After 19 January 2019 in the Schoorlse Duinen nature reserve came 20 January. At beach pole #29, as this Lensbaby photo shows, a jetty protrudes into the North Sea.
Early in the morning, a chaffinch and a great tit.
A buzzard flies across the path.
On and near beach pole #29, about 15 oystercatchers. A sanderling. A black-headed gull.
Lots of foam on the beach, as this Lensbaby photo shows.
Later, in the rosy sunset light, the oystercatchers are still present.
This 20 January 2020 video says about itself:
Bolivian men are protesting against femicides and violence in general against women. They do it as they peel potatoes on the street
This 17 January 2020 video says about itself:
The fangtooth, or ogrefish, has extra-long, sharp teeth and a face only a mother could love. This fierce-looking fish actually gets no bigger than the average adult human hand. The fangtooth is found in meso- and bathy-pelagic waters worldwide. Dark skin and scales provide camouflage in these dim ocean depths, assisting them with catching prey (fish, shrimp, and squid) and avoiding hungry predators (tuna and marlin). Their prominent lateral line system detects water movement and compensates for poor eyesight and low light conditions. The fangtooth has been spotted just eight times in the past 30 years of MBARI ROV expeditions.
This 21 January 2020 video about the United States presidential election says about itself:
“Nobody Likes Him“: Hillary Clinton spreads more lies about Bernie Sanders
Earlier today, Hillary Clinton did an interview where she said that Bernie Sanders “was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. … It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” Clinton also would not commit to endorsing Bernie Sanders if he wins the Democratic nomination: “I’m not going to go there yet.”
She also smeared Bernie Sanders with the Bernie Bro myth, and lied about how Bernie Sanders is attacking Elizabeth Warren, when the exact opposite is true.
All of this is based on lies; Bernie did 41 events for Hillary, Bernie is among the most popular politicians in the United States, and Bernie is supported by millions of regular Americans. All this shows is that Hillary still blames Bernie for her failures, and fails to see why regular people are buying into Bernie’s message .
‘I Like Bernie’ hashtag trends after Clinton criticizes Sanders: here.
‘Inexcusable’: Hillary Clinton, Who Lost to Trump in 2016, Won’t Commit to Helping Bernie Sanders Win in 2020: here.
What will Ms Clinton do if Bernie Sanders will win the nomination? Found a ‘Democrats for Trump‘ Super PAC funded by fossil fuel billionaires?
Top Democratic officials and Democratic-aligned media outlets are engaged in a coordinated offensive against the campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. In an extraordinary interview published Tuesday, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, denounced Sanders and refused to commit herself to support Sanders if he wins the Democratic presidential nomination this year: here.
This 21 January 2020 video from South Africa says about itself:
These Lionesses Have a Special Relationship
In the animal kingdom, it is fairly common to see a dominance display like this by male animals, such as elephants and lions. … However, we have never seen the above behavior between 2 lionesses!
22-year-old guide, Jason De Rauville captured a very rare instance where two lionesses try and mount at Phinda Game Reserve recently. We asked Jason to explain this unusual sighting and he told us what he saw:
“We were on our way out on an early morning game drive and came across some fresh lioness tracks. I was a tracker with one of the guides before becoming a guide myself. We followed the tracks for a while and noticed that a lioness had sort of “scent marked” against a tree so this stated that she must have been on heat. We followed the tracks further and met up with another guide who found two lionesses not far from where we were. We stopped at the sighting and watched them for a while.”
“I was very confused at first, I’ve seen dominance displayed by males toward each other, but never have I seen this behavior in females. We saw one lioness mount the other and decided to stay and see if it would happen again. I was so excited because I had never heard of or seen anything like this before. The wait paid off and she mounted again, this time I had my camera ready!”
“They acted like a honeymoon pair of lions and then lay down again. We left after the second round of mounting when they began to settle down and rest. It was the first time ever that I had seen this and after speaking to a lot of people, I realized that this is very, very rare. One of the lionesses is relatively young, she is also the much smaller one between the two – I’m not sure if that is maybe one of the influencing factors in what happened here.”
“There has not been much research conducted into why lionesses would portray this kind of behavior, but it was amazing to see such unheard-of behavior in the bush.”
This 23 June 2019 German video says about itself (translated):
The alleged murderer of the President of Kassel region, Walter Lübcke, was in contact with Combat 18 structures from Dortmund. This “combat group Adolf Hitler” was never resolutely fought despite the NSU terror series. Robin S. is currently active in the management of Combat 18 in Dortmund. He is the friend of Beate Zschäpe, the convicted Nazi terrorist. The two wrote love letters. They are available to CORRECTIV.
By Dietmar Gaisenkersting in Germany:
Germany: New links found between Lübcke murder, neo-fascist NSU and the secret service
21 January 2020
The links between the series of murders carried out by the neo-Nazi terrorist group National Socialist Underground (NSU), the murder of Kassel’s District President Walter Lübcke (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) and the secret service are closer than previously known. This is shown by investigative documents from the police headquarters of Middle Franconia, which were reported by the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND) on Saturday.
The documents substantiate the suspicion that the NSU continued to operate underground even after the death of its members Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, the arrest of Beate Zschäpe, and the murder of Walter Lübcke. A key figure in this network is Andreas Temme, who, as an employee of the Hesse state secret service, controlled undercover confidential informants (CIs) in the right-wing extremist scene in Kassel. Temme later moved to Walter Lübcke’s regional council, where he still works today.
Temme was already suspected in 2006 of being involved in the NSU’s murder series. He had been in Halit Yozgat’s Internet café, when the latter was the ninth victim of the NSU to be murdered, with two targeted shots to the head. He did not report to the police afterwards, and was therefore suspected of the crime, arrested and interrogated.
During the search of Temme’s apartment and his workplace at the secret service, investigators found drugs, illegal ammunition and right-wing-extremist propaganda in “large quantities”, according to a memo since discovered by broadcasters Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) and Nürnberger Nachrichten (NN). Despite this—and although his reasons for his presence at the crime scene were contradictory and hardly plausible—Temme remained untouched.
Victims’ lawyers and police officers have also long suspected that Temme was untruthful at the time. The then-head of the Kassel homicide squad, Helmut W., for example, declared in 2014 in the Munich NSU trial that he considered Temme’s description of the events to be unlikely. In 2006, he and his colleagues had considered two variants conceivable: Either Temme witnessed the crime but concealed it, or Temme had something to do with the crime.
New investigation files from 2006, seen by the RND, now show that Temme is also linked to earlier NSU murders.
Jürgen S., Temme’s close friend, had also been questioned by the police at that time because his business mobile phone had been located twice in the immediate vicinity of NSU murders—on June 9, 2005, in Nuremberg and on June 15, 2005, in Munich. Although the investigators at that time did not yet consider the crimes to have a right-wing-extremist background, they knew that there was a connection between the killings because of the identical murder weapon.
Jürgen S. worked as a money transport driver for a company in Kassel. His business mobile phone was permanently connected to the money transporter. Investigators therefore believe it is possible that the Kassel money transporter was used to smuggle the perpetrator and the murder weapon unnoticed past possible police checks.
The relationship between Temme and Jürgen S. was very close. In 2006, Jürgen S. provided Temme with an alibi for the first NSU murder in Nuremberg on September 9, 2000, when investigators from the Kassel criminal investigation department checked his whereabouts during the earlier NSU murders. He claimed that they had been at the movies together.
Jürgen S. told Nuremberg criminal police officers around the same time that he had known Temme since 1990. They had travelled together in biker circles and had maintained relations with a motorcycle club called “Wheels of Steel.” In 2006, the police also found on Temme items of clothing with emblems of the rocker gang Hells Angels. Temme admitted to knowing the president of the Kassel-based Hells Angels. Jürgen S. had arranged the contact for him.
In another trial, Temme was even suspected as a mole, according to BR, because of his connections to the Hells Angels, who had passed on internal documents of the Hesse branch of the secret service to the rockers. However, it could never be finally clarified who was the leak in the Hesse security authorities, as the Hells Angels remained silent.
According to the investigation documents available to NN and BR, Temme and Jürgen S. also participated together in shooting practice. The chairman of a shooting club in Kassel stated that Temme had been a good shooter and had later even shot competitively with large-calibre weapons (45 calibre).
Jürgen S. used his service weapon—a revolver of the brand “Rossi,” model 27, calibre 38 Special—as a training weapon. Thirteen years later, CDU politician Walter Lübcke was shot with a gun of this type. According to RND, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office is currently investigating the whereabouts of revolvers and other weapons from Schleswig-Holstein, which biker clubs such as the Hells Angels and the Bandidos are said to have sold to Hesse neo-Nazis. Among them were revolvers of the “Rossi” type.
Temme remained untouched after the assassination of Yozgat, and his role was never fully clarified because former Hesse state Interior Minister and current state Premier Volker Bouffier (CDU), other government representatives and the secret service kept a protective hand over him. Files of the Hesse state branch of the secret service, which could shed light on the background, were originally to remain under lock and key for 120 years. When a protest was raised against this unusually long period of secrecy, it was shortened to 40 years (!).
The closed files also include a 230-page internal report summarising the findings of the Hesse secret service on the right-wing terrorist scene over the past 20 years. The cover-up of this right-wing-extremist network may have cost Lübcke his life.
The neo-Nazi Stephan Ernst, who is in custody because of strong suspicion and who has partially admitted his involvement in the Lübcke murder, moved in this scene. He is mentioned 11 times in the 230-page report. However, the parliamentary committee of inquiry only received an abridged, 30-page version in which Ernst’s name does not appear once.
Ernst was friends with Benjamin Gärtner (code name “Gemüse”), who worked as an informant for the secret service under Temme’s direction. Temme had talked to Gärtner on the phone immediately before Yozgat was murdered. Before that, Temme himself had dealt with Ernst at least twice in an official capacity, as state Interior Minister Peter Beuth (CDU) had to admit.
Also, the claim by the secret service that Ernst and his accomplice Markus H. had not attracted attention with right-wing extremist activities for about 10 years and had therefore not been under observation was demonstrably false. It served to cover up for the right-wing extremist scene in which the two neo-Nazis were active all the time.
This 16 January 2020 video shows grey partridges in Dutch Zeeland province.
Laura Knol made this video.
This 19 January 2020 video from Switzerland says about itself:
Sixteen-year-old Swedish student and environmental activist Greta Thunberg joined thousands of climate change protesters in Lausanne for the ‘Fridays for Future’ rally on Friday, ahead of the 2020 Davos Summit of world leaders, set to take place next week.
“We are now in a new year and we have entered a new decade and so far during this decade we have seen no signs whatsoever that real climate action is coming, and that has to change,” Thunberg said addressing the crowd.
She added, “young people from all across the globe have been school striking for their right for a future every Friday and for me personally this is week 74 of Fridays for future protests.”
Thunberg went on to say “to the world leaders and those in power, I would like to say that you haven’t seen anything yet; you have not seen the last of us we can assure you that.”
By Niles Niemuth:
The oligarchs assemble at Davos
21 January 2020
Hundreds of bankers, corporate executives, celebrities, and heads of state and cabinet members have arrived in Davos, Switzerland, to take part in the 50th annual World Economic Forum (WEF), which begins Tuesday.
With the wealth of the world’s billionaires up by 25 percent in the last year alone, the Davos attendees have much to celebrate. But looking over the snow-capped mountains of Switzerland, the oligarchs see themselves beset by a tide of social opposition and resentment.
WEF founder Klaus Schwab warned in a statement ahead of the meeting that the world is at a “critical crossroads,” noting that, “People are revolting against the economic ‘elites’ they believe have betrayed them.”
Indeed, the meeting is being held amid a global upsurge of social protests over the past year from Chile and Puerto Rico, Sudan and Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon, to Hong Kong and India, to the United States and Mexico.
Across the world, protests fueled by growing social and economic inequality are continuing and expected to grow in 2020, including in France, where the year began with mass strikes against President Emmanuel Macron’s proposed pension cuts.
Ahead of their meeting, the WEF published a global risks report which noted that members ranked “domestic political polarization” in a virtual tie for their number one concern, up from ninth last year.
Meanwhile, the annual Edleman Trust Barometer survey found that a majority of people around the world think that capitalism is doing more harm than good. The survey found a global discrediting of all institutions, with governments, the media, business and NGOs all seen by masses of people as unethical and incompetent.
Ahead of the event, the British charity Oxfam released its annual report on social inequality, which it declared to be “out of control.”
According to Oxfam, the world’s billionaire population alone, just 2,153 people—the number of people which would fit comfortably on a modern cruise ship—control more wealth than the 4.6 billion poorest people in the world.
Meanwhile the top 1 percent collectively has twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people, nearly the entire world’s population.
Placing the mind-boggling gap between the rich and poor in perspective, Oxfam notes: “If everyone were to sit on their wealth piled up in $100 bills, most of humanity would be sitting on the floor. A middle-class person in a rich country would be sitting at the height of a chair. The world’s two richest men would be sitting in outer space.”
The conclave in Davos is an opportunity for the capitalist elite to posture as enlightened reformers while cutting backroom deals aimed at funneling ever more wealth from the bottom to the top, in the privacy of the exclusive Alpine resort town and under the close guard of Swiss police snipers and their own personal security retinues.
The theme for this year’s meeting is “Stakeholders for a cohesive and sustainable world,” with a focus on the issue of climate change. Events headlined by teenage activist Greta Thunberg are being given top billing and Britain’s Prince Charles is expected to deliver a talk on “how to save the planet.”
The billionaires and millionaires in attendance will be able to show their commitment to combatting global warming by refueling their private jets with “greener” sustainable aviation fuel available at Zurich Airport’s private terminal. Attendees are being encouraged to walk on foot from venue to venue in order to reduce their personal carbon footprint.
American President Donald Trump, who set off for Davos yesterday, is set to deliver a “special address” today, in his second trip to the World Economic Forum.
The red-carpet treatment for Trump, a war criminal who has torn thousands of immigrant children from their families, and who just weeks ago brought the planet to the cusp of World War III, explodes the event’s humanitarian pretenses.
New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin commented, “With the stock market at record highs… there is an increasing sense” that Trump “will be accepted, if not embraced (although some attendees may roll their eyes behind his back) when he arrives on Tuesday.”
Sorkin concluded, “Mr. Trump may be the new Davos Man”.
The attendees’ warm reception for Trump expresses the embrace of dictatorship and fascistic forces on the part of the financial oligarchy. Feeling themselves surrounded by social opposition, the oligarchs are turning ever more directly to dictatorial forms of rule.
As the attendees give moralizing sermons about “sustainability” and praise each other’s philanthropic efforts, in their minds will be the fact that most of the world knows that they—the oligarchs—are the cause of the world’s problems.
It is they who benefit from wars, it is they who promote the rise of fascism and who are waging a frontal attack on democratic rights. And it is they who are responsible for the poverty and social misery afflicting the world’s working population.
The entry into struggle by millions of people all over the world is in fact a recognition of this fact, combined with a determination to oppose it. However, any solution to the crises confronting the overwhelming majority of the world’s people above all requires the expropriation of the financial parasites gathered this week in Switzerland.
The seizure of the wealth of little more than 2,000 people under the democratic control of the international working class would lay the basis for providing billions of people with the food, water, education, health care, culture, internet access and housing which are their fundamental social rights. This social necessity of expropriating their ill-begotten wealth is inseparable from the overthrow of the capitalist system and the socialist transformation of society.
President Donald Trump has indicated he is considering cutting funding to entitlement programs such as Medicare within the next year. In an interview at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Trump said social programs would be targeted to reduce the federal deficit: here.
This 20 January 2020 video shows a red squirrel sharing a tree with a ring-necked parakeet couple.
Jacob Knijpers made this video in Eindhoven in the Netherlands.
This 28 October 2019 video says about itself:
U.S. Spills The Beans: Trump Wants To ‘seize’ Syrian Oil
Trump Tells The World That He Wants Syrian Oil For The U.S.
From daily News Line in Britain:
EIGHT EU nations: France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands and Portugal will support a European-led naval mission in the Strait of Hormuz, France’s Foreign Ministry announced yesterday.
The initiative to send European warships to the Gulf seemed dead in the water last year when the UK announced that it would be joining a US-led maritime coalition in the region.
However, France resurrected the plan yesterday, pushing for an alternative European-led maritime security coalition in the Persian Gulf, opening the prospect of both a US and EU anti-Iranian force in the Strait of Hormuz.
The US is seeking to send a naval coalition to police the Persian Gulf including Australia, Bahrain, the UK, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Israel. …
The Strait is in some parts less than 21 nautical miles wide, yet a third of the world’s liquefied natural gas and almost 25% of total global oil consumption passes through it, giving it extreme strategic importance.
Tensions in the Persian Gulf began escalating in May 2019, after the US announced that it would be deploying a carrier strike group to the region to counter an unspecified ‘Iranian threat’ to its interests.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 