This 30 January 2020 video says about itself:
“Dino-mite” invention: Lily Wilder, 4, finds 215-million-year-old ‘two-footed’ dinosaur footprint
A girl from Wales has discovered a perfectly preserved 215-million-year-old dinosaur print, described as the ‘finest’ of its type found in 10 years.
Read more here.
From daily The Morning Star in Britain, 24 July 2020:
Statue of ‘sadistic’ slaver who tortured a 14-year-old girl removed from Cardiff city hall
A CARDIFF statue of a “sadistic” slaver who had a teenage girl tortured was boarded up today following a vote to have it removed from in front of the city hall.
The marble memorial to Sir Thomas Picton has stood there since 1916, when it was unveiled by future prime minister David Lloyd George as part of a series depicting “heroes of Wales.”
Picton was the most senior British officer killed at the Battle of Waterloo but was also known for having used the slave trade to amass a considerable fortune.
He was the colonial governor of Trinidad from 1797 to 1803, during which “highly brutal” time he had a dozen slaves executed, and in 1806, Picton was found guilty of having ordered the torture of a 14-year-old mixed-race girl.
The torture of Louisa Calderon, which involved her being suspended with rope by one arm above a spike in the floor, was an attempt to get her to confess to stealing from a businessman she lived with as his mistress.
Picton was never sentenced and the verdict was overturned following a retrial two years later.
Cardiff’s Lord Mayor Dan De’Ath, the first black person to hold the post, called for the statue of the “sadistic 19th-century slave-owner” to be taken down.
The council voted to remove the statue from the Marble Hall of Heroes on Thursday night with 57 in favour, five against and nine abstentions.
Mr De’Ath said: “I’m delighted. I think the way Cardiff has gone about the whole thing has been the right way. We’ve used democratic means to take it down.
“Most people were incredibly supportive. They recognise the significance of the statue and what an affront it is to black people. Black lives do matter.”
This 10 April 2020 video is called Wales People’s Assembly – Fighting for our future in a time of coronavirus.
This 27 December 2019 video says about itself:
Watch a puffin use a stick as a feather-scratching tool | Science News
A remote motion-sensitive camera captured a puffin on Grimsey Island in Iceland picking up a stick and using it to scratch its feathers in July 2018. It’s the second time researchers studying puffins have spotted such tool use and the first time it’s been documented in seabirds.
By Jonathan Lambert, 30 December 2019:
Stick-toting puffins offer the first evidence of tool use in seabirds
Two birds observed four years and a sea apart turned sticks into feather scratchers
Annette Fayet was scanning a colony of Atlantic puffins off the coast of Wales when something caught her eye. A puffin, gently bobbing on the sea, held a stick in its orange-black bill. Then, the seabird used it to scratch its back.
“I was surprised and excited,” says Fayet, an ecologist at the University of Oxford who studies puffin migration. Puffins (Fratercula arctica<) had never been seen using tools. In fact, no seabird had.
Fayet recorded the unusual behavior in her notebook, but it would take four more years before she got photographic evidence. In 2018 on Grimsey Island in Iceland, one of her motion-sensitive camera captured a puffin snatching a stick from the ground and using it to scratch its chest feathers.
Those observations, described December 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represent the only known example of a bird in the wild using a tool to scratch itself.
Scientists have long known that some birds use tools, mostly to extract food. Stick-wielding crows wow biologists with their ingenuity (SN: 9/14/16), some parrots grind down seashells with pebbles and Egyptian vultures can crack ostrich eggs with rocks. But seabirds, which tend to have smaller brains, were written off as prospective tool users, Fayet says. The puffin discovery suggests that tool use in birds may be more widespread and varied than previously thought, she and her colleagues say.
“I’m not surprised that seabirds can use tools,” says Corina Logan, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the study. She says so many creatures’ cognitive abilities remain undiscovered because detecting them takes so much time and energy.
Despite the small sample size, Logan says she’s convinced puffins can use tools in part because the behavior was seen in two populations four years and 1,700 kilometers apart. Most tool use in birds revolves around eating, but this study “expands our predictions about which species engage in [tool use] and why they might need or want to do so.”
The puffins might be using sticks to flick ticks, a common puffin parasite, from their plumage, Fayet and her colleagues suggest. Summer 2018 in Iceland, when the behavior was caught on video, was an especially bad tick season.
This 26 June 2019 video is called I, Daniel Blake. Full Movie in HD.
By Marcus Barnett in Britain:
Monday, November 18, 2019
Campaigners call for benefit assessment ban after man dies in jobcentre
FILM director Ken Loach backed campaigners calling for an immediate ban on benefit assessments today after a man deemed “fit for work” died in a jobcentre.
The man had been waiting for an appointment to discuss his benefit claims, having been declared “fit for work” earlier this year.
Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) called on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to shelve all personal independence payments (Pip) and employment and support allowance (ESA) assessments, after a 65-year-old man was found unconscious in a chair on Friday morning at the Llanelli jobcentre in Carmarthenshire.
Mr Loach, whose 2016 drama I, Daniel Blake focused on a man’s death at the hands of the benefits system, told the Morning Star that he supported DPAC’s call “every step of the way.”
He said: “What has happened really was disgraceful. The man was only 65 — he only had a few more months to go and he would have been retired anyway.
“Such is the brutality of it, but it’s clear that the Tories have no intention of changing their harsh system.
“We have to vote them out — we may as well start with Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of this misery, who is as callous as he is sanctimonious.”
Although jobcentre staff and fellow benefits claimants called an ambulance and attempted CPR on the man, he remained unresponsive and was declared dead at the scene by paramedics.
A witness said: “I didn’t know him myself, but the man who was sat next to me told me that he had grown up with the guy.
“[He] told me that the poor guy had diabetes and had been declared fit for work by the jobcentre earlier in the year, but he was obviously ill.
“The ambulance came, but he sadly died and they had to take his body out of the jobcentre. It was awful.
“We were all very shook up. It was a horrible situation that should have never happened.”
DPAC activist Jennifer Jones told the Morning Star: “We are beyond heartbroken over the devastating news of the as yet unnamed man who has lost his life in such awful circumstances.
“The saddest and most angering thing is that this man has not died in unpreventable circumstances — far from it.
“He has died in the jobcentre because he was found ‘fit for work’ when he was not, because somebody lied about his fitness levels and abilities and he wasn’t given the support that his individual needs deserved.
“We demand that the DWP impose an immediate ban on Pip and ESA assessments in light of this tragic incident and to open an investigation into the assessment centre in question.
“There must be no more deaths due to the inaccurate reports and lies from Atos/Capita assessors.
“The only way to end this suffering is to end this process altogether. This shouldn’t have happened and must never happen again.”
This 6 August 2019 video from the USA says about itself:
Why Cities Are Banning Facial Recognition Technology | WIRED
A handful of US cities have banned government use of facial recognition technology due to concerns over its accuracy and privacy. WIRED’s Tom Simonite talks with computer vision scientist and lawyer Gretchen Greene about the controversy surrounding the use of this technology.
From daily News Line in Britain:
STATE SPYING: Police launch facial recognition app – UN slams state spying on disabled
9th August 2019
SOUTH Wales Police have launched a facial recognition app which is to be installed on their officers’ phones, prompting human rights campaigners Liberty to exclaim: ‘This technology is intrusive, unnecessary, and has no place on our streets.’
In a three-month trial of the new police facial recognition app which has already prompted a legal challenge, 50 officers will be given the app.
The force’s use of facial recognition technology prompted a legal challenge by a man whose picture was taken by officers while he was out shopping.
Some other forces have already trialled the technology including the Metropolitan Police.
Hannah Couchman, of Liberty, said: ‘It is shameful that South Wales Police are rolling out portable facial recognition technology to individual officers while their so-called pilots are being challenged by Liberty in court. Far less intrusive means have been used for decades by police to establish a person’s identity where necessary.’
Meanwhile, the UN’s investigator into global poverty has said innocent people are being caught up in the mass surveillance system used by the UK’s welfare state to ‘combat benefit fraud’.
Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty, described it as a tragedy that people imagined that ‘the ever-more intrusive surveillance system by the UK welfare state’ was used only against alleged ‘welfare cheats’.
‘It’s not. It will soon affect everyone and leave the society much worse off. Everyone needs to pay attention and insist on decent limits,’ he said.
Alston said the UK’s surveillance system stood the presumption of innocence on its head. He said this was because everyone applying for a benefit was ‘screened for potential wrongdoing in a system of total surveillance’.
Rick Burgess, an activist with Manchester Disabled People Against Cuts, said fears that footage of his members and supporters demonstrating was being passed from police to the DWP had had a ‘chilling effect’ on people’s willingness to protest.
‘There are people who are not protesting today because they are terrified by what the DWP might know about them,’ he said. ‘The idea that information the police gather at protests about some of those taking part could be passed to the DWP for welfare fraud investigations is Stasi-like.’
USA: CLASS ACTION AGAINST FACEBOOK OVER FACIAL RECOGNITION A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that a group of Facebook users can move forward with their class action lawsuit challenging the company’s use of facial recognition technology. [HuffPost]
This 3 April 2019 video from Britain says about itself:
Red Kites: Birds Flying in Slow Motion, filmed at Gigrin Farm in Wales UK
Video Produced by Paul Dinning
This 9 April 2019 video from Britain says about itself:
Red Kites Feeding at Gigrin Farm, Rhayader in Wales – Filmed in Slow Motion
Video Produced by Paul Dinning – Wildlife in Cornwall
This video says about itself:
Peacock Sound, Peacock Opening Feathers and Beautiful Display – Pierre the peacock filmed at Gigrin Farm in Wales UK
Peacocks Video Produced by Paul Dinning – Wildlife in Cornwall
Filmed on March 26th 2019
This 17 January 2019 video says about itself:
Hitachi scraps plans for Wylfa Newydd nuclear power station in Wales
Plans for a £20bn new nuclear power station have been suspended, delivering a huge blow to the industry. Japanese firm Hitachi announced it was not continuing with work already under way at Wylfa on Anglesey in North Wales.
From daily News Line in Britain:
Friday, 18 January 2019
British capitalism so bankrupt it can’t provide for energy demands
THE ANNOUNCEMENT yesterday that the Japanese company Hitachi is pulling the plug on plans to build a nuclear power station in Wales has blown a massive hole in the Tories’ energy strategy.
The giant Japanese conglomerate took over the contract to build up to six UK nuclear plants six years ago from the private German utilities company E.ON which had previously been contracted to build them.
At the time, the then Tory prime minister David Cameron hailed the contract with Hitachi as a ‘multi-billion pound vote of confidence in the UK that will contribute vital new infrastructure to power our economy’ and he boasted that these plants would provide 14 million homes with electricity for 60 years.
Six years on and the reality of the bankruptcy of British capitalism has struck home, with Hitachi becoming the second firm in two months to pull out of major UK nuclear projects triggering what is being described as a ‘full-blown crisis’ for Britain’s future energy supplies along with Tory dreams of attracting huge amounts of investments from foreign companies.
Behind Hitachi’s decision to take a £2 billion hit on money already spent on the £16 billion plant at Wylfa on Anglesey rather than carry on with the project was the breakdown of negotiations between the company and the Tories on the amount of taxpayers’ money the government was prepared to give Hitachi to underwrite the scheme.
According to Tory business secretary Greg Clark, they had offered a ‘generous and significant’ amount of money in addition to a whole package of support. This involved providing Hitachi with a debt facility, taking a one third stake in the company Horizon Nuclear Power set up by Hitachi to build the plant and guaranteeing the price of the electricity produced up to £75 per megawatt hour for the next 35 years.
All this money would naturally come from the taxpayer while every energy user would see their bills reflect the price guarantee to Hitachi over the next 35 years. Even this wasn’t enough for the company’s profit margins and they followed another Japanese company Toshiba who scrapped the plan to build power stations in Cumbria last November. Toshiba’s decision to pull out and leave the UK government high and dry as regards its energy strategy came as no surprise.
This private company was forced into a near meltdown last year when its wholly owned Westinghouse was driven into bankruptcy in the US over the overrun costs of building nuclear reactors in America. The entire business strategy of not just these private nuclear plant construction industries but of all these giant infrastructure contraction companies has been to bid low, demand huge subsidies from governments and dump any increased costs back on the working class through exorbitant charges.
If they decide that they cannot make the vast profits they demand then, like Hitachi and Toshiba, they will simply walk away. This leaves the working class to pick up the tab in the form of the hundreds of jobs that will immediately go in Wales along with thousands more in the supply chain. At the same time it leaves the entire country facing an energy crisis in the very near future.
What is clear from this is that private companies, no matter how large or multi-national, driven solely by the demand for profit cannot fulfil the most basic needs of people. We are seeing the fruits of the Tory campaign started by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s to destroy British industry and end publicly owned vital infrastructure services like energy and hand them over to the privateers.
The answer to this crisis is to put an end to a bankrupt capitalist system through socialist revolution. These companies and every public service privatised must be taken over and placed under the management of the working class – with the bosses along with the bankers expropriated as part of a planned socialist economy. Only by expropriating the capitalist class can the wealth of society be used to provide for all the needs for affordable energy to be guaranteed.
This video from Wales says about itself:
American Royal Tern (Thalasseus maximus maximus) adult at Lligwy Bay, Anglesey, on 11th December 2018.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 