Dear Kitty. Some blog

Associated Press reports:

NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 7, 2006

By JANET McCONNAUGHEY

With bulldozers threatening small carnivores north of New Orleans, volunteers headed to the rescue Saturday.

There wasn’t any chance that the targets might escape.

The Nature Conservancy and nine volunteers from as far as Baton Rouge, 60 miles away, were out to rescue yellow pitcher plants, pencil-thin tube-shaped plants that use slippery wax and slick liquid to trap the flies, wasps and bees they digest.

The plants are threatened by a population boom in St. Tammany Parish and the disappearance of the woodlands they naturally grow in.

The parish was growing rapidly even before Hurricane Katrina, as its high ground and 850 square miles offered a spacious alternative to New Orleans’ more crowded 250 square miles.

In the year since the storm, the parish’s population has grown from 220,000 to about 260,000, exceeding its five-year growth estimate in one year. And with the population boom came a need for more housing and more development.

“Although it is good for the economy, it breaks my heart to see acres of pitcher plants being lost when they could be saved in advance of development and planted in conservation areas or used for educational purposes,” said Nelwyn McInnis, head of The Nature Conservancy’s northshore field office and project manager for Louisiana and Mississippi.

The plants are further threatened in Louisiana by the disappearance of their habitat.

The plants grow only in savannas and hillside seepage bogs in the longleaf pine ecosystem.

These forests, which once covered 90 million acres of the Southeast, now cover only 3 percent of their original acreage.

From Art for a change blog in the USA; with different hyperlinks there:

A little more than a year ago, I wrote an article titled “Fernando Botero Paints Abu Ghraib.”

The piece was about what I referred to as the Columbian artist’s “masterwork, a suite of 50 large oil paintings depicting the horrors perpetrated by Americans at Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison.”

Readers of this web log are by now most likely familiar with Botero’s Abu Ghraib cycle of paintings, but now Americans, at least those in New York City, will have an opportunity to view the works for themselves.

New York’s Marlborough Gallery will present, Botero: Abu Ghraib, an exhibit to run for one month only from October 18th to November 18th, 2006.

Marlborough Gallery has represented the artist for twenty years, but none of the 45 paintings and drawings to be displayed will be for sale.

However, a beautiful exhibition catalog with text by Art in America editor, David Ebony, will be available at the gallery - or you can purchase the book online from Amazon.com.

While it’s good news that Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings are to be exhibited in the U.S., there is an ominous side to the story.

Despite the critical acclaim the works have received, and regardless of their being exhibited in 2005 at Italy’s Palazzo Venezia, Germany’s Wurth Museum, and plans to show them in 2007 at Italy’s Palazzo Reale in Milan and at IVAM in Valencia, Spain, come 2008 - not a single American museum has come forward with an offer to exhibit the paintings.

So much for the “liberal” U.S. arts establishment.

The Art Newspaper of London, quotes Botero as saying an exhibition of his Abu Ghraib paintings was “proposed to many museums in the U.S., but after six months there was no interest.”

Botero asked Arts Services International, the group that organized the artist’s North American traveling retrospective due to begin in January, 2007, to help find a museum willing to exhibit the controversial works - but ASI also came up empty handed.

Only then did Marlborough courageously step in to offer Botero their gallery as a venue - and hurrah for them!

With the U.S. Congress voting to legalize the Bush administration’s policies of torture and indefinite detention without charges or trial, Botero’s artworks are more significant than ever.

That American museums are unwilling, or afraid, to show these challenging artworks only adds to our collective shame.

This video from the USA is called John Sinclair Live In Detroit.

By Joanne Laurier:

John Lennon vs. his celebrators

7 October 2006

This is the fifth in a series of articles devoted to the recent Toronto film festival (September 7-16).

The U.S. vs. John Lennon, a documentary written and directed by David Leaf and John Scheinfeld, recounts the efforts of the Nixon administration to deport the rock legend as part of its campaign to derail the movement against the Vietnam War.

In the early 1970s, top echelons of the FBI increasingly began to view John Lennon and his wife, Japanese artist Yoko Ono, as political threats.

The new film brings together footage of Lennon and his struggle against the American authorities in the decade 1966-1976 with commentary by former antiwar radicals and Nixon aides.

The FBI launched its campaign of harassment against the songwriter/musician, which eventually included wiretapping, surveillance and deportation orders, at the time of a concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in December 1971, organized to protest the jailing of John Sinclair, member of the radical Detroit rock group MC5 and head of the state’s “White Panther” movement.

Essentially a political prisoner, Sinclair had been sentenced to 10 years in state prison for selling two marijuana joints to an undercover police agent.

Lennon’s presence and performance at the benefit concert focused international attention on the Sinclair case, and the musician was released shortly thereafter.

The documentary includes footage of the “Free John Sinclair” concert, attended by some 15,000 people.

The show in Ann Arbor was Lennon’s first performance in the US since the Beatles’ 1966 tour.

He shared the stage with Jerry Rubin, a founder of the Yippie movement, and Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, both members of the “Chicago Seven,” who were being prosecuted for their role in organizing antiwar protests outside the Democratic Party national convention in Chicago in 1968.

By Bill Van Auken:

As Washington focuses on Foley scandal

Condoleezza Rice evades charges over 9/11

7 October 2006

The fixation of both official Washington and the mainstream media on the emails of Congressman Mark Foley (Republican of Florida) and the Republican House leadership’s cover-up of his pursuit of teenage male pages has served to divert public attention from a far more significant cover-up of a far greater crime.

The Foley story has highlighted the official corruption and hypocrisy that characterize the political establishment as a whole in America.

The spectacle of a party that has made “family values” its battle cry and sought to exploit homophobia and religious backwardness for political ends being caught up in such a scandal has undoubted popular appeal. …

But the time and resources—not to mention prurient interest—that the media has devoted to the exposure of Foley’s emails and instant messages stand in sharp contrast to its virtual silence on the revelations—first reported September 28, the same day that the emails from Foley surfaced on ABC News—in the new book by Bob Woodward, State of Denial.

Most damning among them is the revelation that former CIA Director George Tenet and the CIA’s chief of counterterrorism, J. Cofer Black, sought and obtained a July 10, 2001 emergency meeting with Condoleezza Rice to discuss the imminent threat of a major terrorist attack by Al Qaeda on US targets, and were “brushed off” by the then-national security adviser.