This video is about a common vole feeding on peanut butter at a bird feeder in a garden in Heeze, the Netherlands.
Mindy van den Broek made the video.
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Vole eats birds’ peanut butter, video
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Life imprisonment for Ugandan gay people?
This video from the USA says about itself:
Yup, She’s DEFENDING Uganda’s Anti-Gay Laws!
23 February 2014
“The right-wing women’s group Concerned Women for America (CWFA) expressed outrage on Sunday that President Barack Obama condemned a Ugandan anti-LGBT bill that would punish homosexual behavior with lifetime imprisonment.
According to the Joe My God blog, CWFA spokesperson Janice Shaw Crouse said that the president’s “arrogance is breathtaking” for saying that [the] Ugandan government should stop imprisoning and torturing men it suspects of being gay.
On Sunday, Obama released an official White House statement condemning Uganda’s proposed law outlawing same sex marriages and imposing lifetime prison sentences for repeated homosexual acts.”
Read more here.
From daily The Guardian in Britain:
Ugandan men to go on trial on homosexuality charges
Kim Mukisa and Jackson Mukasa face life imprisonment if found guilty in first such case since introduction of new anti-gay law
Barbara Among in Kampala
Thursday 17 April 2014 16.37 BST
Two Ugandan men will go on trial next month accused of homosexuality, the first people to be charged since a controversial new anti-gay law was passed.
Prosecutors said on Wednesday that they had sufficient evidence against Kim Mukisa and Jackson Mukasa, who denied the charges when they first appeared in court earlier this year. They have been held in Luziro prison in Kampala since December.
Mukisa, 24, a businessman, was charged with “having sexual knowledge of a person against the order of nature” and Mukasa, 19, with permitting a person to have sexual knowledge of him against the order of nature.
They are the first Ugandans to face trial on homosexuality charges, with an earlier case collapsing before it reached court and the majority of those arrested paying stiff fines to avoid prison.
Uganda‘s president Yoweri Museveni signed the anti-gay law in February. It punishes first-time offenders with 14 years in jail and allows life imprisonment as the penalty for acts of “aggravated homosexuality”.
Since the law was passed several donors have cut aid to Uganda, while others have diverted development support to projects that promote human rights.
Mukisa and Mukasa, however, have been charged under the 1950 Penal Code Act, which also prescribes life imprisonment if a person is found guilty of homosexual acts.
They are expected to defend themselves during the trial, which is scheduled to start on 7 May.
Britain: KFC ‘sorry’ after lesbian couple are kicked out of Bath restaurant for ‘heavy petting’: here.
USA: Mayor who fired lesbian police chief caught on tape in homophobic tirade: here.
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Newt eating frog’s eggs, video
In this video, common frogs in the water try to protect their eggs.
Still, a common newt manages to feed on the eggs.
Renée Sips from the Netherlands made the video.
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German corporate media demand destruction of anti-Hitler memorial for Ukraine war hysteria
This video says about itself:
In June 1941, German mobile killing squads, known as Einsatzgruppen, were dispatched throughout Eastern Europe. By the spring of 1943, the 3000 members of the Einsatzgruppen, led by highly-educated officers and aided by local collaborators in each country, had systematically murdered over a million Jews and ten thousands of Roma, handicapped, Poles, Russians, partisans and non-combatants.
In the 1960s, a hate campaign by the media of far Right German media baron Axel Caesar Springer brought student activist Rudi Dutschke to the attention of Springer press reader Josef Erwin Bachmann. To Bachmann, Dutschke was a “dirty communist pig”. On April 11, 1968, Bachmann tried to murder Dutschke, firing his gun at him. Dutschke did not die immediately; he died in 1979, after eleven horrible years with a damaged brain.
The Springer media empire, half a century after inciting this slow-motion murder, is now inciting war.
By Christoph Dreier in Germany:
German right-wing press calls for demolition of Soviet memorial
18 April 2014
On Monday, the right-wing Springer newspapers Bild and Berliner Zeitung (BZ) handed in a petition to the German parliament calling for the demolition of the memorial to the Soviet Union in Berlin’s Tiergarten. “At a time when Russian tanks are threatening free, democratic Europe, we don’t want any Russian tanks at the Brandenburg Gate!” the petition states. Two original T-34 tanks form part of the memorial.
Peter Huth, the chief editor of BZ and deputy head of Bild, stated that due to the events in Ukraine, “the fear of Russian tanks, which overthrew Hitler and a few years later moved against German demonstrators,” had returned. “Russian military units have marched to the borders of Ukraine and are threatening the freedom of a sovereign state,” he wrote. “The last Russian tanks in Berlin must leave!”
The memorial was established in Berlin Tiergarten in 1945 in honour of the fallen Red Army soldiers in World War II. It marked in particular the 80,000 soldiers who perished in the liberation of Berlin, some of whom are buried on the site.
Huth’s outrageous argumentation goes beyond the media campaign to date, which has supported the fascist-led coup in Ukraine and NATO’s troop build-up in eastern Europe, while portraying Russia as the aggressor. It is an attempt to rehabilitate German fascism.
With the taking of Berlin on May 2, 1945, the Red Army dealt a death blow to the Nazi dictatorship, which had terrorised the German working class, murdered 6 million Jews, and drowned Europe in blood. It ended a war that had been launched from the outset with the aim of physically liquidating a large section of the Soviet population and all of Europe’s Jews.
It is an incontrovertible historical fact that in the struggle against German imperialism, the Soviet Union bore by far the greatest burden among the allies. The Nazi regime was ultimately defeated by the Red Army and the workers and farmers of the Soviet Union. In heroic struggles, 14 million soldiers lost their lives. At least as many Soviet civilians were victims of the Nazis.
The T-34 tank Huth would like to remove from the memorial played a central role in the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany. In spite of the Stalinist degeneration of the young workers state, the Soviet Union was able to undertake an historically unprecedented programme of industrialisation thanks to the planned economy. From 1942, the T-34 was built by the thousands and surpassed the German tanks of the day by far.
The defamation of the Soviet T-34 tank as a “Russian tank” is a brazen historical lie. The Putin regime in no way represents the former workers state, and the Soviet Union was not limited to the Russia of today. In the battle for Berlin, not only Russians, but also Ukrainians, Belarusians and many other nationalities lost their lives.
Behind the demand for the demolition of an anti-fascist monument is the attempt to rewrite history and rehabilitate National Socialism. Previously, only fascist groups and right-wing radicals defiled Soviet memorials and called for their destruction. Now, the campaign is being led by one of the most powerful media companies in Germany.
In this, Springer Publishers is in good company. In February of this year, Der Spiegel published a lengthy article in which right-wing historians spoke in favour of a fundamental revision of German history. Without comment, Ernst Nolte was allowed to speak out in favour of placing the blame for World War II on Poland and Britain. Historian Jörg Baberowski from Humboldt University in Berlin was cited as saying, “Hitler was not evil.”
Baberowski has been working systematically in recent years to portray the Soviet Union as the real aggressor in the World War II. In his book, Scorched Earth, published in 2012, he claims that Stalin wanted to wage war on Germany. “Stalin enjoyed the war of destruction,” wrote Baberowski, concluding, “Hitler was poorly prepared to lead a war against a regime for which violence was second nature and whose soldiers were fully prepared to use it.”
The revision of history and the downplaying of National Socialism, which has found its sharpest expression to date in the call for the demolition of the Soviet memorial, is directly connected to the revival of German militarism.
To wage war again, the German ruling elite needs to trivialise its crimes in World War II. Since President Gauck, Foreign Minister Steinmeier and Defence Minister Von der Leyen announced the end of “the politics of military restraint” at the beginning of the year, a systematic assault on the anti-fascist and anti-militarist convictions deeply rooted in broad layers of the population has been under way.
To encircle and destabilise Russia, the German government collaborated with Svoboda, the heirs of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, in the coup in Ukraine. Springer Publishers, once one of the strongest advocates of the Cold War, supported this alliance and gave opposition politician Vitaly Klitschko, who is backed by the conservative Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a regular column in the Bild newspaper. BZ, Bild and Die Welt seek to outdo each other in their war propaganda against Russia.
But the war propaganda has had little impact thus far. An overwhelming majority of the German population are opposed to the actions of the German government in Ukraine as well as to foreign interventions by the army.
At the beginning of the month, the deputy editor of Die Welt’s political section, Klaus Christian Malzahn, complained in Welt am Sonntag that NATO was becoming increasingly unpopular. “A majority of 53 percent spoke out against NATO monitoring and securing the airspace of eastern European partners to guard against potential Russian attacks,” Malzahn reported, before launching an attack on this majority. “Obviously, many ordinary Germans believe,” wrote Malzahn, that the federal republic can survive permanently “without out-of-area military interventions and burdensome NATO operations.”
The Springer campaign against the Soviet memorial takes place in this context. The German government’s collaboration with fascist forces in Ukraine, who move from city to city destroying Lenin monuments and terrorising workers, has broken the dam. With the call to demolish the Soviet memorial, the Bild newspaper is attempting to mobilise the most backward elements against the anti-war sentiments of the majority of the population.
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‘Hundreds of thousands of birds killed by BP oil’
This video from the USA is called Gulf Oil Spill Birds – Don’t Let Kids Watch.
From The Lens in New Orleans, USA:
Scientists fear BP blowout killed far more birds than officially reported
By Bob Marshall, Staff writer
April 15, 2014 2:43pm
Almost from the start, wildlife advocates described the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as a war on the Gulf ecosystem. Few quibbled with that analogy as a record 210 million gallons spewed into the Gulf just 50 miles from one of the world’s most productive coastal estuaries.
Yet four years later, wildlife workers, especially those concerned about birds, are skeptical of one metric commonly used to assess wars of any kind: the official body count.
For example, the official count of brown pelicans killed by BP’s oil stands at 577, which doesn’t seem like a big hit on a population estimated in the neighborhood of 85,000. Similarly, the total of 6,381 for all birds killed in the Gulf from populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands would seem insignificant.
But wildlife specialists say those numbers are likely low by a factor of at least 10 — and no one should think the worst is over for the pelicans and a host of other less heralded bird species in the northern Gulf.
Accurate counts of wildlife deaths in spills are always difficult because stricken animals frequently crawl away to die or sink to the bottom of a water body, while others make easy targets for predators, said Melanie Driscoll, the National Audubon Society’s director of bird conservation for the Gulf Coast.
To compensate for those factors, spill specialists use multipliers supplied by computer models.
In the Exxon Valdez event — a smaller spill in a smaller area than the Deepwater Horizon — scientists put the number of dead birds at 225,000, a figure arrived at after applying multipliers ranging from 10 to 30 to the total number carcasses of various species that were actually recovered.
“In some cases the multiplier can be 12 or 5 or even 20,” said Driscoll. “I’ve seen a number as high as 50 by one group for dolphins and whales in this spill. So that would mean if 20 dead dolphins were collected, you multiply that number by 50, and you get 1,000 – which would be much closer to the actual damage done.
“In this spill I would expect the multipliers for birds to be huge.”
That’s because recovery operations during the Deepwater Horizon disaster faced additional complications. The spill occurred at the beginning of the five-month nesting season for pelicans and other birds, and it covered a much larger area than the Exxon Valdez — 68,000 square miles compared to 11,000.
“The decision was made not try to recover dead birds from the nesting islands to avoid causing even more deaths,” said Driscoll. “That meant most of those sites were not searched until late August or early September at the earliest” — months after the disaster struck, in April.
The delay meant adult pelicans, their eggs and then their young were being contaminated as long as BP’s oil was in Barataria Bay. Plastic and cloth booms placed around the islands to collect the oil provided only marginal protection because the pelicans’ daily food searches took them into the oil-fouled waters beyond the booms.
Less fortunate adults were completely soaked in oil, and the heart-breaking photos of their struggles soon became iconic images of the disaster.
Pairs returning to their nests with oil on their feathers smeared the toxic substance on porous eggs they were incubating. And when the surviving young were old enough, they walked and swam through the weathered oil around the booms.
Driscoll said by the time search teams entered the islands, many birds that had died from oil contamination likely had decomposed or had been eaten by scavengers. Nor could there ever be an accurate count of the eggs that failed to hatch due to the oil.
She said the real toll on all birds in the northern Gulf could reach six figures because the delay in counting could mean “thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of carcasses just disappeared.”
The location of this spill would only add to the multiplier, she said. In the sub-tropical Gulf, predation takes place 24/7, 365, which means anything of food value doesn’t last long.
“It’s an incredibly productive system so that means there is also an incredible number of predators,” Driscoll said. “And this was spread over a really huge area, which complicated the collection as well.”
The difficulty of coming up with an accurate number has been compounded by the paucity of post-spill research on birds in the impacted area, Driscoll said.
“Of the $500 million BP set aside for research on Deepwater Horizon impacts, dozens and dozens of studies have been done on oysters and fish, and I know of just two that have been started on birds,” she said.
“I understand the studies on oysters and fish; everybody needs to know what’s happening in the food chain. But we are four years removed from the spill, and we don’t have answers to questions like what the long-term impacts could be.”
Research by government agencies as part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment has been kept from the public. That’s because monetizing the damage done to fish, wildlife and habitat plays out like a personal-injury lawsuit, with opposing sides reluctant to tip off the other to their findings.
One study in Minnesota on the breeding success of white pelicans, winter residents of coastal Louisiana, is a cause for concern. October arrivals in Gulf waters, the whites would have missed most of the surface oil, but they spent the next six months feeding on fish in bays polluted by the disaster. The researchers collected 200 eggs that didn’t hatch and looked for evidence of oil contamination.
“The study is still under way, but of the first 30 un-hatched eggs they looked at, 90 percent had the chemical signature of Deepwater Horizon oil,” Driscoll said, “and 80 percent had the signature of the dispersant Corexit, which was widely used during the spill.
“Now there may have been other reasons why these eggs didn’t hatch. But what they found is significant — and it’s the kind of research we should be doing on many other species here in the Gulf, but we aren’t.”
One clue to the long-term impact of the spill on Louisiana brown pelicans could arrive this summer as many of the birds born during the disaster enter their first spawning season.
But while Louisiana residents are understandably focused on their state bird — which ironically was taken off the endangered list five months before the spill — Driscoll said the ornithological community has graver concerns about other species.
“Pelicans got a lot of attention, and deservedly so, but the reality is their populations have been doing quite well with all the help they’ve received from humans over the last 40 years,” she said.
“They have a fairly large population with as many as 70,000 to 80,000 in Louisiana alone, and many more in other states. But there are only 6,000 Wilson’s plovers in the entire Gulf, so losing even a small number of that species could be a real problem.”
In fact, the official list of birds killed by the spill shows only two Wilson’s plover carcasses collected. But that doesn’t assure Driscoll that the plover population escaped major damage.
“A body count in these spills is just that — a count of the carcasses that were found, not an accurate picture of how many were really killed,” said Driscoll. “What’s been so frustrating in our community is the lack of information.
“We just don’t know yet, and we might not for a long, long time.”
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Author Gabriel García Márquez dies
This video is about Gabriel García Márquez.
From Associated Press:
Gabriel García Márquez Dead: Nobel Prize-Winning Author Dies At 87
Posted: 04/17/2014 4:04 pm EDT Updated: 04/17/2014 4:22 pm EDT
Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez has died at age 87, a source close to the family told the Associated Press. Márquez had been recently hospitalized for infections in his lungs and his urinary tract.
MEXICO CITY — Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate whose novels and short stories exposed tens of millions of readers to Latin America’s passion, superstition, violence and inequality, died at home in Mexico City around midday, according to people close to his family. He was 87.
Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, Garcia Marquez achieved literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
His flamboyant and melancholy fictional works — among them “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” ”Love in the Time of Cholera” and “Autumn of the Patriarch” — outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages.
His stories made him literature’s best-known practitioner of magical realism, the fictional blending of the everyday with fantastical elements such as a boy born with a pig’s tail and a man trailed by a swarm of yellow butterflies.
His death was confirmed by two people close to the family who spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the family’s privacy.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” was “the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure,” biographer Gerald Martin told The Associated Press.
When he accepted the Nobel prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described Latin America as a “source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”
With writers including Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, Garcia Marquez was also an early practitioner of the literary nonfiction that would become known as New Journalism. He became an elder statesman of Latin American journalism, with magisterial works of narrative non-fiction that included the “Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor,” the tale of a seaman lost on a life raft for 10 days.
Other pieces profiled Venezuela’s larger-than-life president, Hugo Chavez, and vividly portrayed how cocaine traffickers led by Pablo Escobar had shred the social and moral fabric of his native Colombia, kidnapping members of its elite, in “News of a Kidnapping.” In 1994, Garcia Marquez founded the Iberoamerican Foundation for New Journalism, which offers training and competitions to raise the standard of narrative and investigative journalism across Latin America.
Like many Latin American writers, Garcia Marquez transcended the world of letters. The man widely known as “Gabo” became a hero to the Latin American left as an early ally of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and a critic of Washington’s violent interventions from Vietnam to Chile.
Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, a small Colombian town near the Caribbean coast, on March 6, 1927. He was the eldest of the 11 children of Luisa Santiaga Marquez and Gabriel Elijio Garcia, a telegraphist and a wandering homeopathic pharmacist who was also something of a philanderer and fathered at least four children outside of his marriage.
Just after their first son was born, his parents left him with his maternal grandparents and moved to Barranquilla, where Garcia Marquez’s father opened a pharmacy, hoping to become rich.
Garcia Marquez was raised for 10 years by his grandmother and his grandfather, a retired colonel who fought in the devastating 1,000-Day War that hastened Colombia’s loss of the Panamanian isthmus.
His grandparents’ tales would provide grist for Garcia Marquez’s fiction and Aracataca became the model for “Macondo,” the village surrounded by banana plantations at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains where “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is set.
“I have often been told by the family that I started recounting things, stories and so on, almost since I was born,” Garcia Marquez once told an interviewer. “Ever since I could speak.”
Garcia Marquez’s parents continued to have children, and barely made ends meet. Their first-born son was sent to a state-run boarding school just outside Bogota where he became a star student and voracious reader, favoring Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoevsky and Kafka.
Garcia Marquez published his first piece of fiction as a student in 1947, mailing a short story to the newspaper El Espectador after its literary editor wrote that “Colombia’s younger generation has nothing to offer in the way of good literature anymore.”
His father insisted he study law but he dropped out, bored, and dedicated himself to journalism. The pay was atrocious and Garcia Marquez recalled his mother visiting him in Bogota and commenting in horror at his bedraggled appearance that: “I thought you were a beggar.”
Garcia Marquez’s writing was constantly informed by his leftist political views, themselves forged in large part by a 1928 military massacre near Aracataca of banana workers striking against the United Fruit Company, which later became Chiquita. He was also greatly influenced by the assassination two decades later of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a galvanizing leftist presidential candidate.
Garcia Marquez suffered a strong official backlash to his story about how government corruption contributed to the disaster recounted in “Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor.” A dictatorship seized power and Garcia Marquez made a new home in Europe. After touring the Soviet-controlled east, he moved to Rome in 1955 to study cinema, a lifelong love. Then he moved to Paris, where he lived among intellectuals and artists exiled from the many Latin American dictatorships of the day.
Garcia Marquez returned to Colombia in 1958 to marry Mercedes Barcha, a neighbor from childhood days. They had two sons, Rodrigo, a film director, and Gonzalo, a graphic designer.
After a 1981 run-in with Colombia’s government in which he was accused of sympathizing with M-19 rebels and sending money to a Venezuelan guerrilla group, Garcia Marquez moved to Mexico City, his main home for the rest of his life.
Despite being denied U.S. visas for years over his politics, he was courted by presidents and kings and counted Bill Clinton and Francois Mitterrand among his friends. He denounced what he considered the unfair political persecution of Clinton for sexual adventures.
Clinton himself recalled in an AP interview in 2007 reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude” while in law school and not being able to put it down, not even during classes.
“I realized this man had imagined something that seemed like a fantasy but was profoundly true and profoundly wise,” he said.
Dirt poor and struggling through much of his adult life, Garcia Marquez was somewhat transformed by his later fame and wealth. A bon vivant with an impish personality, Garcia Marquez was a gracious host who would animatedly recount long stories to guests. Fiercely protective of his image, a trait shared by his wife, he would occasionally unleash a quick temper when he felt slighted or misrepresented by the press.
The author with the bushy grey eyebrows and white mustache spent more time in Colombia in his later years, founding the journalism institute in the walled colonial port city of Cartagena, where he kept a home.
Garcia Marquez turned down offers of diplomatic posts and spurned attempts to draft him to run for Colombia’s presidency, though he did get involved in behind-the-scenes peace mediation efforts between Colombia’s government and leftist rebels.
In 1998, already in his 70s, Garcia Marquez fulfilled a lifelong dream, buying a majority interest in the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio with money from his Nobel. Before falling ill with lymphatic cancer in June 1999, the author contributed prodigiously to the magazine.
“I’m a journalist. I’ve always been a journalist,” he told the AP at the time. “My books couldn’t have been written if I weren’t a journalist because all the material was taken from reality.”
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Good wildlife news from Dorset, England
This video from England is called Dorset Wildlife Trust Nature Reserves.
From Wildlife Extra:
1,500 acres of wildlife-rich land purchased in Dorset
April 2014: Nearly 1,500 acres of outstanding wildlife habitat has been bought by Dorset Wildlife Trust and its partners as part of a new conservation project in east Dorset, Poole, Bournemouth and Christchurch, called ‘The Great Heath Living Landscape’.
The areas purchased include: Lytchett Bay, Upton Heath, Holes Bay, Parley Common and Ferndown Common. These sites provide habitats for many rare and threatened species, including the Dartford Warbler and all six UK reptiles, including the nationally rare smooth snake and sand lizard. This purchase mean two outstanding areas of natural heritage; the New Forest National Park and the Wild Purbeck Nature Improvement Area can be linked together.
DWT’s Director of Operations, Brian Bleese said: “The purchase of this land is a real investment in the future of Dorset’s heritage, and will make a huge contribution to the quality of our natural environment for decades to come. We are very excited about taking the project into the next phase to help local people and communities benefit from the wealth of wildlife around them.”
The Great Heath Living Landscape is a partnership of Dorset Wildlife Trust, the Erica Trust, Poole Harbour Commissioners, Borough of Poole, Dorset County Council Countryside Service and Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust. The project is supported by Bournemouth Borough Council. Christchurch Borough Council, East Dorset District Council and Natural England.
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