This is an Ural owl video from Sweden.
Ural owl video
1
Daily Archives: February 28, 2017
Hungarian Jews, Roma, LGBTQ against bigotry
This video says about itself:
10 December 2015
Holocaust survivor Eva Bock describes antisemitism in Győr, Hungary during the early 1940s.
By Cnaan Liphshiz for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 27, 2017:
Roma Join Jews To Turn Budapest Club Into Anti-Government Hub
BUDAPEST (JTA) — Although she lives in the undisputed nightlife capital of Central Europe, Andi Angelip knows of only a handful of bars here where she is truly comfortable bringing a date.
Angelip, a 19-year-old student and activist for lesbian and gay rights, said she avoids “rainbow” establishments that cater only to homosexuals. Yet in a country where violent far-right activists regularly intimidate gays and lesbians, she also avoids romantic situations in mainstream clubs.
“It’s not so comfortable to be a minority in a country whose politicians preach for discrimination on a daily basis,” she told JTA last month.
Two years ago, Angelip found at least one place where she does feel comfortable: an avant-garde Jewish community center called Aurora. Since its reopening in 2014 in a poor neighborhood of Budapest, it has become one of the city’s hippest coffee bars – and a major hub for social and opposition activists fighting the policies of Hungary’s right-wing government.
“I come here because it’s just a cool place, but also because I feel safe and comfortable here, like I belong,” said Angelip, who is not a part of Hungary’s Jewish population of approximately 100,000.
She is not the only minority rights activist who regards Aurora, a 6,500-square-foot center located in a small building in the crime-stricken 8th District, as a sanctuary from reality in Hungary. Critics of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government here say it is mainstreaming hate crime and Holocaust revisionism, as well as promoting censorship of the press.
Marom, the Jewish association that runs and owns Aurora as part of its outreach mission to young unaffiliated Hungarian Jews, provides office space and facilities to about a dozen non-Jewish activist groups committed to fighting these perceived trends. They include the Roma Press Center, Budapest Pride, the Migszol refugee advocacy group and the Zold Pok agency for social activism.
While Angelip and a female friend chatted over beer on a recent Monday in the Aurora bar – a cozy space with 1970s décor and music by the French protest singer Manu Chao — Marom’s staff of about 12 met in their upstairs office to review last year’s activities, including the group’s weekly Shabbat services in their small egalitarian synagogue and celebrations of Jewish holidays.
In addition to religious services, Marom also organizes educational activities in schools about the Holocaust, programs for street children, and cultural events like film screenings and experimental music concerts. It also hosts political discussions, such as a sold-out Jan. 30 debate on populism featuring László Majtényi, an outspoken critic of Orban.
“We work with non-affiliated Jews who would never go to a synagogue or even the Balint Center,” said Adam Schoenberger, the president of Marom, referring to the Jewish community center in central Budapest funded by the Joint Distribution Committee. “So we try to sneak Judaism into our programming, just to give them a taste and whet their appetite: a klezmer concert here, a Hanukkah candle lighting there.”
As Schoenberger talks to a visitor, in an adjacent room three activists from the Roma Press Center hammer out a strategy for covering the landmark trial at the European Court of Human Rights on the role of Hungarian police in allowing hundreds of rioters in 2012 to attack the home of a Roma family in the village of Devecser.
The court’s Feb. 8 ruling against the police – one of hundreds of hate crimes against Roma, or gypsies, recorded annually in Hungary – was hailed by Amnesty International as a “drop of hope in a sea of fear.”
“Not only is the far right party, Jobbik, the third largest in parliament, but the ruling Fidesz party has drifter further and further in its negative attitudes towards Roma,” the group said.
Against this backdrop, and amid a government-led crackdown on independent media, the Roma Press Center is “the only outlet that will bring the news about assaults in the countryside to the few news portals that are still not muzzled by the government,” Schoenberger said. “We find it very important that they be a part of Aurora.”
The press center, a nongovernment organization with a shoestring budget, receives a significant discount on rent from Marom.
The cooperation with Marom revolutionized the work of the Roma center, which was founded in 1995, according to the organization’s president, Szilvia Suri.
“We were renting office space in the center before we came here,” she said. “It was more expensive but more crucially, we were isolated there, whereas at Aurora we are better connected not only to the other organizations working here, but to the many Roma people who live in the 8th District.”
The Jewish-Roma partnership at Aurora is unusual in a country where the two minorities rarely act in unison, according to Eszter Hajdu, a Hungarian filmmaker who has studied that relationship.
“While both groups encounter some xenophobia, the Roma are far more vulnerable,” Hajdu said. And while Jewish groups at times participate in educational and charitable activities to assist Roma, “I can’t say the Jewish community is the first one to offer help” to the other minority, she added. She also said that part of the problem are negative biases each group holds of the other in Hungary.
The discounts that Marom offered its partner groups last year on using Aurora facilities and utilities amounted to $25,000 — a substantial sum in a country where the average monthly salary is about half that of the United States. Marom generates 90 percent of its annual budget and receives the rest from donations by JDC, the UJA-Federation of New York, Masorti Olami and others.
Building an alliance of liberal groups would be unremarkable for a Jewish organization in most other Western countries. But in Hungary, it places Aurora squarely at the center of opposition to a government-led campaign to root out foreign-funded grassroots organizations that do not conform to the party line, and to significantly limit the work of nongovernmental groups to local funding only.
Officials from Orban’s Fidesz party have already vowed to root out the network of NGOs that receive funding from the liberal Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, who is Jewish, and have limited the work of other groups with funding from Norway. Now, most other local groups with a progressive agenda are bracing for intervention by the government.
Marom has experience with such intervention.
In 2014, Budapest officials kicked the group out of its former site in the city center on a building safety pretext. The eviction notice came two days after opposition activists used the space to plan an anti-government sit-in.
It was one of several opposition activities hosted by Marom in recent years, including in the 2013 student protests. Marom’s previous site was also the birthplace that year of the LMP Green party.
Mazsihisz, the umbrella group of Hungarian Jewish communities, has objected in recent years to perceived attempts by the government to whitewash Hungarian authorities’ complicity in the Holocaust, including by celebrating known anti-Semites. But Mazsihisz has remained nonpartisan.
And with good reason, according to Slomó Köves, a Chabad rabbi and leader of the local EMIH Jewish group, which is not part of Mazsihisz.
The government funds Jewish community life with hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, supports Israel in international forums and protects religious freedoms, Koves said. And while “it can be argued that it needs to be firmer on anti-Semitism, progress is being made there, too.” Ultimately, he argued, Hungarian Jews are safer and more secure about their future than their brethren in France.
But for Marom, which began in 1998 as an apolitical group, the penchant for opposition activism is inescapable, according to Schoenberger.
This is partly because “most unaffiliated Jews in Hungary seem to be liberal,” he said. But ultimately, “our opposition activism owes to the government’s war on core Jewish values of tikkun olam,” a Jewish concept of “repairing the world” and helping the needy, Schoenberger said.
“We did not choose to become political,” he added. “But when the government is targeting the poor, the different, the foreign – then we have no choice.”
REVEALED: Top Trump aide Gorka worked with anti-Semitic and racist groups in Hungary: here.
Related articles
Spotted nutcracker video
This is a spotted nutcracker (and vole) video, from February 2014 in Västmanland province in Sweden.
Related articles
British Blairite-Murdoch anti-Labour coup plot
This video from Britain says about itself:
Leveson Inquiry: Rupert Murdoch endorsed Tony Blair after getting all he could from him
25 April 2012
The News International proprietor admits that he only sanctioned Sun approval of Tony Blair after he had gotten all the concessions he could get from him.
By Lamiat Sabin in Britain:
Blairites‘ Soft Coup Plot Uncovered
Tuesday 28th February 2017
McDonnell: Murdoch-backed opposition moves into shadows
PLOTTERS seeking to oust Jeremy Corbyn are involved in a sneaky “dark arts” operation to get rid of him without sparking another Labour Party rebellion, shadow chancellor John McDonnell has charged.
Mr McDonnell said some Labour MPs in alliance with the Murdoch-owned media are hell-bent on “destroying” Mr Corbyn’s leadership to reclaim the party for capitalists.
He accused the “covert coup plotters” of wanting to undermine Mr Corbyn through “an exceptionally well-resourced ‘dark arts’ operation of the old spin school” in an article posted on the Labour Briefing website on Sunday.
He said the unnamed plotters were so determined to get rid of him that they were prepared to jeopardise their own seats and endanger the very existence of the party.
The warning comes after former Labour spin doctor Peter “the Prince of Darkness” Mandelson claimed last week that he was working “every single day” to drag Mr Corbyn down.
After last year’s failed coup attempt fronted by stool pigeon Owen Smith, the plotters realised a direct attack on Mr Corbyn would provoke an angry backlash from grassroots supporters, Mr McDonnell said.
They are destabilising the elected leader with “constant behind-the-scenes non-attributable briefings” to “chip away at Jeremy’s standing” every time anyone in the shadow cabinet made media statements or appeared in Parliament.
The “constant barrage of negative briefings also crowds out any positive initiatives or narrative from Jeremy and his team,” Mr McDonnell said, ramming home their narrative that the Labour Party is split.
He said these tactics led to “fake news” stories in the Times and the Sun claiming Mr Corbyn was about to stand down as leader — which were then perpetuated by copycat media outlets.
And civil servants’ leader Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the non-Labour affiliated PCS union, threw his weight yesterday behind Mr Corbyn.
“Many of those criticising the current Labour leadership were either complicit or silent when public-sector pay and jobs were being slashed,” he pointed out.
“We have long argued for a genuine alternative to the Tories’ obsession with cuts, for the kind of policies Labour is developing under Jeremy Corbyn, and we continue to believe this is in the best interests of those we represent and the communities they live in.”
A spokesman for Mr McDonnell said the article had been written and published in print last week in response to Tony Blair’s attack on Labour over Brexit, but that it only appeared online on Sunday night.
Asked about Mr McDonnell’s claims of a soft coup, Mr Corbyn has insisted he is “very happy” and that Labour is moving forward with policies and campaigns.
He said Labour would “learn the lessons” of last week’s by-election defeat in Copeland.
Labour lost the seat to the Tories but fended off a challenge from Ukip leader and serial fantasist Paul Nuttall in Stoke.
Labour is expected to face three more by-election challenges in relatively safe seats in the coming months.
Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram are planning to leave Parliament to take on the Manchester and Liverpool mayoralties, while Gerald Kaufman’s death on Sunday will trigger a by-election for Manchester Gorton.
Related articles
Winter-spring birds in Sweden
This video shows birds in March in Västmanland province in Sweden. When the ice is partially melting, winter is almost over and spring is about to begin.
Including adult and young whooper swans, Canada geese, common cranes and sea eagles.
Watching birds near your home is good for your mental health. People living in neighborhoods with more birds, shrubs and trees are less likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and stress: here.
Related articles
Trump, Hitler on German carnival float
At this time of the year, it is the carnival festival in Germany and many other countries. This photo shows a carnival float in Düsseldorf city in Germany.
The caption says: ‘Blond is the new brown’ (brown was the colour of the uniforms of Adolf Hitler‘s SA paramilitary gangs).
Paradoxically, of the four xenophobic politicians depicted on the float with blond hair, not one is really blond. Marine Le Pen of the French National Front dyes her hair blonde. So does Geert Wilders of the Dutch PVV. United States President Donald Trump has orange rather than blond hair. As for Adolf Hitler, on the far right of the float: official nazi ideology claimed that the supposed ‘real Aryan race’ had blond hair. The fuehrer Hitler, however, had black hair.
Another carnival float in Germany mocked Turkish President Erdogan; holding a book called ‘dictatorship‘.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP TO SELL VISION FOR BUDGET IN TONIGHT’S ADDRESS TO A JOINT SESSION OF CONGRESS As well as explain his plans for deep cuts to the EPA, State Department, and other parts of the federal budget in order to pay for a hike in military spending. Cuts to entitlement programs are not currently on the chopping block, which could cause tensions with Republicans in Congress. And try your hand at balancing the federal budget with this interactive. [HuffPost]
In an interview airing this morning on “Fox and Friends,” the president [Trump] says he believes Barack Obama is behind the town hall protests
Related articles
‘Restore predator, prey animals simultaneously’
This 2016 video from North America is called Bison vs Grizzly Bear – Wild Animal Interaction.
From the University of California – Santa Barbara in the USA, 27 February 2017:
Recovering predators and prey
Researchers show how simultaneously restoring predators, prey is much faster and more effective than doing so one at a time
If you build it, they will come. That’s historically been a common approach to species recovery: Grow the prey population first and predators will quickly return. As it turns out, that’s not quite the case. A new study has found that restoring predator and prey species simultaneously speeds the recovery efforts of both.
Published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, the paper by a team of scientists that includes UC Santa Barbara researchers used models and case studies to examine the pace of species and ecosystem recovery efforts. They found that tandem recovery of predators and prey is almost always more efficient — and on average about twice as fast — as sequential recovery.
“Previous work has shown how high demand for resources has led to the overexploitation of species throughout the food chain in a number of ecosystems,” said co-author Adrian Stier, an assistant professor in UCSB’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology. “We show how synchronized restoration of these species is nearly always the more rapid and direct path to ecological recovery. Restoration takes longer when predators recover first, but when prey recover first the system is more prone to volatile population fluctuations.”
Co-author Benjamin Halpern, director of UCSB’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and a professor in the campus’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, noted that the study’s conclusion is important because it offers an improvement on traditional strategies. Historically, about half of species restoration efforts employ a sequential, one-species-at-time tactic, most often beginning with targeted restoration of prey species first.
“Our results suggest that we need to fundamentally rethink the way we approach species restoration and recovery efforts,” said Halpern. “If you stop to think about it, our results make sense. Natural systems are a community of species that all interact; you need all parts present and abundant to function well — and synchronized recovery of species is the best way to do that effectively.”
Just as critical, synchronous restoration is also better for the humans who earn a living harvesting both predator and prey, say, for example, Pacific cod and Pacific herring.
“You might think the loss of income associated with reducing harvest on both species at the same time would be greater than reducing harvest on one species after another, but our work suggests that synchronous recovery is ultimately better for recovering the ecosystem — and better from an economic perspective as well,” said co-author Mark Novak of the Oregon State University College of Science.
Because of overharvest, declines of multiple animal populations are typical of many ecosystems. For example, population collapses seen in pairs of species — lions and wildebeest, Steller sea lions and Pacific herring, and mink and muskrat — are wholly or partially attributable to trophy hunting, industrial fisheries or the fur trade.
In both terrestrial and marine resources management, population restoration and the setting of harvest quotas have long been single-species endeavors. Even in the pursuit of more holistic ecosystem-based rebuilding of food webs — the interconnected chains of who eats whom — the dominant strategy has been to allow prey species to initially rebound to where they readily sustain top predator levels.
However, this new research found that such single-species strategies are less efficient than allowing predator and prey to recover simultaneously. For example, predator-first strategies are particularly slow because they lead to increases in predator numbers while prey species remain depleted, limiting the availability of food that would encourage faster predator population growth.
The scientists’ analyses included information from real-world examples, such as the recovery of aforementioned Pacific cod along the west coast of Vancouver Island, which proceeded slowly before the recovery of cod’s preferred prey: the Pacific herring.
A database of marine fisheries shows that past recovery efforts have been nearly evenly divided between sequential recoveries — those that prioritize predator or prey species — and the type of synchronous recoveries that this new research determined to be faster and more efficient.
“This suggests that there is room for improvement in many restoration efforts by coordinating the recovery of predator and prey species,” Stier said. “Our research emphasizes how existing marine policy, including marine protected areas and mixed stock management, offers opportunities to synchronize the restoration of multiple species.”
“The order and timing of how you approach recovery does matter,” said lead author Jameal Samhouri, a research fish biologist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. The scientists concluded that improving the efficiency of ecosystem recovery efforts by better coordinating the restoration of individual species has the potential to “play a critical role in shaping 21st-century solutions to environmental issues.”
Related articles
European Union climate agreement sabotage?
This 27 February 2017 video from the USA is called Sen. Bernie Sanders & Bill Nye – A Conversation on Climate Change.
Translated from Dutch NOS TV:
Dijksma has major concerns about European climate policy
Today, 08:42
The Netherlands is deeply concerned about the European climate policy, now that [the European Union] will possibly accept a proposal to reduce CO2 emissions less than intended [in the Paris climate agreement]. That said Dutch Government Secretary Dijksma in the NOS Radio 1 news. …
Also, nothing would then happen to the free emissions allowances which some companies sometimes receive as compensation. …
Dijksma: “Our hope was the European Parliament, but they have supported a not really ambitious plan. It is now up to the ministers of the European countries.”
Related articles
Grey-headed woodpecker video
Shell knew about global warming, covered up
This video from Britain says about itself:
What Shell knew about climate change in 1991 – video explainer
28 February 2017
In 1991, Shell produced a public documentary on global warming called Climate of Concern.
It warned that trends in global temperatures raised serious risks of famines, floods and climate refugees. But in the quarter century since, Shell has continued to invest heavily in fossil fuels.
• Shell’s 1991 warning: climate changing ‘at faster rate than at any time since end of ice age.
Translated from Dutch NOS TV:
Shell knew and denied hazards of global warming
Today, 07:59
Already in 1986, Shell warned in a confidential report about the serious consequences of climate change caused by CO2 emissions. [Dutch news site] De Correspondent writes today in a reconstruction based on internal documents, also appearing in The Guardian.
Then already they concluded that the use of fossil fuels contributes in a big way to global warming. However, the multinational corporation since then hardly changed its course and Shell almost exclusively invests in fossil fuels, says Jelmer Mommers, the journalist who has worked for the story in De Correspondent, in NOS Radio 1 news.
The Shell report from 1986 states that global warming could cause parts of the earth to become uninhabitable. It also warned of flooding, extreme weather and migration flows, in short, “changes that will prove the biggest in history,” Mommers quotes from the document. …
Sustainable
Despite the concerns expressed Shell waited until 1997 for their first paces in the direction of renewable energy, under then CEO Jeroen van der Veer. “But they found out that they there not good at that and that the playing field for clean energy is different,” says Mommers. So the greening rate remained until today limited to 1 percent of the total investments by Shell.
Completely contradictorily to their own early warnings Shell supported in the 1990s a campaign of US oil and coal companies to sow doubt and confusion about the findings of climate scientists who described the dangers of global warming. The campaign was intended to prevent government intervention against polluting energy. …
“Documents show that to Shell the climate debate is important,” says Mommers. “But the tragedy is that they obviously are unable to change in a way that is consistent with their own early warnings.”
See also here.
Documents reveal Shell knew dangers of fossil fuels and climate change decades ago: here.
COAL KNEW THE DANGERS OF CLIMATE CHANGE The coal industry knew the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions as early as 1966. “There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels,” wrote the president of a now-defunct coal mining research organization, in a published journal. [HuffPost]
Dear Kitty. Some blog 