Crocodiles. My last blogathon blog

Interesting reports on crocodilians in the Antilles, Florida, etc.: here; and here.

Especially about the spectacled caiman.

Song, "Snappy the little crocodile" (about a Nile crocodile): lyrics and sound file here.

This is my last blog at the blogathon for Greenpeace.

However, the struggle by Greenpeace and other environmentalists goes on.

My own blog goes on as well; here.

Hiroshima and US and Japanese media

Hiroshima, the Top News Story That Wasn't
Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Aug 5 (IPS) - The atomic bomb that was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima 60 years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, may have been the most crucial event of the 20th century. But it was not the top news story.

That was because censorship and the manipulative media treatment of the tragic event, managed by Washington and Tokyo, greatly muffled the impact of the catastrophe and made the press an accomplice in the war.

These conclusions are reached by a book written by Venezuelan journalist Silvia González, a researcher at the College of Mexico. "Hiroshima, la noticia que nunca fue" (roughly "Hiroshima, the News Report That Never Was") focuses on the bombing and its aftermath to demonstrate how news is censored and manipulated in times of conflict.

Six decades later, "manipulative practices are still repeated, at the direction of those in power, and the media disseminates inaccurate, hasty, exaggerated or biased reports, or just plain rumours, that can affect public perception even in the long term," said González in an interview with IPS.

Read rest of this article here.

Environment news

Environment news can be found at many places on the Internet, including IPS Press Agency; here.

At my blog, primarily the categories environment; science [often: biology] and health and animals.

Madagascar forests threatened by Rio Tinto mining and World Bank

Madagascar's unique forest under threat

Ten years ago Friends of the Earth's Andrew Lees died trying to save an idyllic island.

The Observer told his story. Now, as miners arrive, Jo Revill asks if he died in vain

Sunday August 7, 2005
The Observer

One of the world's biggest mining companies has been given permission to open up an enormous mine on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar which will involve digging up some of the world's most unique forest.

The decision has outraged campaigners at Friends of the Earth, who had opposed the plans from the outset.

It is all the more poignant because one of their leading directors, Andrew Lees, died 10 years ago in the same forest while investigating the controversial plans for a mine.

Madagascar is unique for its wildlife - of its estimated 200,000 plant and animal species, three-quarters exist nowhere else in the world.

Its beauty and coastline are also beginning to make it a popular tourism destination and its popularity has been further boosted by the film Madagascar, the animated movie which features animals escaping from a New York zoo and ending up on the island.

But the company, mining giant Rio Tinto, which has the backing of the World Bank for the plan, is adamant that environmental damage will be kept to a minimum.

Read more here.

Declassified images from Hiroshima

From Democracy Now!:

ERIK BARNOUW: Akira Iwasaki writes, “In the middle of the shooting, one of my cameramen was arrested in Nagasaki by American military police. I was summoned to general headquarters and told to discontinue the shooting. However,” he says, he made arguments wherever he could. “Then,” he says, “came the group of the strategic bombing survey from Washington, and they wanted a film on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; therefore, the U.S. Army wanted to use my film and changed its mind. Now they allowed or rather ordered me to continue and complete the film.”

When this compilation had reached a length of approximately two hours and 40 minutes, the saga entered a new stage. Suddenly, all of the material, negative, master positive, boot prints and paper records relating to it, were all suddenly taken over by the American military, shipped off to Washington and declared secret, and all of this material disappeared from view for almost a quarter of a century. Very few people in government and almost nobody in the film industry was aware of -- was even aware of its existence.

View an excerpt of the now declassied film with Real Player.

Stay Warm, Be Cheap

For those of you living in the north, up to 20% of your income can go into keeping yourself warm. As a boy growing up, I used to bundle up in thick boots, snow pants, coat, scarf, toque (what Canadians call a wool hat, eh) and mits.

While at home, I used to park myself over the heating vent to warm to the appropriate level. Other times I just copied my cat. Abbey would go to the south facing front window, find a sunny spot and lie down. Little did I know that that cat was really onto something.

Anyone building a new house in Canada has the option of installing electric heat (now at scandalous prices - Hooray for privatisation!) or gas heating. There are other choices among the mainstream heating systems, but those are the two main.

Why not be cheap? Why not learn from the cat? Any new house can utilise the free power of the sun, if the they want. I'm talking about passive solar heating. It works like this: place your house so that the long side of it faces the sun instead of the standard of making the long sides facing east/west. Next, along the sun side, make a concrete floor that will act as a heat sink. Then install a row of good double or triple pane windows that will cast sunlight onto your heat sink. Voilà! You now have a passive solar house.

For those consecutive cloudy days that sometimes come, you can install a masonry stove like a modern version of a Korean ondol or Chinese k'ang.

The result? You'll live a toasty, inexpensive, eco-friendly winter immune from any energy crush.

USA: green turtle nest first in Virginia

After big sad news, a bit of small, more positive, news:

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. Aug 5, 2005 — A green sea turtle dug out a nest in the sands of this resort beach and left 124 eggs the first documented case of the protected turtle laying its eggs in Virginia.

State and federal wildlife officials are agog by the discovery along a stretch of beach lined by vacation cottages.

"It was just kind of a big 'Wow!' for me," said John Gallegos, a senior biologist at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

"It is a mind blower," added refuge director Jared Brandwein.

The green sea turtle, which is protected by the U.S. Endangered Species Act, commonly nests in southeastern Florida, although a few females previously have laid eggs on beaches as far north as North Carolina's Outer Banks.

The turtles, named for their greenish body fat, weigh 250 to 450 pounds as adults.

They are herbivores, feeding mainly on sea grass and algae, and do not begin reproducing until they are 20 to 50 years old.

While it's possible that green sea turtles have nested in Virginia before, there was no record of it until now, said Sandy MacPherson, national sea turtle coordinator at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services office in Jacksonville, Fla.

Read more here.

And now, I hand over. See you all tomorrow (well, for me, 7 August).

USA: Bush administration in denial on science

The US Bush administration is in denial on mercury, poisoning the American environment.

They are in denial on scientists' work on global warming.

This is part of their broader attitude to science:

US: ACLU hits Bush administration’s anti-science policies

By Jamie Chapman
6 August 2005

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recently issued a scathing indictment of the Bush administration’s record on science.

Its report, entitled “Science Under Siege,” was issued on June 21.

It documents the White House’s distortion, abuse and quashing of legitimate scientific inquiry in order to promote its political agenda.

The ACLU commissioned the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to draft the report.

The UCS issued its own report in February 2004, entitled “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking.”

This earlier statement has since been signed by over 6,000 American scientists, including 48 Nobel laureates, 62 National Medal of Science recipients, and 135 members of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new ACLU/UCS report shows that in the intervening 16 months the Bush administration, far from responding to pressure generated by the earlier UCS recommendations, has deepened its attack on science.

Such political hot topics as government backing for creationism over evolution or state intervention in scientifically supported legal rulings on the case of Terri Schiavo are not addressed.

By focusing on four main areas that are less in the public eye, the authors establish how negatively the Bush administration has impacted the practice of science in the United States.

The first section details the unprecedented control that government exercises over the control of information.

Read more here.

Listening System May Help Save Right Whales

After the sad news on the small Egyptian butterfly, somewhat better news on whales, the world's biggest animals; always part of Greenpeace's stuggle:

BOSTON Aug 5, 2005 — Small survey planes, daylight and luck have long been the best tools for scientists hoping to spot the rare North Atlantic right whale.

The results aren't too impressive.

An estimated one in four whales are spotted by aerial surveys, leaving the rest vulnerable to ship strikes or fishing gear entanglements.

But scientists say an underwater listening system they're developing will dramatically improve detection and reduce whale deaths.

The "passive acoustic" system would find whales and immediately transmit their location to nearby vessels.

"It will reduce (ship) strikes, period," said Richard Merrick, chief of the protected species branch at NOAA Fisheries, New England.

Read more here.

Egypt: global warming threatens to kill world's smallest butterfly

Eurekalert! reports:

Global warming's effects extend to world's smallest butterfly

The latest issue of Conservation Biology examines the viability of the Sinai baton blue and the results of human population pressures.

The study predicts that in the absence of global warming, grazing, and plant collection (three activities directly linked to humans) the world's smallest butterfly would persist for at least 200 years.

The population could withstand small increases in grazing intensity that would decrease their climate, but not increases in temperature.

As the level of global warming raises its impact, extinction rapidly accelerates.

This implies "…that there may be an annual average temperature, specific to each endangered species, above which extinction becomes much more likely," authors Martin Hoyle and Mike James state.

There is no such threshold of grazing pressure.

The authors mapped the entire global range of this butterfly and obtained data on the intensity of livestock grazing.

The Sinai baton blue is one of only two endemic animals in St. Katherine's Protectorate, one of Egypt's most recently designated protected areas.

Based on the authors' model, the effect of global warming on the chance of extinction does not depend on the future level of habitat destruction due to this grazing; the growing number of families that live on the protectorate keep a small herd of goats and sheep that graze on the plants the butterflies thrive on.

Global warming is the deadly culprit. "If the areas of habitat patches individually fall below certain prescribed levels, the butterfly is likely to go extinct,"the authors conclude.

Japan remembers

Today was a hard day for us to get through here in Japan. At 8:15am on August 3rd, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped "Little Boy" on the city of Hiroshima and its 60kg core of uranium 235 was detonated. On that day, the aggressor turned into the victim. Its explosion with a force of 13 kilotons of TNT flattened a radius of 1.5 miles and killed 70,000 to 80,000 people outright with many more later dying of radiation sickness that the U.S. claimed was "Japanese propaganda." (As of August 2004, the City of Hiroshima claimed 237,062 dead as a result of the bombing.

Inside the Truman administration there was a debate on whether to drop the bomb in an unpopulated area to demonstrate its power or to see what it could do on a city. The arguments of Secretary of State James F. Byrnes won out with Hiroshima being the first target.

Claims, most notably from Byrnes, say that the bombs saved lives in the war. However, Japan was looking to end the war anyway. Take for example the words of then President Truman on July 18, 1945, President Truman: "telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace…. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [atomic bomb] appears over their homeland." Another among many examples is Walter Brown, aide to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, who on Aug. 3, 1945 wrote "agreed Japs looking for peace…. "

I could go on about how the bomb was really for the Russians to let them see what the U.S. could do, but this is familiar to the point of cliche. Thus is will end by saying that every year in the peak of summer we here mourn as we will again on August 9th.

Remember Hiroshima: US WMD's out of The Netherlands

Press release [The Netherlands]

Peace activists arrested at military air base Volkel

Volkel, 6 August 2005

This Saturday morning, military police has arrested eleven peace activists at the military air base Volkel.

There, they were demonstrating against the presence of United States weapons of mass destruction at Volkel.

Activists there report this.

On the roof of a military communication building, the activists of Action against Nuclear Weapons, Onkruit and the Peace Action Camp demonstrated with banners.

The action started at 8.15, exactly 60 years after the nuclear bomb attack on Hiroshima in 1945.

From a later press release of this morning:

At Volkel are twenty nuclear bombs, each of them fourteen times stronger than the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

More on this, including Hiroshima mayor's speech: here.

And now I hand over the Blogathon baton. However, "I'll be back" (Gee, that sounds like Schwarzenegger whom I do not want to sound like ...).

More blog entries on Greenpeace

Today, 6 August-7 August is the 24 hours Blogathon for Greenpeace; in which the blog Dear Kitty is also participating.

Other Dear Kitty entries mentioning Greenpeace can be found: here.

And here.

And here.

And here.