Play on British miners as painters

This video from England is called Ashington: Past, Present, Future.

From British daily The Morning Star:

Life and work

(Monday 26 May 2008)

THEATRE: The Pitmen Painters

The Cottesloe, London

HILARIOUS: Lee Hall‘s The Pitmen Painters plays at the Cottesloe until June 25.

JOHN GREEN says that Lee Hall’s rib-crackingly funny play The Pitmen Painters is a must for socialists.

The Pitmen Painters is a must-see play. It has it all – rib-cracking humour, class conflict, pathos, a ferment of ideas and a central glowing humanity and hope.

During the 1930s, a group of miners in the village of Ashington in Co Durham invite an art lecturer to talk to them about art as part of their WEA programme.

They had already spent several years studying evolution and had become interested in how the environment affected the development of individuals and particularly in learning about how art influences human life.

The WEA sends them a well-meaning middle-class academic with little experience of conversing with working people. He begins by presenting slides on Renaissance painting but soon realises that he is talking well above the miners’ heads. They have never even visited a gallery or read anything about art. Most have never even ventured beyond their village.

So, in desperation, he gets them painting themselves – learning through practice, even if they begin by using second-hand tins of gloss paint on hardboard.

In representing their own lives and work in powerful images, they begin to grasp what art is all about.

The group eventually wins widespread recognition, even in the art world, but none of them goes on to become a full-time artist.

Art, for them, is not connected with commercial value. It is solely a means of slaking their own thirst for free expression.

The play’s characters, based on the real-life ones, are vividly portrayed. A bare stage, a few chairs and projected images are the only props.

Writer Lee Hall of Billy Elliot fame gives us a sharply honed down-to-earth dialogue of wit, insight and sensitivity which has strong resonances of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. …

I made a documentary about the Ashington Group in the 1970s, when its orginal members were retired or near retirement. The central character in this play Oliver Kilbourn was still very much alive and told me how much it had meant to him being able to give expression to his work, his life and that of his pit village through painting.

He still lived in his small terraced house in Ashington. The village itself is just one incredibly long terrace, leading like a snake from the pit which provided employment for everyone.

The play concludes in 1947 as the pits are nationalised and everyone is full of renewed hope that the brand new Labour government will usher in socialism.

Kilbourn presents a banner that he’s painted showing on the one side the old pit village – “the dreary past” – and, on the other, an image of a pristine tree-lined village – “socialism, the future.”

However, just in case we are too affected by the miners’ 1947 euphoria, a last projected text on the wall tells us: “New Labour abolishes the section in the constitution calling for shared ownership of the means of production in 1995.” Get tickets for this play by hook or by crook.

The Pitmen Painters plays at the Cottesloe until June 25. Box office: (020) 7452 -3000.

See also here.

First dinosaurs’ tracks in the Arab Peninsula, guest blog

This is a guest blog, by Juanita from Dinosaur Home.

The very first Dinosaur tracks in the Arab Peninsula!

A recent discovery of Dinosaur tracks teaches us on the lives of the ancient creatures.

The tracks belongs to sauropods and the other tracks walking in the opposite direction belong to an ornithopod.

Can you imagine the small herd walking probably to find food and crossing path with another dinosaur walking in the opposite direction.

Because of the tracks it can be seen that the young ones in the herd kept up with the older ones taking more steps. This is something that can’t be learned from studying individual remains.

The research of the area will continue; hoping for more interesting findings.

Dinosaur tracks recently discovered on the Arabian Peninsula are not only the first of their kind in the region, but they also reveal more about the herding behavior of the prehistoric beasts.

The footprints, left by a group of 11 plant-eaters that walked on all fours, along with a lone dino that stood on its hind legs, were found on a coastal mudflat in Yemen.

The footprints left by the herding herbivores varied in size, implying a roving group of adults and children. “Smaller individuals had shorter stride lengths, and took more steps to keep up with the larger individuals,” says Nancy Stevens, an assistant professor of paleontology at Ohio University in Athens, and a co-author of the paper describing the evidence published online by PLoS ONE.

Researchers identified the quadrupedal roamers as sauropods, which had long necks and tails attached to a beefy, elephantlike body. The adults in the sauropod group likely rose 10 to 13 feet (three to four meters) in height making them about as tall as, but probably longer than a bus. The tracks, which run alongside an ancient waterway that has since dried up, imply that the wandering herd may have been searching for food. “This mudflat would have been like a highway for them, with little tree cover,” says lead author Anne Schulp, a paleontologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands.

The second set of tracks, which head in the opposite direction, belonged to an upright-standing dinosaur called an ornithopod. The scientists say it is unlikely the sauropods were in danger or felt threatened if they crossed paths with the other dino, because it was also a plant eater. Nevertheless, Schulp says he would not be surprised to find remains of large carnivores nearby, because they typically lurked wherever potential prey hung out.

For more information check [the complete article in Scientific American] here.

And here.

And here.

Yemen embraces its Jurassic past: here.

Missing link Palaeozoic to modern amphibians discovered?

From People’s Daily in China:

Scientists: 290 mln-year-old fossil settles frog evolution debate

08:27, May 23, 2008

Canadian scientists said a 290 million-year-old fossil, “frogamander,” settles a long and hot debate over the origin of frogs and salamanders.

Their research is published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The fossil that links modern frogs and salamanders proves the previously disputed fact some modern amphibians, frogs and salamanders, evolved from one group of ancient primitive amphibians called “temnospondyls.”

“This fossil is the most like the modern amphibian that you find and it’s from incredibly ancient times,” said principal investigator Jason Anderson, an assistant professor of veterinary anatomy at the University of Calgary in Canada who specializes in vertebrate paleontology.

“So what this does is provide conclusive evidence that frogs and salamanders have an origin among one particular group of extinct fossil amphibians,” Anderson said.

“This fossil falls right into a gap in the fossil record between one archaic group of amphibians and the earliest examples of the modern amphibians, frogs and salamanders.”

The fossil was first collected in Texas by the late Nicholas Hotton, a paleontologist with the Smithsonian Institution, in 1995. It was rediscovered in the collections of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., in 2004.

Dubbed Gerobatrachus hottoni (Hotton’s elder frog), the animal looked somewhat like a salamander with a stubby tail and froglike ears.

“It’s got a great big froggie ear and it’s reduced the number of vertebrae in its back … but like salamanders, it shares a particular fusion of some ankle bones,” said Anderson.

“The skull itself, you look at the skull and it is almost what you’d expect to see in a frog, really lightly built, kind of like soaring, flying buttresses on a cathedral, long arching struts, really broad and wide,” he explained.

The researchers believe the discovery is important not just for science, but also for the general public.

Source: Agencies

See also here.

Kryostega collinsoni – Salamander Ancestor Had Huge Teeth Up Top: here. See also here.

Amphibian extinction threat: here.

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Record flying fish flight

This video is called Flying fish clocks 45 second record.

From Practical Fishkeeping:

A TV crew working off southern Japan has filmed the longest recorded flight by a flying fish.

According to a report from the BBC, which shows the footage on its website, the flying fish was filmed by a film crew from NHK off Yakushima Island and shows the fish completely airborne for 45 seconds.

The longest previously recorded flight was 42 seconds and was recorded by an American researcher in the 1920s.

Rare Crucifix ground beetle rediscovered in England

From Wildlife Extra:

Very Rare Crucifix ground beetle rediscovered at Wicken Fen

May 2008. The Crucifix Ground beetle, one of the rarest beetles in the UK, has been rediscovered at the National Trust’s Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire after an absence of more than 50 years.

The Crucifix Ground Beetle, known as Panagaeus cruxmajor, is listed as an Endangered Species in the UK’s Red Data Book and is a priority for conservation in the UK BAP (the Government’s Biodiversity Action Plan).

Only 3 UK locations

Before the discovery at Wicken Fen the beetle was thought to survive at only three places in the UK, and at one of those it had not been seen for ten years. The eye-catching orange and black Crucifix Ground Beetle was last recorded at Wicken Fen in 1951, despite regular and widespread searches by experts.

Popular with collectors

The rare Crucifix Ground Beetle was considered a great prize by Victorian entomologists. Charles Darwin, a very keen collector of beetles, found the species ‘near Cambridge’ when he was a Cambridge University under-graduate in the 1820s.

Ozaena ground beetles likely have anatomical adaptations enabling them to parasitize ant nests throughout their life cycle, according to a study published January 16, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Wendy Moore from the University of Arizona, USA, and colleagues: here.

Elephant beetle: here.

New invasive beetle species, The Citrus Longhorn beetle, confirmed in the UK: here.

Dick Cheney-Halliburton corruption scandal in Nigeria

This is a Canadian TV documentary about George W. Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney.

By Brian Smith:

Criminal investigation of Halliburton’s Nigerian operation widens

Evidence of corruption during Cheney’s tenure

26 May 2008

Criminal investigations of former Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), for alleged bribery in the construction of Nigeria’s $10 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plant on Bonny Island, have been widened to cover the past 20 years of Halliburton’s operations in Nigeria. Investigators will also probe accusations of embezzlement by senior executives, and Halliburton’s relations with other multinationals, including Royal Dutch Shell.

Halliburton recently dismissed two of its most senior executives, Robert Stanley and William Chaudin, on suspicion of embezzling $5 million from a Nigerian energy project.

The initial claim, which started the investigation some six years ago, was that Halliburton and others working on a gas export project conspired to win a $5 billion construction contract in 1995 by establishing a $180 million slush-fund to bribe Nigerian officials, and to reward Western contractors between 1994 and 2002, which includes the period when US Vice-President Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s chairman and CEO (1995-2000). Such payments are illegal under a 1997 convention barring “bribery of foreign public officials in commercial negotiations,” adopted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Cheney was also at the helm when, on March 18, 1999, Halliburton and the consortium paid $37.5 million to British lawyer Jeffrey Tesler, who served as a consultant to KBR after it was formed in a 1998 merger between Halliburton and Dresser Industries, which Cheney engineered. This and three other similar payments to Tesler are some of the key points in the investigation by French, British, US and Nigerian police.

Related articles

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• Halliburton destroyed Gulf oil spill evidence
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• Rand Paul: Dick Cheney used 9/11 as excuse to invade Iraq for the benefit of Halliburton
• Halliburton/KBR Goes After Rape Survivor Jamie Leigh Jones’ Personal Integrity In Its Supreme Court Petition

‘Brittlestar City’ found on huge seamount in Antarctica

This is a video of a brittlestar in an aquarium, eating.

From Wildlife Extra:

Marine scientists marvel at vast “Brittlestar City” found on huge seamount in Antarctica

Census of Marine Life-affiliated scientists, investigating the secrets of a vast underwater mountain range south of New Zealand, captured the first images of an amazing “Brittlestar City” that, against daunting odds, has colonized the peak of a seamount – an underwater summit taller than the world’s tallest building.

Its cramped starfish-like inhabitants, tens of millions of them, living arm tip to arm tip, owe their success to the seamount’s shape and to the swirling circumpolar current flowing over and around it at roughly four kilometres per hour. It allows these brittlestars to capture passing food simply by raising their arms, and it sweeps away fish and other hovering would-be predators.

Discovery of this marine metropolis, along with important new insights into seamount geology and physics, were the highlights of a month-long expedition to survey the Macquarie Ridge aboard the Research Vessel Tangaroa of New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research, host of the Census of Marine Life seamount programme, CenSeam. The voyage was largely funded by the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.

Undersea Mountain Photos: Brittlestar Swarm, More Found: here.

Changes to the Antarctic ice shelf are causing seals to fight for air and penguins to give up on their young, here.

Film maker Werner Herzog and Antarctica: here.

Brittle stars (Echinodermata: Ophiuroidea) from La Réunion and the systematic position of Ophiocanops Koehler, 1922: here.

Britllestars in the Dutch Oosterschelde: here.

Antarctic Worms, Sea Spiders, Urchins Pounded By Icebergs: here.

Chile Enacts Landmark Fishing Reforms, Protects All Seamounts: here.

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Mass murder of South Korean peasants admitted at last

This painting is Massacre in Korea, by Pablo Picasso.

From the New York Times in the USA:

Thousands killed in 1950 by US’s Korean ally

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: May 19, 2008

DAEJEON, South Korea — Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation’s U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.

With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.

The mass executions — intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners — were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were ”the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War,” said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.

Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million.

That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is ”very conservative,” said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press.

In addition, thousands of South Koreans who allegedly collaborated with the communist occupation were slain by southern forces later in 1950, and the invaders staged their own executions of rightists.

Through the postwar decades of South Korean right-wing dictatorships, victims’ fearful families kept silent about that blood-soaked summer. American military reports of the South Korean slaughter were stamped ”secret” and filed away in Washington. Communist accounts were dismissed as lies.

Only since the 1990s, and South Korea’s democratization, has the truth begun to seep out.

In 2002, a typhoon’s fury uncovered one mass grave. Another was found by a television news team that broke into a sealed mine. Further corroboration comes from a trickle of declassified U.S. military documents, including U.S. Army photographs of a mass killing outside this central South Korean city.

Now Kim’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has added government authority to the work of scattered researchers, family members and journalists trying to peel away the long-running cover-up. The commissioners have the help of a handful of remorseful old men.

”Even now, I feel guilty that I pulled the trigger,” said Lee Joon-young, 83, one of the executioners in a secluded valley near Daejeon in early July 1950.

The retired prison guard told the AP he knew that many of those shot and buried en masse were ordinary convicts or illiterate peasants wrongly ensnared in roundups of supposed communist sympathizers. They didn’t deserve to die, he said. They ”knew nothing about communism.”

The 17 investigators of the commission’s subcommittee on ”mass civilian sacrifice,” led by Kim, have been dealing with petitions from more than 7,000 South Koreans, involving some 1,200 alleged incidents — not just mass planned executions, but also 215 cases in which the U.S. military is accused of the indiscriminate killing of South Korean civilians in 1950-51, usually in air attacks.

The commission last year excavated sites at four of an estimated 150 mass graves around the country, recovering remains of more than 400 people. Working deliberately, matching documents to eyewitness and survivor testimony, it has officially confirmed two large-scale executions — at a warehouse in the central South Korean county of Cheongwon, and at Ulsan on the southeast coast.

Good work by this Korean commission. However, happening only now, when most surviving witnesses of the massacres have already died.

It reminds me of some long overdue news from the USA. Like: Communist party membership no longer a fireable offence in California. And, US government finally takes Nelson Mandela off ‘terrorist list’.

South Korea today: here. And here. And here.

RIOT police fired water cannon and tear gas on a mass march against President Park Geun Hye’s conservative government through Seoul yesterday, arresting scores of people. Trade unions, farmers’ associations and other groups had rallied 70,000 people to demand Ms Park’s resignation and an end to redundancies: here.

Related articles

• Pyongyang OKs women’s peace walk
• Koreas agree to reunite 100 families separated by war
• Koreas retreat away from path to war
• Can the United States Own Up To Its War Crimes During the Korean War?
• Women March for Peace, Reconciliation in Historic Korean Border Crossing