This video is called Mary G. recites Ideeën by Multatuli.
From Dutch NOS TV:
A letter, unknown until now, by 19th century author Multatuli has been discovered. The letter was in an attick in Almere. Multatuli, a pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker, wrote the letter in 1886.
He wrote the letter to a friend, a lawyer. Multatuli writes about various subjects, including the sentencing of socialist leader Domela Nieuwenhuis to jail for insulting the king. Multatuli calls Domela Nieuwenhuis a great people’s leader.
A distant relative of the lawyer has found the letter now.
July 2008. Common Scoter numbers wintering at Carmarthen Bay have dipped below 16,000 for the second consecutive year, according to figures released by WWT.
Down from 20,000 – lowest since 1997
It was the 20,000 plus overwintering scoters that earned Carmarthen Bay the distinction of being the UK’s first marine Special Protection Area (SPA). However, the last few years have seen the marine duck suffer. An aerial survey carried out by WWT earlier this year recorded just 13,100 birds. This is the second year in a row the count has come in at under 16,000 – the lowest level that makes a population of international importance, and numbers are at their lowest since 1997/8, when the Sea Empress oil spill wiped out many birds.
Peter Cranswick, WWT’s Programme Manager for Threatened Waterbirds, said: “It is too early to draw firm conclusions about what may be happening in Carmarthen Bay, but the decline in this Biodiversity Action Plan species is of concern and merits close monitoring. We urge the Countryside Council for Wales to maintain a full programme of surveys of the SPA.”
Record-breaking numbers of sea ducks flock to Carmarthen Bay: here.
Despite spending $230m (£115m) an hour on healthcare, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed country. And while it has the second-highest income per head in the world, the United States ranks 42nd in terms of life expectancy.
These are some of the startling conclusions from a major new report which attempts to explain why the world’s number-one economy has slipped to 12th place – from 2nd in 1990- in terms of human development.
The American Human Development Report, which applies rankings of health, education and income to the US, paints a surprising picture of a country that spends well over $5bn each day on healthcare – more per person than any other country.
The report, Measure of America, was funded by Oxfam America, the Conrad Hilton Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
As for another country whose economic policies have gotten much praise from Reaganites-Thatcherites-Bushites-Blairites; Britain; also from The Guardian:
Britain lags behind in world cancer survival, says study
WHO report discloses extent of global health inequality: here.
My wife and I used Canada’s health care system for years, and we’ve been incensed by the lies we’ve heard back here in the U.S. about how it’s supposedly broken: here.
The seal Else, in Ouwehands zoo in Rhenen, will have her fiftieth birthday this Friday. According to the zoo that makes Else the world’s oldest seal. On Friday, her keepers will give her a special fish pie.
Since 1974, Else used to live with male seal Dolf in a pond in the Amstelpark in Amsterdam. Dolf died in 2001, 39 years old. Else was saddened by this loss and was wasting away.
Then, it was decided to move her to the group of seals in the miniature Wadden sea of Ouwehands zoo. Between those thirteen seals with lots of space, Else started to feel better again. Else is healthy now, though almost blind, her keepers say.
Mexico City – A female spider monkey has adopted as its offspring a Syrian rat at a zoo in the eastern Mexican city of Veracruz, in a behaviour that experts have termed a “psychological maternity” derived from hormonal disorders, Mexican media reported Wednesday. Photographs published in the daily La Jornada show the monkey named Pancha with the little rat in its arms. The rat left the place in the zoo where it had been living to move to the area reserved for monkeys.
Pancha does not only hold the rat but also feeds it and picks off parasites on the rat. The relationship has become a sensation at the Miguel Angel de Quevedo zoo, some 400 kilometres east of Mexico City.
Zoo director Rafael Mariano Torres was quoted in Veracruz media as saying that visitors first discovered the phenomenon on Sunday, when they saw Pancha holding the rat on her lap.
KABUL – U.S.-led coalition troops have killed eight Afghan civilians in an air strike in the western province of Farah during a raid against suspected militants, the U.S. military said.
The acknowledgement came as reports of more civilian deaths caused by a fresh air raid by foreign forces emerged on Thursday from the neighboring province of Herat. …
“The coalition convoy returned fire and called for close air support on the enemy positions. A house was hit; eight civilians were killed, two others injured,” it [the U.S. military] said in a statement late on Wednesday. …
Afghan officials said nine people, all members of the same family were killed in Tuesday’s bombing.
In Thursday’s raid, at least four men were killed, a spokesman for the regional police command said. Witnesses said 17 people were also wounded and taken to hospital.
It was just before midnight when the first police officer hit Mark Covell, swiping his truncheon down on his left shoulder. Covell did his best to yell out in Italian that he was a journalist but, within seconds, he was surrounded by riot-squad officers thrashing him with their sticks. For a while, he managed to stay on his feet but then a baton blow to the knee sent him crashing to the pavement.
On June 4, Italy’s highest civil court, the court of appeal in Rome, ruled that survivors of the massacre carried out in 1944 by Nazi SS stormtroopers in the Greek village of Distomo could apply for damages from Germany in Italian courts. The decision would allow the Italian authorities to sell off German state institutions located in Italy, such as the Villa Vigoni on Lake Como or the Goethe cultural institutes, to compensate victims.
In further judgements, the Italian court ruled that Italians who had been deported by the Nazis to carry out hard labour in Germany during the Second World War could apply for compensation from Italian courts. The number of former Italian forced labourers still alive is estimated at around 100,000.
In the period from September 1943 to the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945, at least 600,000 Italian prisoners of war were deported to Germany and areas of eastern Europe occupied by Germany and forced to work under brutal and inhuman conditions in German factories—in particular, the armaments industry. An estimated half a million died in the course of their deportation and hard labour.
Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office spoke at the National Press Club about the need to reform the government’s terrorist watch list. The watch list now contains one million names based on the government’s own reported numbers. The ACLU says that the watch list could effect up to 5-10% of the U.S. population.
One million names on US government “terrorist” watch list
17 July 2008
One million people—including large numbers of American citizens—are on the US government’s so-called terrorist watch list, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which held a Washington, D.C. press conference earlier this week to mark the ominous milestone.
Since February of this year the ACLU has maintained an online “watch list counter” to track the size of the government’s watch list. A September 2007 report by the inspector general of the Justice Department reported that the list contained 700,000 names and was growing by 20,000 per month. As of this writing, the counter has passed the 1,001,500 mark.
The Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) was set up in December 2003 through a Homeland Security directive signed by President George W. Bush, who ordered the agency to consolidate more than a dozen separate terrorist watch lists maintained by different federal agencies.
Thousands of innocent people have been caught up in the government’s arbitrary dragnet and “no-fly” lists; many held for hours in interrogation rooms, threatened and denied due process. Those on the list have no right to access and challenge the data in which the list is based.
“Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ‘suspicious characters,’ with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.
