We continue our coverage of the standoff at Standing Rock, where on Saturday the Dakota Access pipeline company unleashed dogs and pepper spray on Native Americans seeking to protect a sacred tribal burial site from destruction. Just a few hours before the attack, Democracy Now! interviewed Standing Rock Sioux tribal historian LaDonna Brave Bull Allard about another attack against her tribe more than 150 years ago. On September 3, 1863, the U.S. Army massacred more than 300 members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in what became known as the Whitestone massacre. LaDonna Brave Bull Allard is also one of the founders of the Sacred Stone camp, launched on her land on April 1 to resist the Dakota Access pipeline.
This video from the USA says about itself:
Who’s Investing in the Dakota Access Pipeline? Meet the Banks Financing Attacks on Protesters
7 September 2016
We continue our conversation with Hugh MacMillan on his new investigation revealing the financial institutions backing the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline project.
The investigation, published by research outlet LittleSis, names more than two dozen major banks and financial institutions helping to finance the Dakota Access pipeline. It details how Bank of America, HSBC, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and other financial institutions have, combined, extended a $3.75 billion credit line to Energy Transfer Partners, the parent company of Dakota Access.
This video from the USA says about itself:
8 September 2016
Ahead of a major court ruling expected on Friday, TRNN examines the financial and political interests behind the Dakota Access Pipeline
WHY IT’S A PROBLEM A JOURNALIST IS FACING CHARGES FOR REPORTING ON THE DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE “According to Erickson, a woman who appeared at a protest carrying a microphone emblazoned with the name Democracy Now! and trailing a video crew; who can be heard in the resulting video report identifying herself to a security guard as a reporter; and who then broadcast the video on the daily news program she has hosted for 20 years is not actually a journalist.” [The Nation]
Most tricks by a cat in one minute – Meet the Record Breakers
7 September 2016
Didga the Australian skateboarding cat and her owner Robert performed a total of 20 tricks in one minute to earn themselves a place in the Guinness World Records 2017 book.
Didga, who was adopted from a cat shelter, can even take on the challenge of a real skateboarding park.
The tricks include:
1. Sit
2. Give left paw
3. High-five
4. Give right paw
5. Wave
6. Sit-up
7. Lay down
8. Go onto one-side
9. Roll-over
10. Back to sit
11. Stand
12. Shuffle right
13. Shuffle left
14. Spin 360
15. Come (walk to me)
16. Stop
17. Step on the coin
18. Jump into hands
19. Go from hand, down to knee, then onto the skateboard
20. While the board is moving, jump over the bar and land back onto the board, a.k.a. “hippy-jump”
Ludo from South Yorkshire is the longest cat in the world. “Because he is 118 centimeters long, he is very clumsy,” says his owner. “He often tries to hide, but cannot.” Ludo is of the Maine Coon breed. …
And Lizzy is the biggest dog in the world. This Great Dane in Florida is 96 centimeters high. She is so large she cannot eat from her tray if it is on the ground. Therefore, the tray is always put on a chair.
TYT Politics Reporter Jordan Chariton spoke with Ta’Sina Sapa Win, a water protector who was bitten by private security attack dogs during a #NoDAPL protest a few days earlier. She discussed the biased media coverage surrounding the protests, as well as what the Dakota Pipeline would do to her people and the environment.
Standing Rock protest grows with thousands opposing North Dakota pipeline. People from across North America join fight that tribal leader says is ‘not going to end any time soon’: here.
From Our Revolution, Bernie Sanders‘ movement in the USA today:
A pipeline for fracked oil that would go from North Dakota to Illinois must be stopped. Bernie Sanders issued a call to action to stand with activists who are fighting the Dakota Access pipeline.
An oil company is trying to build a pipeline for fracked oil all the way from North Dakota to Illinois. It would carry some of the dirtiest oil on the planet and present a tremendous threat to our planet’s fight against climate change.
It’s called the Dakota Access pipeline, and it must be stopped.
Activists led by farmers and Native American tribal nations are fighting the pipeline with both grassroots activism and legal tools. Bernie Sanders issued this call to action to support their work:
“The major global crisis facing our planet today is climate change. The vast majority of scientists tell us that climate change is real, it is caused by humans and it is already causing devastating problems. They say that if we do not aggressively transition our energy system away from fossil fuels toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy, the planet we leave our children will be a much less habitable place.
“Like the Keystone XL pipeline, which I opposed since day one, the Dakota Access fracked oil pipeline will transport some of the dirtiest fuel on the planet. Regardless of the court’s decision, the Dakota Access pipeline must be stopped. As a nation, our job is to break our addiction to fossil fuels, not increase our dependence on oil. I join with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the many tribal nations fighting this dangerous pipeline.”
When people stand together, we can defeat the greed of the biggest fossil fuel companies. That’s why today we’re asking you to stand with the activists, farmers, and tribal nations opposing the Dakota Access pipeline.
Add your name to say you oppose the construction of this fracked oil pipeline.
Something shocking happened this weekend to the Lakota and Sioux activists who have been protesting the pipeline in North Dakota. The private security firm hired by the pipeline company attacked the activists with dogs and pepper spray.
This is a dangerous escalation by a company that is apparently so desperate to build its $3.6 billion pipeline for fracked oil it would attack peaceful activists.
Because the pipeline would go through their land, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other nations have been leading prayer protests for months. Farmers and activists in the way of the pipeline have fought the oil company too.
But it’s incumbent on all of us to stand up to this pipeline. For the tribal nations who would have their lands endangered, for the farmers and residents who would have their water threatened, and for all of us who need to fight the effects of climate change.
The good news is that we can win: just this week, another pipeline that would move dirty oil was canceled after months of pressure from activists. Now we must stop this one too.
The first step you can take is to speak out and say you oppose the Dakota Access pipeline and stand with the activists trying to stop it.
Say you stand with activists who oppose the Dakota Access pipeline for fracked oil. Add your name now and help stop this pipeline.
This 7 September 2016 video shows various wading bird species at Spuimond nature reserve on Voorne island in the Netherlands. Among them many northern lapwings. One of them is special, looking much whiter than usual northern lapwings. Can you spot it?
Anger over the arrest of two prominent journalists is gathering steam in Turkey. Police used pepper spray to push back protesters in Ankara rallying in their support… while in Istanbul, hundreds also gathered outside the newspaper’s headquarters in a show of solidarity.
This new wave of suspensions of teachers is not about the Gülen movement, but about teachers suspected of sympathy for the leftist HDP opposition party and Turkish and Syrian Kurdish parties. This makes those teachers ‘terrorists’ according to Turkish President Erdogan. While the Turkish and Syrian Kurds are the only effective opponent of the real terrorists, ISIS.
After all, the words ‘terrorist’ and ‘teacher’ both have the letters t, e, and r. [sarcasm off]
Improved technique suggests large four-limbed Acanthostega were still juveniles
By Susan Milius
1:00pm, September 7, 2016
Better bone scanning of fossils offers a glimpse of preteen life some 360 million years ago.
Improved radiation scanning techniques reveal accumulating growth zones in chunks of four fossil upper forelimb bones from salamander-shaped beasts called Acanthostega, scientists report online September 7 in Nature. Vertebrate bones typically show annual growth zones diminishing in size around the time of sexual maturity. But there’s no sign of that slowdown in these four individuals from East Greenland’s mass burial of Acanthostega, says study coauthor Sophie Sanchez of Uppsala University in Sweden. They were still juveniles.
The bones came from tropical Greenland of the Devonian Period. Aquatic vertebrates were developing four limbs, which would serve tetrapods well when vertebrates eventually conquered land. This mass die-off doomed at least 20 individuals, presumably when a dry spell after a flood trapped them all in a big, vanishing puddle.
This find makes the strongest case yet for identifying genuine youngsters among ancient tetrapods, Sanchez says. She suspects other individuals trapped could have been juveniles too.
Not many other species were found in the mass burial. So young tetrapods may have stuck together much as today’s young fish schools, Sanchez speculates. The limb shape clearly indicates that the youngsters took a long time to start adding hard bone to the initial soft cartilage, she says. So these early tetrapods were at least 6-year-olds and probably 10 years old or more.
For identifying stages of life, the improved technique “allows greater resolution and rigor, so in that regard it is a plus,” says Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago, who studies a fossil fish with some tetrapod-like features called Tiktaalik. There are Tiktaalik preteens, too, he notes.
What interests Nadia Fröbisch of Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin is that some of Acanthostega individuals were different sizes but had reached the same stage of bone development. She muses that they might even have been developing along different trajectories of growth, a flexibility that would be useful in a changeable environment.
Animals emerged from the water and clamored onto land more than 300 million years ago, but paleontologists are looking for even more details about the transition. A healed broken bone that later fossilized is offering some new and unexpected clues. A new fossil from Australia pushes back the origin of tetrapods, or four-limbed animals, more than two million years. The creature, Ossinodus, lived during the Devonian Period 333 million years ago in what would have been temperate forests: here.
The U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which implements foreign arms sales, said that General Dynamics will be the principal contractor for the sale. […]
The tanks, designed for large-scale ground warfare, are part of a larger package of American weaponry, valued at $1.15 billion, that includes a bevy of additional military hardware.
The report adds: ‘UK should suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen until an independent and international inquiry can establish the truth.’ On Monday, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson defended the arms sale, insisting that the UK would continue arming its feudal ally.
In fact, the UK supplied export licenses for over $4 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia last year. The largest export license granted was worth $2.48 billion of fighter jets agreed in May 2015. The UK also approved the export of $1.45 billion of air-to-air missiles to the Saudi regime in July 2015. In September, it further approved the sale of $90.5 million worth of bombs to Riyadh.
The truth is that the Saudi regime is acting as an imperialist gendarme in the Gulf, this is why it is being armed to the teeth. In fact, the Saudi need for more and more weapons is coinciding with a desperate internal crisis.
The Saudi absolutist regime has sought to ruin its rivals by crashing oil prices. It has in fact shot itself in both feet, with the collapse of oil prices, and is now crawling on all fours instead of walking.
Saudi Arabia is planning to abandon a third of its internal projects worth $20 billion. According to Bloomberg, thousands of projects worth $69 billion are being reviewed, which would impact transport, housing and healthcare. The feudal kingdom has been burning through $12-$15 billion per month from its financial reserves to fund government spending and its war in Yemen as well as proxy military ventures elsewhere in northern Iraq, Bahrain and Syria where it favours the anti-Assad, anti-Iraqi IS [ISIS] forces.
The British government not only supplies the arms that Saudi uses it is also guiding the Saudi military aggression in Yemen, and guiding the suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain, through the seconding of UK army and police cadres.
Now the UK is having a giant dock built in Bahrain to house two giant British aircraft carriers that are currently being constructed. The Royal Navy £1bn destroyer, the Daring, has been sent to join a fleet of US warships in the Gulf, where incidents and near misses with Iranian speed boats are taking place every week.
In the last few days the US military has claimed that an American warship patrolling in the central Persian Gulf changed its course after a speedboat operated by Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) came within 100 yards (91 metres) of it.
In a similar development on August 25, Pentagon officials said Iranian speedboats had ‘harassed’ US warships in the Strait of Hormuz. They said Iranian boats sped close to two US Navy destroyers with their weapons uncovered in the Strait of Hormuz in an ‘unsafe and unprofessional’ encounter.
The mood of the Saudi autocrats was recently expressed by the Saudi Grand Mufti who declared that Iran’s leaders are not Muslims but Zoroastrians. This not just fighting talk, this is creating the ideological basis for a new and greater war in the Middle East in which the US, UK and Israel will be the major support of the Saudi autocrats against the masses of Iran, Syria, the Lebanon, Bahrain, Yemen and Palestine.
Workers in the UK must demand that its government stop arming the Saudis, that it withdraws all of its advisers from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Bahrain and that it immediately withdraws all of its military forces from the Gulf! The TUC at its Congress next week must make these demands and tell the Tories that if they do not withdraw from the Gulf, the TUC will start a campaign of industrial and political action to make them do so.
OSIRIS-REx Tech – Surveying an Asteroid with Light
25 July 2016
NASA‘s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is on a mission explore to near-Earth asteroid Bennu, a carbon-rich body that may contain clues to the origins of life. OSIRIS-REx is equipped with a suite of technologies designed to map and study Bennu in unprecedented detail. The OSIRIS-REx Visible and Infrared Spectrometer, or OVIRS, will look at the asteroid’s spectral signature to detect organics and other minerals. After OSIRIS-REx has thoroughly surveyed Bennu from orbit, will descend to the surface and collect a sample of the asteroid for return to Earth in 2023. In this video, OVIRS instrument scientists Dennis Reuter and Amy Simon discuss the challenges and rewards of sending a spectrometer into deep space.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Dan Gallagher
OSIRIS-REx spacecraft launches tonight for mission to grab asteroid sample
by Christopher Crockett
6:00am, September 8, 2016
A spacecraft destined to bring samples of an asteroid back to Earth is scheduled to launch tonight. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission will launch September 8 at 7:05 p.m. EDT atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force station in Florida. The probe will head for 101955 Bennu, a roughly 500-meter-wide asteroid whose 1.2-year orbit intersects that of Earth. Once the spacecraft arrives in late 2018, it will spend more than a year mapping the asteroid before reaching out and grabbing a sample in July 2020.
By bringing an asteroid sample to Earth, planetary scientists hope to learn more about the early solar system, what resources are available for future space explorers and how to knock off course any asteroids that pose a risk to Earth. Bennu itself has about a 1 in 2,700 chance of striking Earth late in the 22nd century.
To get a piece of Bennu, OSIRIS-REx will descend toward the surface and extend a robotic arm that will contact the surface for about 5 seconds. A puff of nitrogen gas will stir up rocks and soil, some of which will be collected in a container. The sample will be placed in a capsule for the ride home.
OSIRIS-REx will leave Bennu no earlier than March 2021. As it passes Earth in September 2023, the spacecraft will jettison its cargo, dropping the capsule in the Utah desert.
OSIRIS-REx snaps first images of asteroid Bennu. The NASA probe will pick up a sample from the asteroid and return it to Earth, by Lisa Grossman. 5:12pm, August 24, 2018
Despite their large size, Golden Eagles are surprisingly agile in the air. They can dive at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour and yet they are still able to land gently on the ground without injury by spreading their wings and tail feathers, maximizing air resistance, and slowing their descent.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 