On the Italian site molleindustria.it, there are free Internet games, in various languages, including English, often critical of aspects of society.
They include games on McDonald’s; on queer people; and on ‘flexible’ workers.
Hundreds laid off at Activision Blizzard and other video game companies: here.
This video is about the consequences of Agent Orange in Vietnam.
From Dutch daily NRC, paper edition, 8 March 2007, page 15:
Insurance companies fear that they will have to pay billions of dollars claims against Philips [Dutch based multinational electronics corporation].
They did not know that a Philips affiliate has sold asbestos and has produced Agent Orange. …
A company which was part of the electronics corporation from 1961 and 1981, sold Agent Orange to the US Army.
Still today, grandchildren of US Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese war victims, because of this, are built with deficiencies in backbones and elsewhere. ….
In 1961, Philips bought the US company Thompson Hayward [Agriculture and Nutrition].
Three activities [of them] are problematic now:
– Selling raw asbestos.
During this, workers were exposed to this cancer inducing substance. …
– Thompson Hayward was one of seven corporations selling Agent Orange to the US army during the Vietnam war. …
– Producing pesticides like DDT, an insecticide which has been illegal for a long time, because it contains the cancer inducing dioxin.
This is a new animation by Mark Fiore.
Its subject is the collusion of the Colombian government of Rightist Uribe, Bush’s favourite president in Latin America, with extreme Right death squads.
Associated Press reports:
With a cast of leering far-right paramilitaries, smiling skeletons climbing from mass graves and a buffoonish George W. Bush, an animated Internet cartoon that criticizes Colombia’s peace process has prompted a rebuke from the nation’s foreign minister.
The two-minute clip playing on the Amnesty International Web site is presented as a mock commercial for a new soap, Colombia Clean.
It’s a sarcastic reference to the Colombian government effort to make peace with illegal paramilitaries, a process that critics say absolves extremist right-wing warlords of savage massacres.
Colombia Clean, the bubbly narrator promises, will wash away “dirty consciences” and “bloodstained histories.”
“We can wallow in the dirt of human rights abuses, but stay spotless with the nonstick blame repellant of Colombia Clean!” a Colombian politician says.
“If you’re a member of a ruthless paramilitary militia, you can come clean,” chimes in an increasingly bloodstained paramilitary commander, “And continue killing!”
Chiquita and death squads: here.
Interview with Colombian trade unionist: here.
Colombia: Agrifuels and death squads: here.
From Women’s eNews:
Iraqi Women’s Death Sentences Spur European Outcry
Run Date: 03/09/07
By Cynthia L. Cooper
WeNews correspondentDeath sentences imposed on three Iraqi women–some of them mothers with young children–have spurred international concerns about the conduct of their trials and the abrogation of international prohibitions against the death penalty for new mothers.
(WOMENSENEWS)–In Frankfurt, Germany, protestors planned to erect a scaffold and post a woman under it with a rope around her neck.
In Stockholm, Sweden, and Ankara, Turkey, protestors gathered in front of the Iraq embassies.
These events, hastily-announced in the past two weeks, were to demand a halt to pending executions by hanging of three young women in Iraq.
The women–Wassan Talib, 31; Zaynab Fahil, 25 and Liqa’ Qamar Muhammad, 26– were charged with vague crimes of acting against the public welfare, according to reports emerging from the war-torn country.
Amnesty International issued an “urgent action,” asking members around the world to send letters of protest, fearing that the executions were imminent.
Update: here.
And here.
US women soldiers fear rape by male colleagues: here.
Rape of Iraqi women by US soldiers: here.
Associated Press reports:
Priests to purify site after Bush visit
JUAN CARLOS LLORCA
GUATEMALA CITY – Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate “bad spirits” after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday.
“That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture,” Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday.
Bush’s seven-day tour of Latin America includes a stopover beginning late Sunday in Guatemala.
On Monday morning he is scheduled to visit the archaeological site Iximche on the high western plateau in a region of the Central American country populated mostly by Mayans.
Update: here.
Ancient Mayan discovery: here.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports:
Researchers discover new species of taipan
Australian researchers say they have found a previously undiscovered species of taipan.
The young snake has been found in the central deserts of Western Australia as part of a biodiversity survey.
It was initially thought to be a brown snake, but Professor Steve Donellan from the South Australian Museum says DNA testing revealed it to be an unknown species of taipan.
He says there are only two other known species of taipan in Australia, and the last one was found 125 years ago.
“You don’t find a big venomous species of snake very often anywhere in the world, especially in a country like Australia which is relatively well explored, so it’s a big find,” he said.
“[For] people who are interested in reptiles, this would be an outstanding find.”
The taipan has been preserved at the WA Museum.
See also here.
This 2014 video is called Demovideo LIFE+ Northern Bald Ibis Project Reason for Hope.
From Wildlife Extra:
Northern bald ibis return to Syria from their wintering grounds in Ethiopia
The rarest birds in the Middle East are returning to breeding grounds after being fitted with satellite tags to unveil the mystery of their migration journey.
The re-appearance of one northern bald ibis in Palmyra, Syria, with two others on its tail, has been heralded as a success for the nine-month tracking project that began when scientists tagged three adult birds last summer.
The trio, Sultan, Salam and Zenobia (the latter named after Palmyra’s third-century warrior queen) have flown more than 3,800 miles across seven countries on their migration route spending the winter in the Ethiopian highlands, 50 miles from the country’s capital Addis Ababa.
Bedouin nomads and rangers from the Syrian Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform are protecting the breeding site and the new tracking data will help conservationists safeguard the birds on migration and over winter as well.
See also here.
Northern bald ibis in Austria: here.
Reuters reports:
“‘Don’t discuss polar bears“: memo to scientists
Thu Mar 8, 2007 5:23PM ET
By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent
WASHINGTON – Polar bears, sea ice and global warming are taboo subjects, at least in public, for some U.S. scientists attending meetings abroad, environmental groups and a top federal wildlife official said on Thursday.
Environmental activists called this scientific censorship, which they said was in line with the Bush administration‘s history of muzzling dissent over global climate change.
See also here.
Response of the Royal Society of Britain to climate change negationist junk science: here.
This is an angel shark video.
From British daily The Independent:
The great white shark is being hunted to extinction in the Mediterranean, while angel sharks have disappeared altogether from the North Sea according to a report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) meeting in Rome.
Although listed as an endangered species since 1983, the great white is legally protected only in Malta.
The UK government promised to protect angel sharks in 2001 but, six years on, nothing has been done and they are now classified extinct.
Overfishing of sharks damages ecosystem: here.
There are big demonstrations against George W. Bush as he visits Brazil.
See here and elsewhere on Indymedia Brazil.
According to images from Dutch NOS TV, members of the party of Brazilian president Lula, PT, participated in the demonstrations.
See also here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 