Helping animals in trouble

Posted on July 25, 2014 by petrel41

This video is about wildlife wardens in South Holland province in the Netherlands helping animals in trouble; like a young pine marten and hedgehogs.

Ring-necked parakeets conquer Haarlem city

Posted on July 25, 2014 by petrel41

This video is about ring-necked parakeets in Greece.

Dutch SOVON ornithologists estimate there are now about 10,000 ring-necked parakeets in the Netherlands. Mainly in the big cities The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam.

However, they are spreading to other cities like Haarlem.

The birds showed up for the first time in Haarlem in 2005. Last winter, 500 parakeets were counted at Haarlem sleeping roosts. In June 2014, 937 individuals were counted.

Apartheid against poor London people

Posted on July 25, 2014 by petrel41

This video is called UK’s Poorest Families hit Hardest by Recession and Austerity.

After the racist segregation in apartheid South Africa … after segregation between rich and poor people in New York City flats … London, England.

British author H.G. Wells described in his science fiction novel The Time Machine time travel from 1890s London to where London used to be in the year 802,701. By then, humans had evolved into two different species. The Victorian leisure class evolved into the Eloi, stupid, living above ground, afraid of the dark. The working class evolved into the Morlocks, nocturnal, living underground, afraid of daylight, and eating Eloi.

We are not yet in the year 802,701. It is Friday 25 July 2014.

From daily The Guardian in Britain today:

Poor doors: the segregation of London’s inner-city flat dwellers

Poorer residents in capital’s developments forced to use different entrances and facilities

Hilary Osborne

Friday 25 July 2014 19.46 BST

Multimillion pound housing developments in London are segregating less well-off tenants from wealthy homebuyers by forcing them to use separate entrances.

A Guardian investigation has discovered a growing trend in the capital’s upmarket apartment blocks – which are required to include affordable homes in order to win planning permission – for the poorer residents to be forced to use alternative access, a phenomenon being dubbed “poor doors”. Even bicycle storage spaces, rubbish disposal facilities and postal deliveries are being separated.

The Green party accused developers of showing “contempt for ordinary people” by enforcing such two-tier policies.

This week New York’s mayor, Bill De Blasio, said he planned to take action to prevent new developments being built with separate entrances and facilities for low-income residents. His pledge followed a furore over a luxury block on the city’s swanky Upper West Side which will have what US newspapers have dubbed a “poor door” for the social housing units on the site. But while the approval for segregated entrances in just one building in New York generated headlines, they are fast becoming standard practice in London.

“When Ken Livingstone left office he was keen that all developments should have their social housing ‘pepperpotted’ – mixed in with all the other more upmarket accommodation,” said Ed Mead, a director at estate agent Douglas & Gordon which sells upmarket properties in central London. “This didn’t go down well with developers with the result that most developments now have a separate entrance and a different look.”

Tracey Kellett, a buying agent who trawls the capital looking for homes for wealthy clients, said a number of developments have separate entrances “so the two social strata don’t have to meet”. In one: “The affordable [housing] has vile coloured plastic panels on the outside rather than blingy glass.”

At one building bordering the City financial district, the Guardian discovered wealthy owners accessed their homes via a hotel-style lobby area, while social housing tenants enter through a side door in an adjacent alley alongside trade entrances.

In marketing information for another development currently under construction, would-be residents have been promised that the affordable homes will have a separate entrance, no access to car or cycle parking and that post and bins will also be divided.

As the London housing market has boomed the expectations of some of the capital’s wealthiest homebuyers have grown and many properties now have communal areas akin to those in some of the world’s best hotels.

Service charges to maintain these are high, and a separate entrance means housing associations and their tenants do not face these extra costs. However, as in New York, there are concerns that it is leading to increasingly divided communities.

Green party London assembly member Darren Johnson said: “This trend shows contempt for ordinary people, and is about developers selling luxury flats to rich investors who don’t want to mix with local people.”

He added: “The mayor and councils have been turning a blind eye to this for too long, they should simply refuse applications that have separate facilities or that refuse any affordable housing on this basis.”

A spokesman for de Blasio’s office in New York said this week : “We fundamentally disagree with (separate doors), and we are in the process of changing it to reflect our values and priorities. We want to make sure future affordable housing projects treat all families equitably.”

Developers said separate doors let housing associations keep costs down as they avoided premium service charges paid by private residents.

Peter Allen, sales and marketing director for Londonewcastle which is behind the Queens Park Place development in north London said housing associations were sometimes unable to pay for all of the facilities covered by service charges. “The simplest way from a design perspective is to have things separate.”

Side-entrance shame

The brochure for the upmarket apartments of One Commercial Street, on the edge of the City, boasts of a “bespoke entrance lobby … With the ambience of a stylish hotel reception area, it creates a stylish yet secure transition space between your home and the City streets”.

In common with many of London’s new concrete and glass residential blocks there’s a concierge, on hand 24/7 to service the every need of residents paying a minimum of £500,000 – which only buys a studio flat – to live in this booming part of the city.

But the lobby is out of bounds to some of those who live in the building. What the brochure doesn’t mention is a second door, with a considerably less glamorous lobby, tucked away in an alley to the side of the building, alongside the trade entrance for Pret a Manger. This is the entrance for One Commercial Street’s affordable housing tenants.

In a bid to ease the housing crisis, developers are obliged to provide a set proportion of affordable homes when they draw up a new project, but they are often able to negotiate this figure down with local planners. Some provide the cheaper homes in separate blocks, but in a single structure development the affordable homes are often on separate floors – with separate entrances, lifts, car parks and even rubbish bins, so that upmarket apartment buyers have no contact with those occupying the social housing in their buildings.

In some cases, developers have even used the fact they need to provide separate doors and lifts to argue against putting affordable homes on the same site as their premium apartments. Planning documents for the 56 Curzon Street development in Soho show that the developers told the local council “that on-site provision of affordable housing would result in significant design inefficiencies due to the need for separate entrances and building cores”.

Some are coy about the subject. Native Land, which is currently building Cheyne Terrace just off Kings Road in Chelsea, complete with a swimming pool and gym, refused to comment when asked if its 13 affordable housing units would be accessed via a separate door. However, the website of John Robertson Architects, which has designed the building, makes it clear this is the case.

In north-west London the developers behind Queen’s Park Place are more upfront about how its 28 affordable and 116 market-rate homes will co-exist – its marketing website says the external appearance will be uniform across all properties – or “tenure blind”. But inside the building the two types of resident will be treated very differently: “Affordable tenants will not have use of the main private residential entrance, private courtyard gardens or basement car and cycle parking. Services including postal delivery and refuse storage are also divided.”

This does not just happen where there are large numbers of affordable homes on a site. In Chiswick, The Corner Haus development which is to be completed this summer, has just two affordable units, but these are also expected to have a separate entrance.

Of course, the separate doors to these developments mean that the housing associations who run the affordable properties and their tenants do not face the service charges attached with the luxurious surroundings that wealthy buyers have now come to expect and accept. However, the stark difference between the entrances, and, in some cases their positioning, rankles with some of those who live there.

Through the main door of One Commercial Street the lights shine brightly in the hotel-style lobby. There is luxury marble tiling and plush sofas, and a sign on the door alerts residents to the fact that the concierge is available. Round the back, the entrance to the affordable homes is a cream corridor, decorated only with grey mail boxes and a poster warning tenants that they are on CCTV and will be prosecuted if they cause any damage.

Brooke Terrelonga lives here with her nine-month-old son – they moved into a social rented flat four months ago and she was surprised to find that she wasn’t allowed to use the front entrance. Her mother, who doesn’t want to be named, said she felt unhappy about her daughter returning home at night to the poorly-lit alleyway. She motioned towards two lights on the wall, either side of the door, which were the only lightling in sight. She said: “It’s like the cream is at the front and they’ve sent the rubbish to the back.”

Another tenant, Judy Brown, had also expected to be able to get to her flat through the main entrance. “I call it the posh door. I feel a little bit insulted. It’s segregation.” Brown said that the lifts kept breaking down and she often had to take the stairs to her ninth-floor flat. “When both the lifts weren’t working they did say that if you were pregnant, had a health problem or a baby in a buggy you could use the main entrance,” she said. Otherwise, the tenants said, they were “locked out” of the main lobby.

We may recoil from the idea of housing developments with separate entrances for the rich and the rest, but they are just a symptom of a much bigger problem in London: here.

CAMPAIGNERS burnt an effigy of the London Mayor for Bonfire Night in protest against social segregation in the capital. The torching of Boris Johnson was part of the Poor Doors campaign, which has been targeting a newly built housing complex in east London: here.

Coots in France studied

Posted on July 25, 2014 by petrel41

This video is about Eurasian coots in Sweden.

From Ringing & Migration, Volume 29, Issue 1, 2014:

Common but poorly known: information derived from 32 years of ringing Coot Fulica atra in the Camargue, southern France

Abstract

Rallidae are common and widespread, yet relatively poorly studied. We analysed the ringing data from more than 8,000 Common Coot Fulica atra, accumulated between 1950 and 1982 in Camargue, southern France, in terms of the dynamics of their biometrics throughout the year, migratory pathways and annual survival rate. Mean monthly body mass and wing length indicate seasonal differences, with birds captured in autumn and winter being heavier and larger than those captured in spring and summer.

The temporal and spatial distribution across Europe of more than 950 ring recoveries indicates a mixing of sedentary and migratory birds. Capture–recapture analysis indicated lower annual survival rates during the year after ringing, and greater survival rates in adults and in males. Mean survival rate across sex and age classes greater than one year after ringing was 55%. This is somewhat lower than found by other studies, and may be influenced by Coot hunting in the Camargue, especially during the years of this study.

Peace demonstration in Israel tomorrow

Posted on July 25, 2014 by petrel41

This video from Britain says about itself:

Gaza Crisis: Jews & Arabs Refuse To Be Enemies

23 July 2014

Jews & Arabs around the world have been sharing loving images of coexistence using hashtag #JewsAndArabsRefuseToBeEnemies in an effort to change the discourse online. BBC Trending meets the people behind the campaign.

From the Gush Shalom peace movement in Israel today:

Stop the War Demo Sat. 8pm Tel Aviv Rabin Square

We Are Not Afraid Of A Political Solution

Gush Shalom is among the initiators

Statement of the organizing coalition + transportation details:

On Saturday, the peace camp takes a stand at Rabin Square. The war is taking a heavy toll in lives and injuries on both sides, in destruction and horror, in bombings and rockets. We answer this by taking a stand and making a demand: end the war now!

We must end the war and start talking with the recognized Palestinian leadership of the West Bank and Gaza to end the occupation and the siege and to achieve independence and justice for both peoples – in Israel and Palestine.

Instead of being drawn, again and again, into more wars and more military actions, it is now time to lead the way to dialogue and political settlement. There is a political solution. What price must we pay – the people of the South and the other residents of Israel, and the people of Gaza and the West Bank – until we reach that solution?

Together, Jews and Arabs, we will overcome occupation and war, hatred, incitement and racism – and offer a path to life and hope.

Transportation:

Haifa-17:45 Al-Midan Theater (Migdal Haneviim), contact: Danny (0525655542)

Jerusalem- 18:15 Gan Hapaamon, 18:30 Binyanei Haouma, contact: Sahar: 0545683419

Registration by text messages to contact persons

Yuli Novak, former Israeli air force officer: When I served, the Israeli military was the most moral in the world. No more.

Blue whales’ lives saved by new technology?

Posted on July 25, 2014 by petrel41

This video is called Why are blue whales so enormous? – Asha de Vos.

From Wildlife Extra:

New technology could save blue whales from being hit by ships

Scientists from the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science are developing a near real-time computer model that predicts where endangered blue whales will gather as they move around the Pacific ocean off California, reports digital news site, TakePart.

Ultimately this technology will mean that ships can be notified of the presence of whales and the chances of a collision will be minimised.

Collisions with cargo ships are the primary threat to endangered blue whales. In 2007, four blues were killed, likely by ship strikes, in or near the Santa Barbara Channel.

In 2010, five whales, including two blues, were killed in the San Francisco area and elsewhere along the north-central California coast.

Scientists and the shipping industry have been looking for ways to reduce the number of collisions, but they have had little solid data on the whales’ whereabouts until now.

The project merges the past movements of satellite-tagged blue whales with current environmental conditions off the California coast that influence where the whales travel.

In 1993, Ladd Irvine, a marine mammal ecologist at Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, and his colleagues began fixing satellite tags to blue whales off the California coast.

By 2008, they had tagged 171 blue whales, which they watched swim to the Gulf of Alaska and the southern tip of Baja, Mexico. In the summer and early autumn, the whales returned to the California coast, feeding on krill before migrating south for the winter.

Near Los Angeles and San Francisco, shipping lanes crisscross these key feeding grounds.

“We got a nice detailed look of where the whales spend their time in US waters from year to year and the timing of when they are present and when they leave,” said Irvine.

“It happened that the two most heavily used areas were crossed by these shipping lanes.”

Most of the tags stayed with the whales for two or three months, but one whale held on to its transmitter for more than 500 days, giving the researchers a unique look at its annual route.

Whale No 3300840 followed its prey over the summer season and returned to several spots within a week of having been there the previous year.

Adding this data to satellite-monitored environmental data – including sea surface temperature, chlorophyll concentration (which reduced food for whales), and upwelling (where nutrient-rich waters move closer to the surface) – could reveal more precisely where and when blue whales will congregate along the shipping routes.

If the model forecasts a whale hot spot, ships could be rerouted or their speeds reduced to avoid collisions.

Helen Bailey, the marine mammal specialist leading the Maryland study, says this information is invaluable.

“We’ll be able to say, given the current conditions, what is a whale hot spot,” she said. “The hot spot might only coincide with the shipping lane a few months of the year. If the shipping lanes could be modified, it would reduce the risk of a whale strike.

“Only three can be killed per year to keep the population sustainable, and anytime we hear a number close to that is reason for concern because it’s probably a large underestimate.”

About 2,500 blue whales live in the North Pacific and another 500 in the North Atlantic. Estimates suggest the global population of blue whales is between 10,000 and 25,000.

Since 1900, the blue whale population has declined or remained flat, even though it is a protected species.

The results of the study are timely as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is currently planning a review of shipping lanes in the Southern California area.

“Having more information from the whale perspective helps NOAA look at the broader story to see if there is a way to reduce the risk of strikes,” said Monica DeAngelis, a marine mammal biologist at NOAA.

Commercial whaling was banned almost 30 years ago, but why hasn’t the world’s whale population recovered yet? Here.

Rupert Murdoch’s empire, new book

Posted on July 25, 2014 by petrel41

This video is called Hack Attack: How the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch – Nick Davies – Published 31st July 2014.

From daily The Guardian in Britain:

The pervasive power of Rupert Murdoch: an extract from Hack Attack by Nick Davies

In this first extract from his new book, the reporter who broke the phone hacking story looks at Rebekah Brooks’s 2009 wedding – and how it was a perfect display of the nature of Rupert Murdoch’s hold on British life

Friday 25 July 2014 14.00 BST

On a bright Saturday afternoon in the middle of June 2009, in the rolling green downland of west Oxfordshire, there is a wedding party. Several hundred men and women are gathered by the side of a great lake, 350 metres long, crowned at the far end with an 18th-century boathouse disguised as a Doric temple. The sun pours down. The guests sparkle like the champagne in their gleaming flute glasses. The bride arrives to the sound of Handel’s “Rejoice!”, written for the arrival of the Queen of Sheba. Among the onlookers, two men lean their heads towards each other.

“So what do you make of all this?” one asks quietly.

“It is a statement,” says the other, in an equally discreet whisper, “of power.”

The man who wants to know what he should make of all this is a senior member of Gordon Brown’s Labour government, one of a small group of ministers scattered through the gathering. Alongside them is a group of other senior politicians from the Conservative opposition, including its leader, David Cameron. The other man in the whispered conversation is a famously aggressive national newspaper editor, a creator of storms, a destroyer of reputations – and just one of a substantial collection of editors, former editors, political editors, political consultants, newspaper executives, TV presenters, political lobbyists, political PR specialists and political correspondents, all now pressed together by the lakeside. This is a gathering of the country’s power elite, and yet the power that is being stated here is not that of the guests.

As the Christian wedding blessing begins, there is an extraordinary interruption. A large car with dark windows arrives at the top of the slope that leads down through the trees to the lake and, instead of halting there with all of the Bentleys and Mercedes (and the chauffeurs slowly baking in the sun), it ploughs on down the hill, its engine horribly loud, its presence horribly wrong, and when several hundred heads turn to understand the commotion, they see the doors of the intruding vehicle open to reveal the familiar form of the prime minister, Gordon Brown, arriving late.

Brown starts to move among the guests, but his body language screams his discomfort. He shakes hands, offers a rictus smile and moves on, obviously ill at ease and out of place. Other guests watch and conclude that he simply does not want to be here. He has just attended the Trooping the Colour ceremony. He is due back in London to meet President Bush. But the fact is that he had to be here, to show respect.

An alien intruder would assume naturally that this respect is being shown to the bride and groom. The groom is Charlie Brooks – easy-going, clubbable, a trainer of racehorses and a liver of the good life, a man who only a few weeks earlier had explained to Tatler, the posh socialites’ magazine, that he liked nothing better than to wake up in the morning in his two-bedroomed, taupe-painted converted barn with his bride-to-be by his side, and for the two of them to fly off to Venice for lunch at Harry’s Bar, followed by some sightseeing and shopping by the canals, and then to fly back to London for dinner in the famously elegant surroundings of Wilton’s oyster bar in Jermyn Street. A perfect day. Charlie is from old English money – nothing flash, nothing vulgar, just solid, comfortable, horse-loving, home counties country folk.

But, for the most part, it is not the amiable Charlie who catches the eye in this gathering. His bride captures far more attention. Rebekah is beautiful, with her red hair falling in crazy corkscrews around her elfin face. She is also charming – really quite famous (among this power elite) for her ability to make anybody feel that she is their special friend, that she is part of their team, always ready with a favour, always willing to confide. She is particularly good with men, her fingers resting gently on their forearm and her gaze resting direct on their eyes. Not quite sexual, not quite romantic, but so intimate that a well married, conservative kind of man, several decades older than her, reflects that sometimes he finds himself sighing and wondering whether “maybe, if things had been a little different, maybe we would have been together”.

This is Rebekah who was so close to Tony Blair when he was prime minister that Downing Street aides recall Blair’s wife, Cherie, finding her in their flat and hissing privately: “Is she still here? When is she going?”; Rebekah who then effortlessly transferred her affection to the next prime minister, Blair’s great political rival, Gordon Brown, who showed his own affection for her by allowing his official country residence, Chequers, to be used one night the previous summer for an all-girls pyjama party and sleepover to mark her 40th birthday; Rebekah who now spends her weekends swapping canapes and gossip with Brown’s newest political rival, David Cameron, who could possibly be prime minister within a year, and who is said to sign off his notes to her with the words “Love, Dave”. Everybody (who is anybody) is Rebekah’s friend.

There are those who say that this is not entirely natural, that they have seen her, for example, on the eve of an important dinner, studying the table plan like a schoolgirl actress with her script, spending several hours revising until she knows all the names and the partners’ names and the children’s names and the personal interests and the important topics; and then she goes out and performs. And everybody feels so special. Some say that, in truth, Rebekah has no friends at all, only contacts; that all these charming conversations she holds with all these guests are really nothing more than transactions; that all of her relationships are simply a means calculated to attain an end for “the World’s Number One Networker”. Her obvious and immediate end would be journalistic. She is the editor of the Sun, the biggest-selling daily newspaper in the country, and, of course, she wants contacts, to give her the stories she needs to succeed. So, in these transactions that pass as conversations, clearly she has more than her charm to offer. She also has power – the power to make and break a reputation; quite an incentive for those who are offered her friendship.

And she will break as well as make: she is famous not only for her charm but also for her tornado-like temper. Some at the Sun remember the morning she woke up to discover that the rival Daily Mirror had beaten them to a particular story, and how she expressed her feelings by walking into the office and targeting the news desk with a well aimed missile, hastily identified as a heavy glass ashtray. One of the guests at this wedding, who has been close to her for years, says that here in Oxfordshire Rebekah is a country wife, riding horses and organising shooting parties, but in London, where the real transactions take place, she is “the beating heart of the Devil”.

The word that follows Rebekah around is “ambitious”. Most of the journalists who have worked for her love her. In the language of Fleet Street, she has earned the highest accolade – she is “an operator”. When she wants a story, nothing will stand in her way. Years ago at the News of the World, she once dressed up as a cleaning lady to infiltrate the office of the Sunday Times and steal their story. But some of those who know her say that it is not really journalism that moves her – that she knows exactly how it works, how to pull in a story and turn out a headline, but that she has no real love for it, no pulse of excitement at the very idea of it. They say that, for Rebekah, journalism is simply a ladder reaching from her not particularly well-off middle-class origins in a village in Cheshire, up through her first humble jobs in various newsrooms, then rapidly up the next few rungs to the editor’s office at the News of the World, and then to the editor’s office at the Sun – and then higher and higher, as far as the eye of her ambition can see. This summer day in 2009, she is still only 41, still climbing. For her, they say, the power of an editor is simply a mechanism for acquiring still more power. “Where there is power,” says one of those who acts as her friend, “there is Rebekah.”

And yet, any intruder who imagines it is the power of Rebekah Brooks that is being stated here today has entirely missed the point. She is merely an avatar. It may not be immediately obvious, but the man with the real power is the elderly gentleman, aged 78, with the avuncular smile and the clumsily dyed orange hair, chatting quietly in the crowd. He is entirely undistinguished in this gathering, but it is he who has raised Rebekah up the ladder of her ambition, and it is his presence that makes the simple, central statement to the members of this power elite: “You need to be here.” He is one of a small global group who have reached that special position where they are commonly identified simply by a first name. It may be Rebekah’s wedding, but this is Rupert’s day. Since 1979, no British government has been elected without the support of Rupert Murdoch. Between then and this wedding, all those who have been prime minister – Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown – have consistently cleared their diaries and welcomed him to the inner sanctum of their governments (and then disclosed as little as possible of what passed between them). It is certain that other national leaders have done the same, in Beijing and Washington and Canberra, and in numerous capitals across the planet. This is the current state of the democratic deal: each man has one vote; this man has power.

The fact of the power is clear. Even here, at the wedding, it colours every move around him. At one point, for example, Tony Blair’s former media adviser, Alastair Campbell, strolls up to David Cameron and tells him that, although naturally he hopes Cameron will lose the general election that is due next year, he would support the Conservative leader if, on winning office, he tried to do something about the press. Campbell starts to unwind a well rehearsed speech about the mendacity and negativity of so much political coverage, and Cameron focuses and is in the process of saying that he does think that newspaper behaviour has got even worse, when suddenly he catches his breath and freezes, like a schoolboy spotted by the teacher, as Rupert materialises at his shoulder, smiling. When Murdoch smiles, respectable politicians burst with appreciation.

Why? That is less clear.

Outsiders often misunderstand the power of a man like Rupert Murdoch. They look at him and they see the very model of a media megalomaniac. Certainly, by fair means and foul, with cleverness and cunning, he has built a vast media organisation – News Corp – with more than 800 subsidiaries and total assets worth some $60bn. He and his family trust directly own 12% of the shares (although a subtle legal manoeuvre means that they control 39.7% of the votes). On this day in June 2009, News Corp owns one of the world’s big six film studios, Twentieth Century Fox; one of the world’s 20 biggest book publishers, HarperCollins; and what was once the world’s most-visited social networking site, MySpace. But, most important of all, News Corp owns TV channels and newspapers.

Murdoch creates media triangles. Country by country, he has bought a downmarket tabloid (the Sun in the UK, the New York Post in the US, the Herald Sun and the Telegraph in Australia); then he has found himself a quality title (the London Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Australian); and alongside them, he has locked in a TV network (BSkyB, Fox in the US, Foxtel in Australia). Each triangle in its own way is the foundation of great wealth and political power.

News Corp’s reach is enormous. Through News International, it owns the four titles that together capture 37% of Britain’s newspaper readers; plus 39.1% of the BSkyB satellite TV business, beaming movies and sports and the Sky News channel into 10m homes in the UK and Ireland. It supplies 60% of Australia’s daily papers and 70% on Sundays. Its TV holdings have spread across Europe (west and east), across southern Africa and into Latin America. Its Asian TV network, Star, reaches all of India and China, most of the rest of Asia and now, through Star Select, the Middle East, too. News Corp’s TV channels broadcast movies made by its own studios and then reviewed by its own journalists in any of its hundreds of magazines. News Corp broadcasts sports whose rights it owns, played by sportsmen whose teams it owns, in games whose results are published by newspapers it owns.

Seeing how Murdoch has hoarded media outlets like a miser gathers gold, outsiders often imagine that he behaves like a caricature media boss, who jabs a finger in the face of the dependent politician and dictates “how things are gonna be if they wanna stay healthy”. In this version of events, the mogul forces the government to cut a deal. He agrees not to attack the government’s policies (and not to expose the grubby personal secrets of its members); in return, the government agrees to reshape its policies to suit the mogul’s ideology; the mogul then whips his compliant reporters into line, and they produce the political propaganda he requires; the government rewards the mogul with lucrative favours for his business.

And yet government ministers, special advisers and civil servants who have dealt with Murdoch, and executives, editors and journalists who have worked for him, tell a different story. The difference between the two stories is itself a clue to one part of the mogul’s method. Those who know him say that this is a man who loves information: he uses his journalists as a network of listeners; he taps up every contact for the inside story; he collects political gossip; he is given secret briefings by intelligence agencies; and he has made a fortune out of selling news. But with his own life, and particularly with his business life, he is well walled and secretive: the outsiders are there to be misled.

The insiders say that his use of power is far subtler than the outsiders imagine. They say first of all that there is something very deep that drives him very hard – maybe, some suggest, that he grew up believing that he could never be good enough for his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, a towering patriarch who built businesses and broke opponents; and so, all his life, Rupert has been compelled to make his own business bigger and bigger, as though one day his dead father might finally signal that it was enough. With that in mind, they say that his primary interest in politicians is not political; it’s commercial. He may be a highly political animal, they say – obsessed with the details of life in the corridors of power and personally possessed of some extremely right-wing opinions – but what he most wants from politicians is favours for his business. He’ll betray his own principles, he’ll embrace politicians for whom he has very little respect, just as long as they have the power to help the company get bigger.

In practical terms, this comes down to a repeated demand to be freed from regulation. He and his senior journalists all sing from the same song sheet on the virtues of deregulated free markets, in the UK and the US and Australia, wherever Murdoch owns outlets: theirs is the world’s loudest voice calling for the state to be cut back to make way for private enterprise. They do this as though it were simply a point of political philosophy. Clearly, however, it is a matter of overwhelming commercial interest for a businessman who wants to expand, to beat competitors and to dominate the very markets whose freedom he so often proclaims. Democratic governments across the world create regulators to speak up for the public interest – to protect their markets against the power of dominant corporations, to stop them crushing the competition or setting unfair prices or otherwise abusing their position. Repeatedly Murdoch has had to find ways to beat them, and to sideline the public interest in order to advance his own. Legal fences obstruct him – so he looks to friendly politicians to quietly open gates and wave him through.

The outsiders may assume that this involves striking a deal. The insiders again say it is subtler than that – not so much a deal (finite, static, a conscious agreement) as a somewhat cynical relationship (each side pretending friendship but seeking advantage, both offering a little more than they hope finally to give, neither side ever quite sure of the outcome). And that special relationship, they say, is born and brought up and free to flourish in places like this wedding.

Here, beside this lake, Murdoch and his executives and senior journalists enjoy the first privilege of power: that they are given for free the kind of access for which unscrupulous lobbyists will pay fat packets of cash. The prime minister, his likely successor and their respective followers queue up to hear his views, to pick up the signals, to understand what he wants, to send him their own signals, to bond. Some 46 million voters in the UK might like that kind of access to their leaders, but it is this foreign billionaire – who does not even have the right to vote in the UK – who enjoys it and the special relationship with governments that it brings.

So he moves among the wedding guests, casual and relaxed, chatting quietly. He does not display his power in any overt way – no bodyguards, no sitting apart and holding court like some silver-screen godfather. There is no hint of threat or enforcement. Effortlessly, and with some charm, he harvests the respect of those around him. But …

Ultimately, of course, there is something else at work here. It is not respect. It is fear. It is a curious fact that Murdoch holds no fear for ordinary people: most could not care less about him; the few who do care, tend to hold him in contempt as a model of avarice with his seven homes around the globe and his annual income touching $22m. But among those who play the power game, certainly, beneath the courtesy and the conversation, there is a quiet fear.

That, in turn, is a little to do with his character. He can show his charm, he can tell a blue joke to the lads, but the truth is that many of those who shake his hand can see the snarl behind his smile. An Australian associate recalls what happened one day when he suggested to Murdoch that he might like to rebuild bridges with a businessman with whom he had argued and who had since seen his business empire collapse. As he remembers it, the snarl pounced out as Murdoch explained: “I didn’t like talking to that cunt when he had money, and now he’s broke, he can get fucked.” One member of this powerful gathering recalls a much gentler but equally revealing comment from the Queen, who asked about Rupert’s son, James, and then added, sotto voce: “The father is awful.”

The man’s character, in turn, is at the heart of his approach to business. Rupert Murdoch is a man who will crush an opponent like a beetle beneath his boot, and he will do it for one simple reason – for News Corp. One of the guests who is closest to him says: “Rupert does not discriminate – he does not care about anybody more than he cares about the business. That includes himself, his kids, his political allies. The business comes first. His plan is “kill or be killed”. Every single corporate battle that he’s fought over the last 50 years, he’s gone head-to-head to win. You have to win. You don’t acknowledge that politics is a higher power. You don’t yield to the law of the land. You don’t submit to any higher code than your own.”

Notoriously, in 1975, Murdoch abused his position as a newspaper owner to support a plot that ousted the democratically elected prime minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, who had dared to wander away from the mogul’s path. Murdoch is the man who threw 6,000 men out of work when he broke away from the printing unions in London; who dumped his own citizenship as an Australian in order to become an American so that he could own more than 25% of a TV network; who pushed the Daily Telegraph and the Independent to the edge of destruction in a UK price-cutting war which doubled the circulation of The Times; who adopted Christianity like a new suit and then dumped it when he tired of it.

But above all, the fear is generated by the people he hires to work for him. “He loves thugs,” as one of his senior executives puts it. Roger Ailes at Fox TV; Kelvin MacKenzie at the Sun; Col Allan at the New York Post; Sam Chisholm at Sky TV: they all came out of the same box, marked “bully”. And when Murdoch’s men bully, their victims really feel it. All these members of the power elite have seen what Murdoch’s news outlets can do, using their stories in the same way muggers in back alleys use their boots, to kick a victim to pulp. “Monstering”, they call it – a savage and prolonged public attack on a target’s life, often aimed at the most private and sensitive part of their existence, their sexual behaviour, inflicting maximum pain and maximum humiliation.

Very often, this will have nothing to do with Murdoch’s own manoeuvres; it will simply be a matter of filling news space at the expense of some hapless individual who has caught the tabloid eye. Most journalists will refuse to do it, just as most men would refuse to be torturers. But some of those who carry press cards are like the droogs in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange: they kick their victims because they love it. It sells newspapers, it pays well, it’s fun.

A monstering from Murdoch’s droogs is a terrible experience. If the damage they did were physical – visible – the courts could jail them for years. As it is, they inflict grievous emotional harm, the kind of injury from which some victims simply never recover. Indeed, there are some who have been left suicidal by the experience. It can come out of nowhere, picking on some off-the-cuff statement or some tiny detail that has caught nobody else’s eye, least of all the victim’s, and suddenly the violence begins. It can be completely arbitrary in its choice of target. If Miss Muffet abandons her tuffet because of the approaching spider, the droogs can choose to attack her for cowardice; or to attack the spider for indecency and threatening behaviour.

Once it starts, the monstering cannot be stopped by the victim. If the spider says he meant no harm, he was simply looking for somewhere to sit, then “an unrepentant spider last night threatened to spread his regime of fear”. Apologising will not work – “a humiliating climbdown”. Nor will refusing to apologise – “an increasingly isolated spider”. There is no end to the potential angles. The droogs will call everybody who ever sat next to the spider until they find somebody else who didn’t like him. They will comb through arachnophobes everywhere, in search of alarmist quotes and calls for action. They can keep it going for days. A little distortion here, some fabrication there. The fact of the focus is itself a distortion: the relentless return to the same victim, the desire to destroy that corrupts normal editorial judgement. Often, other newspapers and broadcast bulletins will join in, so that simple commercial competition encourages the hunt for a new angle. The spider is helpless – if he speaks out, he fuels the story; if he stays quiet, the story tramples him.

Eventually, the monstering stops, usually because some new target has arrived; or because the target has been destroyed. Sometimes, even destruction is not enough. In his diary, Alastair Campbell recalls the ferocious monstering that was given to the then transport secretary, Stephen Byers, in the spring of 2002, which continued even after he had resigned: “It’s like they get a corpse but then are disappointed there is nothing left to try and kill, so they kill the dead body too.”

The fear of this monstering generates power far beyond the relatively small number of victims who are attacked. All those in the power elite are prone to fear Murdoch, because none can be sure that they will not be next to be kicked by the tabloid boot. They all saw what happened to the former Labour minister Clare Short. Several times she criticised the Sun’s use of topless women to sell the paper and found herself denounced to millions as “killjoy Clare”, “fat”, “jealous”, “ugly”, “Short on looks”, “Short on brains”. At various points, the paper offered readers free car stickers (“Stop Crazy Clare”); sent half-naked women to her home; and ran a beauty contest to ask their readers whether they would prefer to see her face or the back of a bus. Separately, the News of the World ran two bogus stories suggesting she was involved with pornography; tried to buy old photographs of her as a 20-year-old in a nightdress; and published a smear story that attempted to link her to a West Indian gangster.

Her fellow Labour MP, the former Anglican priest Chris Bryant, provoked the full wrath of the Murdoch papers when he trapped Rebekah Brooks into admitting that her journalists had paid police officers for information at the media select committee hearing in March 2003. Immediately afterwards, Bryant was warned by a reporter from the Sun that “they will get you for that”. They got him a little bit a few months later when he told the House of Commons that he opposed the idea of a referendum on the new EU constitution and found the Sun telling its readers that he was a “Euro fanatic” who thought they were too stupid to vote. They got him more severely that December when the Mail on Sunday exposed his sex life, complete with an embarrassing photograph of him wearing only a tight-fitting pair of briefs, and Brooks at the Sun and Andy Coulson at the News of the World joined in a vicious monstering. Brooks made it very clear that this was personal, sashaying up to Bryant at a subsequent Labour party conference to deliver a sharp dig at his sexuality, calculated to remind him of the embarrassment of one of his former colleagues who had been accused of cruising a London park for gay sex: “Oh, Mr Bryant, it’s after dark. I’m surprised you’re not out on Clapham Common.”

The punishment was equally harsh for the American writer Michael Wolff. In March 2009 he found himself on the receiving end of a thorough monstering by the New York Post when he was working on a biography of Murdoch. By some unexplained means, the mogul’s people had laid hands on an unpublished typescript and started to send clear warnings that the boss was not happy with some its contents. Wolff recalls a senior executive calling to ask him to make changes before the book was published.

“What will you do if I don’t?” Wolff asked.

“Then we will not support the book.”

“How bad is that?”

“It could be bad.”

And it was bad. The New York Post discovered that Wolff had been having an affair, and ran stories on 2, 3, 6, 25 and 30 March, and 3 and 9 April, publishing along the way a secondary story that accused Wolff of evicting his mother-in-law from her apartment, as well as a cartoon of Wolff in bed with his lover, portraying the Jewish writer in a style which might reasonably be described as antisemitic.

At its worst, everybody in the power elite has heard that the punishment can amount to crude blackmail. They have all heard the stories about how Murdoch editors have safes containing dossiers of evidence about the private lives of politicians and competing businessmen; and that Murdoch and his people agree to suppress these gross embarrassments in exchange for yet more favours. There are specific rumours – about a senior figure in British sport who is said to have complied with Murdoch’s plans for TV rights when he was informed that the Sun was ready to tell its readers that he had had sexual relationships with young men; and about a middle-ranking Labour politician who is said to have spoken up on behalf of Murdoch’s UK newspapers after journalists obtained a video of him having sex with a prostitute while the prostitute’s husband watched. It is true that the sports administrator and the Labour politician offered their support to Murdoch. Whether they did so out of fear of the dossiers – or whether the dossiers even exist – is not so clear. The power is in the belief and in the fear it engenders. Which is widespread.

Certainly, many have come across a gentler version of this, something more like whitemail – a favour done rather than a threat made. There are senior politicians, police officers and others who know that senior Murdoch journalists have privately put in a word for them, to help with a promotion, to defuse some threat. Most of the wedding guests know that Rebekah worked a clever piece of whitemail with the deputy prime minister John Prescott when, as editor of the News of the World, she got hold of the story that many years earlier Prescott’s wife, Pauline, had given up a baby for adoption. This had happened before the Prescotts had met, but now the long-lost son had made contact. Prescott pleaded with Rebekah not to publish the story until his wife and her adult son had had a chance to get to know each other. She agreed – a decent act, and one that earned her a sense of indebtedness from Prescott who later, when his family were ready, opted to take the story to her at the Sun, where she had become editor. Favours are valuable currency in the corridors of power.

Rebekah Brooks and Tony Blair

The power to conceal or reveal sensitive personal information turns out to be just like the power of the bully in the school playground. The bully need only batter one or two children for the fact of his power to be established: fear will then ensure that the others do all they can to placate him. In the same way, the really big power that Murdoch is said to wield – that he can swing the result of elections – does not have to be entirely real. What matters is the fear that it could be real. Far safer to be an ally, or even to join the shuffling queue of current and former members of the power elite who take his money, writing columns for his newspapers or selling their memoirs to HarperCollins: the then Speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich; the daughter of the then leader of the Chinese Communist party, Deng Xiaoping; the former Conservative leader William Hague; the former Metropolitan police commissioner Sir John Stevens; the former Labour minister David Blunkett; the former Downing Street press adviser Alastair Campbell; the former Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Andy Hayman; and so on and on.

Nobody is sure whether an aggressive newspaper really can decide the outcome of a national ballot. The newspapers like to claim that they can; politicians claim not to believe it; psephologists argue about the impact of news on voters and the distribution of any newspaper’s readers among the swing voters in marginal seats that dictate results. In the best-known UK case, Kelvin MacKenzie’s Sun in 1992 bloodied its toecaps all over the political career of the then Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and loudly claimed to have won the election for the Conservative leader, John Major. MacKenzie’s claim was widely seen as unfounded, if only because of his notorious estrangement from the truth.

There is no doubt that the droogs can cause grievous political harm. A cynical newspaper that targets a political party – in or out of government – can inject it with chaos. All debates become splits, all problems become crises, all changes become climbdowns, all setbacks are humiliating, all successes are ignored. It can change the news agenda so that on any day, the party or government is diverted into managing some crisis that the newspaper has manufactured. It can ruin reputations, with falsehood as easily as with truth. It can wreck the public debate of whole subjects by pumping it full of distortion. (Britain’s relationship with the European Union, for example, has been fundamentally shaped by a relentless sequence of notoriously false stories about the EU supposedly banning the British army, Scottish kilts, pints of beer, bent bananas, charity shops and Christian teachers, as well as supposedly suffocating daily life with an imaginary set of petty regulations.) The impact is like the effect a screaming brat has on a family: the family may not break up, but ordinary life becomes impossible.

Murdoch controls his company’s money with obsessive care, checking daily “flash reports” from every subsidiary to ensure they are sticking to the budget he has laid down for each of them. But very little of the editorial distortion in his empire comes directly from him. He intervenes in the round by requiring his outlets to work within the boundaries of policies that will favour businesses like News Corp: cut taxes, cut welfare, cut government, cut regulation – all the essentials of neoliberalism. From time to time, he directly intervenes in particular stories – to help an ally, to promote his business, to reflect some random personal bias. His senior journalists admit privately that this is unacceptable – a clear form of editorial corruption – but they insist that he intervenes far less often than outsiders imagine. The vast bulk of Murdoch’s news output, including the huge majority of any falsehood and distortion, is simply the spontaneous product of his highly commercialised newsrooms. It sells.

In the same way, very little of the aggression needs to be directed by Murdoch himself. The fear is all. In the balance of power, a government wins easily over a newspaper group with its vast budget, its military and police, its bureaucracy and all the limbs of the state. But in the balance of fear, the outcome is the opposite. The government lives in fear of what the mogul might do to its collective standing (and perhaps to some individual reputations) by causing chaos in its coverage. The mogul has little to fear from the government. For the most part, politicians will step round him and, in the unlikely event that they do attack, he has the ultimate sanction: he can sell up and leave, avoiding everything they throw at him, taking his investment and his jobs with him.

The point about real power is that it does its own work, particularly among those who deal in power. Nobody in the power elite needs to be told. They all recognise the mogul’s power and, with few exceptions, they do everything they can to pacify him, to ingratiate themselves. The mogul, for the most part, does not have to make threats or issue instructions. He just has to show up. Not even that – he just has to exist, somewhere in the background. Everybody understands; the fact of power is enough. If there’s a bull in the field, everybody steps carefully. The fear gives him access; the access gives him influence. Real power is passive.

• Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch is published by Chatto & Windus on 31 July, priced £20.

Phone hacking: Coulson asked if he has moved personal wealth to avoid costs: here.

Rupert Murdoch says ‘business knows best’: here.

Mail did not reveal to PCC or Leveson that News of the World hacked staff. Four Mail on Sunday journalists were told by the police in 2006 that their mobile phones had been hacked: here.

Why the hacking scandal isn’t a “load of middle-class wank”: here.

Phone hacking trial – Coulson’s conviction causes a crisis for David Cameron

Borneo rainforests, destruction and conservation

Posted on July 25, 2014 by petrel41

This video from Indonesia is called Protecting a Forest — and a Way of Life: Watching over Wehea.

From Wildlife Extra:

As Borneo deforestation reaches critical level a new protection area is established

According to data published by the Indonesian Forestry Agency, the deforestation in Borneo that occurred between 2000 and 2005 topped 1.23 million hectares, reports ProFauna, the Indonesian organisation for the protection of wild animals and their habitats.

This means that every day around 673 hectares of forest disappeared during that period.

Land conversion into palm oil plantation, timber concessions, industrial plants and mining activities are among the major triggers of the loss.

Despite the threats, there are moves afoot to halt the decline in East Borneo, 450km away from the provincial capital of Samarinda.

The Wehea Protection Forest encompasses an area of 38.000 hectares, 250m above sea level on the eastern part and up to 1750m above sea level on the western part, which means the vegetation varies from lowland forest to montane forest and supports 19 mammals species, 114 birds species, 12 rodents species, 9 primates species, and 59 invaluable types of plants.

One of the most valuable aspects of this forest is its importance to the lives of Bornean orangutans. In 2012, the head of the local environment agency, Didi Suryadi, stated that there were approximately 750 individual orangutans whose lives depend on the sustainability of Wehea forest.

Wehea Protection Forest was established in 2005. The governing board consists of government agencies, indigenous people, educational institutions, and NGOs.

Local people have also formed a ranger team, the members of which are young men of the Dayah Wehea tribe who take turns every day to secure the forest.

Recently, a team from ProFauna visited the Wehea people to establish ties to help with the conservation work.

The secretary of the village, Siang Geah, said: “We are very glad to have ProFauna in Wehea and hope that we can establish a positive partnership in protecting our dwindling forests.”

Indonesian Borneo is finished: They Also Rape Orangutans, 01 Jun 2017: here.

Opera about Holocaust in New York City

Posted on July 25, 2014 by petrel41

This video from the USA is called Houston Grand Opera’s “The Passenger“.

By Fred Mazelis in the USA:

The Passenger depicts the Holocaust and its aftermath in opera form

25 July 2014

Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s 1968 opera The Passenger recently had its New York premiere as part of the annual Lincoln Center Festival. The performances showed that this challenging work, dealing with the Holocaust and its aftermath, deserves a permanent place in the operatic repertoire.

Weinberg, born in Warsaw in 1919, narrowly escaped the Nazi invasion of Poland, arriving in the Soviet Union before his 20th birthday. His parents and younger sister were sent to the Lodz Ghetto and later perished in a concentration camp. Weinberg, who lived the remaining 56 years of his life in the USSR, was a prolific composer of symphonies, string quartets, operas and film music. Among his film scores was that for the award-winning The Cranes Are Flying.

(Interestingly, one of Weinberg’s cousins, following the Russian Revolution, was the secretary of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Baku Soviet commune and was executed by counterrevolutionary forces in September 1918 along with the other 26 Baku commissars.)

In eight scenes over two acts, The Passenger tells the story of a prosperous German couple in the early 1960s, Liese and Walter, who have embarked on an ocean voyage to Brazil, where the husband, a West German diplomat, is to take up a new post.

In the midst of what should be a time of satisfaction and happy anticipation, however, Liese observes a mysterious passenger onboard, and becomes convinced that this is in fact Marta, who as a young Polish woman was an inmate of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Liese was an Auschwitz guard, something she has tried to leave behind and suppress psychologically, and has never even spoken about to her husband.

The opera, with a libretto by Alexander Medvedev and music by Weinberg, then compellingly develops the theme of the Holocaust and its aftermath. The action takes place on two levels, both in its staging and in its time frame. The upper level is the ship itself, including Liese and Walter’s private cabin. Stairs lead to a lower level, the concentration camp barracks and the railroad tracks leading to the camp. The scenes alternate, forcefully depicting the memories that increasingly haunt Liese as the story progresses.

We are soon introduced to Marta as a young concentration camp inmate. Her fellow prisoners include Tadeusz, Marta’s beloved, whom she finds after a separation of two years. Liese is the only character that appears on both levels of the opera, with the events of nearly 20 years earlier clearly seared into her memory. In her role as a camp guard, she threatens and taunts the prisoners, and in particular tries to take advantage of Marta and Tadeusz’s relationship for her own purposes.

The work explores the issue of the aftermath of the Holocaust, for both victims and perpetrators. The Passenger is set in the early 1960s, in the midst of the postwar economic boom in Germany, and also in the shadow of the Eichmann trial in Israel, which brought the issue of the Holocaust and its architects before a new generation of Germans as well as to a global audience. A generation of young people in Germany, as elsewhere, were radicalized by the war in Vietnam in particular as the 1960s unfolded and attempted to come to terms as well with their own traumatic national history. This was the period that saw the publication of some of the best-known novels of German writers such as Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll, as well as the first films of Rainer Maria Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff and others.

The historical issues are deliberately not spelled out in The Passenger. The story is presented without even settling the issue of whether the mysterious woman is in fact Marta, or perhaps only the vivid reflection of Liese’s guilty conscience.

The opera also does not portray Liese as a kind of stand-in for Germany as a whole, a symbol of collective guilt. It does, however, show the impossibility of ignoring the past. It raises the inevitable issues of the causes of the descent into barbarism. The portrayal of both the younger and middle-aged Liese suggests the self-satisfied layer of the middle class that finds itself, under definite social and political conditions, capable of the most monstrous crimes.

The opera is based on a novel by a Polish concentration camp survivor, Zofia Posmysz. Posmysz, alive and well at the age of 90, has been involved in the belated production of the opera, and appeared at the New York premiere.

Arrested as a young girl because of an association with an anti-Nazi group, Posmysz spent three years as a prisoner. Some years later, as a journalist on assignment in Paris, she thought she saw someone who had been a guard at Auschwitz. This episode led first to a radio play, which was later turned into a novel, in which the relationship is reversed, with a conscience-stricken former guard believing she has glimpsed a former inmate.

The novel became enormously popular in Poland. This was a time of political ferment following the working class protests in Poznan in 1956. The book was turned into a film— Passenger (1963)—by the talented young Polish director Andrzej Munk (Man on the Tracks, 1956), completed by colleagues after Munk’s untimely death in an auto accident in 1961. Somewhat later, Weinberg’s close friend and colleague Dmitri Shostakovich urged him to consider a project based on the novel.

Weinberg’s music is impressive, as we have had occasion to note in the past. It reflects his lifelong association with Shostakovich, whom he first met in 1943, when he was only 23 years old and Shostakovich himself was 13 years older. Highly dissonant at times, the score remains tonal and emotionally involving. The composer is especially effective in combining and alternating several styles while still adhering to a distinctive musical language.

The influence of Shostakovich is clear, but the music is not derivative. Weinberg depicts the growing apprehension and panic of Liese, the concern of her husband for his career prospects, and above all the suffering and heroism of the prisoners. The music is at times anguished, jazz-influenced in its depiction of some of the shipboard activities, and briefly but strongly lyrical in the reunion of Marta and Tadeusz.

If there is one major weakness, it is in the vocal writing itself. In an opera, this is of course an issue that can’t be overlooked. There were times, especially in the opera’s first act, when an emphasis on orchestral writing, and an imbalance between the orchestra and performers, tended to detract from the dramatic action. The second act was more affecting, especially the exchanges between Marta, Tadeusz and Liese.

Both Marta and Tadeusz resist Liese’s attempts to enlist their cooperation, even though it will mean their deaths. A high point of this act, and the climax of the entire opera, comes when Tadeusz, a violinist, is commanded to play the camp commandant’s favorite waltz, and instead defiantly performs the famous Bach Chaconne from the Second Partita for Violin, before being led off to his death.

Weinberg’s orchestration is masterful. Strings and winds are joined by powerful writing for the brass section, and above all, a percussion section that includes almost every imaginable instrument, including timpani, triangle, tambourine, whip, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, marimba, vibraphone, xylophone, bells and glockenspiel.

The Houston Grand Opera production was also striking. Director David Pountney was responsible for the English translation of the libretto. The opera, originally presented in Austria in 2010, was staged in Houston last winter, and it is the Houston production, including the orchestra under Patrick Summers, that was brought to New York for three performances. The opera was first presented in Moscow in concert version in 2006, nearly 40 years after it was written.

The New York performances took place in the historic Park Avenue Armory, in a building dating to 1880 and for decades the headquarters of the 7th New York Militia Regiment, which had fought in the Civil War. The huge vaulted space of the Drill Hall, at the center of this building, is a music venue unlike any other in New York. The size of the space made some amplification of the voices necessary, a rare occurrence in the opera world. In this case it was carried off in so understated and effective a fashion that some listeners would not even have been aware of it. Although the opera was sung in English, the use of supertitles was also effective, as was the unusual placement of the orchestra, to the side of the two-tiered set.

The singers were uniformly excellent, particularly soprano Melody Moore as Marta. Tadeusz was sung by Morgan Smith, Katya by Kelly Kaduce, Liese by mezzo soprano Michelle Breedt and Walter by tenor Joseph Kaiser.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg is one of the “lost composers” of the twentieth century. Strictly speaking, he is not of the generation that came of age musically between the imperialist world wars, or whose career was interrupted by the rise of fascism during those decades, including some promising composers who perished in the Holocaust. Although Weinberg was younger and had a full musical career, the environment in which he worked was shaped by the tragedies of this era.

In connection with the belated appearance of The Passenger, little has been said about why it languished in obscurity for decades. Shostakovich was enormously taken by the work, but for reasons that were not spelled out, it was not staged, although many other works of Weinberg were regularly performed in the Soviet Union.

The Stalinist regime, which still used a heavy hand in cultural matters in this period, may have decided that an opera that focused on concentration camps and dealt with Polish victims did not mesh with its own continuous efforts to build up nationalist feelings. The authorities decreed that emphasis had always to be placed on the Russian and Soviet toll in the war, which of course was massive, to the exclusion of others. It was for this reason that Shostakovich encountered such official opposition to his 13th Symphony, subtitled “Babi Yar,” dedicated to the Jewish victims of Nazi extermination at this site in Kiev.

Weinberg’s life was shaped in no small part by horrific Nazi barbarism on the one hand, and the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution on the other. While he and many others found refuge in the Soviet Union, they also confronted the regime of the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy, which used anti-Semitism for its own purposes.

Ancient Egyptian art sellout in England

Posted on July 25, 2014 by petrel41

This video from England says about itself:

The Curse of Sekhemka

9 July 2014

This video is about the Sekhemka Action group in Northampton UK trying to save Sekhemka from being sold at Christie’s in London July 2014. Filmed by Kevin Stoney.

Sekhemka, front (Christie's) By Paul Bond in Britain:

Northampton sale of Egyptian statue: Major assault on art and cultural provision in the UK

25 July 2014

Northampton Borough Council’s sale of a 4,000-year-old Egyptian statue from its museum collection marks a further assault on public cultural provision.

The statue is one of two known statues of Sekhemka, inspector of scribes c.2400-2300 BC. It was presented around 1870 by the Marquess of Northampton. An 1880 Deed of Gift stated it must be “accessible to the public at all proper times.”

The council removed it from public display in 2010, citing insurance costs, among other reasons. This was simply a prelude to sale. A subsequent Freedom of Information request revealed that insurance cover that year was lower than before, and the insurers were imposing no additional security arrangements.

In 2012 the council launched a supposed public consultation exercise on the sale.

The Museums Association (MA) had given the council written advice to “consult explicitly about the proposal to sell”. The council’s questionnaire, however, did not ask “whether the sale should go ahead”. Instead, in the words of MA ethics committee chairman Nick Merriman, it simply asked respondents “to tick which area of investment the sale proceeds should go to.”

At the time the statue was valued at £2 million. The council asked respondents only whether this should be spent on the restoration of Delapre Abbey, the expansion of Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, the establishment of a National Shoe Museum or the development of Abington Park Museum.

Nor did the questionnaire “acknowledge the historical importance of the object to the museum.”

The MA’s Code of Ethics allows for financially motivated disposal in exceptional circumstances. David Fleming, chair of the ethics committee, explained that it provides for such sales “only as a last resort after other sources of funding have been thoroughly explored”. The MA says it had asked Northampton “to seek alternative sources of capital funding before undertaking the sale of such an important item”, but “[t]he council did not provide evidence that it had done this.”

Residents set up a Save Sekhemka Action Group (SSAG). They opposed the sale of the statue, but if it had to be disposed of for curatorial reasons said they would prefer it was loaned to another museum. Before the sale protesters said that if the council no longer wanted to display the statue they should return it to the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, which had itself challenged the sale.

SSAG opposed suggestions that the proceeds be used for Delapre Abbey as the proposals were “too vague” and had “not been planned out.”

In 2013 SSAG called on the council to redisplay the statue. SSAG’s Ruth Thomas, chair of the Northamptonshire Ancient Egyptian Society, pointed to the issue of insurance, noting that the Friends of the Museum had already offered £8,000 for a more secure display case. She also drew attention to legal questions over the 1880 Deed of Gift’s provisions for display and preventing disposal. The inaccessibility of the statue for the previous three years was in clear breach of the Deed, SSAG argued.

The motion was defeated by the Conservative majority on the council. Council leader David Mackintosh declared that they were determined to sell the statue as soon as possible, with the proceeds going towards a £14 million extension to Northampton Museum and Art Gallery.

Questions arose over ownership of the statue, now valued at £4-6 million. It was revealed that 45 percent of the sale proceeds would go to the Marquess of Northampton, whose family had “gifted” the statue to the museum. SSAG remain unconvinced that legal title has been definitively established.

Last week the statue sold for £15.76 million. Northampton Council will take around £8 million for the museum development. The multimillionaire Marquess will pocket another £6 million.

Funding and museum accreditation bodies warned that the sale could have serious consequences for the council and museum.

Ruth Thomas explained that income from the sale would be “completely offset by the much greater amount lost from grants and subsidies no longer available if the museum loses its accreditation.”

Arts Council England (ACE) warned that the sale of collections “will only further alienate both key funders and the public”. ACE said it would now be assessing Northampton’s accreditation status. Northampton Museum has received over £200,000 in ACE grants over the last two years.

An example of the alienation came even before the auction. Alan Moore, the comic book writer, described the planned sale as “undercutting one of the fundamental principles by which museums acquire artefacts”. Moore said he had donated items to the museum, but “would not be able to do that again in the knowledge that at some point in the future that gift, made in good faith, could be sold off by a council.”

The Heritage Lottery Fund warned that the sale “would be taken into account” when assessing future funding applications.

Mackintosh and the council have been bullish about the risks, offering token acknowledgement of the criticisms. Mackintosh claimed that having kept ACE “informed of our actions and plans … we see no reason why we should not retain our accredited status.”

The museum extension, used to justify the sale, might itself be threatened. Loss of accreditation will jeopardise the matched grant funding required for the project. SSAG claim there “still are no such detailed, costed, plans” for the extension.

Mackintosh also tried to sidestep the MA’s concerns. The MA will consider financially motivated disposal if it can be demonstrated that “[t]he item under consideration lies outside the museum’s core collection as defined in the collections policy.”

With breathtaking hypocrisy Mackintosh claimed the statue had “never really been the centrepiece of our collection”, as it had not been on display for four years (since it was withdrawn from exhibition) and no one had asked to see it during that time.

David Verey, chairman of the national fundraising charity Art Fund, described these arguments as “very, very thin … The cash will disappear within a year, so it’s gone.” He warned that the statue will probably go into a private collection and not be seen again.

Alan Moore said it would be a “resounding shame upon this town” if it looked like “the kind of place that’s prepared to sell off all of its culture, all of its heritage, at the drop of a hat.”

That is exactly what is happening. The Northampton sale must be placed in the context of the recent statement by Bruce Katz, former adviser to US President Barack Obama, to the Independent that British cities should look to Detroit as their model for “regeneration.”

His remarks make clear that the looting of art works, public pensions and even water resources underway in Detroit in the interests of the corporate elite is now the model for cities everywhere.

As in the United States, there is no opposition within the establishment parties for such wholesale plunder. Northampton, like other Conservative councils, is enthusiastic about selling off the contents of its public museums and art galleries. The Labour Party accepts the argument that artefacts can and should be sold to make up funding shortfalls.

Last month Plaid Cymru MP Jonathan Edwards called on a local council to re-examine its stored artworks. “We have seen parks, toilets and sports fields given away, and public services cut or out-sourced to save money. I want the council to at least explore the value of this collection”.

The ruling elite are pauperising the working class to maintain their own privilege and wealth. Their plunder extends to cultural impoverishment.

Working people must reject the claim that art works have to be sold off to fund other public services. The defence of culture is a basic component of a healthy society and is inseparable from the struggle to defend the living standards of the working class.