The Manufactured Gas Company informs its clients that due to work that will be carried out by Energas S.A. at its installation in Puerto Escondido, there will be effects on the service, from 9:00 p.m. on Saturday February 22nd until 3:00 a.m. on Monday February 24th
February 20, 2020
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews. NOTE: This article refers to gas for home cooking as received through pipes from the street.
The note issued by the entity’s General Management also announces that during this period the gas service to the capital will be partially or totally affected.
State consumers in the territories are advised not to consume gas until this service is normalized, in order to allocate all production to customers in the population sector of the municipalities of Plaza, Cerro, La Habana Vieja, Centro Habana, Diez de Octubre, Playa and Marianao, adds the information note issued.
The execution of these works will allow greater reliability in the distribution of natural gas to the company’s production plants.
The General Direction of Gas Manufacturado Company offered apologies for the inconvenience that this interruption may cause.
(With information from Juventud Rebelde)
March marks the ninth anniversary of the aggression unleashed against this Middle Eastern country, which has been torn apart by many foreign interests
By Elson Concepción Pérez
February 17, 2020
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Let us put things in place: Syria is an independent and sovereign country, with a democratically elected government, whose program has been directed towards development and social benefits for its people.
It is also part of its status as a sovereign nation that it has the right to sign military agreements with anyone it deems fit. In this case, it is entirely legitimate that it has requested military collaboration from Russia and Iran to defend the country against the terrorism of internal groups and against foreign actions aimed at destabilising the Arab nation.
It has had difficulties and, as in all countries with diverse religious currents, many have been and still are the setbacks in harmonizing its walk in the midst of a region besieged by a foreign power interested in its energy resources.
In this context, it is worth noting that the government of President Bashar al-Assad has made significant economic and social progress in favor of the most dispossessed sectors.
But Syria has become a stumbling block for US policy in the Middle East region and the imperial drive to seize its resources, just as it has done with Iraq and Libya.
A terrorist group called the Islamic State (IS), which many specialists consider to have emerged from the subversion laboratories conceived by the U.S. CIA. IS [ISIS] appeared in the region a little over a decade ago and soon expanded like a bad weed, with a matrix of the most ruthless terrorism.
Together with the EI, a group openly supported by the United States, the Al Nusra Front, a descendant of the shadowy Al Qaeda, established itself on Syrian soil, putting in check its defense system. Moreover, it has suffered and continues to suffer for years from the direct aggression of Israel which has occupied part of the Syrian Golan Heights.
This March marks the ninth anniversary of the war of aggression unleashed against the country. Alarming figures, such as the more than 250,000 dead and more than that number of wounded, as well as the forced displacement and migration of millions of its children fleeing the war and the total or partial destruction of cities, industries, world heritage temples and many other facilities, constitute open wounds that are very difficult to heal.
THE DANGER IS SPREADING
Since last year, the Syrian People’s Army, with the active participation of the Russian aerospace force and Iranian advisers, had defeated terrorist groups in almost 90% of the territory, while the government was demanding the withdrawal of the American military that illegally occupied a part of the country under the assumption of fighting terrorism.
The bombing of areas where the Syrian army was operating, the death of many of its combatants and, in addition, the massacre of hundreds of civilians, including children, with the usual “collateral damage” caused by its bombs, have been part of this reality.
Already almost defeated by the action of the terrorists, those of the Al Nusra Front, supported by Washington, were concentrated in areas near the Turkish border, in the region of Idlib, where there is also the presence of Kurdish groups.
In recent days, on February 12, U.S. military forces opened fire on local residents who gathered near a Syrian Army checkpoint east of the town of Qamishli (Hasaka, Syria) to block the passage of several U.S. military vehicles.
As for the presence of uniformed Turkish soldiers on Syrian soil, the Government of Damascus has characterized it as “a violation of the sovereignty of its territory”.
In recent days, more than a thousand military transports and 5000 Turkish soldiers have crossed the border. Syrian sources accuse the Turkish artillery of having supported the armed terrorist groups’ fighting in Idlib.
As we can see, the current war imposed on Syria may reach a new dimension where, in addition to the internal actors, other external ones are involved, including Turkey in the Idlib border area.
It is quite possible that Trump, in this case, is playing at involving others in a war he has lost, so that he can enjoy his longed-for oil without having to subject his forces to the danger of confrontation.
Not for nothing did the U.S. president, in an interview with Fox News, emphasize once again his administration’s policy of “taking” Syria’s oil.
Published: Saturday 22 February 2020 | 09:03:07 pm.
By Graziella Pogolotti
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Grounded in the Industrial Revolution, with the invention of the steam engine, mass production and the resulting competitive drive to ensure the dominance of the world market had its effects, at an accelerating pace, on the life of society. The soot was invading everything. Cities began to grow rapidly. The proletariat was constituted as a social class. The dizzying change had repercussions on the rise of the social sciences. History changed its perspective, the economy became an indispensable reference point, psychology, anthropology and sociology acquired autonomy. The latter permeated other disciplines with its influence.
With the cost of paper now down, the press has a new reading public. It introduced the soap opera into its pages. It was the antecedent of the current soap opera [telenovela]. With the emergence of creative literary giants, narrative reached an unprecedented peak. First, social romanticism and later the proliferation of “costumbrismo” (local color), the latter spread through the novel, sharpened the sociological outlook. The characters moved in a specific context.
The historical perspective left the past behind to shape the approach of the present. The contradictions in everyday life and the exacerbation of individualism in the struggle to survive, to accumulate power and fortune and to move up the social ladder came to the fore. Little read today, Dickens became a bestseller of that time by showing the drama of helpless childhood in the city environment, captured by crime and victim of the debtors’ prison that punished them along with their parents. Balzac warned about the domination of the financial world, enriched by usury and the consequent disappearance of the small merchant. Emile Zola, A French writer preferred by the cigar factory lectors [workers who read live to cigar workers] wanted to systematize the analysis. He articulated the sequence of his novels to a family genealogy that allowed him to focus each of them on a specific sector of reality.
In one of his novels, Zola examines the seduction exerted on women by the emergence of the first department stores. In accordance with the traditional division of labor, women are responsible for taking care of domestic chores, but they also take on the responsibility of buying what is necessary for the home. Pressed by a concrete need, they turn to the dazzling display case that offers all sorts of temptations. To the purchase of the indispensable, they add the dispensable, with the apparent advantage of having a credit card. Not having to take money out of their purse, they lose track of what they have spent. They fall into debt that, in the end, will be unpayable. It was the original cell of the policy of encouraging consumerism, unleashed more than half a century later, a way of avoiding the overproduction crises characteristic of capitalism through the constant increase in demand, with its depredatory effects on the planet’s goods.
Like history and psychology, sociology became a science. It opened up perspectives that went beyond the field of specialists,. It influenced so-called investigative journalism and can help shape the outlook of better-informed citizens. This approach to reality rethought the complex nature of the link between the individual and society. Considered as a subject of history, human beings build their life expectations from a set of determining factors, among which are class roots, family environment and the education system.
Other factors act on the consciousness of each one, among which the media, entertainment, the use of free time and the formation of paradigms stand out. Some time ago, in the miserable favelas, where the essential was lacking, the television antennas were pointed out. Now, in a similar context, cell phones are everywhere. They offer escape routes, projected towards an illusory world that is not their own. The proposal of models of careers towards individual success replaces the image of a virtuous life in the struggle to transform reality for the benefit of all.
It is often forgotten that among the founders of historical science were Marx and Engels, who put knowledge at the service of the emancipatory revolution. The hegemonic power understood the scope of this way of exploring reality and finding the formulas to intervene in it by operating on human subjectivity. Politics has to strengthen the essential revolutionary condition of the sciences devoted to the study of society, a living and therefore changing phenomenon. It is an urgent demand to calibrate in its right measure the concreteness of the facts, without diluting them in vague generalizations. In the demands of the “wretched of the earth” lies the preservation of the future of humanity. Because once the reserves of the tiny Earth are exhausted, it will have no other planet to inhabit.
Published February 22, 2020 | 12:46:47 pm.
By Juventud Rebelde digital@juventudrebelde.cu
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
BRUSSELS, February 22. – A group of European physiologists have detected negative changes in the volume and activity of the brains of people diagnosed with cell phone addiction.
The researchers scanned the skulls of 22 addicted patients and observed a decrease in gray matter in two regions of their cerebral cortex and less activity in a third region compared to 26 other healthy people.
The observation of this transformation, similar to that which occurs in drug addicts, offers the first material evidence of the relationship between the overuse of so-called smartphones and the physical deterioration of the human brain.
The conclusions of the study will be included in an article that will appear in the journal Addictive Behaviors next June, reports Russia Today. In addition, it was revealed that blue light from digital device screens can accelerate blindness.
The authors stress that the growing use of smart phones in recent years makes it necessary to raise the issue of the harmful effect of their use on physical and mental health.
They are particularly concerned about the health of children, who are spending more and more time with digital devices from younger and younger ages.
In their study, the scientists comparatively analyzed structural and functional magnetic resonance images and used a morphometry based on a voxel, a three-dimensional matrix that served to model brain processes.
This revealed that, compared to the control group, the addicted individuals had a lower volume of grey substance in the left anterior insula of the brain and in two sections of the temporal cortex.
They also recorded lower intrinsic brain activity in the part of the brain that transmits the neural signals between the two hemispheres, the cortex of the right anterior cingulate.
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