Eideard

Manuel Segovia

The language of Ayapaneco has been spoken in the land now known as Mexico for centuries. It has survived the Spanish conquest, seen off wars, revolutions, famines and floods. But now, like so many other indigenous languages, it’s at risk of extinction.

There are just two people left who can speak it fluently – but they refuse to talk to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 metres apart in the village of Ayapa in the tropical lowlands of the southern state of Tabasco. It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other’s company.

“They don’t have a lot in common,” says Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist from Indiana University, who is involved with a project to produce a dictionary of Ayapaneco. Segovia, he says, can be “a little prickly” and Velazquez, who is “more stoic,” rarely likes to leave his home.

The dictionary is part of a race against time to revitalise the language before it is definitively too late. “When I was a boy everybody spoke it,” Segovia told the Guardian by phone. “It’s disappeared little by little, and now I suppose it might die with me.”

Segovia, who denied any active animosity with Velazquez, retained the habit of speaking Ayapaneco by conversing with his brother until he died about a decade ago. Segovia still uses it with his son and wife who understand him, but cannot produce more than a few words themselves. Velazquez reputedly does not regularly talk to anybody in his native tongue anymore.

Suslak says Ayapaneco has always been a “linguistic island” surrounded by much stronger indigenous languages.

Its demise was sealed by the advent of education in Spanish in the mid 20th century, which for several decades included the explicit prohibition on indigenous children speaking anything else. Urbanisation and migration from the 1970s then ensured the break-up of the core group of speakers concentrated in the village. “It’s a sad story,” says Suslak, “but you have to be really impressed by how long it has hung around…”

The name Ayapaneco is an imposition by outsiders, and Segovia and Velazquez call their language Nuumte Oote, which means the True Voice. They speak different versions of this truth and tend to disagree over details, which doesn’t help their relationship. The dictionary, which is due out later this year, will contain both versions.

I’m of the opinion there needs to be a certain minimum of community and voluntary continuing of that community for a language to last, to sustain something beyond history, record.

Thanks, Cinaedh

Elkhorn coral infected with the human pathogen, Serratia marcescens

A strange new menace has joined the long list of threats to corals, the tiny reef-building animals that create important habitat in our oceans.

A bacterium that attacks humans is also killing off a species of coral in the Caribbean, elkhorn coral, according to researchers who proved the link by infecting fragments of the coral with bacteria from human sewage.

“This is quite an unusual discovery. It is the first time ever that a human disease has been shown to kill an invertebrate,” said University of Georgia professor James Porter, one of the study researchers. “This is unusual because we humans usually get disease from wildlife, and this is the other way around.”

In humans, the pathogen Serratia marcescens is opportunistic, causing respiratory, wound and urinary tract infections. In coral, it causes a disease Porter and colleagues have dubbed “white pox” for the white scars that appear on infected elkhorn coral. These scars appear where the coral’s living tissue has disappeared, leaving only its skeleton…

The coral cover in the Caribbean has declined 50 percent over the past 15 years, and elkhorn coral has declined by almost 90 percent during the same time period, according to Porter…

In the Keys, most wastewater is not treated but disposed of in septic systems on land. Ideally, such systems use soil to filter out contaminants, but the porous limestone bedrock of the Keys allows contaminants to leak into the ocean. Sutherland said wastewater treatment also is a problem in the Caribbean, which is south of the Keys.

Of course, the professional ignoranuses who infest American politics, who will jump through flaming sphincters to “prove” human beings need take no responsibility for any foul act – will find a rationale which explains this away to the satisfaction of the average Kool Aid Party acolyte. No doubt.

Meanwhile, responsible adults are working at putting better systems of waste treatment in place in the Florida Keys and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Hopefully, functional before elkhorn coral are wiped out.

Five Indian police constables died of heart attacks during a ten kilometre run as part of a selection test for promotion. A further 100 officers fainted during the trial in which they had to run 10 kilometres in less than ninety minutes in high monsoon temperatures.

Some of those who collapsed said senior officers had shown no sympathy and had shouted abuse at them as they laid on the ground.

Police recruitment managers said the deaths and the high number of men who collapsed highlighted poor fitness levels in the force. The image of the pot-bellied khaki policeman is a well-known and much-derided stereotype in India.

Most of those competing in the race were in their mid-40s and were described as “middle aged and unfit”. They died last week in three separate races in Kanpur, Meerut and Azamgarh, in Uttar Pradesh.

Vikram Chandra Goel, chairman of the state’s Police Recruitment and Promotion Board said the constables who died had been suffering from heart complaints and high blood pressure but either “did not inform the department of their ailments or they were not themselves aware of the disease”…

Promotion aspirants will now have to undergo medical tests before taking place in promotion marathon races.

What a sum of collaborative stupidity. So, no one thought to have a general physical exam for a group of mostly 40′s employees scheduled to set off on a 10K run in monsoon season. That’s DUMB 101.

It’s easy to malign the coppers who were out of shape; but, still joined the competition. They were running to make a little more income. The constabulary in India ain’t exactly the most overpaid in the world.

Shocking footage of the death of Hugo Tale-Yax, a Guatemalan aged 31, was captured on CCTV cameras in the Jamaica area of Queens. The video, put up on the website of the New York Post, shows pedestrians walking and cycling past the man during the course of more than an hour as he lay in a pool of blood on the pavement.

The footage begins at about 5.40am on the morning of Sunday 18 April when a woman wearing a jacket and skirt is seen walking along the pavement. She is being followed by man in a green short-sleeve shirt who comes up to her from behind. Though it is out of camera, it is assumed that Tale-Yax came to the help of the woman as she was being attacked by the man.

The video camera then captures the attacker fleeing in the direction in which he had come, followed a few seconds later by Tale-Yax who appears to be chasing him but stumbles on the pavement and falls.

He lies there, face down, in a gathering pool of blood, having been stabbed several times in the chest with a knife.

Several people then walk by, looking down at Tale-Yax but failing to stop…

It is not until 7.23am, more than an hour after the victim collapsed, that emergency services are called…

There has been comparison to another notorious murder in Queens in 1964 when a young woman called Kitty Genovese was stabbed in the street as she came home early one morning to her apartment block. More than 10 people in the vicinity heard her repeated screams but failed to respond.

I remember the Kitty Genovese case well. Everyone pretends they don’t hear. This time, everyone pretends they don’t see anything that concerns them

If you’re only always concerned with your own problems, you ain’t too likely to notice someone else in trouble. Or dying.

The French state is not famous for sensitivity and tact, but the parliament has voted unanimously for a remarkably imaginative measure to make dying easier there. People who take time off to look after a relative or partner close to death will be entitled to an payment of €50 a day for 21 days. At a time when English politicians argue about a death tax, the French have got on and established a subsidy for the dying.

At a time when American politicians aren’t even convinced we should be alive.

It’s not a huge sum of money. I don’t think that’s the point. There are incidental expenses and inconveniences when someone is dying but they are seldom immense. They matter far less than the grief and exhaustion which attend almost every deathbed. What the payment does is to register the state’s belief that to tend a dying friend or relative is a worthwhile activity, which should be honoured and not needlessly impeded.

This is a much more practical approach, and more compassionate, too, than grandstanding about principles and rights as we have been doing in this country for the last few weeks. Discussions about euthanasia in Britain are mostly conducted on the basis of individual hard cases, but the French law takes account of the fact that even a death that ends well can be hard and terrible for the people around. It is also work. To that extent a subsidy for the work done at the end of life is something the state – society – should pay just as it pays us around the time our children are born.

We don’t do that, either.

Like funerals, the French arrangement recognises that death affects the living all around the dead person, and they require help and acknowledgement to carry on. That may sound cynical, but I think it is purely realistic. We no longer have clear periods of socially supported mourning and this is thoughtless cruelty for the bereaved. Although the British like to think of themselves as pragmatists and the French as airy-fairy theoreticians, in this instance the balance is reversed; we should acknowledge this, and remedy it.

I think I’ll pass this post along to one [of the very few] American politicians who cares about humanity. I’m fortunate that Tom Udall represents me in the Senate. He carries on the family tradition of progressive politics, environmental activism – and backbone.

It won’t stand the chance of a snowball in Hell of getting anywhere in Congress.

Polish the chrome and you’re OK, right?

Want to buy a newspaper company? No? You’re in good company.

The Chicago Sun-Times is the kind of trophy that once appealed to deep-pocketed buyers. It has a big audience in a big market, a storied name, and stars like Roger Ebert and Robert Novak. The Sun-Times Media Group, owner of the flagship paper and dozens of smaller suburban papers, said in February that it wanted to sell assets or maybe the entire company. The chief executive, Cyrus Freidheim Jr., said May 8 that “a large number of parties” had asked to see the books, and that the company expected to field offers by the end of that month.

Since then, silence.
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