Less and less butterflies in Flanders

This video is called The Alcon Blue Butterfly.

From Belgian daily Het Laatste Nieuws:

Flanders now has considerably less butterflies.

Not just the number of species gets less, also the numbers of individuals of the various species get less.

Also the popular peacock and brimstone are getting less numerous. …

However, measures to help the rare alcon blue butterfly do seem to be effective.

Also, in Vlaams-Brabant province, recently the sooty copper, thought to be extinct, was re-discovered. …

“Flanders once had 64 native butterfly species, of which a third has become extinct”, Wouter Vanreusel of Natuurpunt says.

Brimstone: here.

Dingy skipper butterflies in Britain: here.

Judge in Saddam trial joins millions of other refugees from Bush’s ‘new’ Iraq

This 2014 video is called Iraq: Children Traumatised by the Terror of Flight.

From Al Jazeera:

Saddam judge flees Iraq

The Iraqi judge who sentenced Saddam Hussein to death has fled Iraq and sought asylum in the UK.

Al Jazeera’s correspondent in London quoted British official sources as saying that Raouf Abdel-Rahman, a member of Iraq’s Kurdish minority, has requested political asylum in Britain with his family.

Abdel-Rahman headed the Supreme Iraq Criminal Tribunal that heard Saddam’s genocide trial and found the former Iraqi president guilty, leading to his execution.

This judge is only one in the total number of 3.7 million and counting Iraqi refugees since George W Bush invaded Iraq in 2003.

Another one in the 3.7 million was director of the looted national museum in Baghdad.

Blair deports Iraqi refugees to possible death in Iraq: here.

Blair and the Iraqi refugees: here.

Iraqi refugees in Syria: here.

US troops vs. Turkish Kurds: here.

UK: Labour MP resigns from government to protest Blair’s nuclear weapons policies

From the BBC:

Labour MP to resign over Trident

The Livingston MP Jim Devine is to step down from his government post in protest over plans to replace the Trident nuclear weapons system.

Mr Devine confirmed he will resign as a ministerial aide next week over the Clyde-based missile carrying submarines.

A Commons vote is to be held on Wednesday on replacing the Trident system with a new nuclear system.

Mr Devine said intends to vote against government plans.

The vote will determine whether a new generation of nuclear submarines are aquired and the Trident D5 missiles updated.

Last December, Tony Blair said that Britain must keep such an independent nuclear deterrent – at a cost of up to £20bn over 30 years.

Mr Devine won his Livingston seat following the death of Robin Cook, for whom he had been election agent.

Since last October, he has been a parliamentary private secretary to Health Minister Rosie Winterton.

Trident update: here.

UK: Blair government helps Shell, BP, grab at Iraqi oil

From Al Jazeera:

UK in ‘murky Iraq oil deal‘

A social justice group has obtained documents showing that the British government tried to influence a new Iraqi oil law in favour of UK businesses.

The London-based Platform group said on Friday that the documents showed British diplomats tried to exclude Iraqi oil firms in favour of firms such as BP and Shell.

Greg Muttitt, an oil campaigner with Platform, told People and Power programme aired on Al Jazeera on Friday, that the British government was “using their position as a military occupier to influence and shape the future of the country’s economy in the interests of powerful companies“.

British diplomats have been involved in “extensive efforts since at least 2004 to push for companies such as BP and Shell to receive long-term contracts, which would give them exclusive rights to extract Iraq’s huge oilfields“, Platform said in a press release on Friday.

The group said they were able to prove this using documents obtained under Britain’s freedom of information act.

Muttitt said Iraqis have been “excluded” from the oil law while the British foreign office played a “central role in supporting the efforts of the oil companies to lobby the Iraqi government”.

Contentious legislation

Iraq has proven oil reserves of 115 billion barrels, with billions more thought to be as yet undiscovered, but since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq the country has been in chaos and unable to adequately exploit its own resources.

New legislation, drafted by Iraq’s fledgling government, is aimed at reviving the country’s oil revenues, but critics say the majority of the money will be going to multinationals.

Shell is not just a British, but also a Dutch corporation.

What dirty tricks may the Dutch Rightist Balkenende administration have been up to in Iraq?

Iraq war and oil in the USA: here.

Costs of the Iraq war in the US: $2.5 trillion, just for several decades of care for the wounded.

Antarctic as playground for faddish courses for corporate elite

From daily The Guardian in Britain:

Scott, Amundsen … and now BP

How middle management conquered Antarctic

Coca-Cola and oil company fund ‘life changing’ course for executives near pole

Paul Lewis, Antarctic Peninsula

Saturday March 10, 2007

They marched up the glacier, a sharp wind slicing at their faces, buoyed by the thought that they had joined an elite club of people who have stepped on the remote mainland of Antarctica.

At their destination – a pristine white ridge mid-way up an enormous slab of ice – the men and women unfurled their flags.

The corporate banners of a dozen companies, including BP, Kroll and Coca-Cola, fluttered above the last great wilderness.

One man took a photo of a Coke bottle wedged in the ice.

Another stripped to his boxer shorts.

This week, the graduates of a controversial new brand of leadership training returned to their desks.

For its corporate supporters, who paid £16,000 per employee for the trip, the course instills executives with teamwork skills and, crucially, an environmental conscience.

For its critics, including a few of last week’s participants, it is an indulgent booze-cruise on ice masquerading as corporate social responsibility.

The myth of Hitler in the Antarctic: here.

USA: country singer Merle Haggard against Iraq war

From Rocky Mountain News:

[US country singer Merle] Haggard, 69, talking to Rocky music writer Mark Brown from his home in Redding, Calif., continues to be the outlaw and renegade, a quality that has taken him to both jail and the top of the charts. …

*Your song America First came out against the war in Iraq without sounding unpatriotic.

“I think it’s pretty well agreed upon that I am an American.

My family history and my actions and my relatives who fought in previous wars, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam.

I’ve had grandchildren and brothers and cousins (serve).

I tried to get in but I was too young. I wound up going to jail for trying to get in the Army.

I think it’s a well-known fact that Merle Haggard is a red, white and blue American.

There are a lot of red, white and blue Americans who don’t believe in what we’re doing now, don’t believe we’re being told the truth.

We’re being told the truth after the fact because they get caught in their damn lies.

It’s a terrible time, politically, for America.

That Merle Haggard, during the Vietnam war seen as supporting that war, now opposes the Iraq war says quite something on George W. Bush.

Ron Glasser on Vietnam and Iraq wars: here.

Country music and the Iraq war: here.

Related articles

• Merle Haggard – Fair Aid – Siskiyou Golden Fair Benefit September 21st (redding.com)
• Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard to perform in Tuscaloosa (10/24/13) (stillisstillmoving.com)
• US involvement in the Iran-Iraq war: ‘This information is not so new’ – expert (voiceofrussia.com)
• Merle Haggard (jimstunes.wordpress.com)
• My House of Memories: An Autobiography e-book (obdejuce.wordpress.com)

Big anti Bush demonstration in Uruguay

Like in Brazil, there are big anti Bush demonstration in Uruguay, the next country in his tour of Latin America.

See Indymedia Uruguay; and the Uruguayan anti Bush site.

Talking about Bush in Brazil: see Brazil’s Ethanol Slaves. 200,000 Migrant Sugar Cutters Who Prop Up Renewable Energy Boom.

Photos of anti Bush protests in Latin America: here.

Billionaires getting richer, while poor get poorer

By David Walsh:

Forbes 2007 list: Nearly one thousand billionaires in the world, a misfortune for humanity

10 March 2007

Forbes magazine released its annual list of billionaires Thursday.

There are now nearly one thousand billionaires worldwide—946 to be exact, according to the magazine’s calculations—and their combined wealth in the past year grew by 35 percent to $3.5 trillion.

The latter figure is larger than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of every nation in the world with the exception of the US, China, Japan and India.

The combined GDP of all the countries in Africa, a continent of nearly one billion people, was some $2.3 trillion in 2005.

More than a third of the African population lives on less than $1 a day.

The combined GDP of South America’s largest trading bloc, Mercosur, whose full members are Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, is $1.1 trillion.

The proposed US federal budget for 2007 amounts to $2.8 trillion.

The sum devoted in that budget to Social Security, Medicare and education for a population of 300 million people is approximately one-third of the combined wealth of those 946 individuals.

See also here.

Forbes’ list of 400 richest US Americans: here.

Britain: the rich getting richer under Blair; and poor poorer.

See also here.

And here.

Germany: see here.

Blair’s anti poor ‘reforms’: here.