87-year-old Cristina Calderon is the last speaker of the Yamana language. Three of her ancestors met Charles Darwin and the King and Queen of England. She lives in Puerto Williams, Navarino Island, near the southern tip of Patagonia
Indigenous Languages in Final Throes
Languages like Kiliwua in Mexico, Amanayé in Brazil, Záparo in Ecuador and Mashco Piro in Peru are on the verge of disappearing. Their extinction would be a tragedy for humanity, warn linguists.
Oct 2, 2011
MEXICO CITY, (Tierramérica).- Hundreds of languages disappeared from Latin America and the Caribbean over the past 500 years, and many of the more than 600 that have survived could face the same fate in the not-so-distant future.
United Nations agencies and many experts maintain that it is an avoidable tragedy, but there are those who see it as the inherent fate of almost every language…
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Butch Cassidy (far right), the Sundance Kid (far left) & the Wild Bunch in Fort Worth, Texas 1900. That same year Butch & Sundance would leave for Patagonia, in Argentina, and attempt to go straight. Most historians believe that, eight years later, in 1908, Butch & Sundance were gunned down in San Vicente, a small mining town in Bolivia, after robbing a mining payroll. A few writer-historians believe that Butch survived, returned to the U.S., and lived for decades in the western United States under the alias of William T Phillips.
Anatomy of a Farce
By Dan Buck
Earlier this summer, the Salt Lake City Deseret News published an article, “Lost Butch Cassidy Manuscript Found,” by reporter Michael De Groote, disclosing the discovery of a “long-lost manuscript” said to be the autobiography of the Western outlaw. Brent Ashworth, a veteran Provo rare book and document dealer, had recently purchased the manuscript, “The Bandit Invincible,” on Abebooks.com. He told me this week he had paid about $12,000…
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Last year, Brazil registered a 27% increase in Amazon rainforest destruction from the previous year, much of that due to increased production of soy beans for China
China’s Interest in Farmland Makes Brazil Uneasy
May 26, 2011
NYT
URUAÇU, Brazil — When the Chinese came looking for more soybeans here last year, they inquired about buying land — lots of it.
Officials in this farming area would not sell the hundreds of thousands of acres needed. Undeterred, the Chinese pursued a different strategy: providing credit to farmers and potentially tripling the soybeans grown here to feed chickens and hogs back in China…
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