22 Afghan civilians killed by NATO

Posted on April 7, 2008 by petrel41

This video is called Afghanistan Civilian Casualties in Helmand (August 2007).

22 civilians killed in coalition forces’ operation against insurgents

Updated at: 2120 PST, Monday, April 07, 2008

KABUL: Afghan and U.S.-led forces have inflicted heavy casualties on insurgents in a battle, the Afghan Defence Ministry said on Monday, but locals said 22 civilians were killed.

The U.S. military and the Defence Ministry said there were no reports of civilian casualties in the battle against fighters of a pro-Taliban militant faction on Sunday in the eastern province of Nuristan near the Pakistani border.

But Rahmatullah Rashidi, head of a legislative provincial council in Nuristan, said Taliban had been in the area but had fled, and civilians were killed in U.S. bombing.

Bush’s music to torture people by

Posted on April 7, 2008 by petrel41

This video from the USA is called Bush says he did not torture, AGAIN.

Translated from Dutch (Rightist) daily De Telegraaf:

US American rapper Eminem is one of the artists topping the “torture charts” of the US government. The April issue of Wordt Vervolgd, the magazine [of the Dutch branch of] human rights organization Amnesty International says so.

A US journalist has investigated which music soldiers use in Iraqi jails and other places to prevent prisoners from sleeping or to disorient them during interrogations.

Top of the charts is Fuck your God of death metal-band Deicide. Other favourites include … Stayin Alive by the Bee Gees, rather cynical in this context. …

Reporter Justine Sharrock interviewed [for Mother Jones] hundreds of US American soldiers, who had worked, eg, as guards in Guantanamo (Cuba) or Abu Ghraib (Iraq), after they had returned to the USA.

For example, the song Dirrty by [Christina] Aguilera with its sexual implications was used to intimidate women prisoners. … Some artists have reacted indignantly to their music being used for those [torture] practices.

Chilean writer Isabel Alllende interviewed

Posted on April 7, 2008 by petrel41

This video is called Isabel Allende: Tales of passion.

From Democracy Now! radio in the Unted States:

Chilean Writer Isabel Alllende on Her Memoir, Her Family, Michelle Bachelet, Torture and Immigration

Bestselling Chilean writer Isabel Allende is world renowned for her narrative craft and gripping stories that blend the mythical with the personal. She has written over a dozen books that have sold 51 million copies. Her debut novel in 1982, “The House of the Spirits,” chronicled four generations of a Chilean family through the tumult of that country’s political history. It is a history that is intertwined with Allende’s own. Her latest book is a memoir titled “The Sum of Our Days.” Allende joins us in our firehouse studio for an extended conversation about her writing, her family, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, the treatment of immigrants in the United States and much more.

What subjects is this blog about?

Posted on April 7, 2008 by petrel41

This video is called WordPress.com – Step-by-Step Tutorial on How to Blog.

Since this blog started in August 2005, there have been blog posts in 32 categories.

The numbers of blog posts in various categories are (some posts fit in more than one category. So, they they have more than one tag):

Animals (general) 97

Amphibians Frogs, toads, newts, etc. 115

Birds 748

Fish Lampreys, rays, sharks, boney fish, etc. 241

Invertebrates Lancelets, insects, mollusks, etc. 388

Mammals Monotremes, marsupials, placental mammals 441

Reptiles Present reptiles and extinct ones like dinosaurs 267

Art General 15

Architecture Building 76

Dancing Dances 16

Film Movies, movie actors, etc. 163

Literature Poets, playwrights, novelists, etc. 248

Music 283

Visual arts Painting, drawing, photography, etc. 407

Computers and the Internet 119

Crime Murder, other crimes 494

Disasters Tornadoes, earthquakes, etc. 66

Economic, social, trade union, etc. 993

Environment Nature, and humans; pollution and anti-pollution action; etc. 612

Humour Jokes, cartoons, etc. 142

Media Television, radio, press, etc. 144

Plants etc. Plants, fungi, monocellular organisms: all non animal organisms 293

Politics general 612

Human rights Civil rights; torture; etc. 1061

Peace and war 1416

Racism and anti-racism 236

Religion 169

Science; health 888

Sports 36

This blog On this Dear Kitty blog 50

Women’s issues Pertaining to the situation of women in society 174

Save the cormorants of Lake Constance

Posted on April 7, 2008 by petrel41

Great cormorant

From BirdLife:

Save the Great Cormorants of Lake Constance

07-04-2008

Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU – BirdLife in Germany) is protesting vehemently against the planned destruction of Lake Constance’s only colony of Great Cormorants Phalacrocorax carbo.

“It is hard to believe that Freiburg local authority intends to commit such a destructive act, not only in a National Nature Reserve but especially within a European Special Protected Area (SPA)”, said Dr Andre Baumann (chairman – NABU Baden-Württemberg). “This persecution of Great Cormorants not only contradicts common sense, it also contravenes European bird protection legislation and is morally unjustifiable”. NABU is protesting to the authorities in Freiburg against the planned operations and has started an online petition.

Short snouted seahorses breed in Thames in London

Posted on April 7, 2008 by petrel41

This video is called Seahorse gives birth.

From the BBC:

Rare seahorses breeding in Thames

Colonies of rare seahorses are living and breeding in the River Thames, conservationists have revealed.

The short-snouted variety are endangered and normally live around the Canary Islands and Italy.

Experts at London Zoo said the species had been found at Dagenham in east London and Tilbury and Southend in Essex, over the last 18 months.

The revelation coincided with new laws which came into force on Sunday to give the creatures protected status.

The seahorses, or Hippocampus hippocampus, are now protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

Cuvier’s beaked whales may have died from navy sonar

Posted on April 7, 2008 by petrel41

Cuvier's beaked whale From British daily The Independent:

Navy sonar blamed for death of beaked whales found washed up in the Hebrides

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

Monday, 7 April 2008

Anti-submarine sonar may have killed a group of whales found dead in the Hebrides in one of Britain’s most unusual strandings, scientists believe.

Five Cuvier’s beaked whales, a species rarely seen in British waters, were discovered on beaches in the Western Isles on succeeding days in February. Another animal from a related species was discovered at the same time.

Experts consider such a multiple stranding to be highly abnormal. They calculate, from the state of the carcasses inspected that the whales died in the same incident out in the Atlantic to the south and west of Britain, and then drifted towards the Scottish coast over two or three weeks.

The main suspect in the case is sonar, as it is known that beaked whales are highly sensitive to the powerful sound waves used by all the world’s navies to locate underwater objects such as submarines.

Groups of beaked whales have been killed, with sonar suspected as the direct cause, several times in recent years; well-documented incidents include anti-submarine exercises in Greece in 1996, the Bahamas in 2000 and the Canary Islands in 2002. In 2003, an American judge banned the US Navy from testing a new sonar after a court case brought by environmentalists to protect marine life.

US musician Laurie Anderson and the Iraq war

Posted on April 7, 2008 by petrel41

This video is called Laurie Anderson‘s Homeland.

From British daily The Guardian:

‘Adults are idiots’

The spiky-haired queen of avant-garde pop has some new targets: advertising, the war on terror – and her own stage sets. Laurie Anderson tells all to John O’Mahony

Monday April 7, 2008

During a recent Boston performance of Laurie Anderson’s new show, Homeland, a rather extraordinary thing happened. Anderson had just launched into a catchy little number about the recruitment practices of the US army and their gory consequences on the battlefields of the Middle East. “Let me blow up your churches, let me blow up your mosques,” she intoned sweetly, against a surging electronic backdrop. “All your government buildings, ’cause I’m a bad guy.”

About halfway through, protests began to ring out across the auditorium, then a conspicuous and well-heeled contingent made a dash for the exits. “I was literally shocked,” says Anderson, back in the sanctuary of her cavernous New York loft overlooking the Hudson. “With everything that’s been going on, it has been impossible to avoid putting politics in this work. On the one hand, I was pleased I was provoking a response. But before I was pleased, I was very surprised. I thought, ‘This is not at all controversial.'”

Perhaps the audience revolt had more to do with Anderson’s current status, achieved over an astonishing four-decades-long career, than with the actual content of Homeland, a 100-minute musical appraisal of everything from the Iraq war to the excesses of billboard advertising, which has its UK premiere at the Barbican at the end of the month.

These days, with million-selling albums and countless tours under her belt, Anderson is often still regarded as the kooky, spiky-haired queen of 1980s pop experimentalism, guaranteed to provide a little social comment but never to spark actual outrage. It’s generally forgotten that she began her career as an avant-garde sculptor and performer in 1970s New York, where mass walkouts were a nightly staple.Among her earliest wild and wacky works are a symphony for car horns and autoparts entitled An Afternoon of Automotive Transmission, and As:If, in which she stood on stage wearing skates frozen into large blocks of ice. …

Anderson, slight and wiry, with her electroshock hairdo seemingly conveying perpetual if pleasant surprise, calls Homeland “one-third political, one-third from an odd dream world, and the rest music”. It is, she says, “inspired by the fact that there is very little information in America: I am very aware that the media has totally failed us. The journalists have become entertainers, so I thought we should take the next step and ask, ‘Why don’t entertainers become journalists?'”

Homeland’s lyrics certainly have the ring of a hard-hitting article. Take the lyrics to Only an Expert: “And if a country tortures people/ And holds citizens without cause or trial and sets up military tribunals/ This is also not a problem/ Unless there’s an expert who says it’s the beginning of a problem.” …

The reality of her upbringing doesn’t seem to have been quite so lyrical, with her mother and father the living embodiment of pushy parents. “I was forced to play the violin. I had a teacher who said, ‘If you don’t put your fingers in the right place, I am going to put nails where they shouldn’t be and you’ll prick yourself.'” At the age of 12, all of these lofty parental ambitions were almost dashed by a serious accident. “I was showing off doing a flip from a high board,” says Anderson, “and I wound up missing the pool and landing on my back. I was paralysed. The doctors said, ‘We’re not sure you are going to walk again.’ That was the first time I realised that adults are idiots.” She took two years to recover, during which time she read the entire works of Jean-Paul Sartre.