You too can be a LatAm reporter for a major international newspaper

It's easy! Follow the bouncing ball:

1) Read IKN

2) Rolodex!

3) Get assistant to do gruntwork

4) Insert anti-Chávez bias

5) Hey Presto!

Does Simone Rosemary read IKN? Bet yer sweet bippy, dude.

Utterly bizarre

This story in the NYT yesterday has been sent over by four people already. It starts like this:

WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials. continues here

It's just the most bizarre thing I've read in ages. Just imagine that superduper discovery moment, folks, cos it's straight out of Catch 22....

Grunt: "Oh look what I found here, Sir!"

General: "What's that, soldier?"

Grunt: "Look Sir! A trillion dollars worth of minerals Sir!"

General: "Good work, soldier. I'll tell the President immediately."

So the NYT today informs on some strange discovery that neither the US (nor Russia before it) had any idea about? They just kinda started digging around after entering Afghanistan and found all this stuff by accident and had no inkling of its existence before? My stars, you gringos make me laugh.

UPDATE: Via mail, reader 'MP' chimes in with, "Is that 43-101 compliant?".

Hot news! Simon Romero loses all influence on LatAm opinion

Look mom, I'm on TV

It's the future of free speech, dudettes and dudes. Bloomie reports the New York Times wants to charge $5 a month for online access to their musings. Now I might miss reading Krugman's blog every day (though knowing him he'll start publishing somewhere free-access immediately) and Dealbook is worth my wonky while, but the good news is that the dross of the Americas page will become instantly unread forever. Hooray and hip and hip, no more having to refute the idiocies of Simon Romero every week and explaining why he's 1) talking crap or 2) lifting other people's stories wholesale. Amen. Here's a better link to a blog with screenshot of the survey the NYT is conducting.

Whatever gets you thinking that capitalism makes people like Rupert Murdoch greedy, anyway?

Honduras: Proof (if it were ever needed) that Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a pitifully sad excuse for an intellectual

And change that bouffant coiff, puhleeze

Check out today's op-ed in the NYT from Alvaro Vargas Llosa, who must have suffered all his life from the question "Hey I know you...you're Mario's son, right?" and even after publishing several mediocre tomes of his own just can't escape. It really is an impressive piece of mental masturbation. We get his favourite obsession of Chávez-bashing front'n'centre (in a 639 word article Hugo is mentioned by name no less than ten times, including the title line) while other revelations include:

1) Zelaya actually planned to be deposed by the military and...get this...the military fell for it! Allyboy sez;

IN the weeks leading up to Honduras’s coup, President Manuel Zelaya, an ally of Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, knew what he was doing. In pushing the limits of democracy by trying to force a constitutional change that would permit his re-election, he set a trap for the military. The military fell for it, turning an unpopular president who was nearing the end of his term into an international cause célèbre.

Damn, I wonder if Mario's son considered the bullets that shot through the presidential motorcade on June 12th, just missing Zelaya's noggin...betcha that was part of the plan, too.

2) The coup was a popular move in Honduras (hmm...let's check those images again, yeah? My, what a popular fascist repression we have here...betcha that guy getting kicked, pushed to the ground and having an assault rifle prod him in the back is shouting ¡Viva Micheletti! right now). How Vargas Loser managed to conduct his opinion poll between Sunday and now is beyond me, but as he says, "the coup has popular support in Honduras", so if it's written in the NYT it must be true, right?

3) Then there's this pearl:

"Across the Spanish-language news media, the recurring image of the last two days has been that of Mr. Chávez and his allies working furiously for Honduran democracy."

Errrr....no. Allyboy's watching the wrong news channels. The single recurring image of the last two days has been the unanimous support for Zelaya from every single Americas country. The OAS has been front'n'centre on all screens, closely followed by anything Obama says. Only then does Chavez get airtime.

4) We then get Allyboy regurgitating the lies propounded by the kneejerk right and tipping his hand to his real agenda. This argument has been shot down in flames already.

"As the general elections scheduled for November began to creep up, Mr. Zelaya decided to hold a referendum with the ultimate aim of allowing him to seek re-election."

Let's say it again; even the US State Dep't, not normally known for its pally attitude to the Bolivarian Revolutionaries, understands that;

"..we're (talking) about conducting a survey, a nonbinding survey"

Do Gallup pollsters get arrested with rifles pointed at their tushes when they ask people for opinions? But even a numbskull like Alvaro Vargas Llosa can string a sensible sentence together sometimes;

"This is not what Honduras’s establishment, horrified by Mr. Chávez’s increasing influence, intended when it got rid of Mr. Zelaya."

No shit Sherlock. And they would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for those pesky kids and their dog. The NYT note carries the title line "The winner in Honduras: Chávez". Wrong, wrong and a hundred times wrong, the winner in Honduras will be (not is...not yet) democracy and Latin America's self-esteem. At long last the whole region has the wherewithall to stand up to army bullies and their apologist pseudointellectuals such as Alvaro Vargas Llosa standard-bearer. Really, I have to ask myself "is that all they got these days?".

Alvaro, I've already given out this week's coveted award but when I did I hadn't read your ludicrous article. You are a throwback to the 1980's and don't deserve to get taken seriously in the 21st century. So first thing Monday morning next week, look out for a post with your name on it, yeah? DUMBASS.

Wowsers: Rosemary gets the Bagua Peru story right

Credit where due; Simon Romero has actually filed a report that tells people what's really going on this time. He kinda reminds me of the Ancient Mariner (he naileth one in three), but no complaints and a round of applause deserved; tomorrow morning readers of the NYT will have a good grasp of the situation in Peru thanks to the below (here's the first part, click through to read it all):

IQUITOS, Peru — Faced with a simmering crisis over dozens of deaths in the quelling of indigenous protests last week, Peru’s Congress this week suspended the decrees that had set off the protests over plans to open large parts of the Peruvian Amazon to investment. Senior officials said they hoped this would calm nerves and ease the way for oil drillers and loggers to pursue their projects.

But instead, indigenous groups are digging in for a protracted fight, revealing an increasingly well-organized movement that could be a tinderbox for President Alan García. The movement appears to be fueled by a deep popular resistance to the government’s policies, which focused on luring foreign investment, while parts of the Peruvian Amazon have been left behind.

The broadening influence of the indigenous movement was on display Thursday in a general strike that drew thousands of protesters here to the streets of Iquitos, the largest Peruvian city in the Amazon, and to cities and towns elsewhere in jungle areas. Protests over Mr. García’s handling of the violence in the northern Bagua Province last Friday also took place in highland regions like Puno, near the Bolivian border, and in Lima and Arequipa on the Pacific coast.

“The government made the situation worse with its condescending depiction of us as gangs of savages in the forest,” said Wagner Musoline Acho, 24, an Awajún Indian and an indigenous leader. “They think we can be tricked by a maneuver like suspending a couple of decrees for a few weeks and then reintroducing them, and they are wrong.”

continues here

When heads of state guestblog, they don't do it on IKN

Instead they choose some apparently popular publication called 'The New York Times' or something. Here's the link to Evo Morales' op-ed found in the pages of the NYT today. The subject is the coca leaf and the argument can be filed under "plain common sense". Here's an extract, but it's a "read it all" thing so go visit that link yourself.

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The custom of chewing coca leaves has existed in the Andean region of South America since at least 3000 B.C. It helps mitigate the sensation of hunger, offers energy during long days of labor and helps counter altitude sickness. Unlike nicotine or caffeine, it causes no harm to human health nor addiction or altered state, and it is effective in the struggle against obesity, a major problem in many modern societies.

Today, millions of people chew coca in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and northern Argentina and Chile. The coca leaf continues to have ritual, religious and cultural significance that transcends indigenous cultures and encompasses the mestizo population.

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The Nuevo York Times

Hey gringo! You please tell me another funny joke 'bout mejicanos that are lazy and only do nothing and sleep all to mañana and don't have no money?

Carlos Slim just loaned the New York Times $250m. Pachakuti strikes again, as Slim's idea of hobby money to snag a trophy bails out some desperate Statesiders in a dying industry. The guy already owns a touch under 7% of the NYT, and as this loan is guaranteed by a lump of stock, he could move to 17% stakeholder at any given moment.

Hey, Carlos...get us a better class of LatAm correspondent, please?

Ironic? Surely not

So run this by me again, yeah? When 29 people are tortured and held illegally by police and security forces for three days, including one person shot dead, the NYT's Latin American asshole reporter-in-chief doesn't think it newsworthy and so doesn't bother covering it. Because it's Peru. And because Peru is the USA's new-best-friend. And we can't go round upsetting foreign investors, can we? But when four Venezuelan students are arrested by police for protests that include throwing molotov cocktails hither and thither it's immediate front page material of the highest "let's forget the details of what the attackers were doing and only talk about the tear gas" order.

Sounds perfectly logical to me. By the way, El Chiguire Bipolar reports Vzla far better than that twat Romero who prefers to get lawyers molesting bloggers rather than do some actual work. Case in point here, and another is that the NYT has to rely on AP for stories these days. More FruityRumPunch, Rosemary?