Elephant ancestors Moeritherium and Barytherium

This video says about itself:

Finding A Fossil Gompotherium [sic; Gomphotherium] Elephant Tooth Scuba Diving

Here I find a small gompotherium tooth. It was an ancient elephant from the early Miocene.

From Discovery News:

Ancient Mammals Fill Elephant Family Tree

Jennifer Viegas

April 15, 2008 — Fossils of two ancient, extinct mammals are helping piece together the elephant family tree.

Modern elephants and their relatives, which fall into the order Proboscidea, form a diverse clan that includes hyraxes, manatees and dugongs. That group can now be linked to two extinct beasts, known as Barytherium and Moeritherium, which emerged around 50 million years ago.

Surprisingly, they didn’t look much like elephants or their living relatives either.

According to Alexander Liu, lead researcher on a new study of the fossils, Moeritherium was much smaller than today’s elephants and was instead “similar in size and stature to a modern tapir, having a prehensile upper lip rather than a trunk and weighing roughly 250 to 300 kg (551 to 661 pounds).”

Modern elephants, by contrast, can weigh up to 24,000 pounds.

Barytherium, on the other hand, was a little more elephant-like, given its trunk, but was still much smaller than today’s elephants, Liu told Discovery News.

Liu, a researcher in the University of Oxford’s Department of Earth Sciences, along with colleagues Erik Seiffert and Elwyn Simons, reconstructed the habitats and behaviors of the two extinct animals just by analyzing 11 of the beasts’ teeth.

Their findings are published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Their detective work involved studying carbon and oxygen isotopes found in the teeth, which date to 37 million years ago and were excavated at the Birket Qarun Formation in northern Egypt. …

Despite these reservations, Sanders believes the new research “sets a good framework” for additional studies on the elephant family tree. He hopes Liu and his team will study remains from other elephant relatives, such as Phosphatherium and Numidotherium, in the future.

See also here.

Miocene German elephants: here.

New Proboscideans (Mammalia) from the middle Miocene of Thailand: here.

Dinotherium: here.

Babar the elephant books: here.

Miocene Mammals of Oregon: here.

Scientists have found evidence that cavemen near the U.S.-Mexico border were butchering gomphotheres, elephant-like beasts from the Ice Age, that were believed to be nearly extinct in North America by the time humans appeared there: here.

Scientists at the University of Leicester are using an unusual resource to investigate ancient climates – prehistoric animal urine. The animal in question is the rock hyrax, a common species in countries such as Namibia and Botswana. They look like large guinea pigs but are actually related to the elephant. Hyraxes use specific locations as communal toilets, some of which have been used by generations of animals for thousands of years. The urine crystallises and builds up in stratified accumulations known as ‘middens,’ providing a previously untapped resource for studying long-term climate change: here.

New McCain cartoon

This is a new cartoon, from Internet Weekly in the USA, about Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Especially about McCain‘s views on the Iraq war and torture; and his advanced age.

It is based on the horror movie Eraserhead.

Dutch slave trade was worse than thought so far

This video is about the slave trade.

From a press release by the university of Leiden in the Netherlands, it is apparent that Dutch slave trade in the eighteenth century was worse than historians thought so far.

According to the new PhD thesis of historian Ruud Paesie, people had unterestimated the number of slaves brought from Africa to the Americas by Dutch ships which illegally broke the slave trade monopoly of the Dutch West India Company.

Paesie estimates that from 1700 to 1730, apart from the 80,000 slaves transported by the Dutch West India Company, at least 40,000 have been transported on illegal ships.

New snout beetle species discovered in Thailand

This video is called Butterfly garden & Insect World Phuket Thailand.

From the Bangkok Post in Thailand:

New species of snout beetle discovered

APINYA WIPATAYOTIN

A team of Thai entomologists has discovered the world’s three newest species of snout beetle in the eastern forest complex, which is indicative of the region’s plentiful biodiversity.

The newly found species were named Articerodes thailandicus, Articerodes omomoi and Articerodes jariyae. They belong to the Pselaphinae subfamily which groups more than 10,000 species of beetle widely found in many parts of the world.

Watana Sukchoowong, an entomologist at the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, said that before the discovery of the three new species Thailand recorded only 40 species of snout beetle in the Pselaphinae subfamily.

Specimens of the three new species were found at Khao Ang Rue Nai wildlife sanctuary in Chachoengsao province, Khao Soi Dao wildlife sanctuary and Khao Khitchakut national park in Chanthaburi province, the entomologist said.

A century of conservation in the Netherlands

This is a video about Dutch national park Dwingelderveld.

According to the Dutch conservation organization Natuurmonumenten, it recently increased the land surface which it owns to over 100,000 hectare.

It reached this milestone by acquiring land for the Grensmaas nature reserve in the southern Netherlands, along the Meuse river.

In 1906, Natuurmonumenten acquired its first property: the Naardermeer.

Parody of United States paper Wall Street Journal

This video from the USA is called A Bill Moyers essay on Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal.

From Uzbekistan News.Net:

Wall Street Journal not amused by spoof

Monday 14th April, 2008 (IANS)

The redoubtable Wall Street Journal does not seem to have been tickled by a new paper spoofing it, so much so that advance copies of the tabloid are being whisked away from news stands.

‘Bush abolishes death, taxes – Move will benefit McCain‘ is the lead headline on the front page of the inaugural issue of ‘My Wall Street Journal’, which has a striking similarity to the 120-year-old original. The accompanying story tries to make a point about the age, 71, of John McCain, the likely Republican candidate for the presidential election in the US.

‘Could Hillary win as an African-American Man?’ is another headline with a picture of Hillary Clinton morphed as one.

But the satirical newspaper mostly sets out to poke fun at The Journal’s new owner, the News Corporation, and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch, besides Wall Street firms and traders, and assorted politicians and pundits.

Although the new paper’s release date is Thursday, some newsstands began selling it last week. And owner of one newsstand in Los Angeles reported somebody buying all the available copies from his stand and other stands, The New York Times reported Monday.

Contacted by the Times, a spokesman for The Journal declined to comment.

Tony Hendra, editor of the satire, is known to have created Journal parodies in the 1980s. This time, he has contributions from a team of comedy writers and online outlets including Amazon.com and wsjparody.com.

Hendra, a former editor of ‘National Lampoon’, said somebody trying to hoard copies would be good for sales. I’d find it amusing if they bought all 250,000,’ he told the Times, referring to the print run of the satire.

The Wall Street Journal is often referred to as War Street Journal, because of its support for George W. Bush’s Iraq war. That the paper was recently acquired by arch war monger Rupert Murdoch did not exactly help that reputation.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman and managing director of News Corporation, owner of British tabloids, the Star supermarket tabloid, Sky Television, the Fox Network, the New York Post, and, most recently, Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, appears ready to gobble up Long Island’s Newsday: here.

Protecting birds in Bermuda

From BirdLife:

Bermuda’s new National Park extends IBA protection

15-04-2008

The largest island in Bermuda’s Castle Harbour, part of Bermuda’s only Important Bird Area (IBA), is to become the Cooper’s Island National Nature Reserve, classed as a National Park.

The entire world population of Endangered Bermuda Petrel or Cahow Pterodroma cahow nests within 1 km of Cooper’s Island, and the southern promontory of the island is the only area from which the Cahow can be easily observed from land. Cooper’s Island is close to the Nonsuch Island Nature Reserve, site of a five-year translocation project to re-establish a breeding population of Cahows beyond the reach of hurricane damage.

The 77 acre (32.2 hectare) Cooper’s Island is also home to a large number of nesting White-tailed Tropicbirds Phaethon lepturus, and with the other Castle Harbour islands plays host to the largest colonies of this species on Bermuda, at over 600 nesting pairs.

“Almost all of the area designated as an IBA is now protected to some extent,” said Jeremy Madeiros of Bermuda’s Department of Conservation Services.

Parts of the island are still used for purposes not strictly compatible with a Nature Reserve, including a radar tower, marine communications antenna and police firing range, but the Department of Conservation is talking to all parties to minimise light levels, guy wires and similar threats to Cahows and other night-flying birds. …

Cooper’s Island is one of the most important sites on Bermuda for neotropical migrants, both passage migrants and overwintering birds. “It is especially important for shorebirds, including the listed Piping Plover Charadrius melodus, Black-bellied Plover Pluvialis squatarola and Killdeer Charadrius vociferus, which use the large beach areas, and raptors, especially Osprey Pandion haliaetus and Northern Harrier Circus cyaneus,” said Madeiros. …

The Critically Endangered Bermuda Skink Eumeces longirostris, a ground lizard which lives in Cahow nest burrows, eating insects and parasites and helping to keep the burrows clean, will be re-introduced to Cooper’s Island.

From Wikipedia:

The [Cooper's] island has been used by many United States Government agencies, having been the property of the US Army, US Air Force and US Navy (which relinquished the island in 1995), as well as previously being occupied by a NASA space tracking station.

Neotropical migratory bird grants link sites and people along the Americas flyway: here.

Texas fundamentalist sect accused of abuse of girls, subsidized by Pentagon

This video from the USA says about itself:

Author Carolyn Jessop describes her escape from the FLDS, an ultra-fundamentalist offshoot of the Mormon Church.

From McClatchy Newspapers in the USA:

Polygamist sect gets millions from U.S. government

By Jack Douglas Jr.

FT. WORTH, Tex. American taxpayers have unwittingly helped finance a polygamist sect that is now the focus of a massive child abuse investigation in West Texas, with a business tied to the group receiving a nearly $1 million loan from the federal government and $1.2 million in military contracts.

The ability of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or FLDS, to operate and grow is largely dependent on huge contributions from its members and revenue from the businesses they control, according to a former accountant for the church, and government officials in Utah and Arizona, where the sect is primarily based.

One of those businesses, NewEra Manufacturing in Las Vegas, has been awarded more than $1.2 million in federal government contracts, with most of the money coming in recent years from the Defense Department for wheel and brake components for military aircraft.

A large portion of the awards were preferential no-bid or “sole source” contracts because of the company’s classification as a small business, according to online databases that track federal government appropriations.

NewEra, previously known as Western Precision Inc. and located in Hildale, Utah, also received a $900,000 loan in 2005 from the federal Small Business Administration, the data show.

The president and chief executive of the company is John. C. Wayman, identified as an FLDS leader and a close associate to Warren Jeffs, the sect’s “prophet,” who was convicted last year as an accomplice to rape for arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old cousin.

When Jeffs, who was one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, was arrested in the summer of 2006, he was driving Wayman’s late-model red Cadillac Escalade, government officials say.

Wayman did not return phone calls seeking comment.

On NewEra’s Web site Wayman says the company is “an honorable and valuable asset to our country” in helping build military and commercial airplanes that carry people throughout the world. He does not mention its ties to the FLDS. …

U.S. Rep. Kay Granger, the Fort Worth Republican who sits on the House Appropriations Committee that deals with issues of defense, military and homeland security, said she is surprised that the federal government is doing business with a group accused of mistreating women and children.

Ms Granger does not need to be that surprised about that; considering what her party’s George W. Bush administration does to women, children, and other civilians in Iraq and elsewhere. With the help of the military aircraft partly made by this religious fundamentalist business.

John Nielsen, who worked for the company when it was Western Precision in Hildale, said in a 2005 affidavit that he and other FLDS members were made to work for little or no wages, even as the company was bringing in lucrative government contracts and other work.

At the same time, $50,000 to $100,000 in company profits were going each month to FLDS “and/or” Jeffs, Nielsen said in the affidavit, filed as part of a civil lawsuit.

He said he and other sect members thought their working for free or for extremely low wages would bring them redemption. Instead, Nielsen said in the affidavit, he was found to be “wanting” by the sect’s leadership, ordered off the property and separated from his five young children and his wife. She was “reassigned” to another man, becoming the fourth of his six wives.

“It broke my heart,” Nielsen said in the affidavit. He declined to comment when reached by phone Friday.

In Texas, authorities raided the FLDS’ sprawling YFZ Ranch near Eldorado on April 3, beginning an exhaustive search of its 1,691 acres. Authorities were acting on a tip from a 16-year-old girl inside the compound who said she had been beaten and raped by a 50-year-old man whom she was forced to marry. …

While the men of the sect have held close rein on their “plural wives” and children, seldom allowing them to associate with the outside world, the male leaders have fanned out into successful public business ventures. They work as government defense contractors, dairy farmers, engineers, construction contractors, log-cabin homebuilders and suppliers of lanyards, the cords used on eyeglasses or nametags.

In addition, JNJ Engineering, a company owned and operated by FLDS leaders, has made millions of dollars in Las Vegas, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in September. The company won $11.3 million in contract work from the Las Vegas Valley Water District; all but one of the project workers came from the twin towns of Hildale and Colorado City, Ariz., where most of the sect’s 10,000 members live.

Jethro Barlow, a former accountant for the FLDS whom Warren Jeffs excommunicated in 2003, said Jeffs ordered sect members, their families and the companies they operated to “give till it hurts….

“And people did.”

Jeffs was able to rally church members to tithe heavily, even if it hurt them financially, because he had convinced them that they had to prepare for the end of the world, Barlow said.

The fever-pitched preparation continued, even after several apocalyptic deadlines had passed. It motivated the rapid construction of the temple at the YFZ Ranch and the erection there of manufactured cabin-like homes made by sect members in Canada, he said.

See also here.

Decline of fundamentalist Southern Baptists in the USA: here.

African American singer Mavis Staples and civil rights

This is a music video of Mavis Staples “Eyes On The Prize”, with film footage of the 1950s-1960s civil rights struggle in the USA. The lyrics of that song are here.

From British daily The Guardian:

The long march

Mavis Staples helped soundtrack the 60s civil rights movement. Now the only member of the Staple Singers regularly performing, she tells Laura Barton she’s hoping Barack Obama will finish what Martin Luther King started

Tuesday April 15, 2008

The jazz writer Stanley Crouch once described the sound of the Staple Singers as “joy and thunder”. From the 50s, the family group, led by Roebuck “Pops” Staples, married a rumbling gospel with soul and blues and politics, creating hits such as I’ll Take You There and Respect Yourself. Today, only Mavis, the youngest member, continues to perform; her father died in 2000, her brother Pervis has retired, her sister Cleotha suffers from Alzheimer’s, while her other sister, Yvonne, sings occasional back-up on tour. So it is reassuring to hear Mavis Staples’ powerful new album, recorded with Ry Cooder, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the Original Freedom Singers: that distinctive voice is still there – still joyful, still thunderous.

This afternoon, Staples recalls the day the president of her record company suggested she record an album of freedom songs. She was sceptical. “I said, ‘D’you think people want to hear freedom songs today?’” But she soon realised, she says, the strength of the idea: “Because Dr King, he brought us a mighty long way, but the bigotry, the injustice, it’s all still here.” She looks ferocious, in spite of her make-up and pale pink scarf. “We’re freer, but we’re not equal – in our jobs, our schooling, we’re still at the bottom of the totem pole. And Dr King, his dream is not being realised.”

The music of the Staple Singers soundtracked the civil rights movement: it was their songs that were sung on protest marches; Martin Luther King was a close friend of Pops Staples. “Pop, he always told the songwriters: if you wanna write for the Staples, read the headlines,” she says. “‘Cause we wanna sing about what’s happening in the world. And this is still happening.” She shakes her head with dismay. “Every time I pick up the paper. In Chicago today, a black family can move into a neighbourhood, and they get all settled in and the next morning they wake up, their garage is spraypainted: n-word, get out. It’s terrifying. I looked at [Hurricane] Katrina, I had flashbacks. My sister and I, we feel it from time to time – the girl behind the desk, she’ll see us standing there looking right at her, but she’ll wait on the white person. And I’m easy, but Yvonne, she won’t take it. She’ll say, ‘Well, wait a minute! We’re next! Don’t try that!’” …

These reminiscences are delivered over the songs like freestyle poetry, and cover the time Staples first became aware of racial segregation (someone remonstrated with her for almost drinking from a white drinking fountain when she was eight); the time the Staple Singers were arrested in Arkansas; and the occasion when she inadvertantly integrated a launderette in Mississippi. “I was down in Mississippi visiting my grandfather,” she recalls, “and I went up to the laundromat. I didn’t know there was a white side and a black side, but I went in and I happened to go in the black side, and all the machines were taken. And I said, ‘I can’t wait!’ So I was on my way back to my grandfather’s and on the way I passed the white side; just two white ladies sitting in there. So I went in, started washing, they didn’t say anything to me. All of a sudden, black ladies, I saw ‘em peepin’ … ” She starts to laugh. “And I guess they thought, ‘Oh, she’s in there’, so they came over and started washing their clothes, too. And when I got back to the house, my grandfather was preaching, ‘Yeah, my baby Mable!’ – he never called me Mavis, he just had one tooth. Someone had gone round and told him, ‘Your grand-baby has gone and integrated the washeteria!’”

I ask Staples why she thinks music played such a significant role in the civil rights movement, and she tells me about going back to Washington DC to speak to congressman John Lewis, an associate of King who has written the album’s liner notes. “He said to me, ‘Your father, your family, you all kept us going, your music kept us going, the songs you sang kept us going.’ And they did, we were writing our own freedom songs. March Up Freedom’s Highway – we wrote that for the march from Selma to Montgomery. And It’s a Long Walk to DC, But I Got My Walking Shoes On – we wrote that for the march to Washington.

“Music is good for the soul,” she continues. “It just kept you marching. And we would march all day, and then we’d go to someone’s house and have a big dinner, then we’d just all talk about what we’d done that day. It reminded me of the folk singers, when they’d call us to the folk festivals, and there’d be Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Richie Havens. And after we sang the festivals, they’d take their acoustic guitars and go to one of these big houses and just sit on the floor and just everybody sing together. There’s songs on the CD that relate to that time, like We Shall Not Be Moved – we’d go to a restaurant and they wouldn’t serve us, and they’d call the police to get us outta there. And we’d lock arms and we’d sing, ‘We shall, we shall not be moved,’ and everybody would just hold as tight as we could until the police came and pulled us apart. Music is just powerful.”

Does she feel that musicians have a political responsibility? “I have to speak only for us,” she says, tentatively. “But I would love to hear other singers sing it. I would love to hear a rapper rap freedom. We thought about it too late – if I had asked Common or Kanye [see also here] to rap on just on one song, maybe.” She sighs, her mood turned cloudy at the opportunity missed. “Because you want the young people to hear these songs. You want them to know their black history. I had a schoolteacher living next door to me, and she told me that when Rosa Parks passed away, a girl in her class, 17 years old, asked her, ‘What did she do? Who was she?’ And Rosa Parks started it all!”

See also here.

Marcus Garvey: here.

A recent book by author Jeffrey Perry aims to help a new generation of activists rediscover the Black radical Hubert Harrison: here. And here.

US dockworkers’ May Day strike against Iraq war

This video from the USA says about itself:

Oakland injuries from police brutality against protest. Video evidence of injuries suffered by protesters shot by police at protest on April 7, 2003.

From British daily News Line:

Tuesday, 15 April 2008

US Longshoremen show the way with strike action on May Day to stop the war in Iraq

DOCKWORKERS of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have decided to stop work for eight hours in all US West Coast ports on May 1, International Workers’ Day, to call for an end to the war with Iraq.

The motion carried by the dockworkers calls the war an imperialist war for oil in which the lives of working-class youth and Iraqi civilians are being sacrificed and that therefore they have declared May Day a ‘no peace, no work’ holiday.

The Longshoremen oppose both the Republicans and the spineless Democrats, who oppose the war but who vote to finance it, and have decided that they have to show where they stand on the issue.

The Pacific Maritime Association, the West Coast employer association of shipowners, stevedore companies and terminal operators, have declared their opposition to the stand taken by the dockers, and will be running to the Bush regime to use the state to take action against the dockworkers.

In 2002, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration threatened that if there were any of the usual job actions during contract bargaining, then troops would occupy the docks because such actions would jeopardize ‘national security’.

The PMA employers locked out the longshoremen and shut down all the West Coast ports for 11 days. but the ‘security’ issue vanished without trace.

Bush, however, invoked the Taft-Hartley Act, forcing the dockers back to work under conditions favourable to the employers.

This set the scene of one of the biggest battles between workers and the state in the US since the end of the Second World War.

When the US-UK armies invaded Iraq, hundreds of protesters demonstrated on the Oakland docks, and the dockworkers being men of principle refused to cross their picket lines.

Their action was met by a savage police attack, made without warning. Police in riot gear opened fire, shooting protesters and longshoremen alike with allegedly non-lethal weapons – wooden dowels, rubber bullets, pellet bags, concussion grenades and tear gas.

A UN Human Rights Commission investigator described the Oakland police attack as ‘the most violent’ against anti-war protesters in the United States.

These workers are now going to take strike action and march on May 1, international workers day, against the imperialist war in Iraq, and they must have the support of the trade unions not only in the US, but all over the world.

The British workers and youth marched two million strong against the war in Iraq. The so-called democratic Blair government simply ignored their massive protests and launched a savage attack on Iraq, knowing full well that the Iraqis did not have any weapons of mass destruction with which to retaliate.

Over a million Iraqis have been killed and wounded since that savage attack took place.
The only way to stop this war is through strike action, building up to a general strike to bring down the various warmongering imperialist governments.

The British trade unions must follow the example of the US dockworkers.

Monday May 1 is international workers day and it is definitely the day to stop work and march, at the same time as the US dockworkers, to stop the war in Iraq.

Otherwise, if a real struggle is not begun against imperialist war, it is only a matter of time before the US and the UK attack Iran and perhaps devastate a chunk of central Asia using weapons of mass destruction, with the loss of another million or so innocent lives.

Iraq War Costs Skyrocketing, But Congress Unable To Scrutinize Spending, by Jason Leopold: here.