Daily life in Egypt’s pyramid days


This video is called Daily Life in Ancient Egypt.

From ANI news agency:

Secrets of daily life among the great pyramids of Giza uncovered

Washington, June 29: In a study lasting two decades, archaeologists have uncovered a number of secrets of daily life among the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

According to a report in The Columbus Dispatch, archaeologists Ana Tavares and Mark Lehner have been digging for two decades in Egypt, digging up a lost city where Giza pyramid builders lived.

The findings indicate that the Egyptians who built the giant pyramids on the Giza Plateau 4,500 years ago ate dense bread, choice cuts of meat and preserved fish.

They slept in military-style barracks and belonged to work gangs with names such as the “Drunkards of Menkaure.”

Archaeologist Mark Lehner knows these details because he spent the past two decades digging them up from their lost city.

Nearby are the pyramids and the Great Sphinx, icons most people associate with Egyptian archaeology.

Lehner spent three years surveying the Great Sphinx, mapping it by hand, block by block. He then turned his attention to the Giza Plateau, where the Sphinx and the three key Fourth Dynasty pyramids stand.

“The really neat thing about our project is that we could go out there in 1988 and over the next 20 years we tested that hypothesis, which is the best of science. And guess what? Sure enough, there it was,” he said.

“Since then, three areas of the city have emerged,” said Tavares, assistant field director for Ancient Egypt Research Associates, a donor-funded archaeology group Lehner founded to explore the lost city site.

“You have a barracks, which is tightly controlled with streets and an enclosure wall,” she said. “And there in the shape of the houses and the artifacts we find, it tells one story and that’s basically of workers, young men, presumably no women or children at this point: a rotating labor force,” she added.

According to Tavares, near the barracks, a village grew with smaller houses, twisting streets and a less regimented lifestyle, perhaps with more women and children.

“The people who lived there appeared to be providing for themselves on a family scale,” she said.

And then there is the nearby town where officials lived.

“There, you have a lot of evidence of administration, of sealings of documents that came in,” said Tavares. “There are very large houses with beautiful painted plaster on the walls and the finds there are quite different: stone vessels, more delicate finds,” she added.

“The next steps for studying the lost city will take place mostly in the lab,” she said.

New tombs found in Giza support the view that the Great Pyramids were built by free workers and not slaves, as widely believed, Egypt’s chief archaeologist said on Sunday: here.

Black Pyramid of Amenemhat III at Dashur: here.

A new pyramid joins the list of other mysterious step pyramids built before the Great Pyramid at Giza: here.

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Endangered African antelope protected from US hunters


From Scientific American blog in the USA:

Jun 29, 2009

Endangered African antelope win protection from American hunters

Until last week, U.S. trophy hunters had the legal right to hunt three species of endangered African game at American ranches, thanks to a “blanket exemption” to the Endangered Species Act issued during the Bush Administration.

That loophole has now been closed, following a federal judge’s ruling in a lawsuit brought by the organization Friends of Animals, based on Darien, Conn.

The ruling protects U.S.-bred scimitar-horned oryx (Oryx dammah), addax (Addax nasomaculatus), and dama gazelles (Nanger dama), all of which are critically endangered in their African homelands, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

The three species were listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 2005, which should have granted them a greater level of protection, but the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) issued a rule creating an exception for captive-bred antelope, claiming “captive breeding in the United States has contributed significantly to the conservation of these species.”

Friends of Animals first sued to protect the three species in 2005. “Why would the government allow the hunting of these antelope any more than they’d allow the hunting of a chimpanzee?” said Friends of Animals president Priscilla Feral in a statement.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr. attacked this exception, writing, “Blanket exemptions under regulations are anathema to [the intentions of the Endangered Species Act] because they allow the FWS to permit a great number of exemptions at once without providing the detailed information to the public that would be required in an individualized analysis.”

Until now, American sport hunters could pay $3,500 to hunt and kill a scimitar-horned oryx — and even more for an addax or dama gazelle — and keep the carcasses as trophies. International travel to accomplish the same task has long been banned by the Endangered Species Act and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES).

Hirola, one of world’s rarest antelopes: here.

Horned, hooved and hopping through the grass, this scimitar-horned oryx calf is one of the newest additions to the National Zoo’s Virginia facility. He is one of three calves born there this summer, critically increasing the numbers in captivity for a species that is already extinct in the wild: photo here.

Europe’s first camel fossils discovered


This video from the USA is called Fossil Discovery Center, Madera, California, USA.

The Mammoth Site – Hot Springs, S. Dakota: see here.

From DPA news agency:

Mon, 29 Jun 2009

Logrono, Spain – Spanish scientists have discovered Europe’s first fossilized camel footprints, Professor Felix Perez Lorente from La Rioja University said Monday. The footprints found at a site near Murcia were 6 million years old.

They revealed the existence of a hitherto unknown camel-like species, which the scientists named Paracamelichnum jumillensis.

The 191 footprints were made by about a dozen adult animals which walked as a group together.

The long distances between the footprints indicated that Paracamelichnum jumillensis was bigger than all the camel species known so far.

The research was published by the Ichnos Journal for Plant and Animal Traces before being presented in Spain.

An analysis by scientists in China and Inner Mongolia shows that wild Bactrian camels are distantly related to their domestic two-humped counterparts: here.

Dictator Franco stripped of honours in Madrid


This video says about itself:

One man sets out to exhume the ghosts of Spain’s totalitarianism past.

The Part 2 video is here.

From Reuters:

Madrid strips Franco of honorary titles

Mon Jun 29, 2009 3:50pm EDT

MADRID – Madrid’s city hall Monday stripped former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco of his title as honorary mayor and adopted son of the capital, 33 years after his death began the transition to democracy.

Councilors of all political colors unanimously voted to remove the titles, as well as medals Madrid conferred on the right-wing general, a spokesman for the council said.

“The capital of Spain is now clean of support for dictators,” left-wing Councilor Milagros Hernandez, was quoted as saying on the website of TV news channel CNN+.

The move is the latest in an effort spearheaded by the Socialist government to remove traces of Franco in street names, statues and other symbols glorifying the dictator who gained power after a three-year civil war which ended in 1939 and ruled until his death in 1975.

The removals started under a law passed in 2007 by the government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose grandfather was killed by Franco‘s forces.

The push reverses an unspoken understanding after Franco‘s death that his supporters would relinquish power on condition that future democrats would not rake up the past.

Members of the conservative Popular Party have criticized the socialist law for, as they see it, needlessly dragging up the wounds of the past. However, the PP — which rules the local authority in Madrid — backed the proposal to strip Franco of the city’s honors.

(Reporting by Sarah Morris; editing by Ralph Boulton)

Franco’s face and name erased from public view in Spain: here.

La Despedida: A Lost Memoir of the Spanish Civil War: here.

Monument for Polish Spanish civil war fighter destroyed: here.

Britain: A Tory council is planning to dump part of a display commemorating the Spanish civil war, allegedly to help bury past associations with the labour movement: here.

In the penultimate stop on his final international tour as president, Dwight Eisenhower met the fascist dictator of Spain, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, in Madrid: here.

Texas police ‘commemorate’ Stonewall by raiding gay bar


This video from the USA is called Shadows to Sunlight: Gay Activism After Stonewall.

From Think Progress in the USA:

Police raid a gay bar in Texas on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

Shortly after midnight on Sunday, police raided a gay bar in Fort Worth, TX, and arrested seven customers for public intoxication.

The official pretext for the Stonewall raid forty years ago was also alcohol, not “officially” homophobia.

(One man was reportedly taken to the hospital “with bleeding in his brain after officers threw him to the ground and used zip-ties to handcuff him.”) Police said they were simply conducting an “alcohol beverage code inspection” when several customers made sexual advances toward the officers. However, the owner of the Rainbow Lounge, J.R. Schrock, said that claim was a “lie.” “The groping of the police officer — really? We’re gay, but we’re not dumb,” Schrock said. …

The Rainbow Lounge incident came on the 40th anniversary of the famous Stonewall uprising that sparked the modern LGBT movement, when police also raided a gay bar in New York City. Today, protesters rallied in downtown Forth Worth over the weekend’s raid.

Updates on gay man‘s brain injury after Ft. Worth police raided gay bar on Stonewall Anniversary: here.

Houston Voters Reject Measure Barring LGBT Discrimination. Opponents of HERO effectively scared voters into thinking it would allow men in women’s bathrooms: here.

Gay rights in Cuba: here.

British nazi terrorism


From British daily The Morning Star:

Supremacist terror attack thwarted by chance

Monday 29 June 2009

A white supremacist arrested by chance at a Suffolk railway station last year turned out to be “on the cusp” of launching a campaign of terrorism, the Old Bailey has heard.

Jurors were told that Neil Lewington had developed a bomb factory in his bedroom at his parents’ home and aimed to target those he considered non-British.

According to the prosecution, he had an “unhealthy interest” in the London nail bomber David Copeland, the United States Unabomber and Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Lewington was arrested at Lowestoft station in Suffolk last year after abusing a female train conductor. He was found to be carrying the component parts of two viable improvised incendiary devices.

Later searches of his home revealed a notebook entitled Waffen SS UK Members’ Handbook, containing drawings of electronics and chemical mixtures.

See also here. And here.

The BNP: here. And here.

British far right launch campaign of violence and intimidation against opponents: here.

USA: I hear the expressions of rage directed towards Washington from the Tea Partiers and I wonder if there are more Oklahoma Cities in our future: here.

Protests against Honduran coup


From British daily The Morning Star:

World says No to Honduran coup

Monday 29 June 2009
by Roger Bagley in Parliament

A worldwide outcry has demanded restoration of democratically elected Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and an end to the military coup.

Mr Zelaya, who was kidnapped by troops and forcibly expelled to Costa Rica on Sunday, condemned the plot by “a very voracious elite” which wanted to keep the country “in an extreme level of poverty.”

As jittery troops and tanks patrolled the streets of the capital Tegucigalpa, President Zelaya urged Hondurans to resist the coup-plotters.

Late last night, he flew to Nicaraguan capital Managua for a key meeting of leaders of ALBA, the progressive regional bloc started by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez which Honduras is a member of.

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon called for “the reinstatement of the democratically elected representatives of the country.”

And Bolivian President Evo Morales proclaimed: “We no longer live under dictatorships.”

Condemning “an adventure of a group of the military who have assaulted democracy,” Mr Morales predicted: “They will fail.”

Progressives around the world suspected the involvement of the CIA and the US government. However, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the action taken against the Honduran president “should be condemned by all.” …

[British] Labour MP Colin Burgon, chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on Venezuela, said: “There can be no return to the military coups and foreign interventions that devastated millions of lives in Latin America over past decades.”

Mr Burgon urged governments across the world to ensure that President Zelaya is returned to office, “as is the wish of the Honduran people.”

Former mayor of London Ken Livingstone declared: “The world should unite to stop this attempt to return Latin America to the bloody past of military coups to block the will of the people.”

Mr Livingstone called upon the British government to “unreservedly condemn” the military coup.

He also urged President Obama, “who has promised a new era of relations between the US and south America,” to do everything in his power to support the restoration of democracy in Honduras.

Communist Party of Britain general secretary Robert Griffiths condemned the coup and called for an end to military violence against civilian protesters.

“The coup shows that Honduras’s privileged elite is willing to use any means to protect their wealth and power,” Mr Griffiths said, urging the British labour movement, particularly Labour MPs and trade unions, to express the “fullest solidarity” with those defending democratic rights in Honduras and to protest at the Honduran embassy in London.

President Chavez [of Venezuela] said the coup was a “grave challenge” to democracy. …

Solidarity campaigners from Hands Off Venezuela and other groups will rally outside the Honduran embassy at 115 Gloucester Place, London W1 (nearest Tube: Baker Street) this evening from 5pm to protest against the coup.

Anti Honduran coup rally in San Francisco, USA: here.

Sinn Fein in Ireland on the coup: here.

From Al Jazeera:

Mariana Sanchez, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Tegucigalpa, said the situation around the presidential compound was “very tense”.

“We know that there was a ceremony expected for Roberto Micheletti, [the replacement for Zelaya as president] but apparently they could not come to the palace because the protesters have blocked the way,” she said.

See also here. And here. And here.

International Trade Union Movement Condemns Coup in Honduras: here.

While publicly opposing the military coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya on Sunday, the Obama administration on Monday indicated that it will not cut off aid to the Central American country or demand Zelaya’s reinstatement: here.

Futurism and politics


By Christine Lindey in Britain:

Futurism

Tate Modern until 20 September (£12.20, seniors £11.20, concessions £10.20)

Monday 29 June 2009

Discovering some beautiful imagery with some ugly ideas in the Tate Modern‘s Futurism exhibit

It has been 100 years since Futurism first burst upon an unsuspecting world. Invented and named by the Italian poet Marinetti it celebrated the machine age.

Recent technological marvels including telephones, phonographs, motor cars, x-rays, as well as electric trams, metros and street lighting, had transformed communications and urban life.

The new artform rejected the past, embracing these new complexities and the dynamism which they brought.

Declaring speed to be the new beauty, Marinetti asserted that a roaring racing car “is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,” a classical Greek sculpture in the Louvre museum.

Marinetti believed that only with aggressive action and daring could inertia be conquered to forge the new art. “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn women”, he wrote in the first of many manifestos.

A well-heeled bourgeois, he financed and promoted his own movement. Adopting the methods of advertising and of mass culture, he manipulated public opinion and the press by courting scandal and controversy at a time when mass media awareness was still in its infancy.

Thus he arranged for his first manifesto to be published on the front page of Le Figaro, the French national newspaper.

He provoked hostile reactions, and so publicity, for his Futurist performances of sound poetry and noise music by holding them alongside conventional acts in music halls (including London’s Coliseum).

This use of the shock tactics of capitalist mass culture would become Futurism’s strongest, questionable legacy to the avant-garde.

By 1910 the painters Balla, Carrà, Boccioni, Severini and Russolo had joined and within two years Marinetti exhibited their works in Paris, London and elsewhere.

The paintings contained few formal innovations. Rather they exaggerated, adapted and amalgamated existing approaches to new and traditional subject-matter.

In Balla’s Girl Running Along a Balcony, (1912) the sequential repetition of the child’s legs to suggest the click-clacking of her boots was derived from chrono-photography, while the dashes of blues and oranges which add to the staccato effect came from 1880s divisionism.

The city as a symbol of modernity was pioneered in the 1860s but the Futurists added a sense of urgency by depicting it in a fragmented visual language adapted from recently invented Cubism. Their distortion of form and colour to convey states of mind stemmed from 1890s Symbolism.

The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli

When synthesised, these diverse sources succeeded in creating a new and modern dynamism. Carrá’s The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910-11) conveys the viciousness, anger and chaos of a political demonstration being attacked by mounted troops and police.

Challenging conventional perspective, the repeated and interacting curves and straight lines, the sudden reds and yellows bursting out of dark browns and purples, suck us in so that we feel the danger and struggle.

But many works merely superimposed several visual styles to create superficial, programmatic works.

Russulo’s The Revolt, (1911) with its strident primary red, blue and yellow, its fierce arrow-like diagonals pushing schematic figures across repetitive city buildings, evokes the energy and anger of a political protest.

Yet its lack of emotional or intellectual depth is as univalent and sensationalist as an advertisement.

A reactionary stance lay at the heart of Futurism’s progressive calls for innovation, the fascination with revolution stemmed mostly from romantic yearnings for action rather than from principled commitment to progressive change.

From the mid-1880s the political situation in Italy was highly charged. Rapid industrialisation had created a politically active proletariat whose frequent strikes and demonstrations were fiercely counter-acted by the police and army.

Marinetti was aligned with a group of bellicose nationalist anti-parliamentarians who called for an authoritarian corporate governance to restore traditional values and national unity via “cleansing wars” of colonial expansion.

In 1909 Marinetti produced his first Futurist political manifesto, in 1913 he published his political programme and in 1918 he founded the Futurist Political Party. In 1919 Mussolini based his fascist party on Marinetti’s programme.

None of this is mentioned at the Tate. By averting its eyes from this sinister political context the exhibition sanitises Futurism.

The focus is on Italian Futurism, but there is also an interesting over-view of its aesthetic and ideological dialogues abroad.

While sharing some of their preoccupations, French Cubists and Orphicists, British Vorticists and Russian Futurists were largely opposed to the Italians’ ideological stance.

Léger and Sonia and Robert Delaunay‘s interest in the simultaneity of modern experience was rooted in a more rigorous understanding of the subtleties of Cubism, as were the Russian Futurists.

Despite its name, the latter developed independently of the Italians and was rooted in a progressive humanism which opposed Marinetti’s proto-fascism.

Popova, Goncharova and Larionov also welcomed modernity but with a generosity of spirit and sense of fun rooted in respect for human beings. It is a pleasure to see their works.

Simon Basketter explores creative resistance from a century ago at the Art in Revolution: 1911 exhibition in Liverpool: here.

Commemorative plaque for Tony Blair’s victims


This video from the USA is called Blair Tied to Iraq-Linked Oil Firm.

From the Stop the War Coalition in Britain:

Monday, 29 June 2009

Commemorative plaque for Tony Blair: unveiling ceremony 3 July

A Plaque for Tony Blair
Friday 3 July 6.30pm
Connaught Square
London W2

A plaque will be unveiled outside Tony Blair‘s house in Connaught Square, London, on Friday 3 July at 6.30pm to commemorate the over one million victims of the “war on terror”, in which he colluded with George Bush, and the victims of his secret torture policies.

Join the unveiling ceremony on Friday. Everyone is welcome. Publicise the event as widely as you can.

Organised by Don’t Panic magazine, Supported by Stop the War Coalition.

Tony Blair’s penal policy condemned – by Cherie: here.

Madoff Sentenced to 150 Years in Prison


After Ponzi himself … after Enron … after earlier Madoff reports … after Stanford … this today from the USA:

NYT NEWS ALERT: Bernard L. Madoff Sentenced to 150 Years in Prison; half a minute ago from web.

See also here. And here.

Ponzi Scheme Financed 9/11 Monument: here.