Daily Archives: August 5, 2012

British poet Attila the Stockbroker on punk rock

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This video is called Attila the Stockbroker Maggots 1 – Maggie Nil (Live@ Miners Welfare, Whitburn, 12/9/09).

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

On the Road with Attila the Stockbroker: A stick of Blackpool punk rock

Sunday 05 August 2012

with Attila the Stockbroker

I experienced a moment last weekend that I can confidently say was a first in over 2,700 gigs.

I was playing a benefit for the Friend animal sanctuary in Tonbridge, and in the middle of my set a deer called Leroy wandered in.

He just stood there and watched. He didn’t fawn over me at all.

Do excuse me that awful pun. I’ll get on with it now.

This weekend has been rather a different type of affair.

Unless you like wall-to-wall punk rock in a huge leisure complex with about 4,000 variously adorned punks, skinheads, rude boys and girls, crusties and other variants on our subculture, you’re probably glad you’re not.

Welcome to the Rebellion Festival at Blackpool Winter Gardens.

It’s always seemed a bit weird to me that, to many on the left, the term “political song” is more or less exclusively associated with the folk tradition.

Of course, there are some true heroes from that scene, but we punks are very much a part of it too, and some of the great stirrers of the last 35 years are here.

Belfast’s anti-sectarian Stiff Little Fingers are here. So too are punk reggae crossover pioneers Ruts DC from Southall, the mighty Rancid from California and, last but not least, in this fine jubilee year, former Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon with Public Image Limited.

I’m not sure how radical the latter is these days though – I’ve heard he has a tendency toward sycophancy.

Despite the fact that many of the acts – yours truly included – can fairly be described as having been around for a while, there is a healthy presence from a new generation of bands, and the audience is truly diverse both in age range and nationality.

I’d say at least a third are from mainland Europe or further afield, and many are half my age. The punk spirit is alive and well.

But it must be said that despite the huge range of bands and performers doing their stuff, I’ve had my favourite moments watching TV – and I don’t mean the Olympics on the Beeb.

I mean the truly awesome TV Smith, one time frontman of seminal outfit The Adverts, now an articulate and inspirational singer/songwriter with a string of wonderful solo albums to his name.

He did two blistering shows here – one solo, one with his backing band The Valentines – and absolutely brought the house down.

If you like clever, subversive lyrics and great tunes check him out. You won’t be disappointed.

First Hanoi Gay Pride parade

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This video is called 1st Gay Pride Hanoi Vietnam.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Hundreds out at first Hanoi Gay Pride parade

Sunday 05 August 2012

Dozens of cyclists decorated with balloons and rainbow flags streamed through the Vietnamese capital Hanoi today for the country’s first-ever gay pride parade.

Organised by the city’s small but growing LGBT community, the event went ahead peacefully with no attempt by police to stop the colourful convoy of about 100 activists despite their lack of official permission.

In a surprise move late last month Justice Minister Ha Hung Cuong said that it might be time to consider a change in the law to recognise same-sex marriage.

Vietnam currently forbids same-sex unions. Any move to legalise gay marriage would make Vietnam the first nation in Asia to do so.

The cyclists voiced strong support for the possible legal changes, calling for equal rights for gays and lesbians.

Vietnam lesbian couple talks of hope for marriage, LGBT rights: here.

Hiroshima nuclear horror remembered

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This video is called Nazım Hikmet & Joan Baez – Hiroshima.

By Rory MacKinnon in Britain:

Hiroshima horror remains with us

Sunday 05 August 2012

Solemn mourners will gather tomorrow to mark 67 years since an atomic bomb obliterated Hiroshima – and to warn that the threat of nuclear annihilation is still with us today.

Rallies across Britain and the world are being held to mark the date when the United States government became the only power in history to devastate another people with nuclear bombs – the exhausted civilian population of wartime Japan.

In London demonstrators will gather at noon in Camden’s Tavistock Square, where a Japanese cherry tree stands in memory of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, site of a second bombing on August 9 1945 in the last major act of WWII.

Speakers will include 106-year-old lifelong peace activist Hetty Bower, researcher Peter Burt of the Nuclear Information Service, Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn and Green MEP Jean Lambert.

The 1945 nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were conducted in strict secrecy.

Only Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett evaded military censors to report “a warning to the world” from Hiroshima – the horrifying, slow radiation burns that would bring the city’s death toll to between 100,000 and 180,000.

But Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament general secretary Kate Hudson told the Morning Star that the world could not afford to treat Hiroshima as a thing of the past.

She said activists in Japan were “twinning” the ceremony with the memory of last year’s Fukushima disaster which left nearly 80,000 locals in exile from their irradiated hometown.

Ms Hudson also pointed to the fact that the use of depleted uranium munitions during the Iraq war has been linked by researchers to a swathe of birth defects.

“Every year we remember that the only country that has used nuclear weapons is the United States.”

And she warned that though generations had passed since Hiroshima and the superpower stand-offs of the cold war the danger now is that world powers are becoming complacent about their own nuclear arsenals or accepting them as irreversible, she said.

“So long as nuclear weapons exist there’s still an increasing chance that they will be used – by accident or design.

“It’s criminally irresponsible,” Ms Hudson said.

Other commemorative events are planned outside the capital.

In Brighton and Hove the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom will meet tomorrow evening in Queens Park for a candlelight vigil “to remember the dead from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, nuclear tests and accidents.”

In Derby CND and others will gather at Rolls-Royce’s Raynesway, which manufactures reactors for the Trident fleet of nuclear-armed submarines.

In Glasgow the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Faslane Peace Camp will launch paper lanterns on the Clyde River, 25 miles from where the Trident fleet are based.

Japanese officials pledged to seek a society less reliant on nuclear energy today as the country marked the 67th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki: here.

Events to commemorate the dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki took place at centres across Yorkshire and the north today, writes Peter Lazenby: here.

Radioactive cesium found in Japan’s fish, seawater: here.

New animal species discoveries in Venezuela

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This video is called History of Venezuela‘s Ancient Tepuis.

From the BBC:

5 August 2012 Last updated at 05:03

New swimming cave cricket species filmed

By Matt Bardo Reporter, BBC Nature

A swimming cricket was one of three “new species” discovered by a TV crew filming in South America.

The “unbelievable” insect find was captured on camera along with a no-eyed harvestman and a cave catfish.

The trio were found in a remote Venezuelan tepui, a type of table-top mountain in the region.

“We’ve only named about a million species of insects and there are almost certainly five to eight million undescribed,” said Dr George McGavin.

The filming was part of a new BBC/Discovery Channel/Terra Mater TV co-production called The Dark: Nature’s Nighttime World.

“[It's] the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen,” biologist and presenter, Dr McGavin, told BBC Nature.

“It swims underwater and uses its front legs as a proper breaststroke and its hind legs kicking out. It was just amazing,” he said.

The team were alerted to the cave by Italian researchers from the association, La Venta, who had noted the presence of an unusual looking catfish when they recently explored the caves for the first time.

Dr McGavin and the film crew went with them during their return trip to the cave and found a specimen with the hallmarks of an underground evolutionary history.

With a pale colour and only remnants of eyes, its pitch black habitat seemed to have negated any need for visual communication or sight.

The fish navigated using large sensitive organs on the front of its head.

It is thought that millions of years ago the catfish’s ancestors must have lived in water on the plain from which the cave was formed.

“What was originally a catfish perhaps in a lake, suddenly becomes an isolated catfish in these hidden underground areas,” said Dr McGavin.

In the same three-mile stretch of cave, he also discovered a harvestman which he believes is new to science:

“(It) was just such a weird animal and I haven’t seen a picture or a drawing of anything that looks even vaguely similar, so I’m reckoning that it is undescribed.”

Harvestmen are arachnids, the same order as spiders and scorpions but this one was unusual as it did not react to Dr McGavin’s torchlight.

On closer inspection, the team realised the reason for this was that the harvestman had no eyes.

“If we’d had the time there would have been other [discoveries] there,” said Dr McGavin.

“You can’t really as a biologist, put into words how it feels to see something, to film something that’s never been named.”

The three creatures have not yet been formally described but filmmakers believe that they are new species.

“Caves tend to be very isolated so when some adventurous… organism finds its way into the cave, the populations there typically do not come into contact with populations in other caves or the above-ground ancestors that they came from,” explained Professor Quentin Wheeler, director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University.

“Anytime that you get small in-breeding populations, you can have speciation occur far more rapidly than large populations that are interbreeding with more regularity.”

Conservation biologists call places like this hotspots – areas inhabited by a high number of endemic species that cannot be found anywhere else.

“Places like small islands and mountain tops and caves are really new exciting laboratories of genetic experimentation,” said Professor Wheeler.

The International Institute for Species Exploration collates information about newly discovered species, in part because of its value in the study of evolutionary history but also out of a concern for bio-diversity and conservation.

They record around 18,000 new species a year but Professor Wheeler said that they are not about to run out of discoveries.

“We know that about two million species have been named and described but we think there are at least in the order of 10 million additional species,” he said.

“That’s only counting multi-cellular plants and animals, if we get into the microbial world it’s a whole different ball game.”

Every year, the institute publishes a top ten of the past year’s newly discovered species. Professor Wheeler picked out the Devil’s worm as his highlight from last year’s list.

“It was found nearly a mile beneath the surface and I don’t think anyone expected to find a relatively large multi-cellular organism living that deep.

“To me it just says, ‘Well what else don’t we know?’”

Cattle egret, spoonbills, and young shelducks

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This is a video about a cattle egret eating a frog.

On 4 August 2012, to the Starrevaart nature reserve.

Just before the hide, a female pheasant with four not yet quite fully grown young.

From the hide of Starrevaart, one can see common terns sitting on a row of poles in the water. Both adults and recently fledged youngsters.

Between the poles: tufted ducks and lapwings.

A juvenile great crested grebe swimming.

On the island: a white-fronted goose. Young ruddy shelducks. Oystercatchers. Common terns. Adult and juvenile black-headed gulls. A moorhen with two chicks.

On another, longer, row of poles, more to the west, sit lesser black-backed gulls. And great cormorants.

And a cattle egret, in summer plumage with touches of orange. A rare bird for the Netherlands. Maybe it has arrived here after a long flight from the south. It cleans its feathers.

A grey heron.

Five spoonbills standing in the water.

Shoveler ducks swimming.

And a male common pochard.

Near the other bank of the lake, black swans.

Near the southern bank, mute swans.

In rapeseed plants on the island, two greenfinches.

Swifts flying, probably not long before they will fly all the way to Africa.

A barn swallow, which will probably migrate later than the swifts.

As we go back, the mother pheasant with her young again. This time on the other side of the bicycle track.

African diplomats suffer from racism in Israel

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This video is called Racism Report: Africans in Israel.

From Ynet in Israel:

African diplomats in Israel: We’re afraid to walk down streets

In meeting with Deputy Foreign Minister Ayalon, Ghana‘s ambassador says wife gets picked on when she goes shopping

Itamar Eichner

Published: 08.05.12, 12:09

Due to the recent slew of offensive and racist statements made by Israeli politicians, African diplomats in Israel are afraid to walk down the street, said African ambassadors in Israel during a meeting with Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.

The meeting, which was attended by the ambassadors of Angola, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia and the Ivory Coast, was recently held in the Foreign Ministry’s offices in Jerusalem, Yedioth Ahronoth reported.

In addition to Ayalon, the meeting was also attended by Avi Granot, the assistant director general for the ministry’s Africa division.

During the meeting, Ghana’s ambassador to Israel Henry Hanson-Hall said that his wife is constantly picked on when she goes shopping. “If that’s what happens to an ambassador’s wife,” he said “what are the rest of the African employees supposed to say?! I’m afraid of being arrested or picked on,” he added.

According to the foreign diplomats, the racial slurs directed at them harm Israel’s public image in Africa. They emphasized Israel’s right to deport foreign migrants, but asked that the issue be dealt with in a humane manner.

They further said that the publicized deportation of migrants humiliates them and depicts them as dangerous criminals.

A resident of Beersheba claimed that a bus driver called her a “stinking Ethiopian”, Yedioth Ahronoth reported: here.

Israel kicks out migrants – by changing their nationality and sending them to another country: here.

South Tel Aviv stories: Some children lead paperless lives: here.

From the Jerusalem Post in Israel:

Vice Premier Moshe Ya’alon Sunday described two violent attacks against Arabs ​​over the weekend in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem as “hate crimes” and “terrorist acts.” He called the attacks “totally unacceptable and outrageous” and ascribed their incidence to a moral and educational failure that goes against Jewish ethics and values.

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