World’s largest flower flowering

This is a Titan arum video.

The world’s largest, smelliest flower is the Titan arum, Amorphophallus titanum. They flower but rarely, and briefly. Only Sumatra island in Indonesia is their natural habitat.

In the botanical garden in Leiden, the Netherlands, two days ago, one specimen started flowering.

It was 1.8 meter in height today.

Next to the specimen whose flowers are now withering is another one, which is still growing, not flowering yet. Today, it was 1.25 meter.

Amorphophallus titanum has both male and female flowers. These cannot pollinate each other within the same plant. In Sumatra, the strong smell of the flowers attracts insects, carrion beetles, which take the pollen from one Titan arum to another one. In the Netherlands, these beetles do not occur. So, a botanical garden employee was “playing at being a carrion beetle”, to make it possible for the early Titan arum to eventually pollinate the later, still smaller, one; which will probably flower next Thursday. In Sumatra, the Titan arum berries are eaten by hornbill birds, which, like the carrion beetles, help this big flower species survive.

Amorphophallus is a genus with about 200 species, from Africa to Indonesia. Many species are not really big, about 20 centimeter. Only on Indonesian islands like Borneo and Sumatra, giant species occur.

Outside the Amorphophallus’ hothouse, a common tern flying over the botanical garden.

This is a video about the botanical garden.

A. titanum in Japan: here.

Titan arums are true giants amongst flowering plants: the circumference of their huge flowers can be over three metres and they stand three metres high and the single leaf grows to the size of a small tree. Their smell, likened to rotting meat, is so bad it led to the common name ‘corpse flower’. Both the ‘fragance’ and the flower’s meat-colouration attract pollinators – carrion flies and beetles. The common name was given by Sir David Attenborough during the filming of the Private Life of Plants series.

This corpse flower, Amorphophallus titanum, shares that evocative moniker with the Rafflesia genus of plants, which also have giant blooms, and also smell like corpses, but are not closely related: here.

Rightist coup d’état in Honduras

This video from Honduras is called People protest against Honduras coup.

In Honduras, anti-democratic armed forces officers in a coup d’état have arrested the democratically elected president of the country, Zelaya. See also here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here.

The Pinochet-style Right in Honduras thinks Zelaya is too leftist.

The Honduran political, judicial and military elite can assert the legality of its action in overthrowing and deporting President Manuel Zelaya, but the world knows the truth: here.

Afghan civilian massacre video

From the Stop the War Coalition in Britain:

Watch this video: 140 reasons to leave Afghanistan now

Sunday, 28 June 2009

On 4 May, the US launched an airstrike on a village in the Farah province of Afghanistan. Local accounts from villagers, International Red Cross reports and an official Afghan government inquiry all agreed that 140 civilians, including 93 children, were killed. Only 22 of the victims were adult males.

The US military has “apologised” for the attack but has lied incessantly about what happened and who the victims were, still claiming that “only” 26 civilians were killed and the rest were Taliban “insurgents”.

Watch this video for confirmation that this was the worst atrocity since the invasion of Afghanistan began in 2001 and for 140 reasons why all foreign troops must get out of the country now to prevent endless mass slaughter of innocents in an unwinnable war.

Sign the Troops Out of Afghanistan petition: here

The US has finally ackowledged that its opium eradication campaign in Afghanistan is failing, announcing that it would no longer support efforts to wipe out production: here.

Australian song against Mary River dam

By John Tomlinson in Australia:

Traveston

29 June 2009

The Queensland Government is threatening to build a dam on the Mary River at Traveston Crossing.

This dam will endanger the Queensland Lung Fish, flood the nesting sites of the endangered Mary River Turtle and endanger the Eastern Cod. All these species are legally protected in the catchment of the Mary River.

The song below should be sung to the tune of Glen Campbell’s Galveston.

Traveston, oh Traveston, I still hear your river flowin
I still see your lung fish blowin
I was 16 when I left Traveston
Traveston, oh Traveston, I still hear your cod fish thrashing
While I watch your turtles flashing
I wipe a tear and dream of Traveston

I still see the dam wall’s slaughter
Backed up; stagnant pools of water
Slime strangling nature’s daughter
On the bank where we used to run.

Traveston, oh Traveston, I am so afraid you’re dying
Before I dry the tears you’re crying
Before I watch your black ducks flying in the sun
At Traveston, at Traveston

Indian dam causing decrease of dolphins: here.

Argentine torturers on trial

This video from Democracy Now! in the USA includes Bone Fragments Discovered at Argentine Torture Site.

From AFP news agency:

Argentine soldiers face Falklands torture charges

Some 70 Argentine soldiers are to be charged in 80 cases of torture committed by the South American country’s army on its own ranks during the Falklands War against Britain, a prosecutor has said.

A federal appeals court in the southern city of Comodoro Rivadavia upheld a decision by a trial court that the alleged torture are considered crimes against humanity and can therefore not be denied, the source said.

“We have been fighting for 27 years for this to become known, we are really satisfied,” said Eduardo Alonso, president of the Centre for Falkland Islands Veterans at La Plata, 60 kilometres south of the capital Buenos Aires.

“Next week, more soldiers will report about abuses they have suffered.”

He cited several types of torture, including simulated executions and death by starvation.

Prosecutors are investigating the deaths of soldiers Rito Portillo, in an alleged execution, and Remigio Fernandez, who was abandoned on the islands as punishment.

Argentina and Britain fought a bloody war over the islands, known in Spanish as Las Malvinas, between April 2 and June 14, 1982 that left 649 Argentines and 255 Britons dead.

The archipelago in the southern Atlantic has been under British control since 1833.

The conflict erupted when Argentine forces invaded the islands, prompting Britain’s prime minister Margaret Thatcher to deploy naval forces to retake the territory.

No agreement is yet in sight for the Falkands, to which Argentina continues to lay territorial claims.

Plaintiffs before the courts were enlisted as conscripts when military service was compulsory at the time of the war, under the dictatorship of General Leopoldo Galtieri.

Some 30,000 people disappeared during Galtieri’s rule (1976-1983), according to rights groups.

Good that the Argentine dictatorship’s torturers have to stand trial for their crimes at last.

It would be even better if the ally of the Galtieri dictatorship up to the Malvinas war, and the ally of the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship, Margaret Thatcher, would have to stand trial for her crimes in Britain (or in The Hague) as well.