LAB’s New Website March 2017

10 March 2017 Dear LAB Supporter and Friend, LAB has a new website. When you type lab.org.uk into your web browser it will take you to the new site. All the links to articles on our old site will now take you to the same article displayed on the new site. It may look a bit different, but all the same material and features should be there. We hope you like it and find it as easy to use and as useful as the old one.

Why change?

We didn’t do this for cosmetic reasons (though in time we hope the new site will look even better). We did it because our old platform was creaking a bit and it was getting hard to keep everything working smoothly, let alone add any new pages and functions. Wordpress, the new platform, is much more widely used than our old platform (ModX). This means that there are lots of ‘add-ons’ (ready-made packages of code) to enable us to provide new features and new kinds of pages. We will be able to administer membership, as well as free subscriptions, and we will be able to post longer articles and reports, with users able to register and pay to download them. Also, it will be easier for us to find volunteers who know WordPress to help us develop new pages on the website. There are still a few of the most recent articles to re-post onto the new site, and it may take us a few weeks to get everything running smoothly. Please be patient with us. We hope you will continue to visit and support LAB.

Coming soon

• A continuing series of extraordinary articles by Sue Branford about the soya industry in Brazil and its devastating effects on the land, communities and environment of Mato Grosso and Pará, Brazil. These will be appearing on the website in the coming weeks.
• A progress report on our Voices of Latin America project and details of our Crowdfunder appeal, due to launch in April, to enable us to finish and edit this important book. We have already gathered over 65 interviews with social movement activists in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador. Translating and editing these and producing our important new book and accompanying website is going to be a huge job. If you have ideas and suggestions for help with this — especially, how we can contact more people and organisations and get the crowdfunding appeal more widely known — please help us by completing a quick and easy 1-page survey.
• More posts in Jan Rocha’s blog, detailing the chaos and corruption of the Temer government in Brazil and its devastating effects on ordinary Brazilians.

Best wishes, The LAB Team