As a result, Zhucheng City has become known locally as “dinosaur city“.
The footprints were uncovered on a 2,600 sq m (0.64 acre) rock slope in a gully following three months of excavation work, Xinhua reported.
The find is unusual because of the quantity and size of footprints uncovered, scientists said.
The footprints, which range from 10cm (3.9in) to 80cm in length, belong to dinosaur types including tyrannosaurs, coelurosaurs and hadrosaurs, Xinhua said.
Xu Xing: Unearthing how dinosaurs became birds: here.
From the tiny Anchiornis huxleyi to a feathered ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex and the huge Gigantoraptor, Xu Xing’s fossil finds have helped to unearth the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds: here.
Sat 06/02/2010 – 12:17 For the 10th winter in a row Natuurpunt is organising a count of the birds in people’s gardens. Thousands of Flemish families are counting the birds that come to their feeders and giving the information to Natuurpunt.
From 1 October to 31 March Natuurpunt collects and compiles the results of the bird counts by a number of volunteers.
Apart from the monthly information from volunteers a national Bird Counting Weekend is held once a year.
That is what is taking place this weekend.
And how does this work?
After having replenished the feeder you count how many birds come during a period of 30 minutes. Per species, they write down the largest number in the garden at a given moment.
According to Natuurpunt you do not have to be an expert to count the birds in your garden.
Several dailies also periodically include posters with the most common birds in Belgium.
Last year 450 people were involved in the monthly counting. More than 6,600 took part in last year’s national Bird Counting Weekend. Some 290,000 birds were counted last year.
The information compiled by Natuurpunt is clearly not scientific, but it gives an idea of the trend from year to year.
Last winter was the coldest winter since the counting started and the result was that there were spectacularly more species of birds than in the previous winters. This winter is also much colder and Natuurpunt expects a wide variety of birds to be counted this weekend again.
DEN BOSCH – The military historian Christ Klep and the military trade union AFMP say that they knew that the Dutch Department of Defense knew that the pub managed by [ex Afghan war captain] Marco Kroon had a history as a [cocaine] drugs café.
The Ministry of Defense, nevertheless, knowingly, had nominated Kroon for the Military William Order, taking a big risk. Kroon is currently suspected of arms and drugs offenses.
According to the AFMP and Klep, the department should have taken action in May last year, before the presentation of the decoration. Kroon, according to Klep, should have been made to choose between the Order and the café. …
Historian Klep says, however, that Defense wanted the medal for Kroon by any means. “They needed a hero.” He refers to several reliable sources within Defense. “A previous nomination for performance in Srebrenica had been stopped. That had caused bad blood.”
According to Dutch daily Spits, when she pinned the medal on Captain Kroon, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands called the war in Uruzgan, Afghanistan “one of the most striking examples of the humanitarian tasks” of the Dutch armed forces.
Also according to Spits, Kroon has an armed forces desk job now, while also managing the disreputable pub. Kroon’s fellow soldier, fellow Den Bosch inhabitant, and gymnasics international Yuri van Gelder was dismissed from the armed forces last year for cocaine.
A deadly airstrike in Afghanistan‘s Kunduz province last September did not comply with Nato’s rules of engagement, according to the military organisation’s own investigators.
In a leaked document published by the German newspaper Der Spiegel this week, it was revealed that crucial information was withheld from US pilots by the German military, who ordered the attack that killed scores of Afghan civilians.
The newspaper says Nato investigators looking into the September 4 bombing, which claimed 142 lives, found that US fighter pilots were inappropriately ordered to attack two fuel tankers that had been hijacked by the Taliban in northern Kunduz.
Thousands of Afghan civilians have began fleeing their homes before a threatened US military offensive against Taliban fighters: here.
NATO to Afghans: We’re Invading Your Town. Don’t Leave! Here.
The U.S. and its Allies Have 700 Bases in Afghanistan: here.
Anand Gopal, a journalist based in Kabul, Afghanistan, reports on the clandestine detention facilities that the U.S. continues to operate in Afghanistan: here.
Blackwater, Now Xe, Vying For $1 Billion Contract To Train Afghan National Police: here.
Iraq has ordered about 250 former and current employees of Blackwater Worldwide to leave the country within seven days or face having their visas pulled: here.
Three independent investigations have confirmed a CorpWatch investigation into a $305 million USAID project to build a diesel-fueled power plant in Kabul: here.
Most Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with PTSD did not get enough care, study shows: here.
Paleontology Field Prospecting in Angola 2009, looking for vertebrate fossils. This video shows the size of the Cretaceous outcrops in Angola. By Octávio Mateus.
An international team of scientists has announced the discovery of “turtle of Angola,” a Late Cretaceous reptile that was one of the earliest known marine turtles from Africa. The seafaring turtle, Angolachelys mbaxi, lived 90 million years ago.
Octavio Mateus, who led the project, informed me of the find today. He is a researcher at both the New University of Lisbon and the Museu da Lourinhã.
The Dinosaur Era marine turtle “represents one of the first marine amniote lineages to have invaded the South Atlantic after separation of Africa and South America,” according to Mateus and his team. The researchers believe the turtle first emerged in the North Atlantic. When the new opening to the southern part of the ocean occurred, this animal, and apparently others, made a bee-line southward. A marine lizard, Angolasaurus, from the same time period has also been found, and it too was one of the first to invade the South Atlantic.
An orthodontist in the state of Baden-Württemberg has reportedly turned a 16-year-old boy out of her practice because she was offended by his name – “Cihad,” an alternate spelling for “Jihad,” which she interpreted to mean “holy war.”
According to the paper, the boy’s parents were shocked, saying they had chosen the name simply because they liked it, and not for religious reasons.
Islamic scholars say the word “jihad” means “striving for God,” but it has been co-opted by Islamists for their purposes of “holy war,” the paper reported. …
The state medical association told the paper that the law does not require doctors to treat patients except in the case of an emergency. But the organisation also called a treatment refusal based on a first name “unusual.”
“Jihad” is a very common name for both boys and girls. It has nothing to do with Al-Qaeda or anything. Just like, maybe atheist, parents give their children names like “Christian”, “Christine”, or Christian saints’ names (like George, after Saint George, a soldier according to legend), in itself has nothing to do with Christian fundamentalism.
The first person to be found guilty of “Islamist terror” charges in Scotland has been freed amid jubilant scenes outside the Court of Appeal in Edinburgh: here. And here.
A survey of the country’s 27 Catholic dioceses found that 30 of the perpetrators had been tried and sentenced but at least 10 cases were still outstanding and many more never saw court because the statute of limitations to prosecute had passed.
This latest revelation follows the shock admission just over a week ago that at least two Roman Catholic priests at the elite Canisius Catholic school in Berlin had systematically abused children in 1970s and 1980s.
The scandal then spread with the church’s admission that a third priest had been suspended after admitting to abusing a student.
Only three German dioceses, Limburg, Regensburg and Dresden-Meißen, refused to respond to Spiegel’s survey. A spokesman for the Dresden-Meißen diocese said he “didn’t want to fuel the current discussion.”
But the secretary of the German Bishops’ Conference, Hans Langendörfer, said: “The revelations show a dark side of the church that appals me. We want to tackle this issue openly.”
Some Catholic groups have demanded changes to the guidelines for dealing with sexual abuse in light of the discoveries, Spiegel reported. This has included calls for an independent ombudsman to examine abuse claims.
The issue is set to dominate the next meeting of the German Bishops’ Conference, which begins on February 22.
Published: February 6, 2010 10:50 | Updated: February 6, 2010 10:50
By our correspondent Tom-Jan Meeus
Washington, Feb. 6. Queen Wilhelmina [of the Netherlands] in the fifties actively contributed to the establishment of a society of US American evangelicals in Europe.
The secretly operating organization, The Family, according to the American religious researcher Jeff Sharlet, has by now become “by far the most powerful fundamentalist society of the USA”.
The Family, organizers of the the annual National Prayer Breakfast in the USA, is discredited because they have recently advocated the death penalty in Uganda to punish some expressions of homosexuality. The Family last year also played a role in sexual affairs of well-known conservatives in the U.S. The Family aims at “totalitarianism for Christ”, Sharlet says, and in order to get this secretly recruited hundreds of politicians in the U.S. and abroad.
The society was founded in the nineteen thirties by Abraham Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant in the U.S. After the war he sent an American pastor, Wallace E. Haines, to Europe to propagate the message of the group. Wilhelmina in the fifties, after she had given up the throne to her daughter Juliana, was Honorary President of the European branch of The Family.
From the archives of the deceased Haines, to which his son Stephen in part has given access to NRC Handelsblad, it becomes appartent that Wilhelmina had a close relationship with the pastor. She “was the principal mentor of my father in Europe”, says son Stephen Haines. She “treated [my father] like a brother,” said David Haines, another son of the preacher.
Today in NRC Handelsblad a profile of The Family, the most powerful fundamentalists of the United States.
Stock markets in Europe and Asia fell sharply Friday in the second day of a near-panic selloff fueled by fears that the debt crisis facing weaker European economies will throw the world economy into a “double-dip” recession: here.
The official US unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent in January, despite 20,000 jobs lost, according to the Labor Department. Revised figures show a sharp increase in the number of jobs wiped out since the beginning of the recession: here.
Opposition is growing as school districts across Michigan prepare to close schools, lay off teachers and privatize services in response to the huge funding cuts imposed by Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm and the state legislature: here.
Oregon voters approve higher taxes for wealthy and corporations: here.
36% of Americans, 53% of Dems positive about socialism: here.
[Sri Lankan] President Rajapakse delivered the annual independence speech on Thursday, outlining his government’s agenda. In the name of rebuilding the nation, he is preparing an economic offensive against the working class: here.
On 2nd February the major European multinational corporations, united in the European Round Table of Industrialists published a statement of opinion, For a competitive Europe in 2025: here.
Stock markets in Europe and Asia fell sharply Friday in the second day of a near-panic selloff fueled by fears that the debt crisis facing weaker European economies will throw the 
