This is a red-backed shrike video.

The wardens of Dutch desert island Rottum report on their blog that last Monday, among many birds on spring migration, a male red-backed shrike arrived on the island.

They had never seen that species on Rottum before.

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This video from Britain says about itself:

Why were peaceful protestors in Manchester slaughtered by British soldiers in what became knoen as Peterloo?

The Peterloo massacre was in 1819.

In the English elite school Eton, some people want Peterloo-style massacres in the twenty-first century.

From Lucy Sherriff’s blog in Britain:

Eton College‘s Exam Asks Boys To Justify The Army Shooting Protesters Dead

Posted: 24/05/2013 10:09 BST | Updated: 24/05/2013 16:10 BST

Eton College asked 13-year-old boys competing for a scholarship to pretend to be Prime Minister and justify the army shooting dead 25 protesters as a “necessary and moral” decision, it has emerged.

The public school set the question as part of an exam to win one of 14 King’s Scholarships, which is worth one tenth of Eton’s £10,689 termly fees.

The question, which was posed to students in 2011, tells the teenagers: “The government has deployed the Army to curb the protests. After two days the protests have been stopped but 25 protesters have been killed by the Army.

“You are the Prime Minister. Write the script for a speech to be broadcast to the nation in which you explain why employing the Army against violent protesters was the only option available to you and one which was both necessary and moral.” ….

The college, which Prince Harry and Prince William attended, charges more than £30,000 a year in fees.

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This video about Arctic terns is called Migration Google Earth Tour Video.

Translated from Vroege Vogels TV in the Netherlands:

An Arctic Tern from Eemshaven has massively broken a world record: the bird, weighing hardly 100g, during a year has flown 90 thousand kilometers during a return journey to the Antarctic. This is an absolute world record in long distance migration. The record is described in an article in Ardea, the international scientific journal of the Dutch Ornithological Union.

Research

The study was conducted by attaching tiny ‘dataloggers‘, geolocators, to seven birds. This device of just 2 grams stores information about light and dark in combination with time. These two data make it possible to to retrieve the birds’ position on earth with a precision of about 100 km. All birds returned in 2012 and could be caught. Five dataloggers were still working and revealed a startling flyway.

Flyway

The terns were, on average, 273 ± 7 days on the road. They all flew to the same spot in the North Atlantic where the terns of Greenland stayed two weeks later. Like these terns the Dutch terns flew (albeit earlier) then to an area west of Namibia.

After that the birds of Dutch nesting colonies followed a different route. They flew first across the Indian Ocean to a previously unknown stopping place between 20-40° N and 65-100° E (near Amsterdam Island). From this stop they then went on to sea areas south of Australia. Some flew from here south to the Antarctic, but one bird flew to New Zealand and then deflected to Antarctica.

Record distance

During the southern summer they flew westward along the coast of Antarctica, where they stayed in the sea area between 35-150° E. In March they went back to the north with a stopover in the North Atlantic. The distance of the terns averaged around 90,000 km, a record distance. If the distances of stopping while underway and in the wintering area are not counted, then the flyway was on average 48,700 km.

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This video, by CBS in the USA about Tawergha in Libya, says about itself:

Oct 23, 2011

Black Africans in Libya are being discriminated by brown skin Libyans. Racial slurs are directed at them, or worse.

From Amnesty International in London:

Libya: ‘I Cannot Explain How Terrible the Situation Was’

23 May 2013

Press release

This is part of a special ‘People on the Move’ series, highlighting the human rights violations faced by migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers in every part of the world. These profiles are being published around the launch of Amnesty International’s Annual Report 2013.

Abubaker Ali Osman, a Somali engineer until recently living in Libya, never imagined he would become a refugee. But when violence broke out in the North African country in early 2011, he was forced to flee. He rented a car with his wife and six children and drove to Tunisia, where they lived in a refugee camp for a year.

The Osman family now live in Germany, from where Abubaker spoke to Amnesty International about the challenges facing refugees.

I’m from Somalia but I moved to Libya in 1985. I was working as an engineer and teacher in a university in central Libya. I was living there with my wife and six children, who are all born in Libya.

I was working, doing a normal job, living a normal life. Everything was good until February 2011 when the uprising erupted. The situation became very dangerous. I was living in the university campus with my family but Libyans started accusing people from Somalia and other countries of being al-Gaddafi mercenaries. Many people were killed because of these false accusations even though many were like me, normal workers.

I was living in the campus of the faculty and it was safe there but the danger was around me. The threat was there. Also we were living very close to military installations that NATO was bombing. That was terrifying the children and all of us.

When the crisis escalated, we started hearing the noise of bullets nearby, plus the shortage of food and the mobs started getting closer. I got scared for my children and we decided to leave in August 2011.

My older children wanted to stay and started asking, “Where will we go?” I faced the reality that I come from Somalia, with a very different reality so there was nowhere to go.

So we decided to move. Reaching the border with Tunisia was not easy. We had heard many stories of people who faced problems on the road and that some people had been killed. But there was no alternative.

We rented a car, took some clothes and fortunately reached the Libya-Tunisia border safely.

When we arrived at the border, the UN agencies took us to the Choucha refugee camp. We lived there for nearly a year.

The situation there was very difficult.

Thousands of people had left Libya for Tunisia. More than 3,000 people were staying in Choucha refugee camp. They had nowhere else to go.

The UN gave us three tents to live in as we were a large family. We had food.

In the refugee camp sometimes there were problems between people. Organization was a problem and sometimes there were fights. There were also many problems when the sandstorms came. There were also clashes between the local Tunisians and the refugees.

For my children it was all very difficult. They had never seen anything like that. They wanted to go back but I explained to them it was too dangerous. After two months, they adjusted.

Two months after arriving, I started volunteering as a translator in the camp and so did one of my children.

I cannot express in words how difficult the situation was for everybody.

While we were at the refugee camp, the [UN Refugee Agency] UNHCR started to conduct some interviews. Many countries offered to accept refugees although unfortunately the UK and France, who were leading the NATO bombardment, took hardly anybody! My file was fortunately accepted by the German government.

It was a long process and some people are still there waiting but fortunately our file was processed fast. We were lucky.

It’s hard to explain how great it was to be in that terrible situation and be given that news.

On 2 September 2012 we were told that we were going to Germany the next day. We didn’t sleep that night.

When we arrived in Germany we landed in Hanover. We finally slept safely for the first time in one year.

We are now in Berlin. My children are going to school and my wife and I are learning German.

I sincerely hope that now, in Germany, this family will never meet German nazi terrorists or other xenophobes.

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This video is called Engagingly ugly: Common Coot chicks – Fulica atra.

Today at the coot nest, both parents swimming and feeding the chicks.

Both chicks still alive; on the nest.

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This video says about itself:

May 24, 2013

In Pakistan alone, it is estimated that more than 3,000 people have died in drone attacks since 2003 – many of them civilians.

Pakistan’s Government has repeatedly condemned drone strikes and the man poised to become the next Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, has called on Washington to end strikes inside the country.

Shahzad Mirza Akbar, a human rights lawyer based in Pakistan, speaks to Al Jazeera about US drone strikes.

He says Sharif has to convince the US to stop the use of drones, otherwise he will be facing legal consequences for not protecting his own citizens.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Amnesty: US drone strikes seem illegal

Thursday 23 May 2013

Amnesty International has delivered a damning indictment of the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes overseas and questioned its legality.

Amnesty said on Wednesday that US drone policy, which is shrouded in secrecy, appears to carry out extrajudicial killings that violate international rights laws.

“Our view is that the legal basis is quite unclear,” said secretary general Salil Shetty.

“We have issues with how the US defines the ‘theatre of war,’ a very broad definition which allows it free rein to use drones and other weapons under a very wide set of circumstances.”

Mr Shetty said its researchers found that people in Pakistan are “living in constant fear even in very remote areas.”

In a wide-ranging report on civil rights, Amnesty said that “available information, limited by secrecy, indicated that US policy permitted extrajudicial executions in violation of international human rights law under the US theory of a ‘global war’ against al-Qaida and associated groups.”

President Obama defended his administration’s reliance on drone strikes in a speech at the National Defence University today.

On the eve of the speech, US Attorney-General Eric Holder acknowledged for the first time that four US citizens had been killed by drone strikes since 2009.

The US government has targeted and killed one US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, and three other US citizens killed by drones were not targeted.

They were Samir Khan, who was killed in the same drone strike as Mr Awlaki, Mr Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, and Jude Kenan Mohammed, who was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan.

Civil liberties groups and an unusual coalition of Democrats and Republicans have criticised the White House for keeping details of the drone programme secret.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed lawsuits against the government over the drone attacks that killed the three US citizens in Yemen in 2011.

A vast majority of Pakistanis resent American drone strikes, which they believe have killed hundreds of innocent citizens since the program began in 2004: here.

Killing Americans: Jeremy Scahill on Obama Admin’s Admission 4 U.S. Citizens Died in Drone Strikes: here.

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RULES of the Best Moment Award:

Winners re-post this completely with their acceptance speech. This could be written or video. Winners have the privilege of awarding the next awards! The re-post should include a NEW set of people/blogs worthy of the award; and, winners, notify them the great news!

• What makes a good acceptance speech?
  • Gratitude. Thank the people who helped you along the way
  • Humour. Keep us entertained and smiling
  • Inspiration. Make your story touch our lives
• Get an idea from the great acceptance speeches, compiled in MomentMatters.com/Speech
• Display the award’s badge on your blog/website, downloadable in MomentMatters.com/Award

ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

First, I would like to thank Barbara and Chant d’oasien for nominating me. They both have been so kind to nominate Dear Kitty. Some blog for several other awards, besides this one. Thank you so much, my dear blogging friends!

These kind nominations came just before Dear Kitty. Some blog today reached the milestone of getting visits from Greenland and Togo for the first time. When I had to move my blog once again in December 2011, I never expected that (I had eight visits then, on my first WordPress day, all from countries with many more computers than Greenland or Togo …). Thanks, all of you!

Finally, a bit of humour.

My nominees are:

1. Doli Siregar ~ Photography

2. Christopher De Voss

3. Kaligrafi Nusantara

4. Stepping String A travel blog

5. The Backdoor Artist

6. Images of China through English Eyes

7. MARVA SEATON LIFE LINE & SURVIVAL BLOG

8. Talking Experience

9. Kevs’ Blog

10. Mancarea pentru care se merita sa traiesti.

11. Impresii cu parfum de femeie

12. Type One Fun

13. myheartdies4you

14. lovelifeandhappyeverafter

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This video from Australia is called Regent Honeyeaters at Chiltern National Park, 14 July 2011.

From BirdLife:

Regent Honeyeaters on the loose

Thu, May 23, 2013

The captive-breeding-and-release program formulated to boost the population of Regent Honeyeaters in Australia has just set 38 more birds into the wild, where they have become reacquainted with an old friend.

The Regent Honeyeater is a Critically Endangered bird endemic to Australia. It feeds on nectar and insects within eucalyptus forests. Recent genetic research suggests it is closely related to the wattlebirds.

Australia’s national Regent Honeyeater recovery team recently released 38 captive-bred Regent Honeyeaters in the Chiltern–MtPilotNational Park in north-eastern Victoria in a project being led by BirdLife Australia (BirdLife Partner), the Department of Environment and Primary Industries (Vic), Taronga Zoo and Parks Victoria. This is the third such release, and now brings the total number of Regent Honeyeaters released in Victoria since 2008 to just over 100.

The birds were bred and nurtured at Taronga Zoo, and then flown south in aeroplanes before being acclimatised to their new surroundings for two days.

Of the 38 birds released, 25 were colour-banded and fitted with radio transmitters so that researchers can follow their movements throughout the region, with the remainder fitted with colour bands only.

Within minutes of release the Regent Honeyeaters were foraging and behaving like veterans of life in the wild, hawking insects from mid-air and indulging in the blossom in the canopy of ironbark trees. As with previous releases, a team of volunteers are assisting project staff to radio-track the birds to assess their habitat use, movements and welfare. For the first few days, most of the birds stayed within a kilometre of the release site, with few birds venturing much further, but within three weeks, many of the birds had dispersed over an area of several kilometres. Thanks to their radio transmitters, we know that at night they have been congregating at communal roosts in the treetops.

As yet the captive-released birds have not interacted with any wild birds, a honeyeater that was released in the park in 2010 has been seen back again this year, and has become integrated into a flock of recently released birds. This bird, nicknamed “Blue-Mauve” (thanks to the bands he is wearing), was last seen in 2011 and has now thrived in the wild for three years after being released! As the long-term survival of captive-bred birds and their integration into the wild population is the aim of the program, Blue-Mauve adds another feather in the cap of the captive-release strategy.

The release is being conducted under BirdLife Australia’s Woodland Birds for Biodiversity project, which is funded by the Australian Government’s Caring for Our Country program.

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Among those countries with no visits then were Togo in Africa; and Greenland.

This video is called Wild Greenland – home of musk oxen and arctic char.

This morning, WordPress stats say that the first ever visitor from Greenland has arrived. Yeseque, welcome!

This video is called Discover Togo.

Also, there have been two visits from Togo. Not today; I am not sure when. Bienvenu, welcome!

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This video says about itself:

March 27, 2011

Newly discovered Yaqui Indian cave paintings. Located in a canyon referred to as Baromico, Municipality of Alamos, State of Sonora, Mexico.

From the BBC:

23 May 2013 Last updated at 03:44 GMT

Cave paintings in Mexico: Carvings uncovered in Burgos

Archaeologists in Mexico have found 4,926 well-preserved cave paintings in the north-eastern region of Burgos.

The images in red, yellow, black and white depict humans, animals and insects, as well as skyscapes and abstract scenes.

The paintings were found in 11 different sites – but the walls of one cave were covered with 1,550 scenes.

The area in which they were found was previously thought not to have been inhabited by ancient cultures.

Mexico cave painting

The paintings suggest that at least three groups of hunter-gatherers dwelled in the San Carlos mountain range.

Experts have not yet been able to date the paintings, but hope to chemically analyse their paint to find out their approximate age.

‘No objects’

“We have not found any ancient objects linked to the context, and because the paintings are on ravine walls and in the rainy season the sediments are washed away, all we have is gravel,” said archaeologist Gustavo Ramirez, from the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (Inah).

In one of the caves, the experts found depictions of the atlatl, a pre-Hispanic hunting weapon that had not yet been seen in other paintings in the Tamaulipas state.

The paintings are being considered an important find because they document the presence of pre-Hispanic peoples in a region where “before it was said that nothing was there”, Mr Ramirez said.

Another archaeologist involved in the Inah study, Martha Garcia Sanchez, said that very little is known about the cultures who dwelled in Tamaulipas.

“These groups escaped the Spanish rule for 200 years because they fled to the Sierra de San Carlos where they had water, plants and animals to feed themselves,” she said.

The findings were presented during the second meeting of Historic Archaeology, in Mexico’s National History Museum.

See also here.

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The white spots of the roe deer fawn on this video show that it is less than six months old.

The video is by Hans Huisman from the Netherlands.

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This video is called The Most Evil Men In History Caligula PART 1.

From The Art Newspaper:

Caligula reunited with his barges

Restored statue, broken by tomb robbers, to go on display at Roman ship museum

By Federico Castelli Gattinara and Ermanno Rivetti. Web only

Published online: 23 May 2013

A rare and recently restored 2.5m-high marble statue of the Roman Emperor Caligula (who reigned from AD37-AD41) is due to go on display in June at the Museo delle Navi Romane di Nemi—Italy’s popular ancient Roman ship museum.

The Italian Guardia di Finanza, the police force whose responsibilities include apprehending smugglers, seized the statue, which depicts an enthroned Caligula, near Lake Nemi, 30km south of Rome, in 2011. Tombaroli (tomb robbers) illegally excavated and broke the sculpture into two pieces to make it easier to transport. However the authorities managed to seize the work before it reached the black market and a team from the regional branch of the ministry of culture have restored it.

The sculpture will go on display along with other works found nearby including marble pieces unearthed at a circular nymphaeum (a monument dedicated to nymphs) next to Caligula’s villa, artefacts from the second-century Villa degli Antonini and a marble sculpture of Actaeon from Emperor Domitian’s first-century villa at Castel Gandolfo, near Rome. The work has not been on display before.

The museum’s star attractions are two, 70m-long ships that once belonged to Caligula. The vessels were raised in the 1920s. The museum has had a tumultuous history: founded in 1936, it was burned by the German army in 1944. Although the fire destroyed several Roman ships, many other treasures were saved and transferred to Palazzo Massimo in Rome. The museum was rebuilt and reopened in 1953 with scale models of the ships only to close ten years later due to structural problems. It finally reopened in 1988.

This video from the USA is called Mary Pickford (PBS Special).

By Charles Bogle in the USA:

Milestone Films’ Mary Pickford: Rags and Riches Collection: The inventor of movie acting

23 May 2013

Intended as a means of introducing younger viewers to silent films, Milestone Films’ 2012 Mary Pickford: Rags and Riches Collection also provides adults the opportunity to reacquaint themselves with “America’s Sweetheart.” In so far as Mary Pickford is remembered today, the performer whom director George Cukor credited with inventing screen acting tends to be identified with a little innocent girl persona that safely belongs to an earlier, less sophisticated time.

Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto in 1892. Her father, the son of English immigrants, did odd jobs and left the family in 1895. An alcoholic, he died three years later. Pickford’s mother was of Irish Catholic descent. From an early age the future movie star acted along with her two siblings, without much success until she did a screen test for D.W. Griffith in New York in 1909. Griffith saw something in her.

She soon began acting for Biograph Pictures, first arriving in Los Angeles in January 1910. By 1914, Pickford was an immense star. Two years later, only Charlie Chaplin surpassed her in popularity. Commentators suggest she was the most famous woman in the world in the 1910s and 1920s. Her marriage to fellow film star Douglas Fairbanks created one of the first modern celebrity couples. When they honeymooned in Europe in 1920, riots erupted as crowds tried to get to them. Bucking the Hollywood studios, Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin and Griffith founded United Artists, a film distribution company, in 1919. Unable to make the transition to talking films, Pickford retired from acting in 1933, although she continued to produce films. She died in 1979.

The Rags and Riches collection’s three feature-length films— The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), The Hoodlum (1919) and Sparrows (1926)––provide a sampling of the complexity that Pickford brought to her characterizations. She drew on established acting traditions and her own painful childhood experiences for these roles, and in the process created a naturalistic movie acting style. The Poor Little Rich Girl (directed by Maurice Tourneur, father of Jacques Tourneur) was Pickford’s first portrayal of a child in a feature-length film (the 24-year old had already appeared in an astonishing 125 shorts and 26 full-length movies).

Gwendolyn (Pickford) is the 10-year-old daughter of a wealthy family. Because her father is always busy making money on Wall Street and her mother is equally consumed by her role in society, Gwendolyn is starved for attention and companionship and her efforts to gain attention often create problems in the household.

All of this changes when Gwendolyn’s father loses most of his money in the stock market and her attempts to find comfort from her distracted father are thwarted by several members of the household staff. On the night of Gwen’s 11th birthday, the staff members give the girl a strong dose of sleeping pills to keep her quiet so that they can attend a theater party. When she survives a delirious dream (during which she sees life as it really is), her parents decide that money isn’t the most important thing after all.

There was nothing unusual at the time about Pickford in her mid-20s playing a 10-year-old. Pickford, as well as Ruth Chatterton, Norma Talmadge and Lillian Gish, had played prepubescents on stage and in one-reel films. In many of her pre-adolescent roles, the 5-foot tall, slightly built Pickford was surrounded by a tall cast to increase her credibility as a child.

For the role of Gwendolyn in The Poor Little Rich Girl, Pickford could base herself on what she had learned from her earlier roles as well as her own experiences.

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This video from the Netherlands is about a group of common scoters, diving together for food.

The Waddenvereniging in the Netherlands reports that recently, about 50,000 scoter ducks were counted in the North Sea, west of the Hoornderslag on Texel island. Two weeks before, there had been only 12,000 ducks.

It is very unusual that these ducks have not migrated yet to their nesting sites in northern Europe and Siberia. This is because of the cold spring.

The ducks are both common scoters and velvet scoters.

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This video is about the botanical garden in Aswan, Egypt.

From the botanical garden of Leiden University in the Netherlands:

26 May to 1 October: Summer exhibition ‘Plants from the Arabial [sic] Nights’

The Hortus has an Arabic theme in 2013, linking up with the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Chair of Arabic Language and Culture at Leiden University. You can make acquaintance with the plants from the Arabian Nights in the Hortus. A special route has been set out to take you past plants from Arabian poems and plants mentioned in the ancient pharmacopeia Dioscorides. You can also discover herbs and ingredients from Arabic cuisine in the Arabic garden, which has been specially created for this exhibition.

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• Green Thumbs Head To Denver Botanic Gardens For Annual Plant Sale (denver.cbslocal.com)
• New York Botanical Garden Launches Wild Medicine Exhibition (shoppingblog.com)
• Huntsville Botanical Garden Honors Volunteers (whnt.com)
• Wild Medicine On View at The New York Botanical Garden Through Sept. 8 (sacbee.com)