Four leathery white eggs from an indigenous tuatara were found by staff at the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary in the capital Wellington, during routine maintenance work, conservation manager Rouen Epson said.
“The nest was uncovered by accident and is the first concrete proof we have that our tuatara are breeding,” Ms Epson said. “It suggests that there may be other nests in the sanctuary we don’t know of.”
Tuatara, dragon-like reptiles that grow to up to 32ins, are the last descendants of a species that walked the earth with the dinosaurs 225 million years ago, zoologists say.
They have unique characteristics, such as two rows of top teeth closing over one row at the bottom. They also have a pronounced parietal eye, a light-sensitive pineal gland on the top of the skull. This white patch of skin – called its “third eye” – slowly disappears as they mature.
A native species to New Zealand, tuatara were nearly extinct on the country’s three main islands by the late 1700s due to the introduction of predators such as rats. They still live in the wild on 32 small offshore islands cleared of predators.
A population of 70 tuatara was established at the Karori Sanctuary in 2005. Another 130 were released in the sanctuary in 2007.
The sanctuary, a 620-acre wilderness minutes from central Wellington, was established to breed native birds, insects and other creatures securely behind a predator-proof fence.
Ms Empson said that the four eggs – the size of ping-pong balls – were unearthed today but that there were probably more because the average nest contains around 10 eggs.
The eggs were immediately covered up again to avoid disturbing incubation.
If all goes well, juvenile tuatara could hatch any time between now and March, she said.
The Bush gang’s parting gift: a final, frantic looting of public wealth
The US bail-out amounts to a strings-free, public-funded windfall for big business. Welcome to no-risk capitalism
In the final days of the election many Republicans seem to have given up the fight for power. But don’t be fooled: that doesn’t mean they are relaxing. If you want to see real Republican elbow grease, check out the energy going into chucking great chunks of the $700bn bail-out out the door. At a recent Senate banking committee hearing, the Republican Bob Corker was fixated on this task, and with a clear deadline in mind: inauguration. “How much of it do you think may be actually spent by January 20 or so?” Corker asked Neel Kashkari, the 35-year-old former banker in charge of the bail-out.
When European colonialists realised that they had no choice but to hand over power to the indigenous citizens, they would often turn their attention to stripping the local treasury of its gold and grabbing valuable livestock. If they were really nasty, like the Portuguese in Mozambique in the mid-1970s, they poured concrete down the elevator shafts.
Nothing so barbaric for the Bush gang. Rather than open plunder, it prefers bureaucratic instruments, such as “distressed asset” auctions and the “equity purchase program”. But make no mistake: the goal is the same as it was for the defeated Portuguese – a final, frantic looting of the public wealth before they hand over the keys to the safe.
How else to make sense of the bizarre decisions that have governed the allocation of the bail-out money? When the Bush administration announced it would be injecting $250bn into US banks in exchange for equity, the plan was widely referred to as “partial nationalisation” – a radical measure required to get banks lending again. Henry Paulson, the treasury secretary, had seen the light, we were told, and was following the lead of Gordon Brown.
In fact, there has been no nationalisation, partial or otherwise. American taxpayers have gained no meaningful control over the banks, which is why the banks are free to spend the new money as they wish. At Morgan Stanley, it looks as if much of the windfall will cover this year’s bonuses. Citigroup has been hinting it will use its $25bn buying other banks, while John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told analysts: “At least for the next quarter, it’s just going to be a cushion.” The US government, meanwhile, is reduced to pleading with the banks that they at least spend a portion of the taxpayer windfall for loans – officially, the reason for the entire programme.
A tribute to Jan Wolkers, a Dutch multi-talent … cremated today [oct.24th 2007] in Amsterdam – the Netherlands; music by Ramses Shaffy “Zing Vecht Huil Bidt” …
Jan Wolkers (1925-1907) was a graphic artist, painter, sculptor, and author of novels, short stories, poems, and a theatre play. This exhibition opened exactly one year after he died.
Wolkers was born and grew up in Oegstgeest, then a religious Roman Catholic and Protestant village west of Leiden city. To escape from his strictly Calvinist family, he often walked on the Rijnsburgerweg road, which he called “the road to freedom”, to Leiden.
Already when he was ten years old, he visited the Lakenhal museum for the first time. It inspired him to become a visual artist himself. So, it really is appropriate that the Wolkers exhibition now is in the Lakenhal. Much of the work exhibited is owned by Karina, Jan’s widow.
Painters in the Lakenhal collection which inspired Wolkers included Rembrandt, about whom Jan Wolkers wrote a poem when he was eighteen years old. And the late medieval-Renaissance Dutch painters Cornelis Engebrechtsz and Lucas van Leyden; eg, Van Leyden’s self portrait.
During the Second World War, Wolkers had to hide from the nazi occupiers looking for forced labour. However, he managed to study at the Leiden art school. The studies included making drawings of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, based on the art school’s plaster copies of them.
The first halls of the exhibition contain much early graphic work from 1944 and a bit later. Self-portraits. Landscapes, of Poelgeest castle in Oegstgeest and other surroundings of Leiden. In 1945, Wolkers painted a Vanitas: a skull and bones, reminding viewers that life is not infinite. Vanitas is a well known theme in seventeenth century Dutch painting. Though Wolkers painted with much rougher brushstrokes than most seventeenth century painters, the painting is an example of how twentieth century “modern” painters still had links to artists in earlier times. Other examples of this are El Greco, Rembrandt, the Impressionists and others as inspirations for Pablo Picasso. What the modern artists did not do, and conservatice critics hated them for that, was copying old masters in slavish and sugar coated ways.
Until the late 1950s, Wolkers’ paintings and drawings, though looking avantgardist to conservatives, were figurative. That goes for his sculpture, depicting a cock, a woman with a cat, and other subjects, as well. In the late 1950s, Wolkers’ work became abstract, and would basically stay so until the artist’s death.
Much of his later sculpture was made from glass. Well known examples of this are his monument for the people killed by the nazis in Auschwitz concentration camp; and his 2005 monument for Rembrandt. Most of the glass sculpture of the exhibition was smaller work, including a model for the Rembrandt monument.
Wolkers used unusual materials in his later paintings, including gold paint and cow dung, sometimes combined in the same painting. Sometimes, pieces of wood protrude from the paintings, making them three dimensional.
Some of Wolkers’ work hangs between works by earlier artists, from the sixteenth century to Floris Verster, 1861-1927. Between earlier artists’ works to which it has relationships. Also, poems and quotations from novels by Wolkers hang on the walls of the Lakenhal regular collection halls, next to art to which they have relationships.
Something I missed a bit at this extensive exhibition were Jan Wolkers’ views on society and politics (except for a mention of his Auschwitz monument).
In the 1960s, he made election billboards for the Communist Party of the Netherlands; and posters against the Vietnam war; about Che Guevara; and against the colonial war of the Portuguese fascist regime, supported by NATO, in Africa.
When the Yugoslavia war broke out in 1999, unlike Blairite trendy pseudo-lefties, Wolkers did not support that war, but spoke out against it.
I still fondly remember him reading his poems in the Leidse Hout park; not far from where he was born; and featuring in his stories and novels.
Many of the visitors at the exhibition today were primary schoolchildren with their teachers. This is a kind of ironic justice: as in the 1960s secondary school students were often discouraged from reading Wolkers. He was considered too sexually explicit by puritans.
The Madonna del cardellino or Madonna of the Goldfinch is a painting by the Italian renaissance artist Raphael, from c. 1505-1506. A 10-year restoration process was completed in 2008, after which the painting will eventually be returned to its home at the Uffizi in Florence. The painting was replaced in the gallery with an antique copy during the restoration.
In this painting, as in most of the Madonnas of his Florentine period, Raphael arranged the three figures – Mary, Christ and the young John the Baptist – to fit into a geometrical design. Though the positions of the three bodies are natural, together they form an almost regular triangle.
The Virgin is holding a book, with identifies her as Sedes Sapientiae (“Seat of Wisdom”). The goldfinch is a symbol of Christ’s future violent death. St. John offers the goldfinch to Christ in warning of his future.
The Madonna was a wedding gift from Raphael to his friend Lorenzo Nasi. On November 17, 1548 Nasi’s house was destroyed by an earthquake and the painting broke into seventeen pieces. It was restored shortly afterwards, but the damage is [was] still visible.
(European) goldfinches have red on their heads, seen as a symbol of blood.
Vasari recounts in his book The Lives of the Artists that Raphael, who died aged 37 at the peak of his powers, was brought down by excessive passion. This view of health is medieval: the body is controlled by humours, health depends on a balance of humours, and Raphael’s was destabilised by too much action in bed. Well, it’s a theory: here.
IRAQ – MILLIONS AT RISK FROM foul WATER, FIVE YEARS AFTER THE 2003 INVASION
THE International Committee of the Red Cross has issued a damning report that millions of Iraqis’ lives are threatened by foul water and diseases such as cholera and dysentery, five years after the 2003 US-UK invasion of that country that carried through a regime change after a shock and awe bombing campaign killed tens of thousands of people.
These caused the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis, many of them very young children, who died from lack of medicines and foodstuffs.
Since 1990, that is for the last 18 years, the western powers have been attempting to destroy Iraq as an advanced country, in order to pillage its vast oil resources.
Now the American generals are threatening even their puppet government with horrible consequences if they do not agree to an unequal treaty between Iraq and the US which will allow the US combat troops to withdraw from Iraq in 2011 but leave behind thousands of troops manning half a dozen major bases, equipped with a variety of weapons of mass destruction, to be used by combat troops, who can be flown in if and when the situation is felt to demand it.
No wonder when Iraqis are told of the benefits of western democracy they laugh, they know that its content is the death and destruction of Iraq’s sovereignty and its very existence as a modern state, leaving a huge oil-bearing desert behind.
The ICRC says that the situation has not significantly improved since March 2008 when it published a wide-ranging report, ‘Iraq: no let-up in the humanitarian crisis’. This report called Iraq’s humanitarian situation among the most critical in the world.
It adds: ‘Since then, the water supply has continued to deteriorate, with millions of people relying on insufficient and poor quality supplies due to poorly maintained water and sewage systems and a shortage of sanitation engineers.’
Millions of people are at serious risk of water-borne diseases, with children particularly vulnerable.
Cholera cases peaked in a number of provinces during the hottest months of August and September.
‘Iraqis urgently need access to clean water. They try to get it from rivers and wells but these sources are contaminated throughout the country so many people become ill,’ says Patrick Yussef, Head of the ICRC sub delegation in Baghdad.
In the poorer areas of Baghdad, the streets are flooded with sewage, which seeps into the walls and under the floors of people’s houses causing them to collapse.
Now the US is seeking to export these benefits of the democratic way of life, as usual by force of arms to Syria and Iran.
Iranians feel exactly the same about the situation that faces the masses of the Middle East at the hands of US imperialism.
British workers must lend them a hand. They must make the trade unions take action against the British government until it withdraws all of its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The trade unions must be prepared to use industrial action to fight for what is right, and to help save the lives of millions of people, who are in the gunsights of US imperialism.
Iraqi cabinet stalls on US security agreement: here.
Medicine and War: is war ever responsible for human progress? Here.
“Real” Crusoe’s isle said to yield clues to sojourn
Oct. 30, 2008
Courtesy Maney Publishing and World Science staff
Cast away on a desert island, surviving on what nature alone can provide, praying for rescue but fearing the sight of an enemy boat. These are the imaginative creations of Daniel Defoe in his famous novel Robinson Crusoe.
Yet the story is thought to be based on the real experience of sailor Alexander Selkirk, marooned in 1704 on a small tropical island in the Pacific for more than four years.
New clues support contemporary records of his stay on that island, archaeologists say. A paper in the research journal Post-Medieval Archaeology describes evidence of an “early European occupant” from a dig on the island of Aguas Buenas, since renamed Robinson Crusoe Island.
The foremost evidence is a pair of navigational dividers which could only have belonged to a ship’s master or navigator, as evidence suggests Selkirk was, researchers said.
An account by Selkirk’s rescuer, Captain Woodes Rogers, of what he saw on arrival at Aguas Buenas in 1709 lists ‘some practical pieces’ and mathematical instruments amongst the few possessions that Selkirk had taken with him from the ship.
The finds also provide an insight into how Selkirk might have lived on the island, investigators added. Postholes suggest he built two shelters near to a freshwater stream, and had access to a viewpoint over the harbour from where he would be able to watch for approaching ships and discern whether they were friend or foe.
Accounts written shortly after the rescue describe him shooting goats with a gun rescued from the ship, and eventually learning to outrun them, eating their meat and using their skins as clothing. He also passed time reading the Bible and singing psalms, and seems to have enjoyed a more peaceful and devout existence than at any other time in his life, according to researchers.
“The evidence uncovered at Aguas Buenas corroborates the stories of Alexander Selkirk’s stay on the island and provides a fascinating insight into his existence there,” said David Caldwell of National Museums Scotland, one of the researchers. “We hope that Aguas Buenas, with careful management, may be a site enjoyed by the increasing number of tourists.”
Selkirk was born in the small seaside town of Lower Largo, Fife, Scotland in 1676. A younger son of a shoemaker, he was drawn to a life at sea from an early age. In 1704, during a privateering voyage on the Cinque Ports, Selkirk fell out with the commander over the boat’s seaworthiness and chose to remain behind on Robinson Crusoe Island where they had landed to overhaul the worm-infested vessel. He apparently didn’t suspect five years would pass before he was picked up by an English ship visiting the island.
Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe is one of the most famous adventure stories in English literature. Whilst it is unclear whether Defoe and Selkirk actually met, Defoe would certainly have heard the stories of Selkirk’s adventure and used the tales as the basis for his novel, according to Caldwell and colleagues.
Conservationists call for drastic action to rescue the Juan Fernández archipelago’s biodiversity from alien invaders: here.
Chile Creates Large Marine Reserve at Sala y Gómez Island: here.
Last week was a fantastic week for the oceans. Chile’s president announced the creation of a marine reserve around Sala y Gómez Island in the Pacific Ocean that will protect a biodiverse marine habitat larger than Montana: here.
This BBC video from Britain is called Shell sets new UK profits record.
From Dutch NOS TV:
Shell and Unilever have made much bigger profits in the third three month period of this year than a year ago. Shell reports profits of 10.9 billion dollars, up 71 percent. Unilever, 1.7 billion euro, made 72 peroent more profit.
Shell profited from oil prices, high on average. Even though production went down from 3.1 million barrels a day to 2.9 million barrels.
