Wildlife returns at Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia


This 2017 video is about Germain’s Peacock Pheasant.

From Associated Press:

KEO SEIMA, Cambodia — Four decades after U.S. warplanes plastered it with bombs, a remote corner of the old Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia is making a comeback as a treasure trove of endangered wildlife. …

According to WCS, at least 42 threatened species now thrive within the 1,160 square miles of what is officially the Seima Biodiversity Conservation Area.

A sharp eye can spot a charismatic primate called the black-shanked douc, gorging on treetop leaves in the late afternoon.

Once it was thought their main home was Vietnam, but it’s now believed that half the world’s population lives in the once devastated forest.

Large herds of gaur, magnificent horned wild cattle, roam the area as do muntjac deer, banteng ox and wild pig, all vital prey for tigers.

Bird life — ibis, vulture, eagle and hornbill — abound.

So many Germain’s Peacock-pheasants have been spotted that conservationists have scratched the species from the world endangered list.

World’s largest banteng population at risk in Cambodia from hunting and rapid habitat loss: here.

BBC so scared of Blair that they ban Edwin Starr pro-peace song


Edwin Starr war single, 1970From Lenin’s Tomb blog in Britain:

BBC bans antiwar single

Well, you may have already heard that the antiwar single, a cover of Edwin Starr’s ‘War – What Is it Good For?’ has made it into the top ten already.

It’s presently at number six in the charts with precious few resources, and could, with sufficient effort, make it to number 1.

The BBC, in their infinite rubberiness, have decided to ban it, fearing that its antiwar message will offend the government.

It has already appeared in a number of news broadcasts, and news items, and it has been played across the world.

However, senior sources in the BBC say that a banning order has been promulgated, preventing the single from being given further coverage on its programmes.

This comes after a radio segment that was due for broadcast this afternoon was pulled at the last moment.

It would be a little bit embarrassing if the BBC was to avoid playing the number one single in the charts, launched by mass campaign from below, with few resources.

You can watch the video here, and when you’ve done that, kindly text “peace1” to 78789, whereupon you can collect your own copy.

British government photoshopping photographic evidence of obscene gesture by Tony Blair away: here.

US Secret Service grills artist about anti Iraq war art


Bush and the Iraq war, cartoon

NBC in the USA reports:

Alameda Artist’s Display Alarms Secret Service

UPDATED: 5:46 am PST March 2, 2007

ALAMEDA, Calif. — An Alameda artist got a surprise visit from the U.S. Secret Service last week for displaying artwork some people thought was threatening to the president, NBC11’s Jodi Hernandez reported.

Artist Michael McDonald, 55, routinely displays art in his front yard. One of his latest pieces is a cardboard representation of President George W. Bush being impaled by a knife. …

McDonald said the piece intended to spark discussion about controversial topics.

“The knife is used as a hook, basically to bring you into the piece,” McDonald said.

McDonald said the Secret Service grilled him for 90 minutes about his art and his beliefs, Hernandez reported.

They also asked him to allow access to his medical records, he said.

McDonald said the federal agents asked if he interpreted his work as a threat against the country’s chief executive. He said he didn’t.

“They said, ‘You’ve got a knife sitting in the head of the president of the United States,'” McDonald said. “I said, ‘No, I got a knife in a piece of cardboard.'”

McDonald said the art is in no way meant to threaten the president, but to get people thinking about Bush’s policies and the war in Iraq.

“We’re not outraged about that, but we’re outraged about a simple knife stuck in a cardboard figure and saying, ‘Oh no he’s the president, he’s the president.’

No, he’s not. He’s just a cardboard figure that I used as a representation of something,” McDonald said.

Cambrian fossil relative of today’s molluscs discovered


Cambrian animals

Reuters reports:

Spiky oddball prowled ocean half billion years ago

Saturday March 03, 2007

WASHINGTON – A spectacularly quirky creature with long, curved spines protruding from its armored body prowled the ocean floor half a billion years ago near the dawn of complex life forms on Earth, scientists said.

In research appearing in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, scientists identified an ancient invertebrate they named Orthrozanclus reburrus from 11 complete fossils retrieved from Canada’s fossil-rich Burgess Shale rock formation.

“It’s a tiny beast,” Jean-Bernard Caron of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, who described the newly identified species along with Simon Conway Morris of the University of Cambridge in Britain, said in an interview.

Orthrozanclus, about half an inch (one centimetre) long, lived about 505 million years ago during the Cambrian Period.

The Cambrian was an important moment in the history of life on Earth and a time of radical evolutionary experimentation when many major animal groups first appeared in the fossil record.

This proliferation of life is dubbed the “Cambrian Explosion” because of the relatively brief time span in which this diversity of forms arose.

Orthrozanclus had no eyes and no limbs and apparently moved along the ocean floor with a muscular foot, like a snail does, while dining on bacterial growths, the researchers said.

Orthrozanclus seems to have been built to prevent predators from turning it into a quick snack.

It was covered in a shell and had almost three dozen long, pointy, curved spines sticking out from the edge of its body, and many smaller ones, too.

“You probably don’t want to have them in your slippers. They’re kind of spiky,” Caron said.

Early animal evolution

The newly identified invertebrate helps clarify early animal evolution, the scientists said.

The scientists think Orthrozanclus may belong to a newly identified group of organisms characterized by a similar type of body armour, and that this group was related to present-day snails, earthworms and mollusks, which include snails, clams, squid and octopuses.

The researchers described the animal based on complete and beautifully preserved fossils — nine at the Royal Ontario Museum and two at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

The Burgess Shale, an important rock layer from the Cambrian in the Canadian Rockies of southeastern British Columbia, has yielded a treasure trove of fossils from this critical period in the history of life.

These include such weirdos as Hallucigenia, a spiky animal so unusual that the scientists who named it seemed to think it was a hallucination, and the predator Anomalocaris with large, grasping limbs, the largest animal found in the Burgess Shale.

Some creatures found as fossils in the Burgess Shale are ancestors of animals alive today, while others have long since gone extinct and are not like any existing living thing.

THE TERGOMYAN MOLLUSC CARCASSONNELLA FROM THE UPPER ORDOVICIAN OF GIRVAN, SCOTLAND: here.

Cambrian and Precambrian evolution explosions: here.

A unique set of fossils indicates that 525 million years ago marine animals congregated in Earth’s ancient oceans, most likely for migration, according to an international team of scientists: here.

French ‘new philosophers’ support Rightist Nicolas Sarkozy


Sarkozy, Sarkoland, cartoonBy Stefan Steinberg:

Prominent French intellectuals rally to presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy

3 March 2007

With less than two months to go to crucial French presidential elections, a number of prominent French intellectuals have declared their support for the right-wing presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy (UMP—Union for a Popular Movement).

A number of these intellectuals, who are loosely associated with the movement of so-called “new philosophers,” are routinely described in the press as “leftist,” although they broke with any form of leftist or socialist politics a long time ago.

Nevertheless, the fact that such figures as the writer and nouveau philosophe Andre Glucksmann, author Pascal Bruckner and Max Gallo, a novelist and former spokesman for former French president Francois Mitterrand, are now openly backing Sarkozy’s campaign is of considerable significance.

That the so called ‘new philosophers’ are called ‘philosophers’ while they mostly write superficial Rightist political fare, is problematic in itself.

So, apparently, for them, Sarkozy‘s racism against immigrants in France, his links to neo-Fascists in Italy, his corruption scandals, etc. are not problems?

Sarkozy accused of links with Le Pen: here.

See also here.

US Army Secretary Francis Harvey resigns, wounded troops’ hospital scandal


This video from the USA is called Jack Cafferty on the Walter Reed Scandal.

By Bill Van Auken:

Army Secretary resigns, soldiers gagged

Washington tries to quash scandal over neglect of wounded troops

3 March 2007

In an increasingly desperate bid to quell a raging scandal over the gross neglect of severely wounded troops, US Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey resigned Friday, just one day after he himself had fired the commanding officer at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

President Bush, meanwhile, announced that he is forming a bipartisan commission to investigate medical care provided at Walter Reed as well as to wounded soldiers and military veterans in general.

The resignation and firing came a week and a half after the Washington Post published a series of articles detailing the appalling conditions in Walter Reed’s outpatient facilities and the bureaucratic abuse that confronts the war-wounded, many of them recovering from amputations, severe head wounds or psychological disorders resulting from the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Francis Harvey gone, Rumsfeld gone, Wolfowitz kicked upstairs to the World Bank, John Bolton gone … forward to impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

Australian lyre bird singing, video by David Attenborough


Superb lyrebird

When the Australian superb lyre bird is singing, it imitates many other birds, including the kookaburra.

You can hear and see it in this video, by David Attenborough.

Also about lyrebirds: here.

Albino Kookaburras Are the Latest Albino Animals to Make Headlines: here.