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Daily Archives: February 26, 2017
Anti-Semites attack Philadelphia, USA Jewish cemetery
This 23 February 2017 video from the USA is called US Muslims Raise Over $90k To Fix Desecrated Jewish Cemetery.
From Haaretz daily in Israel:
Dozens of Headstones Broken at Jewish Cemetery in Philadelphia
Incident comes just under a week after similar vandalism occurred as a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis.
Feb 26, 2017 8:20 PM
A Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia apparently became the victim of vandalism Sunday, when police were alerted that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of headstones had been broken and toppled over. …
The report came after a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis last week was vandalized in a similar manner, increasing concern in the Jewish community over an increase in anti-Semitic incidents that some have connected to the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump.
It was North New Jersey resident Aaron Mallin who reportedly discovered the overturned headstones, according to the report.
“It’s just very disheartening that such a thing would take place,” Mallin said. “I’m hoping it was maybe just some drunk kids. But the fact that there’s so many it leads one to think it could have been targeted.”
In a continuing surge of anti-Semitic acts and threats across the US, several hundred gravestones were toppled or damaged at a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, late Saturday night. The attack came amid a wave of bomb threats against Jewish community centers and schools and less than a week after vandals overturned some 200 headstones at Jewish cemetery in University City, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. While police initially reported that upward of 100 headstones were vandalized at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Philadelphia, volunteers helping clean up on Sunday stated that more than 500 grave sites had been damaged. Destruction at the cemetery was extensive, with row after row of headstones knocked over; some stones, more than a century old, were split in half: here.
How Philly’s Jewish communities are handling unprecedented attacks: here.
[Donald Trump’ s Vice President Mike] Pence Mistakes Nicaraguan Flag for Israeli in Tweets Supporting Jews: here.
The Trump administration is filled with openly anti-Semitic figures, but unholy alliances between Zionists and bigots in the West are nothing new, explains Sarah Levy: here.
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Saving young Atlantic tropical fish
This video from the USA says about itself:
17 February 2017
Every summer, thousands of baby tropical fish are taken from the Caribbean up the east coast of the USA by the Gulf stream. Some make it all the way to New England, where they will die in the fall when water temperatures drop. Jonathan joins the New England Aquarium Dive Club on a rescue mission to save these baby fish before winter.
JONATHAN BIRD’S BLUE WORLD is an Emmy Award-winning underwater science/adventure program that airs on public television in the United States.
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French historian arrested in the USA
This video from the USA says about itself:
October 5, 2015 a panel discussion Vichy France and the Jews, revisited: Robert Paxton in conversation with Henry Rousso and Phil Nord.
From France 24:
Renowned French historian detained for 10 hours by US customs officials
2017-02-26
A French historian was detained for 10 hours by US customs officials this week while on his way to an academic conference in Texas.
Henry Rousso, 62, a specialist in the history of World War II who has taught at the Sorbonne in Paris and Columbia University in New York, was held for questioning after his flight from Paris landed in Houston on Wednesday.
The Frenchman said on Twitter late on Saturday: “I confirm. I have been detained 10 hours at Houston Itl Airport about to be deported. The officer who arrested me was ‘inexperienced.”
Rousso was on his way to a Hagler Institute Symposium at Texas A&M University, local daily The Eagle reported.
While he was being detained Rousso called the university faculty who worked with immigration lawyer Fatma Marouf to help secure his release.
“When he called me with this news two nights ago, he was waiting for customs officials to send him back to Paris as an illegal alien on the first flight out,” The Eagle reported Golsan as saying on Friday.
According to Golsan, customs officials said there was a “misunderstanding” regarding Rousso’s visa.
The Paris-based scholar is currently a senior researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, or CNRS), in Paris, one of France’s largest public research institutes. His work focuses on France in WWII and the post-war period, and he has spoken many times at the Texas A&M University on the French Vichy government during World War II and the Holocaust.
He was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1954, but his family was expelled from Egypt in 1956.
From the Houston Chronicle in the USA:
A prominent Holocaust historian who was detained at George Bush Intercontinental Airport en route to speak at a Texas A&M University symposium last week, said Sunday that he might think twice before returning to the United States given the new climate surrounding immigration.
Professor Rousso on his arrest: here.
USA: Muhammad Ali’s son asked, ‘Are you Muslim?’ by border agents: here.
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Bumblebee football video
This video says about itself:
Watch a bee score a goal | Science News
23 February 2017
In experiments, buff-tailed bumblebees learned how to roll a ball to a goal (first clip), a task more bees mastered after watching a trained bee do it (second clip). When successful, bees received a sip of sugar solution as a reward.
From Science News:
Score! Bumblebees see how to sink ball in goal, then do it better
Lesson in six-legged soccer tests power of insect learning
By Susan Milius
2:32pm, February 23, 2017
Even tiny brains can learn strange and tricky stuff, especially by watching tiny experts.
Buff-tailed bumblebees got several chances to watch a trained bee roll a ball to a goal. These observers then quickly mastered the unusual task themselves when given a chance, researchers report in the Feb. 24 Science. And most of the newcomers even improved on the goal-sinking by taking a shortcut demo-bees hadn’t used, says behavioral ecologist Olli Loukola at Queen Mary University of London.
Learning abilities of animals without big vertebrate brains often get severely underestimated, Loukola says. “The idea that small brains constrain insects is kind of wrong, or old-fashioned.”
He and colleagues had previously challenged bees to learn, in stages, the not very beelike skill of pulling a string to reveal a hidden flower. Bees eventually succeeded. So the researchers devised an even more fiendish protocol to see how far insect learning could go.
Loukola invented six-legged sort-of soccer (or football for bees in London) in which a Bombus terrestris rolls a yellow ball about the size of its own body down a trackway to a central goal, where researchers dispense sugary rewards. This time, there was no pampering, no working up in stages to full completion of the test. But bees could observe a trained ball roller, a ball moving on its own (thanks to a researcher sliding a magnet under the arena) or get no advance ball-movement hints at all.
The 10 bees that saw an expert bee roll the ball and score three times before their own attempt succeeded in almost every trial at the task. Watching ghostly movement didn’t help as much, and only a few bees happened on the solution on their own. Social learning matters, but Loukola highlights the way bees changed the technique they watched. Most of the successful bees ignored the ball they had seen rolled and instead used one closer to the goal, doing less work for the same reward.
“Fascinating,” says Dave Goulson of the University of Sussex in England, who studies bumblebees. Ball rolling may not be part of routine foraging behavior, but he notes that bees do drag around nesting material, moving backward as they do when playing soccer in the test. And they occasionally remove fat almost ball-like grubs from the nest with a similar technique.
Exactly how the bees solved the problem remains a puzzle, says Bennett Galef of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who has studied social learning. He would like to know more details, for instance, about how untrained bees react to a ball.
Loukola often gets a different question: Could he train bumblebees to play a soccer match? He says he could certainly train some to score on one side of an arena and some on the opposite side. Then he might be able to study whether bumblebees could share a ball.
By sequencing the genome of the yellow-banded bumblebee, researchers have found that inbreeding and disease are likely culprits in their rapid decline in North America. This is believed to be the first time the genome of an at-risk bumblebee has been sequenced and it allows researchers to take a deeper look into the potential reason for their diminishing numbers. What they found surprised them: here.
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British government deports gay Afghan refugees to their deaths
This October 2016 video is called Desperate journeys: Afghan asylum seekers in EU could face deportation.
From ANI news agency in India:
Gay Afghans can be deported to their country, only if they pretend to be straight
26th February 2017 04:19 PM
LONDON: Under new British Government guidelines for handling asylum applications, gay Afghans can be deported to their country, but they will have to pretend that they are straight, as homosexuality is illegal in Afghanistan.
The Home Office’s own Afghanistan unit, however, has criticised the guidance, whereas human rights groups have denounced the same, considering it as a violation of international law, as stated in the Guardian.
The document, dated last month, clearly mentions the number of risks the LGBT Afghans face from their families, Afghan laws, and from Taliban insurgents, as homosexuality is considered a taboo in the country.
In the Guardian, from a reaction to the new send-them-back policy:
“We are deeply concerned at the suggestion that the prevalence, especially in the Pashtun community, of the practice of bacha bazi [pederasty] implies an acceptance of certain homosexual conduct,” warns the document, signed by the head of the unit.
“Its occurrence reflects Afghanistan’s inability to deal with child sexual abuse and paedophilia. It should not be associated with consensual homosexuality and attitudes towards this.”
ACTIVISTS prevented a charter flight full of asylum-seekers from leaving Stansted Airport late on Tuesday night in an “unprecedented victory” against mass deportations: here.
Father shot dead by Taliban in Afghanistan after being deported from Britain: here.
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Raccoon in Canada video
This video from British Columbia, Canada says about itself:
Raccoon Vs Rock Crab – Blue Planet – BBC Earth
22 February 2017
On the coast of Vancouver Island, the changing tides have a fascinating impact on shallow sea life. Raccoons take full advantage of the low tide to enjoy a sea feast in the spring tides.
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Anti-Muslim crimes in the USA, Trump silent
This video from the USA says about itself:
11 November 2016
After Donald Trump’s surprising victory many Muslim Americans are aware of the threat of increased Islamophobia. One incident in New York is very telling.
Fariha Nizam, a Muslim student, rode the on the Q43 bus Thursday morning. A white couple had boarded the bus near Springfield Boulevard and begun to try to take off her head scarf. The pair walked in her direction, and the woman gestured toward her hijab.
Nizam told CBS News: “She started telling me to take it off and that I’m not allowed to wear it anymore –She came towards me and tried to pull it off.” Other Muslim women have reported hostile encounters and harassment this week.
By Carol Kuruvilla in the USA:
2/25/2017 12:21 pm ET
Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes Are Spiking In The U.S. Donald Trump Won’t Speak Up.
“It is [the president’s] duty to repudiate bias.”
After much pressure, President Donald Trump finally conceded this week that the rise in anti-Semitism around the country “has to stop”. But some American Muslims are wondering ― does the president have our back, too?
Since Trump entered the White House, mosques have been vandalized and even set on fire, a prominent Muslim civil rights leader has been threatened with physical assault, and Muslim university students have been targeted with racist fliers and propaganda.
This Islamophobia is nothing new. Last year, The Huffington Post tracked 385 anti-Muslim acts in the United States, ranging from verbal harassment to physical abuse.
But Trump and his administration has had very little to say that would reassure America’s 3.3 million Muslims that their leaders, institutions, and sacred spaces are safe.
Corey Saylor, a leader at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that this organization is waiting on Trump to speak out, after a significant rise in anti-Muslim incidents over the past year.
“It is [Trump’s] duty to repudiate bias. President Bush went to a mosque to push back against anti-Islam sentiment in 2001,” Saylor told HuffPost in an email. “We are still waiting for President Trump to demonstrate the same leadership.”
Trump’s inability to understand the fears and concerns of American Muslims was apparent even before he won the election. During a presidential debate, when an American Muslim asked him directly how he would combat Islamophobia, he turned the question into an opportunity to rant about “radical Islamic terrorism” ― glazing over the woman’s concerns about anti-Muslim bigotry.
This week, American Muslims saw that attitude reappear in the White House. A reporter asked White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer about the rise in anti-Muslim hate groups during a press conference this week. But Spicer dodged the question, speaking instead about “radical Islamic terrorism.” Like his boss, he ignored the fact that Islamophobic groups are fueling hatred and even calling for violence against American citizens.
Catherine Orsborn is the campaign director of Shoulder to Shoulder, an interfaith organization dedicated to ending anti-Muslim bigotry. She told HuffPost that it’s clear from Spicer’s comments that there is a “there is a huge disconnect between what our fellow Americans are facing, in terms of anti-Muslim hate incidents, and how the administration is thinking about these issues.”
“They’re not demonstrating any level of concern for American Muslims to live in peace and security,” Orsborn said. “And we need our government to not only speak out against attacks on Muslims, but also show by their actions they they do indeed respect the rights and freedoms of American Muslims as part of the fabric of our country.”
On the campaign trail, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” which has since morphed into a travel ban that targets refugees and people from seven Muslim-majority countries. In the past, he’s claimed that “Islam hates us” and that refugees from the Middle East are “trying to take our children.”
Reports of anti-Muslim harassment spiked immediately after the election, with some leaders claiming that Trump’s rhetoric has emboldened hate groups.
At the same time, anti-Semitism has also been on the rise. The Anti-Defamation League has recorded a troubling rise in hate speech against Jewish journalists online. After the election, several schools and universities reported anti-Semitic vandalism on their campuses. And since Jan. 9, at least 69 bomb threats have been called into 55 Jewish Community Centers across the country. While no bombs were recovered from these locations, the repeated phone threats have caused fear and aggravation in the Jewish community.
Rabiah Ahmed, communications director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, told HuffPost that she holds Trump and his administration accountable for the increase in hate crimes against Jews, Muslims, and other minorities.
“It is their divisive rhetoric that has emboldened many to act out on their biases and feel justified in doing so,” Ahmed wrote in an email. “And it is their responsibility to undo this increasing tide of hate that we are witnessing.”
The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect is one of the Jewish organizations that have been calling for the administration to speak out on the rise of anti-Semitism in the country. The center called Trump’s statement against anti-Semitism a “pathetic asterisk of condescension.”
And like CAIR, the center is also waiting for Trump to speak out against the abuse that Muslims have had to face.
“The President’s Islamophobia, marked by his repeated phony portrayals of Muslims as more prone to terrorism than others, is responsible for creating the incubator of hate that foments the crimes we are seeing against Muslims in America today,” executive director Steven Goldstein told HuffPost.
Goldstein said that he was “devastated”, but not surprised, by the President’s silence in condemning anti-Muslim attacks. He called it the silence a “double-barreled danger” to Jews and Muslims.
“We have no pecking order in which we fight Antisemitism first, and Islamophobia and other hatred second,” he said. “We have to save every Anne. Never again must mean never again to anyone. Never again is now.”
Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, also called out Trump’s silence on anti-Muslim bigotry.
“Just as we saw the President denounce anti-Semitism earlier this week, albeit far overdue, we demand and expect the same be stated when it comes to anti-Muslim bigotry,” Pesner told HuffPost.
Orbsorn said that while a condemnation of Islamophobia is critical, interfaith activists like her need to see “more than words.”
“We need to see action that demonstrates that American Muslim rights are given the same respect as that that should be given to Americans of any other religious faith or background,” she said. “So, yes, we need to hear the condemnation of Islamophobia, but we’re going to need more than words as well to stop the waves of hate crimes.”
INSIDE TRUMP’S FIRST BUDGET DRAFTS To put it simply, the military is getting more money and most everything else — other than entitlement programs — is taking a hit. [Reuters]
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