‘Giraffe of the Mesozoic’ Dinosaur Unearthed in China
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
Sept. 2, 2009 — Remains of a dinosaur, nicknamed the “giraffe of the Mesozoic” due to its long neck and forelimbs, were recently discovered in China, according to a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Its name refers to a famous Qing Dynasty emperor, Kangxi, and also contains the words for “bridge,” “bend in a stream,” and “dragon,” references to the site as well as a dream the emperor is said to have had.
Rome, September 2 – Premier Silvio Berlusconi is suing Italian newspaper L’Unita‘ for libel.
Berlusconi‘s lawyers sent the left-leaning daily a letter Wednesday asking for two million euros in damages for allegedly vilifying his personal life and performance as premier.
The letter cited articles by four of the paper’s journalists in addition to editor-in-chief Concita De Gregorio.
Lawyers contested quotes taken from television comic Luciana Littizzetto insinuating that Berlusconi used Viagra.
The letter called the jokes ”personally damaging” on the basis of representing Berlusconi as someone with erectile dysfunction, ”which he is not”.
L’Unita editors responded Wednesday with an appeal for solidarity from its readers saying that the lawsuit smacked of fascism and accusing Berlusconi of wanting to shut the paper down.
A statement rebutting claims of defamation by Berlusconi‘s lawyers noted that charges of lese majeste, or offences to a sovereign’s dignity, weren’t a crime in Italy.
Founded by the father of Italian communism, Antonio Gramsci, L’Unita was long the official newspaper of the Italian Communist Party.
Today, it remains close to the left-wing opposition.
L’Unita is the fourth paper to be sued by Berlusconi for libel after Italian’s second leading daily La Republica, the French Nouvel Observateur and Spanish El Pais.
The lawsuit is the latest in an ongoing feud between the premier and left-leaning media outlets, who he blames for fueling the scandals which dogged him over the summer. In June, the Espresso group which owns La Repubblica filed suit against the premier for telling businesspeople to boycott advertising ”in certain newspapers”.
Tens of thousands of people, including journalists and media rights activists, gathered in a Rome square Saturday to defend press freedom, accusing Premier Silvio Berlusconi of trying to silence critical voices: here.
For the first time in Italy, reggae music takes a stance against homophobia. Luciano and The Jah Messenjah Band came out in support of gay rights and the 2009 national LGBT Gay Pride to be held in Genova, Italy on 27 June 2009. The concert took place on the international day against homophobia (17 May) drawing a crowd of 3-500 revellers. Special guest: Carrol Thompson.
Firecracker on Gay Street marks third incident in a week
Rome, September 2 – Members of the Italian gay and lesbian community expressed alarm on Wednesday after the latest in a string of homophobic attacks.
”These are acts of terrorism from people who want us to live in hiding,” said Franco Grillini, president of gay journalists association Gaynet.
On Tuesday night, a pair of firecrackers were thrown at a crowd of people on a street known for being a popular meeting place for gays and lesbians.
Witnesses said four unidentified men ran away after the firecrackers exploded.
According to police, the blasts left one injured, a man hit in the ear by a flying shard, and damaged a scooter.
…
Vladimir Luxuria, a transgender activist and former PM [sic; former MP], commented that ”Rome isn’t a safe city for gays” and warned of ”a cycle of homophobic terrorism”.
Monday’s incident is the third case of homophobic violence in Italy in under a week.
Last week, a young man was stabbed in an attack near the site of Rome’s summer gay and lesbian festival. Days later, a pair of tourists in Naples were beaten up by a gang of young men. The incidents spurred a gay musician in Rome to come forward saying he’d been assaulted by a man shouting insults earlier in August.
The president of gay rights group, Arcigay, Aurelio Mancuso called on the government Wednesday to include gays and lesbians in a hate-crime law being debated in parliament.
”The absence of laws protecting gays makes dangerous fringe elements think they can get away with violence”, Mancuso said.
According to Arcigay, the number of homicide and assault cases involving homosexuals in 2009 have already surpassed those from the year before.
The organization said that it planned torchlight processions in Rome every Friday starting this week to demand that something be done.
Part of French artist Nicolas Poussin‘s painting, Hymenaios Disguised As A Woman During An Offering To Priapus, after its restoration at the Art Museum of Sao Paulo in Brazil, taken on September 1, 2009. A Brazilian art restorer discovered a new layer hidden in a centuries-old painting of the Greek god of fertility, the deity’s erect penis.
Probably that had been censored between Poussin’s time and now by someone more prude than Poussin, though not as artistic. The erect penis was essential for Priapus, marking him as the god of fertility. So, the censorship censored something central.
On September 17, in the midst of the publicity blitz for his cinematic takedown of the capitalist order, Moore talked with Nation columnist Naomi Klein by phone about the film, the roots of our economic crisis and the promise and peril of the present political moment: here.
Agency chiefs faced a Monday deadline to turn over more papers.
But they failed to do so, telling the federal judge in charge of the case the case that, if dozens of remaining documents are made public, it would “degrade the government’s ability to effectively question terrorist detainees and elicit information necessary to protect the American people.”
ACLU National Security Project director Jameel Jaffer observed that the CIA justification for withholding the documents “is entirely incompatible with the Obama administration’s stated commitment to ending torture and restoring governmental transparency.
“On the one hand, President Obama has publicly recognised that torture undermines the rule of law and America’s standing in the world, but on the other, the CIA continues to argue in court that it cannot disclose information about its torture techniques.”
Mr Jaffer said that the CIA arguments “are utterly disconnected from the Obama administration’s stated positions.”
In its filing, the CIA also argued that the information available to the public about the torture programme should be limited to its “historical context and legal underpinnings.”
However, the government has already released several documents that provide more than abstract detail about the interrogations.
ACLU National Security Project legal expert Alex Abdo said: “Given the vast amount of evidence that the US torture programme was widespread and systemic, it’s disappointing that the government continues to withhold these vital documents that would fill in the remaining gaps in the public record.”
Mr Abdo said that the Obama administration has to “fulfil its commitment to transparency.”
In over 300 pages crammed full of facts, figures, incriminating and self-incriminating quotes, Swanson’s Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union makes the following case: Bush-Cheney and their cohorts are guilty of a power grab which has inflicted near mortal wounds on the Constitution; Obama has not done nearly enough to repair the damage; Congress has collapsed, and even the Supreme Court could use some fixing up: here.
CIA doctors face human experimentation claims: here.
Physicians for Human Rights charges in a new report that medical professionals attached to the CIA participated in the torture of “terror suspects” and used prisoners as human research subjects: here.
AMNESTY declared on Wednesday that US President Barack Obama must do more to shake off the legacy of torture, impunity and unlawful detention he inherited from the previous US administration: here.
Shocking evidence has emerged that CIA medical personnel were centrally involved in torture at US detention sites such as Guantanamo: here.
Scientists unearth remains of giant hippo-like animal
IANS Wednesday 2nd September, 2009
Scientists have uncovered the remains of a giant hippo-like creature near Alcoota, a find that will shed new light on the [Northern] territory‘s prehistoric past.
Gavin Prideaux from Flinders University said the discovery was very exciting. ‘One of the problems with Alcoota is that we’ve never been able to date it directly,’ Prideaux said.
‘These Zygomaturus gilli specimens give us a strong tie in with similar specimens found at a site to the south of Melbourne that have been dated at about five-and-a-half million years. It is going to help us lock Alcoota in to a tighter timeframe,’ he said.
The discovery gave an insight into ‘how much there is to learn just at the one site, let alone the whole of Australia,’ Prideaux said.
‘The reality is we know perhaps one percent of Australia’s fossil history. It’s like having 10 pieces in a 1,000-piece jigsaw; there’s a great temptation to reconstruct the picture based on those pieces, but the likelihood is that we’ll almost certainly get it wrong.’
This video from South Georgia in the sub-Antarctic says about itself:
Gentoo Penguins are endlessly entertaining. See them going up to their hilltop colonies where they display, build nests, mate and bicker. Spring snowmelt fills the streams and waterfalls.
Down on the beach, where ice from nearby glaciers fill the bays, the Elephant Seals are feeding their pups. King Penguins are in amongst the tussac grass moulting. Skuas stand on their lookout on cliffs where the Light-mantled Sooty Albatross fly in effortless fashion.
It is the most abundant albatross in Antarctic waters and is known to range further south than other albatross species, often flying as far south as the border of the Antarctic pack ice during long-distance foraging trips.
However, it was only thought to nest on sub-Antarctic islands, lying at latitudes between 46 and 53 degrees South.
That was until Simeon Lisovski and Hans-Ulrich Peter of the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, in Germany and colleagues Karel Weidinger and Vaclav Pavel of Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic discovered a new breeding colony of the birds at Fildes Peninsula on King George Island, at a latitude of 62 degrees and 12 minutes South.
In the summer season spanning 2008 and 2009, a research group led by Dr Peter saw light-mantled sooty albatrosses landing on a large 140m-high flat-topped rocky outcrop on the island.
“On Christmas day I got an unexpected call via the radio that two colleagues could observe some light-mantled sooty albatrosses landing on a very small jutty at the scarp of the rock,” says Lisovski.
So Lisovski, Weidinger and Pavel kept observing the birds, until in February this year they discovered adults at two nests. They also saw three more sitting adults, suggesting three further nests, though they couldn’t climb the rocky outcrop to confirm this.
The new breeding colony is some 1,520km away from the nearest known breeding colony of light-mantled sooty albatrosses, which is on the island of South Georgia, the team reports in the journal Polar Biology.
It is unclear why the birds are breeding so far south.
Climate change could be creating warmer and more benign conditions for the birds, the researchers speculate, though it is not yet clear whether this is the case.
Whatever the cause, the birds are likely to have a much smaller breeding window in the Antarctic.
Light-mantled sooty albatross chicks need 70 days to hatch and another 70 to become independent.
So even if they start nesting early in November, when there is no snow, the chicks will not be ready to fly until April, leaving them vulnerable to extreme weather events.
I myself have seen those beautiful birds flying over the Antarctic ocean.
Morales said that the award was not for him, but for “our ancestors, the native peoples who defended Mother Earth before colonialism, during the colonial period and during the republic.”
Morales said Bolivia’s experience in raising “living in harmony with the defense of Mother Earth” has international repercussions. He gave Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca credit for proposing the policy of “Buen Vivir” – living in harmony with Mother Earth – when the governmental program was first developed.
Morales is one of three world leaders to be given “World Hero” awards. The others are Cuban president Fidel Castro, named World Hero of Solidarity and the late president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, named World Hero of Social Justice.
As Bolivia heads towards its December 6 national elections, the right-wing opposition has again turned to violence and disinformation to try to halt the process of change led by the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales: here.
Newly Declassified Documents Show USAID to Separatists in Bolivia: here.
September 2010: Habitat in Bolivia vital to the survival of world’s rarest macaw, the blue-throated macaw, has been bought in a joint effort by three leading conservation groups: here.
SANTIAGO, Chile — A Chilean judge has issued arrest warrants for 129 former security officials on charges tied to the disappearance of leftists and the slaying of the communist party leadership during the Pinochet dictatorship.
Judge Victor Montiglio says the 129 were members of the army, air force and uniformed police who worked for the Dina agency, which has been accused of the worst killings and other human rights violations during the 1973-90 rule of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
WASHINGTON, Apr 10, 2010 (IPS) – Five days before the assassination in downtown Washington of former Chilean Defence Minister Orlando Letelier, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger rescinded instructions to U.S. ambassadors in Latin America’s Southern Cone to warn the region’s military regimes against carrying out “a series of international murders”, according to documents released by the National Security Archive (NSA) here: here.
