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From Vox
Biden plans to reverse Trump’s Alaska policy. Here’s why it matters. -
A view of Mendenhall Glacier and Nugget Falls, in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. | Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket/Getty Images
Tongass National Forest is a frequent target for political ping-pong between environmental and development interests.
On Friday the Biden administration revealed plans to reinstate environmental protections preventing logging and mining in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, which the Trump administration had discarded. The 17 million acres in southeastern Alaska — the largest national forest in the US — have been a political battleground for over two decades, bouncing back and forth between the interests of logging industries and climate activists.
In 2001, President Bill Clinton finalized the “roadless rule,” which prohibited road construction on 60 million acres of forested land across the US and heavily restricted commercial logging and mining. But in October of 2020, then-President Donald Trump reversed these protections when he made the Tongass Forest exempt from the rule, doing what many developers and politicians in Alaska had been calling for since the Clinton era. But this reversal didn’t last for long.
The Biden administration vowed to undo damaging policies
Since his time on the campaign trail, President Joe Biden has been vocal about climate action, specifically in contrast with the policies that the Trump administration had passed. After the US, under Trump, left the Paris climate agreement and engineered the largest reduction of protected lands in US history, Biden entered office ready to undo the damage. On the same day Biden was sworn in, on January 20, 2021, he signed an executive order titled “Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis,” which includes goals to reduce climate pollution, and to review and revoke action items set forth by the previous administration.
One of the most notable was the revocation of the March 2019 permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline. The project, begun in 2008 and only officially called off this month, has faced backlash at every stage of its development. Canceled by the Obama administration in 2015, and then renewed in 2017 when Trump invited TC Energy, the pipeline’s Canadian developer, to reapply for a permit, the Keystone XL is a perfect example of the back-and-forththat climate politics can have depending on who is in office.
The Tongass National Forest is yet another example. From a developer’s perspective, Alaska’s natural resources make it a gold mine. Its old growth forests make it ideal for harvesting timber, its coastal plains are plentiful in prospective drilling sites for oil and natural gas, and developing these opportunities could boost the state’s economy. No specifics as to how the “roadless rule” reversal will be carried out have been announced, apart from the intent to “repeal or replace” it, but Alaskan officials are aware of the economic loss, and have been vocal about the change.
“The Biden administration’s announcement is an unacceptable whipsaw in federal policy just months after an exhaustively-reviewed final rule was issued by the Trump administration that struck the right balance between conserving the lands we cherish and fostering opportunities for hard-working Alaskans,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) said in a joint statement which also included comments from fellow Alaska Republicans Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Don Young.
Disappointed in the @POTUS latest suppression of AK economic opportunity. From tourism to timber, Alaska’s great Tongass National Forest holds much opportunity for Alaskans but the federal government wishes to see Alaskans suffer at the lack of jobs and prosperity. #akgov#alaska
— Governor Mike Dunleavy (@GovDunleavy) June 11, 2021
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican,alsoexpressed his disapproval of the Biden action on Twitter andlater added, “We will use every tool available to push back on the latest imposition.”
Biden is currently attending the annual G7 summit, which is meeting this year in Cornwall, England. World leaders are expected to address environmental policy on Sunday.
Effects of logging could be dramatic to the “lungs” of North America
While politicians paint a picture of an oppressive federal government that would deny normal Alaskans access to “jobs and prosperity,” the narrative rings a bit hollow when set against actual feedback from the public.In 2019, the US Forest Service released a summary of over 140,000 comments on the “roadless rule” from the public which overwhelmingly supported the restrictions on forest development. In fact, one of the main points of rationale as to why the public thinks the “roadless rule” should remain was that it is vital to the tourism and fishing industries.
According to research by an economic development organization called the Southeast Conference, in 2019 Alaska’s timber industry (along with warehousing, utilities, and transport) only provided 4 percent of Alaskans with jobs in contrast to the 18 percent that were employed by tourism. Commercial fishing, tourism, and recreation are the fastest growing job sectors in southeast Alaska, according to the research. The Southeast Conference has not issued an official statement, but its executive director, Robert Venables, joined Gov. Dunleavy’s statement, in which he accused multiple administrations of “playing ping-pong” with Alaskans and the resources of the state.
In addition to providing jobs, as the United States’ largest national forest, the Tongass plays a significant ecological role in absorbing carbon produced in the US. According to National Geographic, the temperate rainforest absorbs approximately 8 percent of the pollution produced in the US. “While tropical rainforests are the lungs of the planet, the Tongass is the lungs of North America,” Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist with the Earth Island Institute’s Wild Heritage project, told the Washington Post. In fact, the United States Geological Survey recently estimated that if no trees were lost through logging and the land were left unmanaged in the Tongass, its carbon storage could increase by up to 27 percent by the end of the century.
Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket/Getty Images
Brown bears fishing for salmon on Baranof Island in the Tongass National Forest.
The Tongass is also home to a thriving wildlife population, but Trump’s reversal of the “roadless rule” put this in danger. On land, the state of Alaska is home to 95 percent of America’s brown bear population, and the Tongass specifically contains the highest concentration of brown bears on the planet, while the forest’s 17,000 miles of clean freshwater provide optimal spawning conditions for wild salmon. Due to its high populations, the Tongass is sometimes called a “salmon forest” and, as it produces $60 million of wild salmon annually, this name is not far-fetched. But, if not for the “roadless rule,” this might have changed. Logging around a stream causes runoff like silt or dirt into the water, which can smother developing eggs, while dams, often used to maneuver logs down waterways, disorient the fish and disrupt their natural migratory patterns.
Damage to the Tongass goes beyond statistics for Alaska Natives
While this is a loss that can affect any Alaskan, to AlaskanNatives, losing wild salmon and the forests that house them means much more than a declining food source. Twenty-three percent of the region’s population comes from the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian tribes, who have been fighting for recognition and for better treatment of their ancestral land which includes the expansive Tongass Forest.
While logging industries threaten food sources, cultural resources like Western red and Alaskan yellow cedar trees, which many communities use to make traditional regalia, baskets, and totem poles, are also threatened. “Cedar is the warp in the basket of who we are as a people. We weave our way around the cedar, keeping ourselves connected, strong and able to carry the tools and resources forward for the next generation,” Marina Anderson, a Haida and Tlingit woman who serves as the tribal administrator of the Organized Village of Kasaan, said in an article for Juneau Empire.
Anderson recently helped to organize a workshop on cultural uses of forest resources, taught by Native Alaskans, for employees of the United States Forest Service (USFS). For years, the USFS has provided manufacturers with commercial timber from the Tongass without communication with Native populations. The workshop aimed to teach USFS workers how to distinguish different types of trees that can be used to make canoes and totem poles, or trees that are rare and should be protected. While this type of cross-cultural exchange does not target the heavy hitters of industry or politics, it does make an impact on the people carrying out the work.
What Facebook’s two-year Trump ban does and doesn’t do -
This is how Donald Trump makes a “Like.” | James Devaney/GC Images
The social network says the former president will receive a two-year ban following his actions surrounding January 6.
Donald Trump’s Facebook ban will last at least two years, the company announced on Friday. Facebook said that the former president’s actions on January 6, which contributed to a violent mob storming Capitol Hill and staging an insurrection that led to five deaths, “constituted a severe violation of our rules,” and that it was enacting this policy change as part of a new approach to public figures during civil unrest.
Facebook added that the two-year sanction constitutes a time period “long enough” to be a significant deterrent to Trump and other world leaders who might make similar posts, as well as enough to allow for a “safe period of time after the acts of incitement.” However, Facebook still has not made a final decision about the future of Trump’s account. The company said that after two years, it will again evaluate whether there’s still a risk to public safety and potential civil unrest.
“We know that any penalty we apply — or choose not to apply — will be controversial. There are many people who believe it was not appropriate for a private company like Facebook to suspend an outgoing President from its platform, and many others who believe Mr. Trump should have immediately been banned for life,” Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of global affairs, said in a blog post, later adding: “The Oversight Board is not a replacement for regulation, and we continue to call for thoughtful regulation in this space.”
Facebook
The announcement comes after Facebook’s oversight board, a group of policy experts and journalists the company has appointed to handle difficult content moderation questions, decided to uphold the platform’s freeze on the former president’s account. In May, the board ruled that Facebook should not have banned Trump indefinitely and would have to make a final decision within six months. The board also said that Facebook would have to clarify its rules about world leaders and the risk of violence, among other recommendations.
“The Oversight Board is reviewing Facebook’s response to the Board’s decision in the case involving former US President Donald Trump and will offer further comment once this review is complete,” the board’s press team said in response to Facebook’s Friday announcement. Later in the day, the board said in a statement it was “encouraged” by Facebook’s decision, and will monitor the company’s implementation.
Facebook now says it will fully implement 15 of the oversight board’s 19 recommendations. It also responded to the board’s demand that it provide more detail on its newsworthiness exception, a policy that Facebook has used — though rarely — to give politicians a free pass to post content that violates its rules. Now, Facebook says it will label posts that receive those exceptions, and will treat politicians’ posts more like those from regular users.
This set of decisions from Facebook has major implications not just for Trump’s account but also for national politics in the United States in the foreseeable future. At the same time, they signal that the company has remained steadfast in maintaining its power to decide what politicians can ultimately post to the platform. Facebook is providing more details about the rules it could use to punish politicians who violate its community guidelines, potentially increasing transparency. Still, it’s Facebook that has the final say over enforcement, including what’s considered newsworthy and remains on the platform versus what violates its community guidelines and gets removed.
Facebook still decides who gets a free pass from its rules
In Friday’s announcement, Facebook said it would change one of its most controversial policies: an allowance for content that breaks its rules but is important enough to the public discourse to remain online, often because it has been posted by a politician. Some call this the “newsworthiness exception” or the “world leader exception.” Now, Facebook is changing the rules so that the exemption seems more transparent and less unfair. But the company is still preserving its power to decide what happens the next time a politician posts something offensive or dangerous.
Trump was the inspiration for this exemption, which Facebook first created in 2015 after the former president (then a candidate) posted a video of himself saying Muslims should be banned from the United States. The newsworthiness exception was formally announced in 2016 and has long been controversial because it creates two types of users and posts: those who have to follow Facebook’s rules and those that don’t, and can post offensive and even dangerous content.
In 2019, the company added more detail. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs and communication, said that Facebook would presume anything a politician posted to its platform would be of interest to the public, and should stay up — “even when it would otherwise breach our normal content rules” — and as long as the public interest outweighed the risk of harm.
The policy also presumably serves as a convenient shield for Facebook to avoid getting into fights with powerful people (like the president of the United States).
For all the controversy and confusion it has produced, Facebook says the newsworthiness exception is rarely deployed. In 2020, Facebook’s independent civil rights audit reported that Facebook had only used the exception 15 times in the previous year, and only once in the US. Facebook amended its previous statement to the oversight board on Friday, saying it has only technically used the standard once in regard to Trump, over a video Trump posted of one of his 2019 rallies. Despite rarely being the beneficiary of the policy, the oversight board said back in May Trump’s account suspension meant Facebook should respond to the ongoing confusion.
Now, Facebook says politicians’ content will be analyzed for violations of its community guidelines — and weighed against the public interest — just like any other user. While that means the formalized global leader exception is gone, much of what actually remains up and off Facebook remains where it started: in Facebook’s hands.
Facebook won’t study how the platform contributed to January 6
In the aftermath of the deadly January 6 insurrection, many have pointed to the role social media platforms, including Facebook, played in exacerbating the violence. Critics of Facebook have said the insurrection showed how Facebook shouldn’t just reflect on its approach to Trump’s account, but also to the algorithms, ranking systems, and design feature choices that could have helped the rioters organize.
Even the Facebook oversight board, an independent body set up by Facebook to serve as a sort of court for litigation of the company’s most difficult content moderation decisions, recommended Facebook should take such a step. Earlier this week, allies of the Biden administration urged the company to follow that guidance and conduct a public-facing review of how the platform might have contributed to the insurrection.
Facebook has ample reason to believe their platform contributed to the events of Jan. 6. At a minimum they have an obligation to conduct a full, independent, thorough investigation, and to publish the results. It’s the least they should do.
But Facebook isn’t doing that, and it seems to be deflecting that responsibility. The company is instead pointing to a separate research effort focused on Facebook, Instagram, and the 2020 US election, which Facebook says could include studying what happened at the Capitol.
“The responsibility for January 6, 2021, lies with the insurrectionists and those who encouraged them,” the company said in its Friday decision, adding that independent researchers and politicians were best suited to researching the role of social media in the insurrection.
“We also believe that an objective review of these events, including contributing societal and political factors, should be led by elected officials,” wrote the company, adding that it would still work with law enforcement. Republicans, notably, have all but shut down the possibility of a bipartisan January 6 commission.
Facebook might never make a final ruling on Trump
Facebook is delaying, perhaps forever, a final decision on Trump himself. Right now, Facebook plans to suspend Trump for a minimum of two years, meaning he’d regain his account at the beginning of 2023. The ban does exclude Trump from using the platform to comment on the 2022 midterm elections, during which his posts could have boosted (or hurt) the hundreds of Republican candidates for the House.
Still, the two-year ban is not a final ruling as to whether Trump can return to Facebook. That means it’s still unclear if the former president will have access to the platform should he run for president again. It also leaves open the question of what it would really take for a politician to be permanently booted from the platform.
Many are frustrated that Facebook didn’t permanently ban Trump. It’s possible he could return to the platform in time to run for president in 2024, and Facebook obviously knows that. “If this gets 2 years, what can one possibly do to get a lifetime ban,” wrote one employee on an internal post, according to BuzzFeed. Civilrightsgroups reacting to the decision called Facebook’s ruling inadequate, and called Trump’s potential return to the social network a danger to democracy. Some think the decision yet again proves lawmakers need to step in and regulate social media.
Trump, for his part, seems extremely displeased with Facebook’s decision. “Facebook’s ruling is an insult to the record-setting 75M people, plus many others, who voted for us in the 2020 Rigged Presidential Election,” Trump said in a statement released Friday. “They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this censoring and silencing and ultimately we will win. Our Country can’t take this abuse any more!”
It’s not clear what Trump returning to Facebook would even look like. Facebook has said the policy is in part meant to deter politicians from violating their rules again, but Facebook’s current suspension hasn’t stopped the former president from spreading election conspiracy theories on other platforms. Facebook implied Trump could possibly return when things are more stable, but it often appears that Trump himself is a primary source of instability.
It matters that Trump won’t be posting on Facebook until 2023, at the earliest, and that the company has some shiny new rules. But overall, Facebook is once again holding onto its power to decide what happens next.
Update, June 4, 6:10 pm ET: This piece has been updated with further analysis.
Colombia’s protests are a product of its post-peace-deal reality -
Demonstrators in Cali, Colombia, shout anti-government slogans as they continue a blockade at the Sameco sector during a protest amid a national strike on May 19, 2021. | Gabriel Aponte/Getty Images
“The peace process has opened up a space for other concerns and for other political debates.”
In Cali, a city in southwestern Colombia,protestersput up barricades across the city.A front line — la primera línea — sometimes guards these barricades with masks and helmets and shields.
The government defended the proposed tax increase as a much-needed measure to repair the economy after fallout from the coronavirus. Those who opposed the legislation saw it as putting another burden on middle-class and poorer families who are already in a precarious position, also because of the coronavirus.
Anger over the tax bill also became an outlet for pent-up grievances against Colombia’s economic structures and its political elite. “It only takes a spark where there’s a lot of discontent,” Muni Jensen, senior adviser with the Albright Stonebridge Group and a former Colombian diplomat, said.
The people flooding the streets across Colombia have faced brutal crackdowns from police, fueling demonstrators’ rage and adding police brutality to their list of grievances. Human rights groups have alleged abuses such as indiscriminate beatings, killings, and sexual violence. Temblores, an organization that tracks police brutality in the country, has documented more than 3,700 cases of police violence as of May 31, 2021, as well as 45 deaths it said were caused by police. Colombia’s human rights ombudsman said at least 58 people have died during the protests so far.
“That just enraged people who are already enraged because of the situation, because of the government,” Laura Gamboa, assistant professor of political science at the University of Utah, said of the police crackdown. “What you see here is like this ball that is just going to grow and grow.”
Experts say there’s another, deeper dynamic also fueling the protests.
Instead, it created “the possibility new issues that had been long left aside, become central again,” Juan Albarracín Dierolf, assistant professor of political studies at the Universidad Icesi in Cali, Colombia, told me. Demonstrations also carried a stigma during the conflict, as political protests were often grouped together with armed resistance. That has dissipated in the aftermath of the peace deal, though it has not eliminated the heavy-handed response from police, a force shaped to counter guerrillas, not peaceful protesters.
Colombia’s protests, then, are as much about its past as they are about its present. As Albarracín said, it is all “happening really, really quickly.” Together, that is making Colombia’s future very uncertain.
Colombia’s peace process gave the space for these protests to happen
In 2012, then-Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos began negotiations with the leftist guerrillas known as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), or FARC, in an attempt to end a civil war that had gone on for more than 50 years. After four years of negotiations, the Colombian government and the FARC signed a peace deal under which the FARC demobilized and became a legitimate political party.
The peace deal did not solve all of Colombia’s problems, nor did it fully end the violence. But the civil war between the government and the FARC was Colombia’s central crisis. With the peace deal, that main cleavage consuming Colombia started to fade away, said Gamboa.
But all the other major problems stuck on the sidelines, especially socioeconomic issues, started to bubble up. Inequality, education, employment, social justice, racial inequities — all of it became much more salient.
“The peace process has opened up a space for other concerns and for other political debates,” said Sandra Botero, assistant professor of international studies and political science at Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá.
All of this was brewing underneath the surface of Colombian society — and when Duque introduced the tax bill, he unleashed these dormant frustrations.
Colombia also saw street protests in 2018 and 2019, and in some ways, this latest round of unrest is a continuation of those. But these kinds of mass protests are a relatively recent political expression in Colombia.
In the past, mass mobilization or resistance in the streets was framed by the same paradigm of war. “Before the peace agreement, any kind of dissatisfaction of the people was framed as mobilization made by the guerrillas,” Carlos Enrique Moreno León, professor of political science at the Universidad Icesi, said.
The peace deal, then, not only made room for people to push on other issues but also destigmatized demonstrations and, in doing so, reanimated one of the most potent tools regular people had to advocate for political change.
“In Colombia, civil protests were always repressed brutally because it was filed with the guerrillas and with this insurgency,” said Elvira Restrepo Saenz, associate professor of international studies at The George Washington University. “This is a post-conflict protest, and it’s unprecedented in its magnitude, in its intensity, and in its territorial comprehensiveness.”
The heavy-handed police response is a legacy of the civil war
The same peace process allowing the protests to flourish is also showing its limitations when it comes to the response from police and the government.
The Colombian National Police is very much linked to the military; though a distinctive branch, it falls under the oversight of the Ministry of Defense. The force itself was shaped by the conflict in Colombia, with officers often fighting “on the front lines, wielding tanks and helicopters as they battled guerrilla fighters and destroyed drug labs,” according to the New York Times.
Critics have said the country’s national police needs to reform, moving from a focus on training for battle to one of public safety. “On balance, there’s been a real struggle to democratize policing, in part because the institutions themselves — the police and the military — benefit politically and economically from this kind of ‘us-versus-them, we’re still at war’ mentality,” Eduardo Moncada, assistant professor of political science at Barnard College, said.
That has been on display during the most recent demonstrations. Even if the act of protest itself has become normalized in society more broadly, the police themselves still largely see the demonstrators as “internal enemies.”
“They are treating the protesters as they used to treat the guerrillas, as subversives, because that’s the type of public force that is the police,” Restrepo said. “The military and security forces that we have, that was never reformed.”
Another (almost obvious) difference is that the police can’t operate in the shadows in the same way they might have at the height of the conflict in Colombia. Now there are people with cell phones everywhere, taking videos and documenting the brutality.
Initially, Duque took a line that may sound familiar, saying he had “respect for peaceful protest” and that while incidents of police abuse are intolerable, they were isolated rather than evidence of a systemic problem. (He has since promised some reforms.)
The government has also alleged that some of the violence and chaos is the work of guerrillas, including the vestiges of the FARC, as well as drug traffickers who have infiltrated the protests. At the end of May, when protests had stretched on for a full month, Duque deployed the military to Cali, saying the increased capacity would help in the areas that have seen “acts of vandalism, violence and low-intensity urban terrorism.” Officials have also said hundreds of police officers have been injured, including by armed civilians.
Restrepo said the government is trying to bring the FARC guerrillas and Colombia’s conflict back to the center of the agenda “to justify the militarization of the police and the techniques that they’re using, the violence [and] brutality that they’re using.” In other words, when it works politically, go back to the us-versus-them paradigm.
This has further enraged protesters who see their legitimate grievances being ignored and their anger recast.
But at the same time, there are credible reports of street gangs and other criminal elements blending into the protests, trying to sow and take advantage of the chaos for their own gain.
Colombia, despite the peace deal, is still dealing with a very precarious security situation. Instead of an armed conflict, a slew of non-state actors and paramilitaries are engaging in violence of a particular form, including selective and extrajudicial killings, particularly against human rights advocates, community organizers, and civil society leaders.
Experts told me it would be a mistake to say all protesters, or even all blockades in cities like Cali, are associated with criminal elements. “That being said, you’re having this context of social protests embedded in a city, in a country where, of course, there are some powerful criminal organizations and guerrilla groups,” the Universidad Icesi’s Albarracín said. At least some of those groups will take advantage of the disorder — and the front lines are already so chaotic and disorganized, it’s hard to know who’s who.
None of this, of course, negates the very real and well-documented allegations of misconduct against Colombia’s police force. But it is a reminder of just how complex the situation on the ground in Colombia really is.
The protests are diverse in geography and demands, and that makes for a messy and volatile combination
Beyond the question of whether “terrorists” are mixing with peaceful protesters, figuring out who the peaceful protesters are and what they want is its own challenge.
Protests are happening across Colombia, in cities including Cali, Bogotá, and Medellin. But this is not a fully unified movement. Up close, the protests all look very different, with diverse and often localized grievances — and not all of the demands are aligned.
Just looking at Cali, which has become the symbol of the protests in Colombia, reveals just how complicated the movement is.
Many of the people on the front lines are young, including students who feel disillusioned with their education and employment opportunities. At different times, Indigenous groups, farmers, Afro-Colombian groups, labor unions, and other workers have all joined the protests.
“They are not organized by a mastermind or even by a collective,” Botero said. “Many of them are organic, and to a certain extent, spontaneous.”
Instead, there are many, many individuals or groups with many, many demands, and not all of them are in agreement with each other. At the Puerto Resistencia — the biggest barricade in Cali — about 21 separate groups occupy just one point, Moreno said. And those groups have no affiliation with the handful of others posted up at another blockade across the city. And, of course, the specific demands in a place like Cali will be different than those in, say, Bogotá.
Without obvious leaders, or a confederation of them, negotiations are extraordinarily difficult. The Duque government had been negotiating with the organizers from the Comité Nacional de Paro, or National Strike Committee, who originally called for the national strike in response to the proposed tax bill. But the National Strike Committee walked away from talks this week. The protests have become much bigger, though, and the committee is largely disconnected from the action on the ground. “Certainly, those are part of the groups that are being mobilized,” Botero said. “But the strike committee does not control the blockages that are happening in Cali.”
On the local level, city or municipal governments are also trying to quell the unrest and negotiate with protesters. Local officials, for example, have to deliver services behind the blockades. But they, too, are struggling to make inroads amid the demonstrations.
Experts said that even if protesters do sit down withlocal officials and come to an agreement, it tends to fall apart quickly. For one, who comes to the table to represent the protesters? Plus, the local government has limited resources and power; it can’t necessarily follow through on whatever promises it makes, and right now, it doesn’t have the backing of the national government.
And even if a bunch of groups and the local government agree somehow, others affiliated with the protests may be left out or feel like their demands weren’t fully heard, so why would they agree to any bargain and get off the streets?
It is, as Albarracín put it, “tiers of confusion.”
Where do the protests go from here?
Colombia’s protests, in some ways, fit into the larger global movement against police brutality and injustice that has arisen over the last year in countries from the United States to Nigeria. In other ways, they are specific to Colombia’s current status as a country still trying to overcome a decades-long conflict, with a population trying to push a more democratic and equal vision.
“The protests have put on the table a requestioning of power in Colombia,” the University of Utah’s Gamboa said.
Still, critics say these reforms are superficial and won’t go far in addressing the systemic problems in the force. They are calling for such actions as moving the national police force out from the auspices of the Ministry of Defense and disbanding the riot police.
There’s another challenge blocking any sort of real breakthrough: the electoral calendar. Scheduled for May 2022, Colombia’s presidential election is less than a year away. Duque is a lame duck and cannot run again (Colombia’s presidents are limited to one four-year term).
Whoever wins, Botero said, will inherit a “powder keg” — but right now, politicians on both the left and the right are carefully positioning themselves as they try to use the fallout from the protests to advance their own agendas.
This kind of volatile politics tends to benefit the more extreme candidates on either side, which may make it harder to find a leader who will address the very real need for change and reform in Colombia. That is a threat to Colombia’s democracy, and to the peace it is still trying to build.
From The Hindu: Sports
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From Jokes Subreddit
A man wearing a ten-gallon hat and leather boots goes into a bar and sits down next to a woman. “Are you a real cowboy?”, she asks him. -
He responds: “For all my life, I have been tamed and ridden horses. I have repaired fences, herded and tended to cows and caught escaped cows. I think it would make sense to call myself a cowboy.”
To which she says: “Interesting. I myself am a lesbian. I wake up thinking about women, when I am in the shower I think about women, at night laying in bed I think about women. I constantly think about women.” They talk for a while, until she gets up and leaves.
An older couple enters the bar and sits down next to the cowboy. They eyeball him a short while and then muster up the courage to ask him:“Are you a real cowboy?”,
to which he replies:“For all my life I thought I was a cowboy, but today I learned that I am in fact a lesbian.”
Bert and Ernie had worked together as morning drivetime radio hosts for twenty years. -
They traded jokes, played pop music and generally made people’s lives a touch brighter as they trundled to work.
Now though there was silence on the air, Ernie silently reread the fax message from civil defense. As licensed broadcasters they were legally obligated to alert the public, to tell them the nukes were flying and that in a few minutes, all of the world’s troubles would be over.
What was the point of that though? To torture people with the knowledge of something they couldn’t change?
Their eyes met and a decision was reached. Bert put on their most requested song, a sugary top 40 tune while Ernie produced a bottle of bourbon from under the desk. As their producer banged on the locked studio door, the colleagues toasted the end of a long career.
Bert, always the consummate professional, turned away from the window as the first explosion split the distant horizon. He straightened his tie, tucked in his shirt and brushed his hair back. He would meet his fiery death with dignity.
Bert turned to Ernie and said in a quiet, resigned voice, “How do I look, Ernie?”
Ernie walked slowly over to his friend. He looked into Bert’s face and saw the closeness they shared, the strength of their relationship, forged over the years. took a deep breath and spoke quietly:
An elderly man in Phoenix calls his son in New York and says, “I hate to ruin your day, but I have to tell you that your mother and I are divorcing, forty-five years of misery is enough.”
“Pop, what are you talking about?” the son screams.
“We can’t stand the sight of each other any longer,” the old man says.
“We’re sick of each other, and I’m sick of talking about this, so you call your sister in Chicago and tell her,” and he hangs up.
Frantic, the son calls his sister, who explodes on the phone. “Like heck they’re getting divorced,” she shouts, “I’ll take care of this.”
She calls Phoenix immediately, and screams at the old man, “You are NOT getting divorced. Don’t do a single thing until I get there. I’m calling my brother back, and we’ll both be there tomorrow. Until then, don’t do a thing, DO YOU HEAR ME?” and hangs up.
The old man hangs up his phone and turns to his wife. “Okay,” he says, "They’re coming for Thanksgiving and paying their own fares Now what do we tell them for Christmas?
A lady approaches a priest and shyly tells him, “Father, I have a problem. I have these two talking female parrots but, they only know how to say one thing… they keep saying ‘Hi, we’re hot… do you want to fuck us?’” -
“That’s terrible!” says the priest. “But, I have a solution to your problem. Bring your two parrots over to my house tomorrow. I will put them with my two male talking parrots… to whom I’ve taught to pray and read the bible. My parrots will then teach your parrots to stop saying that terrible filth, and your female parrots will learn to pray and worship the good Lord.” So the next day, the lady brings her two female parrots to the priest’s house. The priest’s two male parrots are holding rosary beads and praying in their cage. The lady puts her female talking parrots in with the male talking Parrots, and the female parrots say, “Hi, we’re hot. Do you want to fuck us?” One male parrot looks over at the other male parrot and screams, “put the bible away you idiot, our prayers have been answered!”
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