Police arrest a woman who was demonstrating against the arrest of Mapuche Indians involved in a land dispute in Valparaiso, Chile, about 75 miles northwest of Santiago. Dozens of protestors marched through downtown Valparaiso on Dec 13, 2007 to pressure the government to release five Mapuche Indians. The Mapuche had been holding a hunger strike in the south of Chile after being arrested for starting forest fires on land belonging to a logging company whose land they are claiming by legacy.
Prosperous Chile’s Troubling Indigenous Uprising
Dec. 12, 2009
Time Magazine
Compared to high-profile groups like the Quechua of Peru and the Yanomami of the Amazon rain forest, Chile’s Mapuche are a relatively obscure indigenous cohort in South America. But that has changed dramatically in recent months as a growing number of armed and masked Mapuche activists, pursuing a centuries-old claim to land they say was taken from them by the Spaniards and then the Chilean government, have engaged in a wave of arson attacks… (more…)
Tawa hallae, a meat-eating Theropod dinosaur discovered in New Mexico
New Meat-Eating Dinosaur Alters Evolutionary Tree
December 10, 2009
Esciencenews.com
Paleontologists, aided by amateur volunteers, have unearthed a previously unknown meat-eating dinosaur from a fossil bone bed in northern New Mexico, settling a debate about early dinosaur evolution, revealing a period of explosive diversification and hinting at how dinosaurs spread across the supercontinent Pangaea.
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December 23, 2009
On Monday, Brazil decreed nine new indigenous reserves covering 51,000 square kilometers (19,700 square miles) of the Amazon rainforest, an areas larger than Denmark or Switzerland, reports the AFP…
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