Starting on Monday, October 2, 2017, Embassy Panama Federal Benefits Unit will cease performing most Social Security Administration-related federal benefit services.
This change is occurring because the Bureau of Consular Affairs and the Social Security Administration (SSA) are updating our Interagency Agreement, which outlines services that most Consular Sections at US embassies can perform on behalf of SSA.
SSA requires all beneficiaries and most applicants living overseas to contact the specially-designated Federal Benefits Units (FBUs) abroad that are best equipped to handle such inquiries. Because of the changes, the FBU designated for Panama will now be the US Embassy in Costa Rica.
These changes are not expected to affect other federal benefits services
Arab workers now banned from Har Adar, built where two Palestinian villages were confiscated and demolished. In the wake of the shooting Israeli soldiers arrested 15 people in retaliation.
A Tale of Two Stories
by Uri Avnery
This is the story: at 7 o’clock in the morning, an Arab approaches the gate of Har Adar, a settlement close to the Green Line near the Israeli-Arab village of Abu Ghosh.
The man is a “good Arab.” A good Arab with a work permit in the settlement. He lives in the nearby West Bank Arab village of Beit Surik. He received a work permit there because he fits all the criteria — he is 37 years old, married and father of four children. The inhabitants of Har Adar know him well, because he has been cleaning their homes for years.
This Tuesday morning he arrived at the gate as usual. But something aroused suspicion among the guards. He was wearing a jacket, though the weather was quite hot on this early autumn day. The guards asked him to remove his jacket.
Instead, the man took out a loaded pistol and shot three of the guards in the head at close range — two civilian guards and a member of the semi-military Border Guards. One of the victims was himself an Arab. Another security officer, the local commander of the guards, was severely wounded. Since the assailant had never received military training, the precision of his shots was astounding. The pistol had been stolen 15 years ago.
All Israel was shocked. How could this happen? A good Arab like this? An Arab with permits? Why would he do such a thing in a place where he was well liked and well treated? Where he played with the children? And that after he was thoroughly vetted by the Security Service, which has innumerable Arab spies and is considered well-nigh infallible?
Something extraordinary must have happened. Someone must have incited him against the Jews and the nice people of Har Adar, who had treated him so well. Perhaps the UN speech by Mahmoud Abbas. Or perhaps some secret contacts with Hamas. “Incitement!” cried Binyamin Netanyahu.
But then another fact emerged, which explained everything. The man had quarreled with his wife. He had beaten her up, and she had escaped to her family in Jordan, leaving the four children behind.
So, obviously, he had become temporarily unhinged. In a state of mental derangement he had forgotten the kindness of the Har Adar people. Just a unique case, that need not trouble us further.
But it all shows that you can’t trust the Arabs. They are a bunch of murderers. You cannot make peace with them until they change completely. So we must keep the occupied territories.
That is the story. But there is another story, too. The story as seen by the man himself.
From his home in neighboring Beit Surik, the man — whose name was, by the way, Nimr (“leopard”) Mahmoud Ahmed al-Jamal — could see Har Adar from his home every day when he woke up. For him, as for every Arab, it was a flourishing Jewish settlement, built on expropriated Arab land. Like his own village, it belonged to the Palestinian West Bank which is occupied territory.
He had to get up in the darkness of the night in order to get to Har Adar on time — 7.00 o’clock in the morning — and work hard until late in the night, arriving home at about 10 o’clock. This is the lot of tens of thousands of Arab laborers. They may look friendly, especially when their livelihood depends on it. They may even be really friendly to benevolent masters. But deep in their hearts they cannot forget for a moment that they are cleaning the toilets of the Jews who came to Arab Palestine and occupied their homeland.
Since most of the agricultural land of their villages has been expropriated for Jewish settlements, they have no choice but to work in these low-status jobs. There is no industry to speak of in the West Bank. Wages are minimal, often below the legal minimum wage in Israel proper (some 1500 dollars per month). Since they have no choice, they are not far from being slaves. Like the nice slaves in “Gone with the Wind.”
Such a man may be at peace with this reality, but if something bad happens, he may suddenly become upset with his status and decide to become a martyr. Nimr left behind a letter in which he defended his wife and absolved her from any responsibility for the deed he had planned for the next day.
So these are the two stories, which have very little in common.
The people of Har Adar are completely shocked. Since they live 20 minutes drive from Jerusalem, they do not consider themselves settlers at all, but Israelis like any other. They don’t really see the Arabs all around them as people like themselves, but as primitive natives.
The Har Adar people are not like the fanatical, religious and nearly fascist people in some settlements. Far from it. Har Adar people vote for all parties, including Meretz, the left-wing Zionist party which advocates the return of the occupied territories to the Palestinians. This is not seen as including Har Adar, of course, since there is a consensus among Zionists, right and left, that the settlements close to the Green Line should be annexed to Israel.
Har Adar people can rightly be proud of their achievements. From the air, the place looks very orderly. It has 3858 inhabitants. Their average income is about 5000 dollars a month, well over the national Israeli average (some 3000 dollars). Their local council is the third most efficient in the entire country.
Located in the mountainous area around Jerusalem, it has a beautiful landscape. It also has man-made amenities: a library, a youth club, a skate-park and an amphitheater that seats 720 people. Even for an average Israeli, this is paradise. For the Arabs around, who cannot enter without a special permit, it is a perpetual reminder of their national disaster.
Of course, like other settlements, Har Adar is not located on land that was empty. It occupies the location on which stood a village called Hirbat Nijam, a village which already stood there in Persian-Hellenistic times, some 2500 years ago. Like most Palestinian villages, they were Canaanite, then Judean, then Hellenist, then Byzantine, then Muslim, then crusader, then Mameluk, then Ottoman, then Palestinian — without the population ever changing. Until 1967.
When Nimr was born, all this long history was long forgotten. What remained was the reality of the Israeli occupation.
This now looks like the normal state of things. The members of Har Adar are happy, feeling secure and well guarded by the efficient Security Service, the Border Guard and local mercenaries, mostly Arab citizens of Israel. Neighbors like Nimr seem content, and probably are, if they are lucky enough to have a job and a work permit, even with pitiful wages. The historical grudge lies deeply buried within their consciousness.
And then something happens, something that may be quite irrelevant — like the escape of his wife to Jordan — to bring it all up. Nimr the lowly laborer suddenly becomes Nimr the freedom-fighter, Nimr the martyr on his way to paradise. All his village respects his sacrifice and his family.
Israelis are furious that the families of “martyrs” are paid an allowance by the Palestinian Authority. Binyamin Netanyahu accuses Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) of incitement to murder with these payments. But it is quite impossible for Abbas to annul them — the outrage reaction of his people would be tremendous. Martyrs are holy, their families respected.
The day after Nimr’s dastardly terrorist act and/or heroic martyrdom, a grandiose national ceremony took place in another settlement.
All the country’s major dignitaries, led by the President and the Prime Minister, assembled to commemorate the 50tth anniversary of “our return to our homeland, Judea and Samaria, the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights.”
Missing in the list is the Gaza Strip, which Israel has evacuated, leaving behind a tight land and sea blockade aided by Egypt. In the Strip there are about two million Palestinians. Who the hell wants them?
All hell broke loose when the President of the Supreme Court, who was supposed to send a judge to represent the court at this ceremony, canceled his attendance because of the highly propagandist style of the event. She decided that this is party propaganda, in which her court would not take part.
Altogether, not a day of quiet in this country, a state without borders and without a constitution, where every story has two totally different sides, where nice and quiet people suddenly become raging martyrs.
There will be no quiet until there is peace, with each of the two peoples living in their own state, a situation where real friendship has a chance of blooming.
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.
comunicado de lose profesores de las escuelas de arte de INAC
“El compromiso por el desarrollo y mejortamiento de la cultura nacional, su accionar educativo formativo y academico, asi como su proyeccion en tods sus formas y ambitos deberia ser el norte y ruta a seguir decualquiera institucion que se digne decir la encargada de velar y promover la cultura en panama- sentimos que este rumbo no se esta llevando a cabo ni siquiera considerando para el mas comun y humilde de los panameños”.
Por las respuestas al pliego de peticiones con 21 puntos entregados al INAC, MEDUCA y Presidente de la Republica (hace más de 2 años), y del cual se desprenden muchas soluciones a los males que aquejan e interrumpen el normal y correcto desarrollo cultural de este país.
La crisis educativa no tiene solución solo a lo interno del apartado institucional del INAC y refleja una ruptura general del régimen político partidocratico incapaz de solventar, gestionar y respetar los derechos del ciudadano. Con esta urge un cambio político institucional profundo y meridiano para poder decir que se supera este abismal problema que afecta todo el país.
Por una verdadera justicia laboral que asegure el cumplimiento de los acuerdos en materia laboral, ya sea por asuntos de pagos atrasados, deudas pendientes o derechos incumplidos.
Por el mejoramiento de las infraestructuras y condiciones de los centros, escuelas e institutos para así poder y decir que se alcanza los logros educativos con calidad integral en las artes de este país. Por una verdadera evaluación integral del sistema educativo de las escuelas, centros e institutos de Bellas Artes, no punitiva y que responda a la realidad del país permitiendo un diagnóstico preciso y una efectiva investigación socioeducativa para la planificación de políticas públicas.
Por qué los debidos procesos de la Ley Orgánica de Educación se lleven a cabo de una manera coherente sin violentarla y aplicarla de manera positiva, llevando a cabo una integración MEDUCA/INAC como se debe para que todos los procesos fluyan de manera positiva y factibles.
~ ~ ~
Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web
La gran vergüenza de América pronunció. Ya los músicos están uniendo con tanta gente común para hacer su trabajo. ~ America’s great embarrassment spoke. Now musicians are joining with so many ordinary people to do his job.
Conjuntos / Together
Mezcla bilingüe y de generaciones ~ Bilingual and inter-generational mix
Stevie Wonder – A Wonder Summer’s Night (full concert) https://youtu.be/9dB9ZyXtXlQ
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information. Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
The stench that the rot of corruption produces in Panamanian public institutions reaches levels never sniffed in our country in recent decades.
Thanks to impunity and the ineptitude of top officials, our country sails upon dangerous waters. It allows us to presage a sinking under the waves of violence to be generated. This is the product of policies that break down the functions of the Public Ministry and cover up the actions of the mega-criminal enterprise Odebrecht, the offspring of the Attorney General’s office and its leadership.
Patrick Suskind, in his novel “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer,” brilliantly tells us pf the life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who lived in France in the eighteenth century and was “one of the most genial and abominable men of an era in which the abominable and genial men were not scarce.”
The German writer tells us that at the time of his story “there was a stench in the cities hardly conceivable for modern man. The streets stank of manure, the interior courtyards stank of urine, the stairwells of rotting wood and rat droppings. kitchens with rotten cabbage and mutton fat. The unventilated rooms stank of moldy dust, the bedrooms, greasy sheets, damp duvets, and the sweet, sweet smell of the urinals … Men and women stank of sweat and dirty clothes, in their mouths infected teeth stank, breaths smelled like onions and bodies, when they were no longer young, with stale cheese, sour milk and rumors of evil … “
Jean Baptiste Grenouille produced a rare perfume that subjugated the will of the one who smelled it. Thanks to his marvel he obtained the favor of high society and control over the powerful. In our times Odebrecht has emulated Suskind’s character, has managed, with its bribes, to seduce our authorities and turn them into concealers of the stench of their crimes against our country.
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.
Working against time to save anyone still living. Photo by Notimex.
Mexico’s road to recovery after quakes is far longer than it looks
by Morten Wendelbo — The Conversation / Texas A&M
In the span of just 11 days, Mexico was devastated by two major earthquakes that destroyed buildings and claimed lives across southern and central Mexico. The official death count was higher than 400 as of September 24, but it will continue to climb as relief efforts turn from rescue work to the recovery of bodies buried in the rubble.
In the days ahead, other measures of the disaster’s extent will emerge, including the number of people who were physically injured and the estimated costs to the Mexican economy. No matter the measure, the disaster has clearly devastated many parts of Mexico. But, even then, those measures still obscure the true human cost of the disaster.
Long after the dust settles and new buildings are erected in the place of those that crumbled, tens of thousands of Mexicans will continue to feel the impact of the disaster. Many families, especially those living in poverty, will see their health, well-being and ability to escape poverty worsen for decades. Some will be affected for life.
I study how earthquakes and other natural disasters affect individuals, households and communities — and how to prevent natural hazards from becoming natural disasters in the first place. My research on past earthquakes and other natural disasters shows that these events exacerbate social disparities that are much more difficult to repair than the physical destruction.
Losses caused by a natural disaster almost always affect the poor disproportionately and can even cause poverty. Beyond the devastating loss of a loved one, the loss of life is catastrophic for a household that struggles to put food on the table every day. For a poor family, the loss of a breadwinner threatens the future of everyone. For many families, even a modest loss of access to food can lead to malnutrition or affect the long-term health of family members.
And a minor loss in the ability to work or farm profoundlythreatens the welfare in households that live close to the subsistence level.
What little savings poor households have are typically tied up in the value of their house, their livestock or some other physical asset. These life savings are often meant to support children through school or to invest agricultural equipment that could substantially increase yields. In developing communities where access to credit is limited, a household’s ability to escape poverty depends almost exclusively on savings. In the blink of an eye, the life savings of thousands of Mexican families disappeared this month.
While shaking near the epicenters of the two earthquakes was 8.1 and 7.1 on the Richter scale, both of which can cause even modern buildings to crumble, shaking as low as 5.5 can cause noteworthy property damage. While fully collapsed buildings, fatalities and even injuries were fairly concentrated, at least nine states outside of Mexico City experienced widespread shaking high enough to ruin a poor household’s assets.
The Mexico City quake’s scope. Wikimedia map.
The loss of property deteriorates a family’s ability to sustain the agricultural output upon which their food security and other needs depend. The 2017 earthquakes came during the middle of a growing season for many households. It is too soon to know just how badly the agricultural capacity in southern Mexico has been affected. In other disasters, like the earthquakes in Nepal in 2015, there was a significant loss of crops.
Lower agricultural output will have widespread consequences across the region, inevitably affecting food prices. As the yield drops, or the price of sustaining the yield increases, food prices must rise. Poor families will in turn have a harder time sustaining a sufficient diet, or they will have to reallocate funds intended for long-term improvements to satisfy immediate needs. Many households that sustained no direct damage will be affected.
The United States Geological Survey predicts losses of between $100 million and $1 billion for the second of the earthquakes alone. However, these numbers almost certainly underestimate the long-run consequences that accrue, especially in the case of poor families.
As Mexico moves forward and the world responds, it will be important to remember that the total number of assets lost is not a meaningful indicator of how deeply lives are affected by the disaster. Losses of expensive luxury or vacation homes will quickly increase the total asset losses, while not affecting the food security of their owners. A $100 loss, while adding little to the total, can mean ruin for a subsistence-level household. Such a loss can cause not only short-term food insecurity but also an inability to escape poverty in the long run.
The emergency response will soon end and the world will turn its attention to the next disaster, but Mexican families will still feel the effects of the twin earthquakes for years to come.
Morten Wendelbo, Lecturer, Bush School of Government and Public Service; Research Fellow, Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs; and, Policy Sciences Lecturer, Texas A&M University Libraries, Texas A&M University
After spending trillions of dollars on counterproductive regime change wars in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, we cannot afford to enmesh ourselves in another costly conflict with North Korea.
Trading barbs, personal insults, and threats with Kim Jong Un has put the United States in a more tenuous position in East Asia than we have experienced since the Korean War. Taking a hardline stance that abandons diplomacy has caused the North Korean military to multiply their ballistic missile tests, put Guam in their crosshairs, and now threaten to shoot down American military planes.
Regime change policy has failed, and it has nearly bankrupted our federal government. We have leaders who drag their feet at ensuring clean water for Flint or health care for the American public, but who jump at the opportunity to entangle ourselves in more costly foreign conflicts. Toppling Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein has not made the world safer — instead, dictators like Kim Jong Un cling harder to their nuclear arsenal as the only deterrent to further US aggression.
I need your help to break through the bipartisan foreign policy establishment that says the United States must wage war in countries across the world. Support diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis in North Korea.
The cost of war is profound. I have served alongside friends in the Middle East who never made it home, and alongside still more who have struggled against systemic issues at home that we have neglected for want of more foreign entanglements.
Diplomacy is our best hope to de-escalate the crisis with North Korea, and ultimately denuclearize the Korean peninsula. In order to protect our troops and allies in South Korea, Japan, and on naval vessels patrolling the Pacific, we have a responsibility to bring North Korea to the table.
We can only win North Korea’s trust when we swear off our arbitrary interventions in sovereign countries. Peace, not war, is the only sane option, but there is a longstanding bipartisan consensus in Washington that disagrees. I have never been afraid of going against my own party or the Washington establishment to do what I feel is right. Please sign our petition for diplomacy and an end to counterproductive regime change policy.
Peace is more difficult to achieve than conflict. We cannot be afraid of standing up to our enemies — especially when all our enemies seem to want is violence. Let’s find a better path forward.
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.
The calls of frogs on warm nights in the spring are a welcome sound, telling listeners that the seasons are changing and summer is coming. Today, however, ponds that once echoed with thechirps,chucklesandcallsof frogs and toads are falling silent around the world.
This loss is worrying. Amphibians are the environment’s canaries in the coal mine. Their declines provide early warning signs to scientists that stressors like habitat loss, climate change, pollution and disease are making ecosystems unhealthy. Without amphibians, insect and algae populations multiply, causing cascading effects on other organisms – including humans.
Almost half of all amphibian species on Earth are declining, and a disease called chytridiomycosis is one culprit. We work with a team of scientists and resource managers who are trying to keep amphibian populations healthy in the face of this disease.
Good science always involves uncertainty, butuncertainty makes it hardfor managers to decidewhich of manypossible actionsto take. Moreover, while scientists do field work, analyze data and present results, government agencies and other land managers typically make the decisions about how to conserve species. However, we have learned that when these groups work together, we can move toward solutions step by step.
Global distribution of threatened amphibian species.IUCN, CC BY-NC-ND
Confronting an ‘amphibian apocalypse’
The word “amphibian” has Greek roots and means “double life.” These aptly named creatures split their time between water and land. Many amphibians use their sponge-like skin to breathe and absorb nutrients, so they are sentinels of environmental changes in both habitats.
The frog infection chytridiomycosis is caused by a fungus known as Bd, short for Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and popularly known as chytrid fungus. Like amphibians, Bd has several life stages: a swimming spore that lives in water and an encysted form that occurs on frogs’ and toads’ sensitive skin. Infected animals grow lethargic and malnourished, often dying within weeks.
Several of the world’s most extraordinary amphibian species have already gone extinct due to chytridiomycosis, including the stranger-than-fictiongastric-brooding frog(which reared offspring in its mouth) and the beautifulPanamanian golden frog. Hundreds of other species are on the brink of extinction. Eradicating Bd is likely impossible, so we need to take alternative management actions to bolster amphibian populations if we want to see them survive.
Scientists have learned a great deal about Bd and its impacts over the past 20 years. Researchers know that someBd strainsare more dangerous than others; that some amphibians are geneticallyresistantor haveother mechanismsthat help them tolerate infection; and that environmental differences can createdrastically differentdisease dynamics.
Researchers have called the disease-related decline of amphibians anapocalypsethat requires anunprecedented conservation response. But despite great advances in knowledge about Bd and amphibians, no one has identified consistent, effective actions that we can use to halt or reverse these declines.
The life cycle of Bd starts with an aquatic spore that burrows into the skin of amphibians.Brian Gratwicke, CC BY
Knowing enough to act
For the past three years, we have been part of a team tasked with merging science with management in an effort to saveboreal toads, which live at high elevations in the Rocky Mountains. Juvenile toads are the size of your fingernail, but eventually grow as large as baseballs when they are sexually mature. They spend more than half of their lives buried in snow, waiting for opportunities to feed and breed in spring. Boreal toads are highly susceptible to Bd and now occupy only a fraction of their former range.
A researcher swabs the skin of a boreal toad to test for chytrid fungus. Brittany A. Mosher,CC BY-ND
The Boreal Toad Conservation Teamincludes resource managers from federal and state agencies in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico andscientists from Colorado State Universityand the US Geological Survey. The team used research on current toad populations to help predict how toads might fare in the future under various possible management actions. It was humbling and exhilarating to see our work used to make decisions that might influence the fate of a species. But we wondered whether “our” science was truly the best available, and whether our team would make the “right” decision – or even have enough information to know which choice was most likely to succeed.
Ouraction plan, recently published in Conservation Letters, proposes multiple strategies, including reintroducing toads to wetlands in Colorado; managing wetland habitats to prevent them from drying out; and slowing the spread of Bd by requiring researchers to carefully disinfect boots and gear after visiting a wetland.
No single solution
We have found thatrelocating captive-reared boreal toads is an especially effective strategy and shows some promise of successfully restoring this mountain resident to its high-elevation ecosystem. Lessons from our research will help other scientists find effective strategies for monitoring and making decisions in areas where Bd may spread.
Researchers carefully monitor tadpoles that they have introduced to a site in Rocky Mountain National Park. Eggs are collected from the wild, reared to tadpole age in captivity, and then carried in backpacks filled with water to the reintroduction site.Brittany A. Mosher
For example,Bd has recently spread to Madagascar, a mega-biodiversity hotspot with about 300 frog species, nearly all of which are found nowhere else on Earth. Our work could help managers in Madagascar formulate anational monitoring plan and prioritize strategies for conserving amphibian populations.Wildlife diseases arenotoriously hard to study and act on because they are new and complicated problems. At the start, scientists may not even be able to differentiate helpful actions from those which might be harmful. We have learned that it is rare that one single action will save a species. Rather, conservation is a learning process and a product of many actions and people. And the promise of restoring singing frogs to silent ponds is a powerful incentive for all of us to keep learning.
Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Gary Haley searches the area for people in distress during search and rescue operations following Hurricane Maria in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Sept. 22, 2017. Haley is assigned to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron Seven. Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Liam Kennedy.
Nature having doused the limelight, Puerto Rico, its families and its friends cope
by Eric Jackson, from various other media
In these days of instant communications, people outside of the world’s metropoli should have already noticed that large areas of the world are already blacked out. After all, wars rage across much of Africa, and how often does anyone see things about them in the US corporate mainstream media? Get into places with underdeveloped or undeveloped transportation and communications infrastructures and modern reporting becomes difficult to impossible, and get beyond where many Americans know and the editors of downsized news corporations decide that it’s not worth their restricted budgets to cover.
But a lot of Americans do know Puerto Rico. About two-thirds of those who consider themselves Puerto Rican live in the continental United States, where they have elected several members of Congress and scores of state and local officials. The problem with covering the devastation of Puerto Rico is much more basic, even more basic than the economy-driven undercoverage of rural areas of the United States. It’s that the lights went out in Puerto Rico, and won’t be back for some time. The cell phone towers were toppled. Mostly via combinations of generators and portable satellite links we did see some of the first responses by local officials. NBC showed us an emotional mayor of San Juan as she dampened constituents’ expectations and began to mobilize them for the hard work and sacrifices to rebuild the city and island anew. AP showed us a city worker in Yabucoa struggling to reopen a road. But mostly silence — no Twitter tweets, no citizen journalist Facebook videos. With a government in Washington that was none too sympathetic to Puerto Rico before the hurricane hit, the Puerto Rican people have been left largely voiceless by the destruction.
So who will restore Puerto Ricans’ voice, eyes and ears to communicate with the rest of the world? In the first instance, the US Armed Forces, beginning with the hard-pressed Puerto Rico National Guard, which was already pressing toward the point of exhaustion with relief efforts for Hurricane Irma damages when Maria hit. At first there was a joint US military relief mission stationed in Puerto Rico, with the plan to assist both that island and the affected Leeward Islands. But Dominica was all but totally destroyed and the facilities in Puerto Rico so degraded that the task force was moved to Martinique and other islands. That effort is on its civilian end led by the US Agency for International Development, mobilizing military units from the US Southern Command. For Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, the lead civilian agency is FEMA and military assistance is now through the US Northern Command. An early priority has been restoring basic communications links for public institutions and their officials, with signal units from different National Guards sending in satellite stations. Unlike in some of the independent Caribbean Islands where the Red Cross is running shelters, that function is handled by the government in Puerto Rico, but near the top of the list of things that the American Red Cross sent to the island were satellite phones.
A New York delegation led by Governor Andrew Cuomo and Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez arrived on a donated Jet Blue charter with relatively small offerings of food, bottled water and generators, but a main mission of coming away with information. The group left behind some of its members, a team of engineers from the state’s power authority, who will help in the prolonged task of getting the island’s power grind up and running again.
In Washington few politicians are talking about Puerto Rico, but President Donald Trump did declare the island a disaster area, which opens the door for a certain amount of federal funding for the recovery effort. It’s across the river in Virginia at the Pentagon, and down the street at FEMA headquarters, where people are working overtime to coordinate relief efforts for Puerto Rico.
New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo and US Representative Nydia Velazquez (D-Brooklyn) were among the first civilian outsiders to get into Puerto Rico. They called on Washington for unity in response to the disaster. Cuomo used the visit to inform a state disaster response task force how its resources and efforts can best be directed toward hurricane relief. Puerto Ricans have US citizenship. Many islanders have lost jobs or homes, so expect that there will be an influx of new arrivals to the large Puerto Rican community of New York as people flee the island to seek refuge with whom they know.
With the power out and the communications towers down across the island, by light provided by a generator the troops coordinate relief efforts by paperwork that these days would ordinarily be computerized and online. Department of Defense photo.
The crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Donald Horsley delivers food and water from FEMA to Vieques, September 22, 2017. The crew offloaded 750 liters of bottled water and 1,440 meals. US Coast Guard photo.
The Joint Incident Site communications Capability (JISCC) offers a communications bridge to first responders tasked with saving lives and protecting property during the domestic emergencies that resulted from this year’s historically catastrophic hurricane season. Photo by US Air National Guard Tech. Sgt. Michael Bennett.
The storm surge hits Guayama. Photo from a video on Cruz Rodriguez Keila’s Facebook page.
~ ~ ~
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.
These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information. Estos anuncios son interactivos. Toque en ellos para seguir a las páginas de web.
Wildlife diseases are
