about the collections and the stories they tell,” Robb says.

Fowler Museum director Marla Berns ’73, M.A. ’76, Ph.D. ’86; Hammer Museum deputy director of curatorial affairs Cindy Burlingham; and Fowler Museum chief curator Matthew Robb, pictured at the Fowler Museum.

UCLA boasts scores of iconic alumni, but also countless others who have made admirable contributions with minimal fanfare. Our Stories, Our Impact will showcase the unsung heroes who have advanced social justice and equality movements in Los Angeles and across the nation. A multimedia exhibit will raise the profile of these Bruins, past and present. The exhibit, featuring 10 people, will move from the UCLA campus to venues across the city.

“We know about many alumni who resourced their earnings and fame in positive ways,” says Abel Valenzuela, professor and director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. “But we want to celebrate those who took a less linear path to leadership, like the leaders of the L.A. teachers’ strike, or the students who led the DACA movement and other campus-based efforts to support diversity and equity.”

Our Stories, Our Impact will be a joint production of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, the Labor Center and the Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Immigration Policy, in partnership with the UCLA American Indian Studies Center, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA and UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center — the four ethnic studies programs at UCLA that have fueled campus diversity and the rise of students and graduates fighting for equity and social change, Valenzuela notes.

The fourth centennial initiative harkens back to UCLA’s origins as a teachers’ college in downtown Los Angeles. UCLA Data for Democracy in L.A. enlists campus re- search centers that address issues of social inequality and opportunity to partner with Los Angeles K-12 teachers to strengthen civic discourse among the city’s youth.

“We’ve been hearing from teachers and principals across the country about disputes over what were pre- viously perceived to be facts, as well as the spread of untrustworthy information through the Internet,” says John Rogers, faculty director of Center X and the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access in UCLA’s Gradu- ate School of Education & Information Studies, which is spearheading the initiative. “With this project, we want to engage young people in establishing more powerful relationships with the data so that they can assess the degree to which information is trustworthy and then use it to address problems in their everyday lives.”

Every month throughout the 2019-2020 school year, participating K-12 classrooms will receive data from UCLA research centers highlighting a local issue of in- equality and opportunity, along with questions designed to assist teachers in helping students to analyze and interpret the data, conduct related investigations and hold evidence- based discussions on how to address these concerns. The initiative will culminate with a Centennial Youth Summit, bringing students to UCLA to present and exchange ideas with the research centers’ faculty and staff.

Rogers sees the initiative as part mathematics education and part civics lesson. “As a great public university, we should not only make our data public, but also encourage a more vibrant and robust public life in Los Angeles,” he says. “The university plays an important role in supporting informed dialogue and communication about critical public policy issues among all residents of Los Angeles.”

Cuervo adds that UCLA’s position as a leading public institution and major driver of progress dictates that the celebration should go well outside the confines of Westwood and be both democratic and forward-facing. “We hold the values and themes of our mission as a public university very dearly,” he says. “The centennial year is an opportunity to embody them, expand them and recommit.”