Today, to the cemetery.
Great spotted woodpecker. Many blackbirds.
This is a video about a great tit nest in a nestbox.
Juvenile great tits. Also a juvenile blue tit, hanging on the underside of a leafy oak branch.
From British daily The Guardian:
Now for South Korea? North Korea reaches World Cup finalsForty-three years after success in England, North returns to football’s big stage
* Justin McCurry Tokyo
* Friday 19 June 2009It could be a genuine game of two halves. Forty-three years after they stunned the world by reaching the quarter-finals in England in 1966, North Korea have qualified for the World Cup finals – setting up the tantalising possibility of a match with South Korea.
Having played out a 0-0 draw in Saudi Arabia, the North Korean team is now preparing for next summer’s finals in South Africa.
A North Korean victory over the old enemy or its other great nemesis, the US – who are on the verge of qualification – would be exploited for every last ounce of propaganda value in Pyongyang. …
When in Pyongyang, Jong Tae-se, a Japanese-born forward who plays for the J-League team Kawasaki Frontale, travels to training by subway and trolleybus.
Jong, who was born to South Korean parents, is regarded as something of a socialist poster boy after rejecting offers from Japan and South Korea to represent the North. …
Yet North Korea’s only previous appearance in the World Cup suggests the Italians [current world champions] have reason to fear the men they called the Red Mosquitoes.
At their last meeting, at Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough, in 1966, North Korea stunned the football world with a 1-0 win. While the Italians dodged a hail of rotten tomatoes on their arrival in Rome, the victors endeared themselves to their hosts during the tournament.
In the quarter final against Portugal, North Korea went 3-0 up, only to lose 5-3 after a Eusebio-inspired comeback.
Few believe the current team will revisit those heady days: bookmakers are offering odds of 750-1 on North Korea to lift the World Cup. The best they can hope for is another famous victory, perhaps against the US or South Korea.
Japan: Communists Protest Call for Using SDF to Inspect North Korean Cargo Ships: here.
North Korea to restart exchanges with South: here.
South Korea is poised to launch its first rocket into orbit, just four months after Pyongyang launched its own and was immediately slapped with UN sanctions: here.
This video says about itself:
Did the CIA abduct, torture and hold men prisoner on European soil? President Bush recently acknowledged that the CIA has operated secret prisons. What happened in these secret prisons in Europe? Filmmakers Arnaud Muller and Steve Baumann conduct their own investigation around a European Parliament inquiry to help answer these troubling questions.
From The Raw Story in the USA:
CIA delays release of secret prison reportBy Stephen C. Webster
Published: June 19, 2009
Updated 13 hours agoThe CIA has delayed the release of a promised 150-page report on secret prisons and interrogation techniques, according to a letter sent to the American Civil Liberties Union on Friday.
The report, originally expected Friday, was still being examined by government censors for sensitive material, the intelligence agency said Thursday.
“We are disappointed by the delay in the disclosure of this report which contains critical information about the illegality and ineffectiveness of the CIA’s interrogation program,” said ACLU attorney Amrit Singh in a media advisory. “We can only hope that this delay is a sign that the forces of transparency within the Obama administration are winning over the forces of secrecy and that the report will ultimately be released with minimal redactions.”
The report sought by the ACLU was originally released, albeit heavily redacted, in May 2008. The document, now expected on Friday, June 26, will likely be only slightly less-redacted.
The report on the CIA’s torture program, as released by the Office of the Inspector General last year, is available on the Internet (PDF link).
Unfortunately, that PDF link at the Raw Story does not work.
Several senior Obama aides have told the Washington Post that an administration task force is drafting an executive order that would allow for the indefinite detention, without charge or trial, of those the president claims are terrorists: here.
This video says about itself:
Salvador Allende – 1:39:55From his childhood in Valparaiso to his death during the Pinochet military coup on September 11, 1973, the life and works of Chilean president Salvador Allende.
From British daily The Independent:
Hortensia Bussi De Allende: Widow of Salvador Allende who helped lead opposition to Chile’s military dictatorshipBy Phil Davison
Saturday, 20 June 2009
Hortensia Bussi de Allende will inevitably, and she always said “proudly,” be remembered as the widow of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Marxist president of Chile who died in a coup d’état launched by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973.
But to those Chileans who fought for democracy during the dark years of dictatorship, she was respected, even revered in her own right.
After her husband’s death during Pinochet’s air and ground attack on the presidential palace in Santiago, Bussi fled Pinochet’s death squads and went on, in exile based in Mexico, to become a campaigner for democracy and human rights in her homeland and the other military-oppressed Latin American nations of the time. Known nationally by her nickname Tencha, she became a figurehead among her leftist or moderate compatriots who eventually prevailed over Pinochet in a 1988 referendum, allowing her to return home after 15 years.
From British daily The Guardian:
Austria set to sue over BAE arms sales• New documents in inquiry into corruption allegations
• Vienna prosecutor builds case against ‘persuader’* David Leigh and Rob Evans
* Friday 19 June 2009 21.58 BSTAustria expects to bring corruption charges in connection with BAE arms sales, the first such prosecution in five years’ of bribery investigations all over the world.
The Austrian prosecutors’ decision follows the emergence of new documents that outline in considerable detail the channelling of secret BAE cash to Count Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly, an Austrian aristocrat who worked undercover for the arms firm. In one memo, Mensdorff claims Austria was persuaded to buy BAE‘s Eurofighters in 2002 for €1.7bn (£1.5bn), thanks to “aggressive incentive payments to key decision-makers”.
Leaked Austrian legal files reveal a new witness has emerged, Mark Cliff, 51, a British accountant, who helped the count to acquire a shooting estate with castle at Dalnaglar in Scotland in 2003. Cliff has now supplied information and documents. He was closely involved in running a chain of offshore companies used by Mensdorff. Cliff told the Guardian he did not wish to comment. …
According to the documents, Mensdorff helped promote BAE‘s interests in Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary.
New business for BAE Systems boosted its shares in a lacklustre stockmarket . News of a £370m contract to maintain and develop torpedoes for the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force lifted the defence group 4.9p, or 1.5%, to 325.5p: here.
This video from the USA says about itself:
Caroline Elkins – Colonial War Crimes in Kenya: Prospects for Reconciliation.Hugo K. Foster Associate Professor of African Studies, Caroline Elkins, discusses her first book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya.
From British daily The Morning Star:
Mau Mau veterans to sue Britain for tortureFriday 19 June 2009
Kenyan independence veterans have announced that they will file a lawsuit against the British government next week for the torture that they claim they suffered at the hands of their former British colonial rulers.
Mau Mau War Veterans Association spokesman Gitu wa Kahengeri said on Thursday that the suit, which will be filed at the High Court in London on Tuesday, follows the British government’s rejection of a 2006 demand for compensation and a formal apology.
Mr wa Kahengeri said: “What we are doing is for all the freedom fighters in Kenya.
“We are demanding compensation because we were in concentration camps for 10 years. Our children did not go to school.”
Six members of the association will be seeking general compensation of £50,000 each.
The veterans participated in the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, which aimed to shake off colonial rule.
The colonial regime launched a brutal counterinsurgency effort in a bid to stamp out the armed nationalist campaign.
According to the Kenya Human Rights Commission, 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured or maimed during the crackdown.
See also here.
This is a David Rovics music video about Coca-Cola and Colombian death squads. It says about itself:
True story first told to me by Katie Knight from the Colombia Support Network in Montana. Something like half of the union organizers that are killed in the world each year are Colombian. Colombia is also the biggest recipient of military aid in the hemisphere. This, of course, is a coincidence.———–
Coca-Cola came to Colombia
Seeking lower wages
They got just what they came for
But as we turn the pages
We find the workers didn’t like the sound
Of their children’s hungry cries
So they said we’ll join the union
And they began to organizeSo Coke called up a terrorist group
Called the AUC
They said “we’ve got some problems
At the factory”
So these thugs went to the plant
Killed two union men
Told the rest, “you leave the union
Or we’ll be back again”Now Coke did not complain
About this dirty deed
Why give workers higher wages
When Coke is all they really need
They phoned the AUC
Said “thanks, without you we’d go broke
And to show our appreciation
Here’s one hundred cases of Coke”(Chorus)
The baby drinks it in his bottle
When the water ain’t no good
The dog drinks it
But he don’t know if he should
Some folks say
It’s the nectar of the Gods
But Coke is the drink of the Death SquadsWell the workers wouldn’t take
This situation lying down
Some went up to Georgia
Said “look what’s happened to our town
You American workers got downsized
And as for us we just get shot
And those of us who survive
Our teeth begin to rot”(Chorus)
Well now that’s the situation
What are you gonna do
‘Cause death squads run Colombia
And they’re paid by me and you
We can let Coke run the world
And see what future that will bring
Or we can drink juice and smash the state
Now that’s the real thing(Chorus)
Created March, 2002
Copyright David Rovics 2002, all rights reserved
From British daily The Morning Star:
Uribe‘s military ‘gets away with murder’Friday 19 June 2009
A UN investigator has slammed Colombia for not doing enough to punish soldiers who systematically killed innocent civilians to inflate guerilla death tolls.
After a 10-day visit, interviewing more than 100 witnesses and survivors, special envoy Philip Alston told reporters yesterday that he had found nothing to indicate that such extrajudicial killings were state policy or that President Alvaro Uribe and his defence ministers knew of them.
However, he said that it was “unsustainable” for officials in Mr Uribe’s conservative government to argue that the killings were carried out “on a small scale by a few bad apples.”
The vast majority of the “more or less systematic” slayings occurred after Mr Uribe‘s 2002 election.
The hard-line president’s supporters claim that he has used billions of dollars in US aid to intensify the fight against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerillas, making wide areas of the country safer.
But Mr Alston criticised what he called too few successful prosecutions of extrajudicial killings, saying that Colombia needs more human rights prosecutors.
And he complained that military judges have tried to “thwart the transfer of clear human rights cases” to the ordinary justice system.
Mr Alston characterised as “blatant and obscene” the most highly publicised case – at least 11 young men lured from the poor Bogota suburb of Soacha early last year with promises of work, only to be found dead hundreds of miles away, depicted as dead FARC fighters.
“Evidence showing victims dressed in camouflage outfits which are neatly pressed or wearing clean jungle boots four sizes too big for them, or left-handers holding guns in their right hands, or men with a single shot through the back of their necks, undermines the suggestion that these were guerillas killed in combat,” he observed.
Mr Alston called that case the “tip of the iceberg” in a practice of “cold-blooded, premeditated murder of innocent civilians for profit” that involved “a significant number of military units” in nearly half of Colombia’s states.
And he observed that such killings have disproportionately affected the rural poor, indigenous people, Afro-Colombians, trade unionists, human rights activists and community leaders.
Victims included “boys of 16 to 17, a young man with a mental age of nine, a devoted family man with two in-laws in active military service and a young soldier home on leave.”
The government, which invited the fact-finding mission and co-operated with the inquiry, has taken “important steps to stop and respond to these killings, but the number of successful prosecutions remains very low,” Mr Alston warned.
COLOMBIA: Spying in the Name of ‘Democratic Security’, here.
Colombian government targets Communist leader: here.
Colombia has announced that 15 soldiers have been sentenced to up to 30 years in prison over the slaying of two brothers, falsely identified as left-wing guerillas: here.
Colombian ministers sought to defend plans to allow the US to boost its military presence in the country at a public hearing on Wednesday: here. Venezuela’s president has objected to a decision by neighbouring Colombia to allow more US troops onto its soil: here.
Tensions Rise in Latin America over US Military Plan to Use Three Bases in Colombia: here. And here.
Isolated Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has embarked off on a south American tour to defend his unpopular plans to expand the US military’s presence in his country: here.
COLOMBIA: Indigenous People Troubled by U.S. Military Presence: here.
US military aid to Colombia is privatized: here.
Over 100 leading US human rights, peace and community organisations have called on Washington to “suspend negotiations for expanded US military access or operations in Colombia”: here.
Professor in Colombia victim of repression: here.
COLOMBIA: Spying on Human Rights Defenders: here.
COLOMBIA: From Espionage to Sabotage – and the Dirty War (Part 3): here.
Colombia vs. Venezuela: here.
What can make a giant tremble? When a penniless student group gets a threat from New York lawyers – in this case, Coca-Cola’s lawyers – on account the students want to show a film condemning human rights abuses, the optics suggest that the giant has something to hide. ‘Screening truth to power’, it seems, has its consequences: here.
This video from England says about itself:
Hazel Blears MP for Salford caught with both feet in the trough, claims she has done nothing wrong; only claimed within the rules, in other words rob the taxpayer and have your three house paid for by the taxpayer and while your at il furnish them as well, WHAT HAS TOWELS GOT TO DO WITH HER PARLAMENTAL DUTIES, SHE IS ROBBING THE TAX PAYER BLIND ALONG WITH ALL THE OTHERS ROBBERS. IF IT WAS A MEMBER OF THE PUBLIC DOING WHAT THESE MPS DO THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN ARRESTED FOR FRAUD BY NOW, DON’T VOTE FOR THIS WOMAN AGAIN. SEND HER PACKING.
From British daily The Morning Star:
Salford petitions to drive Blears outFriday 19 June 2009
by Louise Nousratpour
Local residents and union activists have vowed to continue their campaign to oust Salford MP Hazel Blears after the former communities secretary survived a deselection vote.
Ms Blears insisted that the Labour Party had “rallied behind” her after she kept the party’s nomination for her Salford seat on Thursday night. The voting was 33 against the deselection motion, 12 for and one abstention.
In a fiery and passionate meeting, some party members berated Ms Blears for fiddling her expenses and said that she had left the local party with a “lame duck” candidate for the next general election.
Some local party members said that they themselves had been verbally attacked in the street following the expenses scandal.
The news that Ms Blears would stay in her post was met with shouts of “Hazel out” by protesters in front of Salford Civic Centre on Thursday night.
The Hazel Must Go! campaign – a coalition of local resident groups backed by public-sector union UNISON Salford branch and Salford Star community magazine – said that her constituents were “fed up” with her.
Organiser Stephen Kingston said that the vote showed that the Labour Party in Salford is “completely and absolutely” out of touch with its own voters.
He added: “Labour is supposed to be the party of the working class, so why aren’t they listening to the working class in Salford? The campaign will definitely continue. This is just the start of it.”
Mr Kingston reported that the campaign had already gathered 250 signatures in under two hours.
“People were literally queuing up to sign the petition to oust Ms Blears,” he added.
A UNISON Salford spokesman confirmed the union’s support for the campaign and condemned Ms Blears‘ “corrupt” behaviour.
See also here.
British trade unions are refusing to be a cash cow for a party that presents nothing but neoliberalism: here.
The MPs’ expenses report has got more blackouts than London during the blitz: here.
Scotland Yard announces inquiry into expenses of ‘small number’ of unnamed parliamentarians: here.
