Great grey and tawny owls in Sweden

This video is about a great grey owl in Sweden.

This video is about tawny owls in Sweden.

Saudi royals-Trump massacre in Yemen

This 3 August video from the USA says about itself:

The Saudi-US Agenda Behind Destroying Yemen (Pt 1/2)

A Saudi-led airstrike has killed dozens in Yemen’s port city of Hodeida amid UN warnings of another catastrophic cholera outbreak. Professor Isa Blumi of Stockholm University and author of “Destroying Yemen“, discusses the motives and impact of the unrelenting US-backed assault.

This 3 August video from the USA is the sequel.

Dolphin mother and unborn calf, video

This video says about itself:

Dolphin Mother Speaks to her Unborn Calf | BBC Earth

2 August 2018

Dolphin mothers can use their unique calls to let calves learn it before they’re born, so they will be able to follow them easily.

Chilean clerical child abuse scandal continues

This video says about itself:

Chile: Scandals Tarnished Church`s Image

3 August 2018

This evening we take you to Chile, where the prosecutor’s office continues their investigation into the accusations of sexual abuse against 73 bishops, clerics, and lay workers. This and more headlines now.

Eurasian siskins on video

This video is about Eurasian siskins.

Saudi warplane massacre of Yemeni fish market, hospital

This 2 August 2018 video says about itself:

At least 26 people were killed and many were left injured when a Saudi-led coalition airstrike hit a fish market in Yemen’s city of Hodeidah.

It turns out that 26 was a far too conservative estimate.

By Alec Andersen:

Sixty dead, over 100 wounded in Saudi air strikes on Yemeni port city

4 August 2018

The toll from US-backed Saudi coalition air strikes on a fish market and hospital in the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah Thursday has risen to at least 60 people dead and 130 others wounded. The bombardment, which has been all but ignored by the establishment press, comes amid a weeks-long siege of the western city and coalition efforts to destroy vital civilian infrastructure, threatening to sharply escalate the world’s most dire humanitarian crisis.

Saudi coalition warplanes struck a crowded Hodeidah fish market as throngs of residents packed in to purchase one of Yemen’s only abundant domestic sources of food. Witnesses report a chaotic scene as a warplane overhead fired upon the packed market, then continued to linger above the city. As people rushed the dead and injured to the al-Thawra hospital just 20 meters (60 feet) away, the warplane began bombing the entrance to the hospital, apparently to prevent the injured from receiving treatment.

By all accounts, there were no military targets in the surrounding area, nor even a noticeable presence of armed men. Rather, rights groups and witnesses argue that bombing of the fish market and the follow-up attack on the hospital served no apparent purpose other than to spread terror within Yemeni society following a series of attempts over recent weeks to recapture the city that have all ended in defeat or stalemate for the invading forces. These are comprised primarily of mercenaries from Central America and members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from the country’s east and south.

A 38-year-old Hodeidah resident, Alaa Thabet, told Middle East Eye that he was on his way home when, “I heard a warplane hover over Hodeidah. Then I heard an air strike target the fish market and the buzzing of the warplane was clearer after the attack. After that people went to take the casualties to several hospitals, including al-Thawra Hospital, but the warplane returned to hover again.”

Dr. Yaser Nour was working in the oncology center at al-Thawra Hospital when he heard the sound of air strikes and “saw the smoke rising in front of the gate.” He continued: “I was in a state of severe panic. Everyone was running scared while I was heading towards the emergency gate. I saw more than 10 bodies, including four women and a young girl.”

The Saudi-led coalition began its offensive against Yemen in March 2015 following the overthrow of the corrupt puppet regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh by Houthi rebels in 2014, leading to a political settlement that installed his protégé [and vice president], Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, before the settlement collapsed and Houthis captured the capital Sanaa once again.

The Houthis, a militant political movement based on the Zaidi branch of Shia Islam, today control the city and most of the country’s densely populated north, including the capital of Sanaa.

The Saudi-led campaign—which could not be waged without vital support from the United States in the form of intelligence, logistics and weaponry—has killed tens of thousands of people in the poorest country in the Arab world due to the indiscriminate targeting of civilians and deliberate destruction of infrastructure. Over the past month, the coalition has targeted water treatment facilities that serve the 600,000 residents of Hodeidah, leading to fears of a deepening cholera outbreak that has already infected over one million, as sanitation is shut off.

The suffering of the Yemeni people at the hands of the Saudis has been compounded by a US-enforced blockade of the nation, which relies on imports for over 90 percent of its food supply, 70 percent of which flows through Hodeidah. This has led to more than one-third of the population of 22 million being at risk of starvation.

Female common pochard in England

This video says about itself:

Female Common Pochard (Aythya ferina) at Chorlton Water Park, Manchester, UK, on 4th February 2018.

German secret service-extreme right AfD party collusion

This video says about itself:

Germany: Thousands of protesters march in Berlin against racism, AfD

3 September 2016

Thousands of people gathered at Adenauerplatz in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district on Saturday, to protest against the AfD party and against what they see as the rise of racism in Germany.

Protesters held banners and flags against racism while some made use of flares and destroyed election placards of the AfD. Demonstrators claimed that 6,000 people took part in the march while police estimated around 2,500 protesters. …

Block Occupy representative (German): “With this protest here today, we all target the AfD and this is right. No other party in the last few years has achieved in bringing together and spreading racism, social chauvinism and sexism.”

By Ulrich Rippert in Germany:

Head of German secret service advised far-right Alternative for Germany

4 August 2018

Hans-Georg Maaßen, the president of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), met with former Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Frauke Petry several times in 2015, advising her how to avoid nationwide surveillance of the AfD by the German secret service and having her party designated as “right-wing extremist.”

This was revealed in a recently published book, Inside AfD, by AfD dropout Franziska Schreiber. The 28-year-old author was a close colleague of Petry’s and was chairperson of the AfD youth organization Junge Alternative in Saxony.

“Petry informed me later that Maaßen had told her what the AfD had to do to evade surveillance by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which he had not wanted himself”, writes Schreiber. “They both seem to have developed a certain sympathy for one another.”

Maaßen is said to have advised the AfD leader to expel Björn Höcke, a representative in the state parliament of Thuringia associated with the AfD’s ethnic nationalist wing. In December 2015, shortly after meeting with Maaßen, Petry did in fact call for Höcke’s resignation and prepared expulsion procedures against him. According to Schreiber, she did this “at the urgent advice” of the chief of intelligence.

The BfV has in the meantime indirectly confirmed that Maaßen met with Petry. One generally conducts conversations with representatives of all parties, a spokesperson told the Süddeutsche Zeitung, not denying that the meetings took place. He did, however, deny that Maaßen advised the AfD or recommended the expulsion of specific leading members.

That there were close relations between Maaßen and Petry was already known long before the publication of Inside AfD. The news magazine Der Spiegel reported in early 2016 that they had “at Petry’s request” met several times in the fall of 2015. The magazine referred to “several AfD politicians”, including Petry.

There was talk even then of counsel given to Petry. It was understood that Maaßen warned the AfD leader that the Saarland chapter would be placed under surveillance because of extremist activity. Shortly thereafter, the AfD moved to disband it.

Maaßen has for some time declined to investigate the radical right-wing AfD. In early 2016, Die Welt quoted him as saying, “The AfD is not a right-wing extremist party.” According to the article, Maaßen spoke with “unexpected clarity” against surveillance of the AfD. The conditions requiring such an investigation had not been met, according to Maaßen.

Since then, the AfD has increasingly advocated openly for National Socialist (Nazi) and ethnic-nationalist positions. Petry, who as head of the AfD called on police to “make use of their firearms if necessary” against those crossing the border illegally, left the party because it was, by her own admission, too right-wing. Her successor, Alexander Gauland, has called Hitler and the Nazis “a speck of bird shit in over a thousand years of successful German history.”

Not only is Björn Höcke still a party member, he has triggered nationwide protests with several inflammatory right-wing speeches. At the beginning of last year, he railed against the “culture of remembrance” of the crimes of the Nazis, called the Berlin Holocaust Memorial a “monument of shame”, and accused the Allies of seeking to “rob us of our collective identity” and “eradicate us root and branch” with their bombing runs on German cities. Despite this, party expulsion procedures against him ceased under pressure from the party leadership.

Notwithstanding these developments, the BfV maintains its defence of the AfD. In the new 2017 Report on the Protection of the Constitution, which Maaßen and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (Christian Social Union—CSU) presented last week at a press conference in Berlin, the chapter on “right-wing extremism” does not devote so much as a syllable to the AfD. Their name appears more frequently in the chapter on “left-wing extremism”—as a “victim” of alleged “left extremists”.

The report reads as if it had been written at AfD headquarters. “Protests against the two party conferences of Alternative for Germany (AfD) held in Cologne in April and Hannover in December” are cited as defining characteristics of “left-wing extremism.” The same goes for the “persistent ‘struggle’ against right-wing extremists” and the fact that, in addition to the AfD, the “left-wing extremists” hold “the federal government of the Christian Democrats and social democracy as well as the party Alliance 90/The Greens responsible for the tightening of asylum laws.”

Whoever criticizes the far-right or rejects the brutal and inhumane refugee policy of the grand coalition in the Bundestag (parliament), is, according to the definition of the secret service, a “left-wing extremist” and a threat to the Constitution. Still more reprehensible, according to the report, is the collection of “information on alleged or actual right-wing extremists and their institutions.”

Maaßen’s meetings with Petry and the Report on the Protection of the Constitution make clear that the BfV does not “protect” the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution, but rather defends the AfD against all those who seek to exercise these basic rights. This is consistent with the policies of the federal government, which is made up of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the CSU and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). This grand coalition government has not only adopted the policies of the AfD, it does everything it can to promote the growth of this widely hated party.

With its decision to join with the CDU and CSU in a second grand coalition following the disaster in last year’s parliamentary elections for these, the parties of the previous grand coalition government, the SPD not only helped form the most right-wing government since the founding of the federal republic after World War II, it made the AfD, which received only 12.6 percent of the vote, the official opposition. Because of this, the right-wing demagogues of this neo-fascist party have unlimited access to prime time TV cameras and are able to freely spout their brown poison in the Reichstag—the very building whose destruction in a fire served as the pretext for the recently installed Chancellor Hitler to assume total power.

The grand coalition has adopted and implemented the demands of the AfD regarding refugees. Its policy of militarism and the building up of the state apparatus is supported by the AfD.

The BfV, which has more than 3,100 employees and a budget of 350 million euros at its disposal—and this does not include the secret police offices of the 16 states and their numerous informants, or “V-Leute ” —is playing a key role in the political shift to the right in Germany. This process recalls more and more the end of the Weimar Republic, with its conspiracies and political killings.

It was no accident that after the Second World War, many Nazis and members of right-wing organizations such as the Organization Consul (OC), which destabilized the Weimar Republic with political assassinations, were integrated into the BfV.

The links between the BfV and the neo-Nazi scene are notorious. The BfV was involved in covering up the background to the 1980 Oktoberfest bombing, in which 13 people were killed and more than 200 injured. After the National Socialist Underground (NSU), which murdered nine immigrants and a police officer, was broken up, it was revealed that at least two dozen V-Leute had been in the immediate periphery of the far-right terrorist cell.

This, too, was covered up. During the NSU trial, which lasted five years, the judge and the prosecuting attorney ruled out any investigation into this background, despite the insistence of the joint plaintiffs. Several V-Leute received limited or no authorization from the interior minister to speak before the court or a parliamentary investigating committee.

Maaßen, who claims to be unaffiliated with any party, has been a top official in the state intelligence apparatus for almost 30 years. In 1991, Otto Schily (SPD), then federal minister of the interior, brought Maaßen into his ministry, where he quickly became the head of the department on immigration law. In this capacity, he prevented the Guantanamo prisoner Murat Kurnaz, who grew up in Bremen, from returning to Germany in 2002.

In August 2012, Maaßen was appointed president of the BfV by then-Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich (CSU). A short time later, he attacked whistleblower Edward Snowden as a “traitor” and called for the media to collaborate more closely in the strengthening of state security. In 2015, Maaßen brought forward several criminal charges to initiate an investigation against two bloggers from “netzpolitik.org” on suspicions of treason. With this action, Maaßen unleashed a major attack on freedom of the press.

Resplendent quetzal video

This 1 July 2018 video, in French with English subtitles, is about a resplendent quetzal in Mexico.

I saw these beautiful birds in Costa Rica.

ISIS using American Raytheon weapons

This 3 August 2018 video from the USA says about itself:

REPORT: ISIS Caught Using US Weapons

“Readers, a small detective story. Note down this number: MFG BGM-71E-1B. And this number: STOCK NO 1410-01-300-0254. And this code: DAA A01 C-0292. I found all these numerals printed on the side of a spent missile casing lying in the basement of a bombed-out Islamist base in eastern Aleppo last year.

At the top were the words “Hughes Aircraft Co”, founded in California back in the 1930s by the infamous Howard Hughes and sold in 1997 to Raytheon, the massive US defence contractor whose profits last year came to $23.35bn (£18bn). Shareholders include the Bank of America and Deutsche Bank.

And they include United States President Donald J. Trump.

Raytheon’s Middle East offices can be found in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Kuwait.”

Read more here.