Dear Kitty. Some blog

The British army subjected Republicans to waterboarding torture during interrogations in Northern Ireland during the 1970s, according to a report in Tuesday’s Guardian newspaper: here.

Disclose.tv CIA secret prison in Lithuania Video

From British daily The Morning Star:

US had secret detention camp in Lithuania

Tuesday 22 December 2009

by Tom Mellen

A commission of Lithuanian MPs have confirmed that its spooks had let the US set up a secret detention camp in Lithuania over the heads of top politicians.

The head of parliament’s national security and defence committee revealed that the domestic intelligence service had opened two detention centres in co-operation with the CIA.

Arvydas Anusauskas said that top officials had not been informed about the jails, and that they had not been appproved by politicians.

The investigation found that five planes related to the CIA landed in Lithuania in 2003-2006 and that domestic intelligence officials stopped customs and border guards from inspecting them.

“Regarding the ‘cargo,’ I can’t confirm anything, because Lithuanian authorities could not carry out the usual checks, so what was being transported was unknown,” Mr Anusauskas explained.

The panel of MPs kicked off its investigation into the CIA prisons in November after the US channel ABC alleged that the ex-Soviet republic had hosted a so-called CIA “black site,” or secret interrogation facility, up to 2005.

ABC cited unnamed former intelligence officials and records of flights between Afghanistan and Lithuania.

It alleged that Lithuanian officials had agreed to host the prisons in return for Washington’s support for Lithuania’s 2004 admission into NATO.

Mr Anusauskas said: “We have identified the sites. The first project was developed from 2002.

“In response to the wishes of our partners and the conditions that were imposed, the site was meant to host one person. The second site was created in 2004.”

He said that the parliamentary probe had concluded that Lithuania’s two presidents over the period were “not informed, or only informed superficially” about the sites.

The parliamentary commission asked prosecutors to investigate three of the country’s former state security officials over possible abuses of power.

Responding to the commission’s findings, Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius said: “It is deeply worrying that a small group of state security department officials could make a decision to establish a detention centre without informing the society and state officials.”

Mr Kubilas declared that the officers had violated Lithuanian law and ignored the negative consequences to Lithuania’s international reputation.

“Lithuania is a strategic US ally, and co-operation in many fields, including secret operations and counter-terrorism, is very important,” he said, adding: “However, the strategic partnership with the US cannot be an excuse to essentially operate under Soviet methods, to ignore the civil control of special services and to violate existing laws.”

David Tepper, manager of the hedge fund Appaloosa Management, is set to pocket more than $2.5 billion this year after successfully gambling that the Obama administration would provide unlimited public funds to bail out the banks: here.

Wall Street’s 10 Biggest Lies of 2009: here.

This video is about The Power of Yes, a David Hare play on the economic crisis.

In the wake of the ongoing crisis, the British theatre has sought in a number of pieces to address the meltdown of the financial system: here.

Three top City financiers have given Labour a £2.25 million top-up before the next general election, the party has disclosed: here.

This video, in French, is about Jörg Haider and other extreme Rightists in Austria commemorating the “heroes” of Adolf Hitler’s Waffen SS.

By Markus Salzmann and Peter Schwarz:

Massive bank scandal: Austrian right-winger Jörg Haider’s legacy

22 December 2009

Austrian far-right politician Jörg Haider, at the time governor of the province of Carinthia, died in October 2008 in an automobile crash—while driving twice the speed limit and with a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit.

His legacy, however, is now costing billions, tearing holes in the budgets of Carinthia and Germany’s Bavaria. The crisis surrounding the Hypo Group Alpe Adria (HGAA) bank, in which Haider played a central role, is a prime example of the coming together of high finance and right-wing politics.

A week ago, the Austrian government took control of ailing HGAA to prevent the immediate collapse of the sixth-largest banking house in the Alpine republic. In the settlement, the previous owners—Bayerische Landesbank (BayernLB), the province of Carinthia, and Austrian mutual insurer Grazer Wechselseitige—each received one euro. They had collectively pumped in several hundred million euros to try and secure the survival of the bank.

The state-owned BayernLB, which became the majority owner two and a half years ago, must now deal with losses of nearly €4 billion. These will largely fall on the Bavarian state treasury and will be recouped through cuts in public spending. A year ago, the state of Bavaria pumped in €10 billion to protect Germany’s second-largest Landesbank (owned 94 percent by the Bavarian government) from bankruptcy.

The fate of HGAA is closely linked with the rise of Haider’s ultra-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and its successor, the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ). Haider, who served 12 years as governor of Carinthia, used the bank to finance his political projects, enrich his friends in the party, and buy votes.

Under Haider’s charge, the financial institution, founded in 1896, rose from being a provincial bank into a market leader in the Balkans. The bank funded Haider’s money-losing prestige projects in Carinthia, such as the luxurious Schlosshotel Velden and the floating stage on the Wörthersee in Klagenfurt, as well as financing the province’s growing debts. Carinthia is now considered the “debt emperor” among Austria’s provinces.

In return, the state government guaranteed the bank’s creditworthiness, underwriting guarantees amounting to €19 billion. That is almost 10 times the state’s annual budget of €2 billion. The bankruptcy of HGAA would inevitably have resulted in Carinthia’s insolvency.

In the manner of an emperor in ancient Rome, Haider used the cash flow from HGAA to win the support of the voters. He introduced various forms of family benefits, payments for commuters, heating and diesel fuel subsidies, and an inflation relief payment. Under Haider’s successors, young people who acquired a driver’s license were given €1,000. These monetary gifts did little to lessen social inequality; with 76,000 people at risk for poverty, Carinthia is the second poorest of Austria’s provinces—but it ensured that the BZÖ won substantial majorities.

In the successor states of Yugoslavia, the HGAA financed a semi-criminal and corrupt elite, which resembled the one surrounding Haider. “In Macedonia, Bosnia or Montenegro, banking geniuses were drawn hypnotically into the wake of Jörg Haider, needy entrepreneurs who could make good use of inexpensive bridge financing for their cash flow,” the Frankfurter Allgemeine commented.

From British daily The Guardian:

Kew discovers new plant species in one of its own glasshouses

Botanists at Kew unveil a bumper crop of new plant species for 2009 including one that had been growing under their noses for 50 years

* Ian Sample, science correspondent
* Tuesday 22 December 2009 00.00 GMT

The quest to catalogue Earth’s rich flora has taken botanists to the farthest flung and most treacherous corners of the world, from the humid rainforests of the Amazon to the highest peaks of Borneo.

Which made it all the more surprising when Iain Darbyshire stumbled upon a species of plant unknown to science while taking a lunchtime stroll around the Royal Botanic Gardens in west London.

Darbyshire, an expert in African botany at Kew, happened upon the foot-tall plant in full bloom, its striking green and grey heart-shaped leaves set off by tiny white and pink flowers.

“I just happened to take a different route through the glasshouse that lunchtime and stumbled across it,” Darbyshire told the Guardian. “I knew instantly that it was a new species. It was just sat there waiting for someone to study it.”

Record books revealed the plants had been donated by Swedish botanists in the 1990s after an expedition to the Eastern Arc mountains of Tanzania. Unsuspecting gardeners had tended them for more than a decade, using them as tropical bedding in Kew’s Princess of Wales Conservatory.

The plant was officially named Isoglossa variegata last month and is among more than 250 new plant and fungus species discovered and described by the gardens’ botanists in the past year.

Giant rainforest trees, tiny fungi and wild coffee plants are among almost 300 species that have been described by UK botanists for the first time in 2009: here.

From British daily The Guardian:

Dinosaur with feathers and fangs prowled forests like a predatory turkey

Poison from the bird-like dinosaur’s fangs may have sent victims into shock, hampering their chances of escaping

* Ian Sample, science correspondent
*Monday 21 December 2009 20.00 GMT

The remains of a venomous, feathered beast that terrorised prehistoric forests like a predatory turkey have been unearthed by fossil hunters in northern China.

Palaeontologists uncovered a well-preserved skull and partial skeleton of the bird-like dinosaur, Sinornithosaurus, that lived in the region 128 million years ago.

The creature, a close relative of the velociraptor, had fangs similar to those seen in modern poisonous snakes and venomous lizards, such as the Mexican gila monster.

Analysis of the dinosaur’s fang-like teeth revealed grooves that could channel poison from glands set into each side of the creature’s jawbone, researchers said.

“This is an animal about the size of a turkey,” said Larry Martin, curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of Kansas. “It’s a specialised predator of small dinosaurs and birds.”

The discovery, reported in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first evidence of a venomous relative in the velociraptor lineage.

The venom was probably not potent enough to be lethal, but may have sent victims into shock, hampering their chances of fighting back or escaping.

“You wouldn’t have seen it coming,” said co-author David Burnham. “It would have swooped down behind you from a low-hanging tree branch and attacked.”

“Once the teeth were embedded in your skin the venom could seep into the wound. The prey would rapidly go into shock, but it would still be living, and it might have seen itself being slowly devoured by this raptor,” Burnham added.

One of the beast’s close relatives was the four-winged glider, the microraptor, which some scientists believe may also have been poisonous. Sinornithosaurus’ fangs were long enough to penetrate thick feathers and pierce the skin beneath to a depth of half a centimetre, enough to get venom into the prey’s bloodstream.

From the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, USA:

At 2:25 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 20, one of Shedd Aquarium’s beluga whales, Naya, successfully gave birth to a male calf, with physical assistance from Shedd’s animal health and animal care experts. It is the first time a beluga whale calf has been successfully birthed with human assistance at Shedd, and only the fourth known in the zoo and aquarium community.

This video from England says about itself:

Million Women Rise 2009, march for International Women’s Day London: Oxford Street 7th March 2009 Copyright: Pam Isherwood

By Ian Sinclair in England:

Ms Understood: Women’s Liberation In 1970s Britain

Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University, E1

Monday 21 December 2009

Tucked away down a side street in east London, the Women’s Library is one of the best educational museums in the capital. The problem is nobody seems to know it exists. For example, during the hour I spent visiting the library’s latest exhibition on a dreary Saturday afternoon recently, I shared the exhibition space with just one other visitor.

It’s a damn shame, because Ms Understood: Women’s Liberation in 1970s Britain, like all their recent exhibitions, is an informative, fascinating and accessible introduction to a key period of women’s history.

Although substantial gains had been made by women in the preceding decades (the vote, legalised abortion, the introduction of the pill), there was still much to fight for.

Women continued to be “routinely discriminated against in education, the workplace and at home. There was no such thing as equal pay. If you got married, you could lose your job. If your husband beat or raped you, that was your problem,” one display notes.

In addition, while the popular image of the 1960s is one of revolution, free love and anti-establishment politics, the majority of dissident groups were male dominated, often belittling the important contribution women made.

Asked what the role of women was in the US civil rights group Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the main organisers Stokely Carmichael replied: “The position of women in SNCC is prone.”

It was in this general atmosphere that 600 women met at Ruskin College in Oxford for the first National Women’s Liberation Movement conference in February 1970. With men running the crèche, the delegates debated the issues facing women and the challenges ahead. “It was an amazing buzz,” remembers Sue Crockford. “I think it was one of those rare times in your own history when you know you’re there at an occasion that’s historically important.”

Playing on a loop in one corner of the exhibition, Crockford’s impressionistic 1971 documentary of the event, A Women’s Place, provides a glimpse of the chaotic and passionate discussions that took place, lingering on the men taking care of the children, albeit with a cigarette in their hands.

Out of the conference came four key demands - equal pay, equal education and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand and free 24-hour nurseries. This influential gathering energised the movement, leading to a headline-grabbing protest at the 1970 Miss World Competition and the first National Women’s Liberation Movement march in March 1971.

At the former, “demonstrators shouted, blew whistles, and threw flour bombs, tomatoes and stink bombs.” Heckled by the protesters, comedian and host Bob Hope replied: “Pretty girls don’t have these problems.”

Studying the photos, press clippings, magazines and oral testimony on display, many visitors will be surprised by the sheer radicalism and energy evident in the movement at this time.

Of the Playboy protest, the Women’s Liberation Newsletter had the following to report. “Sally was arrested for assault (stubbing her cigarette out on a police pig) … Maia was arrested for abusive language (telling a pig to fuck-off).” The past really is a foreign country.

From Ann Oakley’s Housewife and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch to the monthly magazine Spare Rib, which sold 30,000 copies at its peak, the exhibition argues the literature of the 1970s “brought about a new way of thinking” for many women. Special mention should also go to the selection of staggeringly good posters on display, many of which made me laugh out loud with their radical politics and sharp humour.

Turning to the present day, the question must be asked. Have the demands of the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s been achieved?

With a new Fawcett Society report highlighting the persistent pay gap between men and women, pregnancy discrimination still rife in the workplace, abortion still illegal in Northern Ireland and childcare prohibitively expensive throughout Britain, the answer has to be a resounding No.

So what can concerned women (and men) do? The last section of the exhibition, titled “Where are we now?” gives hope, highlighting the important work women’s groups continue to carry out.

The rejuvenated Reclaim The Night marches, this year’s student-led protest against Miss England, the creation of the anti-porn group Bin The Bunny - this is where the radical spirit of the Women’s Liberation Movement lives on.

Runs until March 31. Admission free.

See also here. And here.

You can watch the film A Women’s Place here.

From British daily The Guardian:

Spanish quest to identify black soldier who fought against fascism in civil war

• US volunteer in picture killed in civil war battle
• Authorities plan to present image to Obama next year

* Giles Tremlett in Barcelona
* Sunday 20 December 2009 16.50 GMT

As a volunteer in the International Brigades that fought in Spain’s civil war, the unidentified black soldier in the photograph was one of the first Americans to die fighting fascism.

Now Spanish authorities want to put a name to him so they can present his picture to President Barack Obama when he visits Spain next year.

The black and white picture of the African American volunteer forms part of an extraordinary collection of civil war photographs that was bought recently by the Spanish state.

“All we know is that he arrived with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American volunteers and that he died in the battle at Brunete [in July 1937],” said Sergi Centelles, whose father, Agustí, took the picture.

The soldier is one of more than 90 African-Americans who volunteered to defend Spain’s elected Republican government from a 1936 rightwing military uprising that sparked a three-year civil war.

Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini sent troops to back the rebel army of future dictator General Francisco Franco. Leftwing and anti-fascist volunteers from around the world joined Russians sent by Stalin to help defend the Republic.

Obama defended the concept of waging a “just war” in his Nobel peace prize speech this month.

The New York-based Abraham Lincoln Brigades Association and New York University’s Tamiment library have scoured their civil war archives to see if they could identify the man in the photograph, which was probably taken in February 1937. Two possible candidates have emerged: Milton Herndon, whose brother Angelo won a famous supreme court case against a sentence for “incitement to insurrection”, and aviator Paul Williams.

“It is one of eight or nine photographs my father took of the Americans marching through Barcelona,” said Agustí Centelles.

The photograph remained hidden for four decades after Agustí Centelles, known as the “Spanish Robert Capa”, fled Spain as Franco’s forces looked set to win the civil war in 1939.

“My father took his photographs with him in a suitcase because he was scared they would be used to identify people and carry out reprisals,” said Sergi Centelles.

The photographer used the suitcase as a pillow in a French refugee camp to prevent it from being stolen. He later moved in with a French family in Carcassonne, in southern France, but had to flee again after the second world war broke out and the occupying Germans heard that he was using his camera to take photographs for false passports.

“The Gestapo were chasing him, so he walked back across the Pyrenees into Spain,” said Sergi Centelles. “He left the suitcase behind, telling the French family not to hand it over to anyone but him.

“It was passed down from the grandfather, when he died, to his son and then, when he also died, to the grandson.”

Agustí Centelles sent the French family a present every Christmas as a sign that he was still alive.

Spain did not give the photographer a passport until 1962, when the family travelled to Carcasonne to check the suitcase was still there. It was only in 1976, a year after Franco died, that he dared pick up the suitcase and bring it home.

It contained hundreds of civil war photographs, including one of writer George Orwell with a group of fellow international volunteers.

The mix of races in the International Brigades saw attempts made to observe a degree of racial equality otherwise unseen in western armies in the 1930s.

“We know there were quite a few African American volunteers and that many were treated badly when they went home, as people thought they were communists,” said Sergi Centelles.

“We have four or five names of possible candidates, but what we really want to do is to find their family.”

• If you know who the man in the main photograph is, or can provide any information that might help identify him, please contact giles.tremlett@guardian.co.uk

From British daily The Guardian:

Jewish anger as Pope Benedict moves Pius XII closer to sainthood

• Catholic leader signs decree extolling virtues of predecessor
• Wartime pontiff accused of inaction during Holocaust

* Riazat Butt, Religious affairs correspondent

* Monday 21 December 2009 15.44 GMT

Jewish leaders from around the world expressed their outrage today after the Pope opened the way for his controversial wartime predecessor to be made a saint, with some calling the possible beatification of Pius XII as “inopportune and premature”.

Benedict signed a decree last Saturday on the virtues of Pius, who has been criticised for not doing enough to stop the Holocaust. The decree means he can be beatified once a miracle attributed to him has been recognised.

Beatification is the first major step towards sainthood. But Benedict, who has long admired Pius, continues to draw fire for ignoring concerns over the controversial pontiff.

Among those to criticise him was the World Jewish Congress, whose president, Ronald Lauder, said: “As long as the archives about the crucial period 1939 to 1945 remain closed, and until a consensus on his actions ‑ or inaction ‑ concerning the persecution of millions of Jews in the Holocaust is established, a beatification is inopportune and premature.

“While it is entirely a matter for the Catholic church to decide on whom religious honours are bestowed, there are strong concerns about Pius XII’s political role during world war two which should not be ignored.”

He called on the Vatican to immediately open the files on the controversial figure. “Given the importance of good relations between Catholics and the Jews, and following the difficult events of the past year, it would be appreciated if the Vatican showed more sensitivity on this matter,” he added, referring to Benedict’s rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying cleric, Richard Williamson.

The incident sparked worldwide condemnation from prominent Jewish groups and individuals and placed an additional strain on interfaith relations, which were already under pressure after the pope issued an edict permitting a prayer that called for the conversion of Jews.

In France, the country’s chief rabbi urged the Vatican to abandon its mission to beatify Pius. Gilles Bernheim said: “Given Pius XII’s silence during and after the Shoah [Holocaust], I don’t want to believe that Catholics see in Pius XII an example of morality for humankind. I hope that the church will renounce this beatification plan and will thus honour its message and its values.”

The renewed source of tension could cast a cloud over Benedict’s inaugural visit to Rome’s synagogue next month.

Giuseppe Laras, president of the Assembly of Italian Rabbis, told the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica: “I hope it goes ahead but after this latest move I wouldn’t be surprised if it is cancelled. While I respect the autonomy of the church in matters of sainthood, I don’t see how the pope could have taken such an untimely decision. Anything can happen now.”