Dear Kitty. Some blog

ABC News (USA) reports:

Sept. 4, 2006 — He’s tackled Wal-Mart and Fox News with his scathing documentaries.

Now, filmmaker Robert Greenwald is releasing a documentary which argues that private companies helping to fight the war in Iraq don’t have the nation’s best interests in mind.

“Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers” debuts in limited release this week, and presents an assault on companies that provide the kinds of services in Iraq that the military once handled itself, such as supplying food, water and mail delivery for the reconstruction.

In the film, former KBR/Halliburton water purification specialist Ben Carter is interviewed and says when a motor went out on a truck, they would “buy a new truck … and bill the government.”

Greenwald also interviewed relatives of four Blackwater Security guards who were mutilated in Fallujah [see also here] in March, 2004.

One mother claimed her son died because the company cut corners, failing to supply armored vehicles or maps.

See also here.

And here.

Review by Senator Edward Kennedy: here.

Reuters reports:

Paintings can be heard as well as seen, study shows

By Patricia Reaney | September 4, 2006

NORWICH - Artists such as Wassily Kandinsky appeal to more than just the visual sense because their work can also be heard — at least by some people, a British neuroscientist said on Monday.

Synesthetes are individuals in whom one sense triggers another.

Their senses are connected, so as well as seeing a painting such as “Composition VIII, 1923” by the Russian painter, the work also triggers sounds.

“What Kandinsky wanted to do was for it to appeal to hearing as well,” Dr Jamie Ward, a neuroscientist at University College London (UCL), told a British science conference.

Whether or not Kandinsky was a synesthete is not known but Ward said the artist certainly knew about the sensory phenomenon.

Synesthetes make up only about one to two percent of the population but Ward believes everyone links music and art unconsciously.

See also here.

On the Los Angeles Times site in the USA is [update Sepember 2009: was] a multi media presentation on the state of the world’s oceans these days, including the dangers of pollution.

Deap sea trawling threatens seamount ecosystems: here.

Bioluminescence in oceans: here.

From Daily Yomiuri in Japan:

Darwin’s finches are world famous as examples of how new species emerge.

Lesser known, but equally valuable as evidence of speciation, are the many little Asian salamanders that live all over Japan.

The finches of the Galapagos diversified by adopting different behavior, but the Japanese salamanders split up chiefly through the process of isolation.

Salamanders are widespread throughout the temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere.

Although they are sometimes confused with lizards, they are not reptiles at all, but amphibians with tails.

Tailed amphibians, which also include newts and sirens, number fewer than 400 species worldwide, as opposed to nearly 4,000 species for their close cousins, the frogs and toads.

With their squat bodies and short legs, salamanders retain the basic form of their distant ancestors, the first vertebrates to crawl out of the sea and colonize the land some 360 million years ago.

The Asian salamanders are thought to have originally evolved on the Asian mainland, and to have migrated into Japan during the glacial periods, when western Honshu and Kyushu were connected by land bridges to the Korean Peninsula.

These migrants from the continent found Japan much to their liking.

As they spread across the country, they first split into two groups.

One group stayed in the lowlands and river valleys, breeding in ponds, marshes and other bodies of still water.

The other group worked their way up into the mountains, breeding in faster-flowing streams and creeks.

Japan is a small country broken up by range after range of steep mountains.

As the salamanders spread eastward and northward, the populations in various valleys, as well as those living in various mountain ranges, became isolated from one another.

Unable to interbreed, these populations drifted away from each other genetically, eventually evolving into separate species.

Asian salamanders found Japan so much to their liking that the number of species here now outnumbers that on the continent.

In the genus Hynobius, for example, there are 28 species found worldwide, 16 of which live here in Japan.

Furthermore, 15 of these 16 species are endemic, which means that they can be found only in this country.

The Hida salamander (Hynobius kimurae, or hida sansho-uo) is a typical Japanese mountain salamander, an endemic species inhabiting the mountains of central and western Honshu.

Ogasawara islands south of Japan: here.

Idaho giant salamanders in Montana, USA: here.

Anti-evolution religious creationism in Kenya: here.

Associated Press reports:

NATO Warplanes Kill NATO Soldier, Wound Others in ‘Friendly Fire’ Incident in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan Sep 4, 2006 — NATO warplanes killed one of the force’s own soldiers and wounded several others in a “friendly fire” incident in southern Afghanistan on Monday, NATO said in a statement.

In a sense, this is symbolic for NATO.

On paper, it has lofty principles of promoting peace, human rights, etc.

However, in practice, they constantly attack those very principles: not just in Afghanistan, but also in Yugoslavia, Iraq, etc.

More British dead in Afghanistan and Iraq: here.

And here.

Canadian dead: here; and here; and here.

More Afghanistan: here.

And here.

And here.

And here.