Dear Kitty backup UK

From the BBC:

Wednesday, 18 November 2009

DNA clue to save rare Darwin bird

Sub-populations of the mockingbirds remain on two small islands

A rare mockingbird could be reintroduced to the Galapagos Islands - with the help of some specimens collected by Charles Darwin.

A team of geneticists extracted DNA from two birds that the famous naturalist collected in 1835.

By comparing this to DNA from living sub-populations on two other islands, the scientists revealed genetic clues about how best to conserve the birds.

They report their findings in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

The researchers used two specimens that Darwin and Robert Fitzroy - the captain of HMS Beagle - collected from Floreana Island during their trip to the Galapagos more than 170 years ago.

The Floreana mockingbird (Mimus trifasciatus) became extinct on the island soon after this famous expedition, mainly because of the human impact on its delicate habitat.

Today only two small sub-populations survive on two tiny satellite islets - Champion and Gardner-by-Floreana.

Survival of species

Karen James, a Natural History Museum of London researcher who was involved in this study, said the Floreana mockingbird was one of the rarest birds in the world.

"It was also important for Darwin's realisation that organisms might evolve independently on islands," she told BBC News.

The Charles Darwin Foundation, which carries out conservation research in the Galapagos, plans eventually to reintroduce the birds to Floreana.

But for this reintroduction to be effective, Dr James said, a population would have to be restored that was "as close as possible to what existed before".

To find out what this population would look like, the scientists needed to study the Floreana birds.

"There are very few of these specimens," Dr James explained. "But the Natural History Museum has two of them and they just so happened to have been collected by Darwin and Fitzroy."

Dr James and her colleagues were given the opportunity to take tiny samples from the toe pads of each historic specimen, from which to extract DNA.

The team found "genetic signals" in each of the two surviving species that were also present in Darwin's samples.

This revealed that the two sub-populations split from each other very recently. This split, the researchers said, was likely caused by the Floreana mockingbird becoming extinct.

Its extinction would have severed a "bridge" between the two populations - meaning that it was no longer possible for them to interbreed.

Even though they have evolved independently and become inbred, this study showed that the tiny sub-populations have retained much of the important "genetic variation" once found in the mockingbirds on Floreana.

This is good news for the survival of the species.

It has led the researchers to conclude that future conservation plans should focus on protecting "the two satellite populations in situ and establishing a single third population on Floreana".

This reintroduction could use birds from both islands, the researchers said, "to maximize genetic diversity".

Dr James said the project highlighted the importance of historic specimens.

"Though Darwin knew nothing of DNA, the specimens he and Fitzroy collected have, after 170 years of safe-keeping in collections, yielded genetic clues to suggest a path for conservation of this critically endangered and historically important species," she said.

This video from CNN in the USA is called Rep. Wasserman Schultz on Situation Room about new breast cancer screening guidelines.

By Joanne Laurier in the USA:

US government mammogram recommendations

Denial of breast cancer screenings will have deadly consequences

18 November 2009

A US government panel’s recommendation that women under the age of 50 not undergo annual mammogram screenings has provoked outrage from oncologists and other health care professionals, as well as breast cancer patients and survivors.

Compelling evidence suggests that following the advice of the United States Preventive Service Task Force (USPSTF) will lead to thousands of new breast cancer deaths and a rise in the incidence of the disease. One in eight women in the US (13 percent) will be afflicted by the disease at some point in their lives. An estimated 182,000 American women were newly diagnosed in 2008 with breast cancer, and more than 40,000 women died from the illness.

After decades of promoting mammograms as the best tool for early detection of breast cancer, the USPSTF is recommending against yearly screenings for women between the ages of 40 and 49, claiming the risks outweigh the benefits.

The recommendations announced Monday have been denounced by a wide range of specialists in the field and people who deal on a daily basis with the devastation that breast cancer inflicts upon hundreds of thousands of women and their families every year. Both the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute condemned the change.

USPSTF mammography recommendations will result in countless unnecessary breast cancer deaths each year

This is a video of a goldcrest feeding young at its nest.

Another goldcrest video is here.

An article about goldcrests in Britain is here.

This video from England says about itself:

Afghanistan - the "Good War"? Seumas Milne July 13 2009

Guardian columnist in a meeting organised by Stop the War Coalition and Media Workers Against War.

From People's Weekly World in the USA:

Afghanistan: U.S. military contractors take root

The U.S. military buildup in Afghanistan signals opportunity for DynCorp and Fluor corporations. Awarded contracts totaling $15 billion over five years, the giant enterprises will build military structures and bases there and undertake power, water, housing, logistic and administrative projects.

Texas-based Fluor Corporation will carry out work at 74 bases in northern Afghanistan, while DynCorp will operate throughout southern Afghanistan.

The Defense Department rejected bids from Halliburton subsidiary KBR, recipient of contracts worth $31.4 billion from 2001-2009. Reuters recalled that a Congressional commission found that KBR had wasted billions because of “poorly defined work orders, inadequate oversight and inefficiencies” marking construction projects in Iraq and Afghanistan.

From British daily The Independent:

Picasso's red period - heading for Liverpool

By Jonathan Brown

Wednesday, 15 July 2009

Pablo Picasso was the most celebrated artist of the 20th century when, living under Nazi occupation in exile in Paris, he stunned the world with the announcement that he had joined the French Communist Party.

The enlistment to the casue of perhaps the greatest living creative genius of the day was an incredible coup for Moscow and one which has divided scholars of art and politics ever since. Some cynics doubted his convictions, claiming they were merely typical of the fashionable views espoused in the intellectual leftist circles in which he mixed. Others believe his art was never to recover its former glories as the great showman and extrovert found himself enmeshed in the increasingly bitter propaganda battles of the Cold War.

Now British audiences will be given the chance to make up their own minds about Picasso's long red period as a member of the communist party, a relationship which survived the Hungarian uprising and Prague spring, keeping him loyal right up until his death in 1973. A major exhibition of more than 150 works by the Spanish painter will go on display at Tate Liverpool next year in a bid to throw new light on this controversial chapter in his extraordinarily productive career.

Among the stars of the show will be his monumental The Charnel House, not been seen in Britain for half a century, which was inspired by images of liberated concentration camps. The exhibition, being staged in collaboration with the Albertina in Vienna will feature The Rape of the Sabine Women, a variation on David's masterpiece painted at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

There will also be examples of The Dove of Peace, which went on to become the instantly recognisable symbol for the international peace movement.

Picasso: Peace and Freedom, which follows Tate Liverpool's blockbusting Gustav Klimt exhibition during the city's year as Capital of Culture, follows years of planning and painstaking research which took experts to the Picasso Institute in Paris where much of his correspondence is held.

Tate Liverpool director Christoph Grunenberg, hopes audiences will develop a more subtle appreciation of the artist in the years after 1945. "It is really looking at Picasso during the Cold War and driving away from this myth of him as a creative genius and playboy with this compulsive expressive talent, for a more nuanced view," he said. "People have tried to downplay Picasso's political involvement but he was a full party member and was clearly highly committed to the peace movement," Mr Grunenberg added.

One of the things that made Picasso and the communists unlikely bedfellows was the party's official embrace of the Social Realist School and official opposition to the Modern movement of which the "decadent" Picasso was perhaps the greatest exponent.

But his long exile from his native Spain in opposition to the regime of General Franco coupled with the brutal experiences of life during the Nazi occupation of Paris, meant he saw communism and the ideal of peace as the key to a world free of fascism.

There was a severe backlash following Picasso's public unveiling as a communist. Protests by right-wing groups were held at exhibitions after liberation and he was barred from entry to the United States. But the artist began to travel widely, addressing public audiences for the first time, and giving donations to causes including a one million Franc gift to striking French coal miners.

He joined protests against the Korean War, and the execution of Nikos Beloyannis, the Greek communist and resistance leader.

He went on to receive the Stalin Peace Prize and the World Peace Prize, which he shared with the American singer Paul Robeson and Chilean writer Pablo Neruda though [he] later declined the Legion d'honneur [of the French government].

I hope my Blogsome blog will be back soon; it is, unfortunately, not working at the moment.

In that blog, some time ago, I mentioned that there is much Leftist criticism of the United States Obama administration for not breaking enough with the previous George W. Bush administration. This, however, did not prevent US extreme Right university authorities from banning the student organization of Obama's Democratic Party.

And now, it turns out that in "the land of the free", not just Obama's party may face bans; but his books as well.

From World War 4 Report blog in the USA, quoting Associated Press:

Supermax prison: Obama's books objectionable

The federal government's most secure prison has determined that two books written by President Barack Obama contain material "potentially detrimental to national security" and rejected an inmate's request to read them. ...

Last year, [prisoner] Abu Ali requested two books written by Obama: Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope.

But prison officials, citing guidance from the FBI, determined that passages in both books contain information that could damage national security. A prison spokeswoman referred questions to the FBI, where a spokeswoman was looking into the matter Thursday evening.

From the BBC:

Gibbon sings 'door-slamming' tune

Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News

The all singing, door-slamming female white-handed gibbon

A female gibbon has been observed enhancing her territorial song with a percussive noise.

Each time her song reached its natural climax, the gibbon slammed shut the door of her enclosure, using the loud noise it made to accentuate her call.

The gibbon used the door to create a single beat rather than a rhythm.

But her behaviour is yet another example of how smaller ape species are also capable of novel tool use, says the primatologist who witnessed it.

Thomas Geissmann is a leading expert on the conservation and behaviour of small apes, which comprise four genera of gibbon and siamang.

Yet while great apes, the gorillas, chimps and orang utans, are frequently observed to use tools both in captivity and in the wild, gibbons are rarely seen to do the same.

That was until Geissman observed a female white-handed gibbon (Hylobates lar) living with a male at Zoo Seeteufel in Studen, Switzerland.

In many gibbon species, the males call out using a series of short distinct noises that gradually become more complex. At regular intervals, females join in, singing long phrases known as 'great calls'.

The gibbons are thought to produce these sounds to defend their territory, and they can be heard from up to 2km away in natural forest.

No other gibbons lived at the zoo with the white-handed pair, but a group of siamangs did live in an enclosure nearby.

But despite the absence of other gibbons, the pair sang regularly.

However, Geissmann soon noticed that the female would exhibit a rather unique behaviour every other time she made her great call.

Just a few seconds before she started her great call, Geissmann reports in the 5th edition of the Gibbon Journal, the female would retreat into her sleeping box, singing as she went.

She then half shut the sliding door to the wooden box.

At the climax to her call, she would then slam the sliding door shut, and after it bounced back open again, she would jump out of the box, thrashing her arms and legs in a display.

"She would go into her little sleeping box made of wood, and always at the same point of her duet song she would jump out and smash shut the sliding door, which made a bang," says Geissman, who is based at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. ...

It also bears a striking resemblance to one other example of primate behaviour recorded back in the 1960s at the Gombe study site in Tanzania.

Then chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall recorded a wild male chimp, which she called Mike, using four empty gasoline drums to make a loud noise.

Mike was a low-ranking male, and would loudly bang on the drums to enhance his threat displays to other males. It seemed to work, as Mike rose to the top of his troop without fighting any other males.

Wild orang utans have also been recorded calling through folded up leaves, which increase the intensity and frequency range of their calls, while wild capuchin monkeys have also been seen bashing stones in threat displays to rivals.

Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys spotted in forests of northern Vietnam by local community conservation team: here.

From LiveScience:

Pot-Bellied Dinosaur Skeleton Found in Utah

By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer

posted: 14 July 2009 07:59 pm ET

The most complete skeleton of a type of pot-bellied dinosaur, a therizinosaur, has been discovered in southern Utah.

Such remains shed light on the evolution of leafy and meaty diets back in paleo times, suggesting that iconic predators like Velociraptor may have evolved from less fearsome plant-eating ancestors.

The newly discovered dinosaur, dubbed Nothronychus graffami, lived some 93 million years ago. When alive, the animal would have stood at 13 feet (4 meters) and sported a beaked mouth and forelimbs tipped with 9 inch- (22 cm)-long sickle claws.

Its stumpy legs, large gut and other features suggest the lumbering giant scarfed down plants rather than chasing after meaty prey.

"It takes a lot of gut-time to digest plants," said lead researcher Lindsay Zanno of the Field Museum in Chicago. "Plant eaters have to develop long digestive tracts to get the energy they need to survive."

Diet discovery

The dinosaur's physical features match up with other so-called therizinosaurs, a mysterious group of dinosaurs now thought to be a type of maniraptoran dinosaur, which share a common ancestor with birds (though the two groups split some 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period).

While most theropods, such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor, were meat eaters, the therizinosaurs likely consumed plants.

To figure out how both carnivorous and herbivorous diets evolved in theropods, Zanno and her colleagues compared the anatomy of the newly discovered dinosaur with specimens from 75 other theropod species. In doing so, the team found that plant-eating therizinosaurs like N. graffami are the most ancient group of maniraptorans.

That meant plant-eating was around early in the evolution of maniraptorans.

Early plant eating

Several maniraptoran lineages show adaptations for plant-eating, including the beaked ornithomimosaurs (ostrich-dinosaurs) and oviraptorosaurs (egg-thieves). So the team looked at herbivorous and carnivorous features in a sample of maniraptorans, finding the earliest species may already have been at least flirting with the idea of plant-eating.

"Before this we thought that plant-eating theropods like therizinosaurs were a rare occurrence," Zanno told LiveScience. "We knew they must have evolved from meat-eaters somewhere in their ancestry, but before our study it seemed like plant-eating was the exception not the norm for maniraptoran theropods."

Rather than a rarity, Zanno and her colleagues discovered that eating plants exclusively or in combination with meat can be traced back to the origins of the maniraptoran group as a whole.

"Many lineages of maniraptoran dinosaurs likely ate some amount of plants as part of their diet, and they probably inherited this ability from the common ancestor of the whole group," Zanno said. "Thus, predatory maniraptoran dinosaurs like Velociraptor must have re-evolved exclusive meat-eating."

The researchers speculate this ability to nab veggies may have allowed maniraptorans to move into new niches and diversify in ways they couldn't when only meat was on the menu.

"Something happened early in the evolution of maniraptorans that is tied to their incredible diversity," Zanno said. "The ability to feed on much more than just meat may have been one of several key innovations contributing to their ultimate success."

The discovery is reported online July 15 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

From the BBC:

Israel soldiers speak out on Gaza

Soldier testimonies appear to contradict official Israeli statements

A group of soldiers who took part in Israel's assault in Gaza say widespread abuses were committed against civilians under "permissive" rules of engagement.

The troops said they had been urged to fire on any building or person that seemed suspicious and said civilians were sometimes used as human shields.

Breaking the Silence, a campaign group made up of Israeli soldiers, gathered anonymous accounts from 26 soldiers. ...

Many of the testimonies are in line with claims made by human-rights organisations that Israeli military action in Gaza was indiscriminate and disproportionate.

Amnesty International has accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during the 22-day conflict.

See also here.

This is a Dutch TV video (in Hebrew, with English subtitles) of interviews with Israeli soldiers who were involved in the "Cast Lead" invasion in Gaza.

This video is called Indigenous Leader visits Oil Contamination in Peru's Amazon.

Peru’s President Garcia is moving towards a confrontation with the working class in the wake of nationwide protests over the recent massacre in the Amazon basin: here.

Thousands of workers marched in Lima, Peru on July 8 in opposition to the free-market economic policies of President Alan Garcia: here.