Bermuda petrel returns to Nonsuch island after 400 years

This video is called Bermuda’s Treasure Island / Bermuda Petrel feeding chick.

From BirdLife:

Bermuda Petrel returns to Nonsuch Island (Bermuda) after 400 years

24-03-2008

Three Endangered Bermuda Petrels (Pterodroma cahow – also known as the Cahow), translocated to Nonsuch Island before fledging in 2005, have returned to the island, and been observed entering artificial nesting burrows constructed for them.

Bermuda Petrel was thought extinct for almost three centuries. In 1951, 18 pairs were rediscovered breeding on sub-optimal rocky islets in Castle Harbour, Bermuda.

The birds began to be moved to Nonsuch, in the entrance to Castle Harbour, after Hurricane Fabian (2003) caused the flooding and partial collapse of the islets, which contained the entire known breeding population.

In the last four years, a total of 81 chicks have been translocated, of which 79 have fledged successfully.

The 6.5 hectare (15.5 acre) Nonsuch Island Nature Reserve has potential nesting habitat which is elevated enough to be safe from hurricane flooding and erosion. The present nesting islets total less than one hectare (2.4 acres).

See also here. And here.

Henriette Roland Holst poem on a dock worker

This poem is a sonnet, first published in 1907. As far as I know, it has never been translated into English.

Here is my translation, from the original by Henriette Roland Holst:

Dock worker

You who dive from darkness of ship’s hold
up to the darkness where the blind night stays
or until noon, that’s when the solar rays
are flashing goldlike ‘long blue water bold,

in a clear world you’re shouldering at length,
go down again: up, down, along your narrow rope;
the whole world’s treasures pass you as you grope,
and you get nothing; only bread for labour strength.

Sometimes, a wave of anger fills your brain:
for freedom, you advance like a mad bull,
you fall, so wounded by the sharpness in their hand.

Then you lay powerless, of pain so full.
O tortured brother, please do look again:
learn calm strength, which you need, to understand.

The last six lines of the poem are about early twentieth century Dutch dock workers sometimes individually lashing out against individual bosses or policemen, as a reaction to exploitation.The poem advises to organize workers’ struggles; instead of reacting emotionally.

This is the original poem in Dutch, as published in Henriette Roland Holst’s poetry book, Opwaartsche Wegen (Ways Up), second edition, 1914, page 11:

Haven-arbeider

Gij die duikt uit het donkere ruim der schepen
tot het donker gewelf der blinde nacht
of tot den middag, als de zonneschacht
goudflitsend glijdt langs blauwe waterstrepen,

in heldre wereld schoudert gij uw vracht,
en daalt weer: op en neer, langs smale reepen;
schatten der aarde voert ge door uw grepen,
en int niets, dan wat brood tot nieuwe kracht.

Soms stijgt een golf van toorn u naar den kop:
om vrijheid stort ge als een dolle stier
voorover, waar de scherpe punte’ u treffen.

Dan ligt ge machteloos, een kreunend dier.
O veelgekwelde broeder zie toch op:
leer kalme kracht, die ge behoeft, beseffen.

Related articles

• Where can young people go for refuge? (Open letter to the Principle and Governors of Life Learning Academy, San Francisco) (beyondproject.wordpress.com)
• Poetry as character development (newauthors.wordpress.com)
• If this were a response to your love poem – poem inspired by a poem (susandanielspoetry.com)
• Haiku Poem ?? (angiesgrapevine.wordpress.com)

4,000 US military deaths in Iraq

This video from the USA is called IVAW Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan Vermont Appeal.

By Joe Kay:

US military deaths in Iraq reach 4,000

Eight US soldiers and dozens of Iraqis killed in weekend violence

24 March 2008

At least eight US soldiers were killed in Iraq over the weekend, amid a resurgence of violence underscoring the instability of the US-led military occupation. The number of US soldiers who have died in Iraq now stands at 4,000.

Seven soldiers were killed in two separate roadside bombs in Baghdad, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. The eighth was killed by “indirect fire”—mortar shells or rockets—on Friday south of Baghdad, according to the US military. So far, 27 US soldiers have been killed in the month of March.

Dozens of Iraqis were killed over the weekend in suicide bombings, and in raids carried out by the US.

The US military stated that it killed 17 and captured another 30 in operations centered in Baquba, about 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. According to the Associated Press, “Iraqi police reported a dozen civilians killed in an airstrike” in Baquba, but the military said that all those killed were “insurgents.”

See also here. And here. And here.

97 percent of US death toll came after Bush’s Mission Accomplished’ speech: here.

White House signals continued Iraq escalation as US death toll tops 4,000: here.

Corporate profiteering from ‘war on terror’

This video is called Stop the war, London demo 15/03/08.

From British daily The Morning Star:

A terrifying truth

(Sunday 23 March 2008)

War On Terror, Inc: Corporate Profiteering From the Politics of Fear by Solomon Hughes
(Verso, £16.99)

TOM MELLEN learns how the ‘security-industrial complex’ is cashing on our politicians’ promises to protect us from harm.

THE words “war on terror” have slowly but surely been exorcised from the government’s vocabulary, but no new newspeak has yet been cooked up to replace them.

Saatchi and Saatchi chief Kevin Roberts attempted a rebrand, but all he could come up with was “global struggle against violent extremism,” which never caught on, perhaps because Jacqui Smith started using it.

The problem, as Solomon Hughes makes crystal clear in War on Terror, Inc, is not one of bodged presentation.

New Labour is simply too deeply compromised by its exploitation of the politics of fear at home and its disastrous military interventions abroad to get out of it with a bit of expensive spin.

Blair may be heading to greener pastures across the pond and the US is already pretending that Bush is a distant memory, but we all still face being locked up without trial.

Civilians, not to mention soldiers, are dying every day in Iraq and Afghanistan and teachers’ pet David Miliband has cemented his new Labour credentials by launching a spirited defence of liberal interventionism, just when you were hoping that it was going out of style.

So, tolerating business as usual means that it is only a matter of time before our boys are called upon to, once again, wage asymmetric warfare in the service of Miliband’s muscular humanitarianism – and all in the name of the national interest.

Hughes shows that a decisive break with the war on terror world view can only come when the British people form a government that wages war on the military-industrial complex itself rather than underdeveloped, impoverished former colonies.

He argues that, since the collapse of the USSR, the military-industrial complex which so concerned Eisenhower has evolved into what he terms the security-industrial complex, an unholy alliance of prison privateers, mercenary outfits, war contractors such as Halliburton and the political elites of the US and Britain.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Germany over the weekend to take part in the traditional Easter peace marches against wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: here.

The ‘Blair doctrine’ and after: five years of ‘humanitarian intervention’: here.

‘Humanitarian intervention’ ideology and the Left in Japan: here.