The head of the Chiefs of Ontario (COO) has blunt words for Ontario and Alberta, who this week called on the federal government to not reintroduce legislation that would mandate safe drinking water in First Nation communities.

“Ontario and Alberta’s opposition to Bill C-61 is not only disappointing, it is a direct attack on the rights, health, and safety of First Nations,” COO Regional Chief Abram Benedict told APTN News in a statement.

“This legislation was developed to ensure that our communities finally have access to clean, safe drinking water, a basic human right that far too many have been denied.”

He reiterated that Ontario has the highest number of long-term drinking water advisories in the country and gave the example of Neskantaga First Nation whose members have lived under a boil water advisory for over 30 years, calling it “a national failure that must be addressed.”

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The Supreme Court of Justice of Mexico (SCJN) has issued a groundbreaking ruling: works generated exclusively by artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be considered copyrightable in Mexico. Therefore, such content is considered public domain, as it is not human-made.

This was the ruling of the Second Chamber of the Court, denying the injunction requested by Gerald García Báez, who attempted to register an AI-generated avatar with the National Copyright Institute (Indautor).

García Báez filed a request with Indautor to protect the work entitled "Virtual Avatar: Gerald García Báez." The piece, a graphic representation of himself for augmented and virtual reality environments, was created using the generative artificial intelligence system Leonardo AI, to which García provided photographs and instructions.

In his application to Indautor, he also requested that moral rights be recognized in favor of the AI ​​system, while he, as a user and contributor of creative input, claimed property rights.

The Public Copyright Registry Office rejected the application, arguing that the work was not derived from a human creation, but rather an artificial one. It noted that, under the Federal Copyright Law (LFDA), only original works that are expressions of the individuality and personality of a natural person can be protected. Thus, any content generated completely automatically by AI is excluded from this protection.

Amparo

García Báez first filed a nullity action before the Federal Administrative Justice Tribunal (TFJA), and subsequently a direct amparo action. He then asked the Supreme Court to hear the case due to its "importance for the Mexican State," which was accepted by the Second Chamber in January 2025.

The SCJN's unanimous ruling was resounding: "The justice system of the Union does not protect Gerald García Báez," the Second Chamber ruled. The reporting judge, Lenia Batres Guadarrama, led the constitutional review of the case, based on the legality of the Indautor resolution and the TFJA ruling.

In its analysis, the Court held that Articles 3 and 12 of the LFDA are clear in establishing that only natural persons can be considered authors.

"The author must be a natural person. It cannot be a synthetic or artificial entity," the ruling reiterated.

In its view, the creativity, originality, and individuality required by law can only arise from human experience, emotions, and intellect. Consequently, no artificial intelligence system, no matter how advanced, can meet these requirements.

The Court cited previous jurisprudence and pronouncements from international organizations such as the UN Human Rights Council, which define authorship as an exclusively human right. It also ruled out the possibility of applying foreign legal criteria, such as those of the United Kingdom, Australia, or South Africa, as they are incompatible with the principle of territoriality in force in Mexican law.

Republican congressional proposals to sell off huge swaths of public land for housing could threaten tribal nations’ constitutional and treaty rights to access hunting and fishing grounds, as well as their cultural and ceremonial sites, experts say.

The latest proposed text, obtained by E&E News, from the Senate Committee on Natural and Energy Resources would allow the sale of Bureau of Land Management lands within 5 miles of a “population center.” A previous version included Forest Service lands, and federal lands within reservation boundaries. The legislation would also conflict with current procedures that allow tribes to obtain nearby public lands at no or low cost, instead requiring that such lands be purchased at “fair market value.”

“This is a frontal assault on tribal treaty rights and the exercise of those,” said Cris Stainbrook, Oglala Lakota and CEO of Indian Land Capital Company, which assists tribal nations in regaining land.

The proposed legislation — which has not yet passed out of committee — repeatedly puts states and local governments ahead of tribal nations. For example, the bill gives state and local governments the “right of first refusal” when land is put up for sale but denies tribes that same right. The bill would also prioritize land nominated for sale by states and local governments but not land that is nominated by tribes. While the legislation does include a requirement to consult with tribes as well as with states or local governments affected by land sales, it’s not clear how such proposals would be weighed should they conflict with one another. The state of Montana and federally protected lands are exempt, though tribal nations do not appear to have been consulted on the legislation.

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Settlers: The Mythology Of The White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern - J. Sakai

A uniquely important book in the canon of the North American revolutionary left and anticolonial movements, Settlers was first published in the 1980s. Written by activists with decades of experience organizing in grassroots anticapitalist struggles against white supremacy, the book established itself as an essential reference point for revolutionary nationalists and dissident currents within the Marxist-Leninist and anarchist movements. Always controversial within the establishment left, Settlers uncovers centuries of collaboration between capitalism and white workers and their organizations, as well as their neocolonial allies, showing how the United States was designed from the ground up as a parasitic and genocidal entity. As recounted in painful detail by J. Sakai, the United States has been built on the theft of Indigenous lands and of Afrikan labor, on the robbery of the northern third of Mexico, the colonization of Puerto Rico, and the expropriation of the Asian working class, with each of these crimes being accompanied by violence.

The counter-revolution of 1776: slave resistance and the origins of the United States of America - Gerald Horne

In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne complements his earlier celebrated Negro Comrades of the Crown, by showing that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. In the prelude to 1776, more and more Africans were joining the British military, and anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain. And in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were chasing Europeans to the mainland. Unlike their counterparts in London, the European colonists overwhelmingly associated enslaved Africans with subversion and hostility to the status quo. For European colonists, the major threat to security in North America was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. And as 1776 approached, London-imposed abolition throughout the colonies was a very real and threatening possibility--a possibility the founding fathers feared could bring the slave rebellions of Jamaica and Antigua to the thirteen colonies. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in large part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their liberty to enslave others--and which today takes the form of a racialized conservatism and a persistent racism targeting the descendants of the enslaved. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 drives us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.

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By Lecanard on twitter

Wild orcas on more than 30 occasions in four oceans have attempted to share their prey with people, potentially to develop relationships with humans, researchers have found.

In each of the instances recorded over two decades, orcas approached a person within a length of the orca’s body, and dropped freshly-hunted prey in front of the human, then waited for a response, according to a paper reporting the behavior published Monday in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

Orcas of every age tried to share their prey, and just about everything was on the menu: sea otter, harbor seal, common murre, gray whale, green turtle, eagle ray, starfish, jellyfish, on and on.

Orcas are the ocean’s top predator, and their brains are second only to modern humans in terms of their size in relation to their body. Their capacity for advanced communications and cognitive, social and emotional intelligence is well known. Prey sharing is common in orca culture.

So just what are the orcas doing, offering food to people?

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The homes of Miccosukee and Seminole people, as well as their ceremonial sites, surround the detention center on three sides.

Osceola-Hart’s great-grandfather Wild Bill Osceola fought against the development of an airport at the same site where the ICE facility’s construction is now underway.

In 1968, authorities in Dade County, now known as Miami-Dade County, began building the Big Cypress Jetport on land the Miccosukees used for ceremonial practices. The Dade County Port Authority referred to the project as the “world’s largest airport,” with six runways designed to handle large jets, and officials were quoted as calling the environmental and tribal leaders who opposed it “butterfly chasers.”

Osceola-Hart is proud of her great-grandfather’s efforts to stop the 1960s development, but she is disappointed the Miccosukees lost land they considered sacred. “We got kicked out of ceremonial grounds,” she says.

Finding a safe place to live has been an ongoing battle for the tribes in Florida. Seminoles retreated into the Everglades after the Seminole wars ended in 1858.

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Patrice Emery Lumumba was born on 2 July 1925, at Onalua village near the Katako-Kombe Town in the Sankuru district of north-eastern Kasai, Congo (modern day the Democratic Republic of Congo). . Lumumba’s tribe was the Batetela (Tetela) which is a dynamic branch of the Mongo-Nkutshu family of central Congo. He grew up in a mud-brick house. The Congo was a colony of Belgium and, as such, he attended both Protestant and Catholic schools run by white Belgian missionaries. Lumumba was intelligent and used to ask too many problematic questions

Lumumba was ambitious and aimed for social mobility, predominantly to form part of the “evolue”, the upper strata of the middle class; the highest-level indigenous Congolese could attain in the Belgian colony. His first employment was at the Postal Office as a postal clerk in Stanleyville City in 1954. However, Lumumba was accused of embezzlement and was jailed in 1955. Due to an extensive interview with King Baudouin, when he visited the Congo in 1955, Lumumba’s sentence was reduced in 1956. Lumumba, after working for almost three years,was appointed as the sales director for a brewery company in Léopoldville (currently known as Kinshasa) in 1957. This is how Lumumba left Stanleyville (currently known as Kisangani) for the Congo's capital city, Kinshasa.

While Lumumba was working in Stanleyville, he joined the Belgian Liberal Political Party. When he relocated to Léopoldville to work at the brewery, he helped to find the Movement National Congolais (MNC) political party. Lumumba's good personality and public speaking skills won him many admirers, making him a focal point within the party. While in prison in 1955, Lumumba reconsidered his status as an evolue and made a major shift towards Pan-Africanism and Congolese nationalism. The notion of nationalism enabled different ethnic groups that made up the Congolese society to come together and fight against colonial economic exploitation, political repression and cultural oppression.

The Belgian led government, in 1959, announced that Congolese local elections should take place within five years to full Congolese independence. At the Luluabourg Congress meeting in April 1959, various political groups and some members of MNC that favoured a unitary form of government for the Congo chose Lumumba to lead them. Within the MNC, however, there were other leaders that considered Lumumba’s views as radical and not good for the nation. It is argued that the result of this difference of opinion, was a split in the MNC party in July 1959 with a majority of the members following Albert Kalonji. Even though Lumumba had left Stanleyville , he was briefly detained on charges of encouraging the outbreak of riots in Stanleyville in November 1959. He was released from detention in time to attend the Round Table Conference in Brussels which paved the way for Congo’s general elections. Lumumba was an effective speaker in each of the Congo's major vehicular languages as well as in French when compared to other Congolese leaders and this helped his campaigning.

After the May 1960 general elections, Congo achieved independence on 30 June 1960 with Lumumba as the leader of the largest single party. He was selected to become the Congo's first prime minister and his political rival, Joseph Kasavubu, became president of the Congo.

As the prime minister, Lumumba faced sudden emergencies.The Congolese elite feared Lumumba’s notion of nationalism and participatory democracy and thus they started revolting against him. The revolt of the army and the secession of the provinces of Katanga and Southern Kasai were further emergencies. Lumumba sent Congolese troops to Southern Kasai province in attempt to restore the situation but the poorly trained soldiers killed thousands of Congolese civilians. The United Nations, through Secretary General Hammerskjöld, blamed Lumumba for the massacre of civilians. Lumumba disliked Belgium and the UN for not helping to restore order and unity in Congo. The Congolese elite conspired with foreign states, specifically the CIA and US administration, to get rid of Lumumba. When Lumumba asked for military help from the Soviet Union against the secessionist provinces of Southern Kasai and Katanga, President Kasavubu dismissed him from office on 5th September 1960. This was the beginning of the end of the political life of Patrice Lumumba. The Congolese National Assembly disagreed with the decision of the president and ordered Lumumba back in power as prime minister. This did not happen since a faction of the Congolese army, under Colonel Mobutu, took over the government instead and put Lumumba under the house arrest under the protection of Ghanaian troops of the UN force. Lumumba managed to get out of the house arrest in Kinshasa and attempted to leave for Stanleyville, but he was arrested by an army patrol and held prisoner in a military camp at Thysville.

From the military camp, Lumumba was transferred to Elisabethville, Katanga on January 18, 1961 despite the presence of United Nations troops, he was picked up by a small group led by Katanga's interior minister, Godefroid Munongo. Lumumba was taken to a nearby house where he was assassinated.

Lumumba's assassination made him a symbol of struggle for champions of African nations' attempts to bond and set themselves free from the influence of the European Colonizers.

Patrice Émery Lumumba - South Africa history online

Why Patrice Lumumba Was a Threat

How the West Destroyed Congo’s Hopes for Independence

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A peer-reviewed article—on Indigenous dance in Palestine and Native North America as resistance to genocide—was formally accepted then rejected by the editors of The Journal of Somaesthetics, citing fear of criticizing Israel’s genocide.

It is unclear why—after a year of nonstop affirmation and written acceptance from both editors—the decision was suddenly reversed. Finally, it is also unclear why making a political statement (or being perceived as making one), or putting a journal, its editors, and/or its board members “in a difficult position” are legitimate grounds for reversing a formal acceptance for publication in an academic journal. My subsequent attempts to clarify and resolve the situation have all gone nowhere.

From these exchanges, I logically inferred, as did several colleagues in Philosophy and Dance Studies (via email correspondence), that the real reason for the journal’s sudden reversal was my essay’s naming and condemnation of the genocide in Palestine, and the journal leadership’s attempt to protect itself from feared retaliation. In support of this interpretation, my essay also introduced a likely conflict of interest for Richard Shusterman, the founder of somaesthetics, cofounder of its journal, and currently first-listed member of its Editorial Board. Since Shusterman received a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a lecturer in Israel at Ben-Gurion University, Bezalel Academy of Art, and the Hebrew University, for his journal to publish an essay critical of Israel’s genocide of Palestine, in today’s climate, would presumably have involved personal, professional, and political risks for him.

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The Chilean left chooses communist Jeannette Jara to challenge the unstoppable right wing for the presidential election in November.

The Chilean left has chosen this Sunday the candidate who will represent them in the first round of the presidential elections on November 16th against the relentlessly advancing right: Jeannette Jara, 51, a member of the Communist Party. With 77.5% of the votes counted, the public administrator, lawyer, and master's degree holder in public management obtained a resounding 60.5%, compared to the social democrat Carolina Tohá, who reached 27.6%. The representative of Gabriel Boric's Broad Front, Representative Gonzalo Winter, came in third with 8.9%, while Congressman Jaime Mulet, of the Green Social Regionalist Federation (FRVS), came in last with 2.9%. Jara's election marks a milestone for the Chilean Communist Party: it is the first time since the return to democracy in 1990 that this political force, which opposed the center-left governments of the transition, has successfully installed a candidate from its ranks in the race for La Moneda, supported—at least institutionally—by the entire party. The result of this primary, in turn, represents a major blow to the moderate forces of progressivism—embodied by Tohá in this internal competition—who are once again subjugated to the radical sectors of the left.

The unity of the left will be a major test starting tonight. The campaign has intensified in recent weeks, and the fundamental differences have been exposed to the public, especially between Tohá—who began the race as the favorite—and the winning candidate. “Where [the Communist Party] has governed around the world, countries have stagnated socially and poverty has spread,” the 60-year-old social democratic political scientist charged in one of the debates. Both former ministers in Boric's government—Tohá of the Interior and Jara of Labor—showed that they embody very different perspectives on the role of the left in 2025 and the needs of a country like Chile, which has stagnated economically for more than a decade and faces urgent challenges such as the security crisis. In this campaign, both sides highlighted fundamental differences regarding the coexistence of the state and the market, economic growth, crime management, foreign relations, and the control of illegal immigration, among other issues.

"The important thing is that, at the end of the day, the progressive sectors will all be united behind a single candidacy," President Boric stated this morning, addressing a concern across the political spectrum: whether, given the vast gaps between the official proposals and the heated competition, the result will generate dispersion and whether the winner—Jara—will actually have a torrent of political power to confront a right wing that has the winds in its favor. The opposition, in fact, benefits from the fact that the communist militant was chosen. This is especially beneficial for Matthei, who, with Tohá out of the running, will try to win over the moderate sectors of the center and center-left who are unwilling to support a candidate from the radical left.

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