This 23 May 2017 video shows a grass eggar moth caterpillar in windy weather in sand dunes in the Netherlands.
Marcus Bouma made this video.
Caterpillar in the wind, video
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Daily Archives: May 23, 2017
Neonazi scandal in German army update
This video from the Voice of America in the USA says about itself:
Evidence of Pro-Nazi Extremists in German Military Deepens
19 May 2017
Evidence of far-right extremism within the German armed forces is growing following the arrest Friday of four students at a military university in Munich. Police are trying to establish whether they have links to another soldier accused of plotting to frame refugees in a terror attack. As Henry Ridgwell reports, the allegations remain sensitive in a country where the 20th century Nazi history casts a long shadow.
By Christoph Vandreier in Germany:
Links established between neo-Nazi network and “Identity Movement” in the German army
23 May 2017
It is becoming increasingly clear that the far-right terrorist cell around First Lieutenant Franco A is part of a broad neo-Nazi network in the German army. This network is evidently linked to the “Identity Movement.”
Last Thursday, the media outlet NDR (Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland) reported on an aspiring officer who admitted to having telephone communications with Franco A. The officer candidate is suspected of breaking into a tank at an army training ground in Munster in February of this year and stealing two machine guns and a pistol. It has been determined that he was at the location when the incident occurred.
NDR based its report on information from the parliamentary Defence Committee, which met behind closed doors last Wednesday. The suspect is reportedly a student at the Bundeswehr University in Munich who allegedly had contact with the right-wing extremist “Identity Movement.” The stolen weapons are compatible with the arms found in the possession of Franco A’s suspected accomplice, the student Matthias F.
NDR reported that the aspiring officer exchanged Facebook messages with a second accomplice, Maximilian T, shortly before the theft in Munster. The stolen weapons have not been located.
Army officers Franco A and Maximilian T, as well as the student Matthias F, have been arrested. They are accused of preparing a serious criminal act endangering the state. They allegedly procured weapons and identified potential targets for a terror attack, including former President Joachim Gauck and Justice Minister Heiko Maas. Franco A created a second identity as a Syrian refugee in order to blame such an attack on asylum seekers.
The latest reports confirm that the suspected terrorist cell is part of much more widespread right-wing extremist networks in the army. In addition to the aspiring officer, investigations are ongoing into three other students at the Bundeswehr University in Munich. Soldiers in Bremerhaven, Torgelow (Mecklenburg-Pomerania), Bischofswiesen (Bavaria) and Munster (Lower Saxony) are also being targeted. Some of the suspects are associated with the Identity Movement.
This is a far-right group that espouses cultural racism and has some 400 members in Germany. “Their leading members come from the NPD (National Democratic Party) youth, radical student groups, and even the banned Nazi organisation Loyal Youth for the German Homeland (HDJ),” wrote Die Zeit.
No concrete proof of ties between the group and the neo-Nazi network has yet been published. But the group is reportedly extremely active at the Bundeswehr University in Munich where Maximilian T studied. Already in 2011, several media outlets reported that three writers for the new right-wing newspaper Sezession had jointly initiated the takeover of the student newspaper Campus by the Identity Movement. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, university staff feared “that attempts were being made to saturate the newspaper of the student body with the political agenda of the new right.”
But the three students remained largely untouched and expanded their network in the course of their officer careers. In 2013, they jointly published the book Soldiery—Searching for the Bundeswehr’s Identity and Vocation Today, which was celebrated by right-wing extremist newspapers and presented by the authors at the Library of Conservatism in Berlin.
One of the three writers, Lieutenant Felix S, is now one of the leading figures in the Identity Movement. He appears in campaign videos, marches in xenophobic demonstrations and publishes on new right web sites. He makes no secret of this.
The soldiery volume was funded by the Foundation of the German Army Association. Neither the Bundeswehr University nor the military Surveillance Service (MAD) responded to requests from the Süddeutsche Zeitung for comment on the matter, pointing to an official cover-up of neo-Nazi forces.
A glance at the list of authors in the book published by the Identity Movement group in Munich demonstrates how far these right-wing networks reach. One author is Marcel Bohnert, a major in the army and a participant in the training programme for the general staff at the Leadership Academy in Hamburg. He has published two militarist books that made headlines because of their anti-democratic tendencies and historical revisionism.
In the 2014 book Army in Turmoil, 16 officers wrote about their conception of the army. These officers depict themselves as an elite that stands in contrast to a “hedonist and individualist” society that concentrates on “self-realisation, driven by consumerism, pacifism and egoism.” According to the authors, this society has no understanding of “the striving for honour through a great readiness to sacrifice” for a “patriotic ideal of the people and fatherland,” and for “courage, loyalty and honour.”
Similar theses, together with the explicit covering up of Nazi crimes, were advanced in the 2016 book The Invisible Veterans. The book states that the Nazi Blitzkrieg and the “military triumphs” associated with it resulted from the “decisiveness” of the officers involved, whereas in today’s Bundeswehr, “the leader who enjoys taking decisions is no longer desired.” Instead, “the functioning bureaucrat” is the ideal.
The book continues: “A clientele [is] being targeted for recruitment that is more focused on the blessings of public service than the concept of sacrificing to serve,” including a readiness to “lay down one’s life.” It states further: “The ‘warrior instinct’ is tossed aside. All that is left is the soul of bureaucrats.”
The book advances in opposition to this the ideal of a “spirit” of “readiness to sacrifice, courage and comradeship,” which “was to be found in the army until the retirement of those generals forged in the Second World War.”
The right-wing cliques reach well beyond the officer corps. The editor of these two volumes was given space for a guest commentary by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung just three days after Franco A’s arrest. In it, he warned that one should not demonise “military rigour.” “Giving [it] sufficient emphasis in the training of soldiers is an essential precondition for ensuring that they will be able to cope under the hardships of operational reality.”
A day after the parliamentary Defence Committee was informed of the possible ties between the terrorist cell and the Identity Movement, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an article by Gerald Wagner explicitly defending Major Bohnert’s views. He declared that he understood the “military capacity to fight” not in the sense of technology and weaponry, but “rather as the mental superiority of an elite formed for this purpose.”
He also explicitly defended Bohnert’s two books and the militarist volume published by the right-wing clique from Munich. The officers wanted to “build bridges, without concealing the essence of a special type of soldiery,” according to Wagner. The authors considered “the capacity of military force experts to use force responsibly” as the “best means to guard against the excesses in question.” That the public was now refusing to “recognise their ability to lead” was a “particularly humiliating disappointment.”
The only problem seen by Wagner was that some of these declarations were “accompanied by the unpleasant smell of superiority.” He added, regretfully, “The damage is that it makes it much easier for society to avoid the challenge and instead regard terms like nation, honour, loyalty, obedience, valour, elite and fighting spirit as the internal enemy speaking.”
The political and media establishment in Germany is exploiting outrage at US President Trump’s arrogant behaviour to mobilise support behind an independent great power policy: here.
The far-right German army officer Franco A. has been freed from custody. The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) withdrew his arrest warrant on Wednesday: here.
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Badger collects nesting material
This 9 April 2017 shows a pregnant badger bringing dry leaves for nesting material.
Petra Rozendaal from the Netherlands made this video.
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President Donald Trump update
This video from the USA says about itself:
Guilty Trump Backer Gets Off Easy
22 May 2017
A millionaire who supported Donald Trump has been convicted of sexually abusing a housekeeper. Cenk Uygur, Hannah Cranston, and Brett Erlich, the hosts of The Young Turks, tell you what happened.
“He was a millionaire, in Washington to toast President Trump’s inauguration.
She was a maid, tasked with cleaning rooms that cost more in a few days than her monthly rent.
On Jan. 19, as the nation’s capital swelled with tourists and protesters, the millionaire and the maid met on the 10th floor of the Mayflower Hotel downtown, in Room 1065.
As she made his bed, he approached from behind and began rubbing her buttocks, according to a police report.
“This is very nice stuff,” he said, according to the report. “I like that!”
Such incidents are all too common in an industry where about half of employees say they have been sexually assaulted or harassed by a guest, union surveys have shown. Many go unreported because the housekeepers, often immigrants or women of color, fear losing their jobs.”
Read more here.
The US president [Trump]’s pretense that his policies will bring about an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is transparent window-dressing for a policy of escalating militarism against Tehran [Iran]: here.
The speech delivered Saturday by US President Donald Trump in Saudi Arabia provoked sharp reactions in Europe. While politicians expressed themselves cautiously, since they will meet with Trump at a NATO summit in Brussels on Thursday and a G7 summit on Friday in Sicily, several media outlets sharply criticized his speech: here.
The Trump administration will unveil a fiscal year 2018 budget today that includes $1.7 trillion in cuts to major social programs. The plan marks a new stage in a bipartisan social counterrevolution aimed at eviscerating what remains of programs to fight poverty and hunger and provide health care for millions of workers: here.
A LOOK AT TRUMP’S PROPOSED BUDGET SET TO BE UNVEILED TODAY Here are the winners — the military — and losers in the plan. [HuffPost]
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Black tern flock
This 22 May 2017 video shows a black tern flock.
Luuk Punt in the Netherlands made this video.
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Criminal bloodbath at Ariana Grande concert in England
This 29 August 2016 music video from the USA says about itself:
Ariana Grande – Side To Side ft. Nicki Minaj
From the World Socialist Web Site:
Explosion kills, wounds dozens at pop concert in Manchester
By our reporters
23 May 2017
An explosion just after 10.33 p.m. outside the foyer of the Manchester Arena concert hall, in northern England, has killed at least 19 people
22, according to a later report
and wounded 59. According to witnesses, the blast occurred just minutes after American pop singer Ariana Grande had finished performing and thousands of concert-goers were making their way toward the exits. Most of those attending the event were young people in their 20s and teenagers, with some as young as 12.
Emergency wards throughout the city were placed on standby, while nearby Victoria Station was evacuated and train and light rail services were suspended. Six hospitals are reportedly treating the injured.
In an outpouring of solidarity, Manchester residents rallied to assist the thousands of young people stranded in the city due to the closure of public transport. Locals in the area invited people to wait in their homes and assisted in contacting their families. Nearby hotels and clubs took in dozens of youth. Taxi drivers rushed into the area to offer free rides home.
Heavily-armed police have taken up positions surrounding the arena and across central Manchester. Stepped-up police operations are expected at landmarks throughout the United Kingdom over the coming days.
While authorities have not—as of the time of writing—released information on the nature of the blast, they have announced it is being treated as an act of terrorism. British Prime Minister Teresa May, in her first statement, said the explosion was “being treated by the police as an appalling terrorist attack.”
The official statement of the Greater Manchester Police declared it was “working closely with the national counter-terrorism policing network and UK intelligence partners”—a reference to American agencies in particular.
To this point, no terrorist organisation, including Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or Al Qaeda, has claimed responsibility.
Witnesses spoke of panic and terror inside Manchester Arena, which is among the largest indoor concert facilities in Europe, capable of holding some 21,000 patrons.
One man, Andy, told BBC5 that he was waiting for his wife and daughter in the foyer when he was hurled to the ground by the impact of the explosion. “When I get up and look round,” he recounted, “there’s just bodies everywhere. I reckon 20–30 bodies. I can’t say if some of them were dead but they looked dead. They were covered in blood and were really seriously hurt.
“The first thing I did was I ran into the arena trying to find my family. I couldn’t find them, so I pulled back to where everyone was injured, to physically look at people to see if it was my family. At the same time, I started helping the emergency services as best I could, while I was trying to get hold of my family.”
A woman, Emma, told Manchester Radio that she and her husband were waiting for their 17-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter when the blast took place. “It was definitely a bomb. It was definitely in the foyer—about 15 feet away,” she said. “We stood at the top of the stairs and the glass exploded… The whole building shook. There was a blast and then a flash of fire afterwards.
“We obviously then ran to try and find our children and fortunately for us we were all safe to tell the story.”
David, who chaperoned his 13-year-old daughter to the concert, told Manchester News: “The lights came on after the gig and people were starting to leave. As I turned to the left there was an explosion. It was about 40 feet behind us, near one of the exits. We thought it was just people messing about then it happened again. Another explosion…
“Then we saw smoke. Everyone just fled. Some people were injured. We saw blood on people when we got outside.”
At 1.30 a.m., a police bomb squad carried out what they described as a “controlled explosion” of a suspected bomb in Cathedral Gardens, a parkland and meeting place to the south of the arena. Shortly after, the suspected device was confirmed to have been a pile of abandoned clothing.
CNN subsequently reported that it had already been informed, by an unnamed “law enforcement” source, that the explosion was detonated by a male “suicide bomber.” …
The carnage and terror in Manchester has taken place barely 17 days before Britain votes in the snap June 8 national election. It will be exploited by large sections of the political establishment and the media to elevate terrorism and national security to the centre of the campaign, as took place in France, after an extremist, who was known to the authorities, shot police in Paris on the eve of the first round of that country’s presidential election in April.
I wish strength to all relatives and friends of the killed people, and recovery to all injured persons.
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Smooth newt swims, video
This 22 May 2017 video shows a smooth newt swimming.
Bregje Brinkmann made this video of her garden pond in the Netherlands.
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French president Macron attacks workers
This video from France says about itself:
France: Mélenchon takes aim at Macron during GM&S protest
16 May 2017
Former presidential candidates Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Philippe Poutou joined hundreds of protesters in La Souterraine commune of Creuse, Tuesday, who were rallying in support of GM&S factory employees facing potential job losses.
Mélenchon addressed a throng of reporters, stating “Mr. Macron has begun his term as the President of the Republic and has to go ahead with the process, but he bears responsibility. I personally hope that he will understand and listen.”
By Alex Lantier in France:
Macron prepares enabling act to slash contracts, labor rights in France
23 May 2017
Newly-elected French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing a historic assault on jobs, wages, and labor legislation, to be rammed through by presidential decree, in the face of overwhelming public opposition.
Details of Macron’s plans emerged Monday, in the run-up to his meetings Tuesday with trade union and business representatives at the Elysée Palace.
After next month’s legislative elections, Macron will demand an enabling act from parliament authorizing the president to decree changes in French labor law. “The reform of the Labor Code has been well planned,” incoming Prime Minister Edouard Philippe told the Journal du Dimanche. “We will now discuss it to enrich it and explain it. This means discussions with the trade unions, which are indispensable, and a parliamentary discussion which will take place during the vote of the enabling act that will allow the government to impose decrees in a context defined by the parliament.”
Philippe said that he and Labor Minister Muriel Pénicaud would work closely with the trade unions and meet bilaterally with each of the major union confederations. “But once the discussion has taken place,” he added, “we will have to act fast. We cannot wait two years to finish the job. Emmanuel Macron has heard the anger of the French people. He also knows how urgent it is to transform the country.”
The decrees being discussed indicate that Macron aims to tear up the entire framework of labor relations in France as they emerged from the Liberation from Nazi Occupation and the social concessions of the immediate post-World War II period.
Many of these decrees aim to re-introduce provisions into the 2016 labor law, which the previous Socialist Party (PS) government removed in order to halt strikes and protests against the law. The PS rammed the law through without a parliamentary vote, in the face of opposition from 70 percent of the French population, as riot police were sent under the state of emergency to assault protesters and striking workers. Nevertheless, in order to prevent a social explosion, many provisions favored by Macron were removed. He now wants to reinstate them. They include:
● Placing a ceiling on the fines that labor courts can assess employers for illegally firing employees. It was widely feared that the imposition of low fine ceilings would emasculate the labor courts: bosses could simply foresee and incorporate the fine for firing employees “without real or serious cause” into the cost of doing business. According to Le Parisien, the ceiling Macron is considering, three months’ wages, is half the current minimum fine of six months’ wages. The goal is clearly to allow businesses to hire and fire at will.
● Enabling individual firms to negotiate contracts violating industry-level contract agreements and the national Labor Code. Currently, firms can only negotiate contracts that are more beneficial to the workers. Macron’s decree would turn all this labor legislation into a dead letter, since firms could blackmail workers, threatening their jobs if they did not accept contracts inferior to the wages and benefits supposedly guaranteed by the industry-level and national agreements.
● Enabling employers who are proposing contracts supported only by a minority of trade unionists at the workplace to demand a referendum of the workers at the site on whether or not to accept the contract despite union opposition. Insofar as yellow unions are present in the vast majority of workplaces in France, this would effectively allow employers to dictate contracts, obtain minority support, and then demand that workers accept the contract or face the loss of their jobs.
Other proposals backed by Macron are inspired by anti-social legislation elsewhere in Europe, notably the Agenda 2010-Hartz IV laws imposed by Germany’s Social Democratic Party. These include pushing workers to enter into supplementary private pension schemes, a step towards eliminating the right to a state-funded pension, and enforcing strict testing of workers claiming unemployment benefits. This would allow the state to kick workers off unemployment unless they meet stringent tests to prove they are looking for work.
The Macron administration is trying to present these proposals as part of a plan to “modernize” France, notably by playing up policies ostensibly aimed at defending women’s rights. All France’s different maternity leave programs would be combined into one, whose features, according to one proposal, will be “aligned on the most advantageous program.” There would also be random testing of workplaces, supposedly to check that bosses do not discriminate against women.
This is a reactionary fraud, however. The legislation is a massive step backwards, submitting all workers, including women workers, to the diktat of the bosses and the state. The fact that proposals on gender equality include anti-democratic restrictions on religious liberty at work, and a ban on “proselytizing,” are an ominous sign: they could be used to allow employers to fire veiled Muslim women, and generally to feed anti-Muslim and pro-war hatreds.
The capitalist crisis and the austerity drive the European Union (EU) launched after the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and accelerated after the 2008 Wall Street crash, is undermining democratic forms of rule.
The Macron administration has no mandate whatsoever to carry out the program it is proposing. The labor law was deeply unpopular even without its most controversial provisions; former PS President François Hollande’s economic policy, which Macron helped formulate, had a 4 percent approval rating. Now Macron is advancing such a program after an election that he won largely by default, because he was facing deeply unpopular neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen.
Macron, a former investment banker at the Rothschild bank, aims to impose the arrogant diktat of the banks. Under Hollande’s presidency, as workers’ living standards fell, the wealth of top French multi-billionaires like Liliane Bettencourt and Philippe Arnault nearly doubled. With the world economy still mired in crisis, however, and France’s economic position and its weight in world trade continuing to fall, the ruling class is determined to squeeze even more money out of workers and place it in the hands of the super-rich.
The working class is faced with a political struggle against an absolutely ruthless government that is willing to resort to forms of repression unseen in France since the 1940s in order to ram through the diktat of the banks. The new administration is aware that it faces massive popular opposition and is making detailed plans to crush strikes and protests.
Last week, the media revealed that the PS had made plans for a coup d’état after the presidential elections, to be implemented had Marine Le Pen won. Its purpose would not have been to topple Le Pen, however, but to crush anti-fascist protests and suspend normal parliamentary procedure by imposing a PS government on Le Pen.
Incoming Interior Minister Gérard Collomb said on Friday that he will review the state of emergency and that he would support extending it yet again past its current expiration date, July 15. “I think at some point we will have to end the state of emergency. But is now the right time? Maybe not right after the formation of the government,” Collomb told RTL.
Under the state of emergency, workers exercising constitutionally-protected rights to strike and protest can be targeted with bans on demonstrations, arbitrary detentions, and house arrest by police. That is to say, the French capitalist class is repudiating the promises it made, in the aftermath of World War II, never to return to the arbitrary and unrestrained oppression of working people that characterized the Nazi Occupation.
For his first official visit outside Europe, Emmanuel Macron traveled on May 19 to the military base at Gao in Mali, to which 1,700 French troops are deployed in the context of Operation Barkhane. There, the newly-elected French president paid a full-throated tribute to the French army. Macron was accompanied by the chief of the general staff of the army and by two ministers, former Defense Minister and now Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, and the new minister of the Armies, Sylvie Goulard: here.
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Peregrine falcons in the Netherlands
This 22 May 2016 video is about a peregrine falcon nest on a pylon in De Mortel, North Brabant province in the Netherlands. The chicks are being fed.
There are also peregrine falcon nests in, eg, South Holland province in the Netherlands.
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English violent Islamophobe sentenced
This video from England says about itself:
Pregnant Woman Kicked
7 February 2017
A man who attacked a 34-year-old pregnant [Somali] Muslim woman, who went on to lose her unborn twins, has been charged.
From daily The Morning Star in Britain:
Racist thug jailed for kicking pregnant Muslim in stomach
Tuesday 23rd May 2017
A VIOLENT racist was sentenced yesterday to 47 months in jail for repeatedly kicking a pregnant Muslim woman in the stomach, after which she had a miscarriage.
David Gallacher’s attack on Samsam Haji-Ali and her husband Abdullah Sulamain on August 6 last year began with verbal abuse in the Co-op store in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, Aylesbury Crown Court heard.
Mr Gallacher, 37, then physically attacked Ms Haji-Ali in the store’s car park, repeatedly kicking her in the stomach, and ignoring her cries of: “I’m pregnant.” He also attacked Mr Sulamain.
Prosecutor Christopher Wing said Mr Gallacher told the pregnant woman: “You come here with your clown outfit on, you fucking people, you are the fucking problem in this place.”
Ms Haji-Ali miscarried on August 24. Judge Francis Sheridan branded Mr Gallacher “a thug and a racist” whose “vile conduct and abhorrent views are a thing of the past.”
Dear Kitty. Some blog 