Rare parrot draws in celebrities at ecotourism centre launch
31-01-2007
Miss Bolivia 2006 was among those attending celebrations for the opening of a new ecotourism centre in the country.
The centre is part of a conservation program focusing on the Red-fronted Macaw Ara rubrogenys, being undertaken by Armonia (BirdLife in Bolivia). …
The Ecotourism Cabin is situated in one of the natural habitats of the parrot, alongside other endemic birds like Cliff Parakeet Myiopsitta monachus luchsi and Bolivian Blackbird Oreopsar bolivianus, both of which breed on the cliff face with Red-fronted Macaw.
The Cabin will offer visitors a chance to see and learn more about the birds and their habitats at close quarters.
In a recently published paper, Asociacion Armonia (BirdLife in Bolivia) monitored the wild birds which passed through a pet market in Santa Cruz between August 2004 to July 2005, and recorded nearly 7,300 individuals of 31 parrot species, of which four were threatened species.
Scotland Yard said the peer, known as “Lord Cashpoint”, was detained on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice when he answered bail yesterday for alleged breaches of the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 and the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.
He was bailed pending further inquiries.
The dramatic twist led opposition politicians to compare the affair to the cover-up after the Watergate crisis, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.
Lord Levy, who is also the Prime Minister’s personal envoy to the Middle East, is the second close ally of Mr Blair to be arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice.
Ruth Turner, Downing Street’s director of government relations, was arrested at her home 12 days ago.
Mark Wallinger: anti-war art and the state of Britain today
Mark Wallinger and Leon Kuhn spoke to Anindya Bhattacharyya about State Britain, the new anti-war artwork
Every age has its defining political struggle, and the anti-war movement occupies this role today.
Yet Britain’s visual art scene has by and large avoided directly addressing the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the protests against it.
This fact makes the latest work by leading British sculptor Mark Wallinger all the more surprising.
State Britain is currently on show at the Tate Britain in central London. It was commissioned by the Tate last year and kept secret until its unveiling earlier this month.
The work is a reconstruction of Brian Haw’s ramshackle collection of anti-war placards, banners and posters, exactly as it was in Parliament Square before most of it was torn down by police in May last year.
“It’s a sculpture, a reproduction,” explains Wallinger.
“You can think of it as a historical reconstruction if you like, except that historical reconstructions are ordinarily of something considered rather ‘important’ in an authoritarian way.”
PURE MINING STOCK: Yorkshire artist Rachel Horne’s Maggie Thatcher Wicked Witch.
Judith Amanthis meets RACHEL HORNE, an artist whose work is aimed at keeping the rich history of mining communities alive.
RACHEL Horne appears to be unassuming. In fact, she has the lightness of touch that goes with extremely serious work.
Horne was born in 1984, the year of the great miners’ strike, in the mining village of Conisbrough, near Doncaster.
Her ancestors had worked down the local mines for generations.
“We found a newspaper article from 1883 with a photo of my great great grandfather saying: ‘50 years in the mine.’
I think it was his 60th birthday. So, I’m pure mining stock all the way.”
Then, in 1986, Cadeby Main Colliery was closed and her father lost his job.
Horne says: “They put a notice up. ‘Anyone wishing to take redundancy may do so at any age.’
He was a skilled coal cutter. He’d been in mining 30 years.”
She recalls how her mother brought up her and her three sisters in the aftermath of the closure.
“Sometimes, we’d have no electricity at weekends and stuff and the gas’d be low.
I’ve got this one memory of my mum making toast on the one ring on the oven that worked … and not really questioning it.
She’d be standing there with this fork and the toast on the end.”
Her art - photography, collage, drawings, installations and videos, which she characterises collectively as assemblage - is biographical rather than just autobiographical.
Belgium’s interior minister was left red-faced after it emerged that photos comparing US President George W. Bush to a chimpanzee had been used in a police training manual.
“I hadn’t seen these photos and I think they are in bad taste,” the minister, Patrick Dewael, told the Flemish-language daily Het Laatste Nieuws, which first reported the story.
The pictures in question — reprinted by the newspaper [and shown then on Indymedia Belgium]– showed a series of the US leader’s facial expressions next to shots of a chimpanzee making apparently similar faces.
They were intended to help trainee police officers in the western city of Bruges to recognize the importance of body language in dealing with the public.
Bush is shown in poses ranging from pensive to finger-waving debating mode.
The pictures are all the more embarrassing for Dewael since he had signed a letter calling on Belgian municipal authorities and other police chiefs to use the manual.
But he was at pains to insist he did not know about the pictures.
“This collage was not an initiative of the interior ministry,” he said, adding that he intended to ask Bruges authorities to withdraw the controversial pages from the manual.
Brave New Films put together this devastating film on “Straight Talkin’” John McCain’s whack-a-mole positions regarding Iraq, gay marriage, and the Christian Right as the champagne smash across the bow of a new website, therealmccain.com.
One of the virgin blogs on the site includes a link to Sidney Blumenthal’s chronicle of the destruction of the myth of John McCain.
It’s called: The Myth of John McCain. Here’s a key passage:
McCain’s political colleagues, however, know another side of the action hero - a volatile man with a hair-trigger temper, who shouted at Senator Ted Kennedy on the Senate floor to “shut up”, and called fellow Republican senators “shithead … fucking jerk … asshole”.
A few months ago, McCain suddenly rushed up to a friend of mine, a prominent Washington lawyer, at a social event, and threatened to beat him up because he represented a client McCain happened to dislike.
Then, just as suddenly, profusely and tearfully, he apologised.
So much for the Republican even liberals love..
McCain’s flip-flopping in support of Bush’s escalation in Iraq: here.
Stephen Harper, Canada’s conservative Prime Minister, campaigned on strengthening ties with the Bush administration.
But the love affair has ended over the American “rendition” of a Canadian citizen to Syria.
A U.S. Ambassador lashed out against a foreign official last week for standing up to the Bush Administration - and it wasn’t against Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or any of the other usual suspects.
It was Canadian Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day - a fundamentalist creationist, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights hawk who once spoke at a “Canadians for Bush” rally.
At the onset of the Iraq war, he published a pro-Bush letter in the Wall Street Journal with Stephen Harper, who would become Canada’s Prime Minister in 2006.
Day and Harper blasted their own government’s opposition to the U.S. invasion and lauded the Bush administration’s “fundamental vision of civilization and human values.”
That conservative lovefest is now over.
Last week Day and U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins exchanged the most hostile tit-for-tat to date over the case of Maher Arar.
In 2002, U.S. authorities detained Arar, a Canadian citizen, at JFK airport.
After accusing him of having links to al Qaeda, they sent him to Syria, where he was tortured for nearly a year before being released without charge.
After an exhaustive inquiry, an independent Canadian commission cleared Arar of any terrorist ties last fall.
On January 26, the Ottawa government announced it would apologize for its role in the debacle and compensate Arar to the tune of about US$8.5 million, plus legal fees.
But while the Canadian government has now admitted that Arar is indeed the innocent computer engineer and father of two he always said he was, the Bush Administration continues to insist that Arar belongs on their “no-fly” list of terrorism suspects.
Germany wants CIA agents arrested for “rendition”: here.
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