This video is called Edvard Munch.

By Mike Marqusee in Britain, originally from The Hindu in India:

Munch’s very real phantoms

In celebration of the return of “The Scream” to museums, Mike Marqusee recounts the painting’s remarkable life, and that of its creator, Edvard Munch.

July 3, 2008

FOUR YEARS after it was stolen by masked gunmen in broad daylight, and two years after it was recovered in still undisclosed circumstances, “The Scream” has gone back on display at the Munch Museum in Oslo. …

Part of Munch’s genius lies in his evocation of isolation; but though mentally embattled from an early age, he was not an entirely isolated genius. As a young man he was drawn into Oslo’s bohemian counter-culture, where he was exposed to anarchist and revolutionary ideas.

He enjoyed friendships with a wide range of contemporary Scandinavian and European artists and writers, who saw Munch’s work as part of a broader avant-garde challenge to a complacent establishment. An establishment that reacted accordingly, condemning the subject, tone and technique of Munch’s groundbreaking paintings of the 1890s. He was not accepted as the master he obviously was until he was past 40.

In 1937, the Nazis condemned Munch’s work as “degenerate” and sold off the scores of Munch paintings held in German museums. When they occupied Norway in 1940, Munch refused to have anything to do with them. He confessed to a friend that the “phantoms” that had haunted him for years had been put in the shade by the giant “phantom” at loose in the real world.

This video from the USA is called Jeremy Scahill on The Myth of Humanitarian Intervention.

By Andy Newman in England:

ENGLAND AND THE DEATH OF NARNIA

Last weekend I took my oldest son and his friends to see the new Narnia film; “Prince Caspian”. They were entranced: this is a near-perfect movie for eight year old boys. And the story remains faithful to the spirit of the book, and even improves upon it.

As a child I loved the Narnia books. Though their deficiencies are obvious: there is a general distrust of women, a certain middle class priggishness and occasional racism. But the values of C. S. Lewis were typical for a man of his class and background at the time he wrote them; and the same attitudes were equally found in other children’s books of the period, like Frank Richards’ Bunter books or the Biggles books by W. E. Johns.

The difference is that the Narnia stories are so good that the books are still read, while childrens’ books by C.S Lewis’s contemporaries are not. This is of course something that Lewis shares with another great writer with outdated social attitudes, Rudyard Kipling.

Gore Vidal once wrote that L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Wizard of Oz, was one of the most important influences upon him, because if children learn to dream of alternative and different worlds, then they learn to dream that our own world could be changed for the better. Narnia is a beautiful imaginary for children, where animals talk and magic is real.

The religious content of Narnia is very clear, reflecting Lewis’s devout Protestantism, but only in the weakest of the books, The Last Battle, does the religion become so pompous as to drown the story. Generally, the didactic content of the Narnia books is a discussion of ethics, questions of right and wrong, free will, temptation and redemption that are useful ideas for children, and go beyond Christianity. …

The Second World War that contextualised Narnia also saw the shift of popular national understanding of what England and Britain represents. The old Britain of Empire loyalism and Anglicanism was reimagined as a new Britain that defined itself by the war against fascism, and the promotion of egalitarianism, of Beveridge and comprehensive schools. Narnia was dead.

Polly Toynbee’s criticism of the first Narnia film: here.

This is a Michael Moore interview on privatized medicine.

Here comes a poem about the tendencies of the Thatcherist-Blairist-Brownist British governments towards privatization of the National Health Service.

The Bevan! in the poem ia Aneurin Bevan, the British “Old” Labour minister, who founded the National Health Service in the 1940s.

The “should be living at this hour” line is borrowed from a poem by William Wordsworth:

Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:

LONDON, 1802.

Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters

From London daily The Morning Star:

POETRY: Poem of the week

edited by John Rety

Poem of the week: For Aneurin Bevan by Danielle Hope.

Bevan! You should be living at this hour
the NHS has need of you. She is a shell
sapped of spirit, a disoriented hull
a revengeful return of the Mayflower.
Her decks brim with pristine shops and babble,
burble like a jaunty airport mall.
Her cargo strains with episodes, manpower
and medicines, each counted to cut costs.
Below she battles ageing, accidents and old super-bugs
that breed below adverts for tomorrow’s drugs.
Passengers please travel on for health care
you’ll find private dentists, stocks, shares
and lawyers on each turning of the stair.

About the poet

Danielle Hope was born in Lancashire but now lives in London. She has had three collections of poetry, Fairground of Madness, City Fox and The Stone Ship, published by Rockingham Press.

John Rety of Hearing Eye Press and Torriano Meeting House is a former editor of anarchist paper Freedom.

This video from London is called George Galloway Stop The War [in Iraq] Protest March 15 2008 London.

From British daily The Independent:

Muslims feel like ‘Jews of Europe’

Minister’s shock warning on rise of anti-Islamic prejudice

By Cahal Milmo, Chief Reporter

Friday, 4 July 2008

Mr Malik said that many British Muslims now felt like ‘aliens in their own country’

Britain’s first Muslim minister has attacked the growing culture of hostility against Muslims in the United Kingdom, saying that many feel targeted like “the Jews of Europe”.

Shahid Malik, who was appointed as a minister in the Department for International Development (Dfid) by Gordon Brown last summer, said it has become legitimate to target Muslims in the media and society at large in a way that would be unacceptable for any other minority.

Mr Malik made clear that he was not equating the situation with the Holocaust but warned that many British Muslims now felt like “aliens in their own country”. He said he himself had been the target of a string of racist incidents, including the firebombing of his family car and an attempt to run him down at a petrol station.

“I think most people would agree that if you ask Muslims today what do they feel like, they feel like the Jews of Europe,” he said. “I don’t mean to equate that with the Holocaust but in the way that it was legitimate almost – and still is in some parts – to target Jews, many Muslims would say that we feel the exact same way.

“Somehow there’s a message out there that it’s OK to target people as long as it’s Muslims. And you don’t have to worry about the facts, and people will turn a blind eye.”

The claims are made in an interview to be broadcast on Monday in a Channel 4 Dispatches programme to coincide with the third anniversary of the London bombings of 7 July.

A poll to accompany the documentary highlights the growing polarisation of opinion among Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims, who say they have suffered a marked increase in hostility since the London bombings.

This video from Britain is called Boris Johnson refuses to answer a question 12 times.

From The Guardian in England:

Johnson deputy faces inquiry over alleged financial wrongdoing

· Fresh blow to London mayor’s administration
· Aide had been banned from working as priest

* Matthew Taylor and Dave Hill

* Friday July 4, 2008

Boris Johnson, London mayor, launched an independent inquiry last night into allegations of financial irregularities and inappropriate behaviour against his deputy mayor, Ray Lewis.

The move followed a Guardian investigation and a series of questions tabled by the newspaper on Wednesday.

It became the second blow to Johnson’s administration in the past 10 days after one of his senior advisers, James McGrath, quit for telling an interviewer that African-Caribbean migrants should go home if they did not like London.

This video from the USA says about itself:

Bush’s buddy’s oil deal destroys revenue sharing agreement in Iraq.

Rachel Maddow speaks on Count Down about Hunt Oil’s ties to Bush and effects on Iraq.

Bush administration encouraged oil deal in Kurdistan, undermining Iraqi “national unity”

4 July 2008

The Bush administration publicly criticized a deal made between Hunt Oil of Dallas, Texas and the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq last September for supposedly undermining Iraqi “national unity,” while privately officials were facilitating the oil firm’s activities, documents released this week by the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reveal.

Hunt Oil, whose chief executive Ray Hunt has been a major backer of George W. Bush, signed the agreement with the Kurdish government on September 8, 2007 to explore and develop oilfields in the region.

No national law on the division of oil revenues had been passed at the time (and still has not been), and the agreement outraged Iraqi government officials fearful that Baghdad would be cut out of its share of lucrative oil profits by such arrangements and that the country might well break up under centrifugal pressures. At the time Iraq’s oil minister, Hussein al-Shahristani, called the deal “illegal.”

Naomi Klein on Iraqi oil: here.

Rising oil prices: here.

US election: Obama denies flip-flop over policy on Iraq withdrawal: here.

This video from the USA says about itself:

This rare beaked whale stranded on 6/20/2008 and was cared for by the volunteers at the Marine Mammal Conservancy in Key Largo, Florida. Sadly the whale died on 6/23/2008.

More on beaked whale strandings in the USA: here.

From Wildlife Extra:

Scientists to study elusive beaked whales in Biscay – “Diver 2008 project”

June 2008. A group of Europe’s leading marine conservation and research organisations have joined forces to carry out further crucial research into some of the rarest and most elusive marine animals on the planet - beaked whales. The research programme, called “Diver 2008″, will run for a month off the northern coast of Spain, within the Bay of Biscay - an area renowned for sightings of these mysterious marine mammals. The programme follows on from a successful first Diver project in 2006, which established an important research baseline.

Beaked whales

Beaked whales are a group of 21 whale species, characterised by their distinctive beaks. They are primarily found in offshore deep water canyons and as such are rarely within easy reach of researchers and whale watching enthusiasts, making them little studied. However, the northern Spanish coast has a number of these deep water canyons within 20km of the coast and past survey work by the Diver 2008 researchers from commercial ferries, has highlighted the importance of these canyons for a number of beaked whale species, including Cuvier’s beaked whale, Sowerby’s beaked whale and Northern Bottlenose whale.

This is a video about domestic spying in the USA.

There is a new animation by Mark Fiore from the USA on the Internet.

It is called Constitutional Comprise.

It is about George W. Bush´s domestic spying, and the compromise in Congress about it.

It is here.

This video is called Socotra Yemen Heaven On Earth.

From BirdLife:

03-07-2008

The Yemen Council of Ministers has recently approved the Golden-winged Grosbeak as Yemen’s national bird. This colourful bird, with a huge beak for eating fruits and seeds, occurs in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen.

Yemen has also chosen the Arabian Leopard Panthera pardus nimr as the national mammal, the Dragon Blood Tree Dracaena cinnabari as the national tree, and the Aloe Aloe irafensis as the national plant.