Another Qaddafi going

The BBC has an article about Gaddafi's son:

A court in Libya has sentenced Saif al-Islam Gaddafi (photo), son of deposed leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, and eight others to death over war crimes linked to the 2011 revolution. More than thirty close associates of Colonel Gaddafi were tried for suppressing peaceful protests during the uprising. Saif al-Islam was not in court, but has previously appeared via video link. He is being held by a former rebel group from the town of Zintan that refuses to hand him over. A Zintani source indicated to the BBC that they would not execute him or hand him over to the court.
The former head of intelligence for the Gaddafi regime, Abdullah al-Senussi, is among those also facing death by firing squad, as is former Prime Minister Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi.
They have the right to appeal against their sentences within sixty days. Only some of the defendants were in the Tripoli court for sentencing
The BBC's John Simpson says the trial came to "an extraordinary and chaotic end".
In the years before the uprising, Saif al-Islam was known for trying to introduce political and economic reforms, says the BBC's North African correspondent Rana Jawad. "But as people called for the fall of his father's rule; he stood by him till the bitter end," she added.
He is also wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Prosecutors say that he was part of his father's plans to "quell, by all means, the civilian demonstrations against the Gaddafi regime".
Eight other ex-officials received life sentences and seven were given jail terms of twelve years each, said chief investigator Sadiq al-Sur. Four were acquitted. The defendants were accused of incitement to violence and murdering protesters during the revolution that eventually toppled Colonel Gaddafi.
Since his death, Libya has been plagued by instability, and currently has no single government. Instead, two warring factions each claim to run the country. An internationally-recognised parliament is based in Tobruk, while the capital, Tripoli, is held by rivals Libya Dawn.
The trial, which opened last year, has been dogged by criticism from human rights agencies, who are concerned about the fairness of Libya's judicial system.
The United Nations human rights office said it was "deeply disturbed" by the sentences, while Human Rights Watch said justice for the victims could "only be delivered through fair and transparent proceedings".
Saif al-Islam has been held in the mountainous western town of Zintan since the end of the war, by rebels who are allied to the Tobruk-based government.
The fighters were key to the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi and, after the revolution, they established themselves as one of the most powerful militias in the country, cementing this with the capture of Libya's most wanted man: Saif al-Islam.
He was ambushed deep in Libya's southern desert and immediately flown north to the mountains. As news of his capture broke, celebratory gunfire broke out across the country. Hordes of Zintanis met his plane at the town's rudimentary airstrip.
Placed immediately in a secret prison in the dusty town, his captors were adamant that they would not hand him over to the official authorities, a promise that still holds true.
They spoke openly of using him as a bargaining chip, and knew exactly the value of this precious political commodity.

Rico says it, as it was for his father, death couldn't happen to a nicer guy...

He's coming, ready or not

Julia Terruso has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about Philly's preparations, or lack thereof, for the Papal visit:

Confusion and frustration are mounting in Philadelphia over the coming visit of Pope Francis, largely because of few details from planners and city officials about mobility and accessibility within the expected secure zones.
Questions swirl over where and when vehicular traffic will be allowed, how far and where exactly a security fence will stretch, whether the Benjamin Franklin Bridge will be closed, and how SEPTA will handle the mass transit of possibly hundreds of thousands of visitors into and out of the city the weekend of 26 and 27 September 2015.
At a news conference, Mayor Nutter (photo) said his office would provide updates next week - and told Philadelphians to take a deep breath.
A spokesman for the Secret Service, which is directing the security operation, said details may not be released until three weeks before the Pope arrives. Nutter said that was common protocol. "I'm not planning to give every nut case in the universe a significant amount of advance information from a security standpoint as to exactly where, when, and how Pope Francis will be transported," Nutter said.
Among the most concerned are expectant mothers due to give birth the Saturday that Pope Francis arrives. Nutter said two pregnant Center City women had called him, concerned they won't be able to get to hospitals if they go into labor that weekend, given expected vehicle restrictions and the crush of hundreds of thousands of people in the city.
"I've had two personal requests from folks due to deliver their babies on the day Pope Francis is to arrive," Nutter said. The mayor said he gave their information to his Office of Emergency Management and assured them "they will get to the hospital that day."
With sixty days until Francis arrives, big logistics questions are testing the patience of Center City business owners and employees of hospitals, restaurants, and nonprofits. Organizers insist factual updates are near. "When there's official information to be released, we'll release it officially," Nutter said. "We're not in the business of leaking information or kind of sharing parts or pieces of the information."
In South Jersey, one law enforcement source briefed on the potential security plans said he and others had received little information from the World Meeting of Families.
"Their plan hasn't really been conveyed to us," he said, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the subject. "So we're kind of at their mercy at this point." He said South Jersey authorities had made plans for both closing the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and allowing traffic. The Delaware River Port Authority said Monday that it expected the bridge to remain open to traffic, but that plans could change.
Unofficial maps were posted online over the weekend, purporting to show a huge swath of Center City closed to all vehicular traffic, with a secure perimeter stretching from the Parkway to Independence Hall. Nutter called the maps phony.
Reliable sources have said vehicle traffic will not be allowed in Philadelphia from the Schuylkill to the Delaware River and from South Street north to Girard Avenue. The security perimeter, likely involving some fencing, will include areas from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to Independence Hall.
Exactly what the official impact map will look like is not yet public. One source familiar with the details said that officials planning the events had not been given digital or print versions of maps and that perimeters were frequently changing.
Another Secret Service spokesman, Brian Leary, said details on crowd control and restrictions on vehicular traffic and pedestrian movements during the Pope's visit to Washington would not be released until three weeks before, either.
In June, officials announced that Pope Francis would visit the Parkway for the Festival of Families event and the papal Mass, the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, Independence Hall, St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, and the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility.
SEPTA has announced drastically truncated routes with limited stations and departure and arrival times. The agency said it would sell special passes in advance for papal visitors to buy online. But the agency's website crashed the first day when tens of thousands of people tried to buy the ten-dollar passes at the same time.
Tthe beleaguered transit agency scheduled and then postponed a news conference to update plans for reopening sales. Spokeswoman Jerri Williams said the agency called the delay to brief officials and partners before the public announcement.
Meanwhile, many who live or work in Center City have growing concerns over accessibility and transportation. Karen Hoffman, a nurse at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, says she has been unable to get answers on how she will get to and from work that weekend. All she knows is she will be working, twelve hours on and twelve hours off, four shifts in a row. "What's upsetting is, no one is telling us anything," she said. "No one knows exactly what we have to do, where we're sleeping. I just think maybe the city should have said: 'Look, health-care workers, we're going to have a shuttle, we'll pick you up and drop you off.' Why couldn't we do that? Why does the whole world have to shut down because the Pope is coming?" Hoffman said the problem was not unique to Jefferson nurses, that she was not the only one in search of answers. "It's not so much about me, but what about all the nurses with small kids at home? Do they need to pay child care for four days?"
Taxi drivers and bicycle riders worry about how the vehicle restrictions will affect them.
Ron Blount, president of the Taxi Workers Alliance of Pennsylvania, said that, while he had already told members to plan to stay home that weekend, some confirmation or information would be useful. "We haven't received anything," he said. "Our understanding is the same limits apply to us as regular motorists. It's frustrating."
Bicycles won't be allowed inside the security perimeter, but may be permitted on nearby streets that are closed to vehicular traffic. John Boyle, research director at the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, hopes the city looks to bikes as a convenient and expedient way to get people around. "We think bikes are a great opportunity to move people in this case," he said.
At-large Councilman William K. Greenlee, who lives in Fairmount, said his office had fielded many calls from residents concerned about getting in and out of their homes that weekend. "The Pope is someone who wants to bring people together, and it's a shame there's at least, at this point, all this consternation," he said. "I think as the rumors fly around about fencing and restrictions of various sorts, what people would like to know as soon as possible is kind of the definitive answer."
Rob Saxon, a spokesman for Manna, said the food service provider had decided to halt deliveries to the sick on the Thursday and Friday before the pope arrives. He said it plans to double up on deliveries earlier in the week. The organization delivers in both Pennsylvania and South Jersey.
Many Center City businesses situated between the Art Museum and Independence Hall are waiting to hear if they will be inside or outside a fenced perimeter before determining whether to stay open. Some are considering renting cots and buying showers for their employees who must stay overnight. "There's going to be a lot of chaos going on in the city, and the transportation in and out of the city is going to be crazy," said Naeemah Henderson, a supervisor at Century 21's store at Eighth and Market Streets, near Independence Hall. Henderson said store officials would decide in the coming days if the store will stay open.
Restaurant suppliers are also anxious for information. "They're going to be ordering three days in advance," said Greg "Oz" Ostrofsky, who supplies produce to many restaurants in Center City.
Donna Crilley Farrell, executive director of the World Meeting of Families, echoed Nutter's call for patience and trust in the planning. The coming of the Pope, she said, is a "once-in-a-lifetime event for Philadelphia, for the archdiocese, and for the country."

Rico says he can't imagine how fucked up the City is going to be, but everyone's gonna be glad it's only 'once-in-a-lifetime'...

A rainbow merit badge?

Rico's friend Kelley, a noted crank on the subject of homosexual rights, forwards this:

After two thousand years of supposedly being celibate champions of chastity, a Catholic priesthood dedicated to overseeing the morality of the world is revealed to be unable to keep their hands off of young boys. Despite this, the Boy Scouts have decided to open up membership (in one of the greatest assemblages of boy-bum on the planet) to all homosexuals, young and adult. I propose a rainbow rondel merit badge, distorted ever so slightly to look like a puckered anus. NAMBLA's fondest wet dream just came true.

Rico says he doesn't think this is gonna go over well with the middle of the country; he predicts no Boy Scout troops between Pittsburgh and San Francisco...

Keeping a watchful eye on the ISS

The BBC has an article by Richard Hollingham on NASA and the space station:

In a darkened room, deep within the high-security perimeter of Redstone Arsenal, an army base in Huntsville, Alabama, eight men and women sit behind concave banks of computer monitors, streams of data reflecting across their faces. One of the women will occasionally speak into her headset, although she speaks so quietly it is difficult to make out more than a few words.
Along the wall in front of them, screens display images of the Earth, graphs, timelines and, as we watch, an astronaut’s backside as he floats through a hatch four hundred kilometers above the planet.
Staffed round the clock, this is NASA’s Payload Operations Integration Center, the control hub for all the science experiments on the International Space Station (ISS). Here, every working minute of the orbiting astronauts’ days are accounted for, monitored and, if necessary, adjusted. Houston may get all the glory, but this little-known control room, part of the Marshall Space Flight Center, is the hub of space station science.
“We are the go-betweens,” says payload communications manager Sam Shine. “We are the interface between the scientists and the crew on board the space station.” In fact, Shine is one of the few people on Earth, along with the Capcom (Capsule Communicator) in Houston, able to talk directly to the crew on the ISS, looking after them as they work through their daily science routines.
“It’s very tricky,” says Shine. “We have language barriers, we have time zone differences; sometimes trying to work with an Italian principal investigator and get the information they need up to, perhaps, a German crew member can be a bit tricky.”
Since its completion in 2011, the hundred-billion-dollar ISS has been all about the science. The walls, ceiling and floor of its US, Russian, European, and Japanese laboratories are crammed with experiments, and astronauts spend an increasing amount of time as orbiting research technicians.
“If you name a discipline of science, we are probably doing that kind of experiment on board,” says Shine. Studies in this unique microgravity research lab range from investigating plant growth to understanding the properties of liquid metals.
Much of the science overseen from the control room in Alabama is concerned with studying the effects of space on the astronauts themselves, such as the bone and muscle wastage they experience. This is essential research if humans are ever to leave their home world for any length of time.
Scientists are also studying the psychological challenges of living away from Earth in an isolated metal box, eating reconstituted meals, drinking recycled urine, with only work colleagues for company.
One of the most intriguing of these experiments, known as Astro Palate, has been devised by food and nutrition scientists at the University of Minnesota. Among other things, it seeks to understand how food can be used to reduce stress. In other words, when living for a long time in space, is comfort food good for you?
“We may have astronauts do a task they don’t enjoy, such as vacuuming the space station,” says Shine. “We then have them take a survey to see how they feel about it, then let them eat some comfort food, perhaps chocolate pudding, and take another survey.” “We’re starting to understand ways of making our crews feel at home as they’re in space for longer and longer durations,” she adds.
Another study involves astronauts keeping journals of their life on board the station; an attempt to get honest accounts of their feelings, stresses, tensions, or homesickness. Because only the researcher compiling the results of the project reads them, the hope is that the crew are more likely to be candid.
“One of the most interesting findings is that the fourth month of the mission is when the crew is most likely to want to come home,” says Shine. “They’re getting tired of being on the space station, and they want to see their families.”
As most missions to the ISS are now between six months and a year in duration, NAASA may therefore want to consider sending up some more chocolate pudding.
To help cope with the daily frustrations of living on board a cluttered orbiting laboratory, the Alabama team is even responsible for the astronauts’ lost property. It is the job of the Stowage Officer to keep track of every item on the ISS. Shine describes it as “one of the hardest jobs in the space program”.
“Sometimes astronauts don’t put their things away, just like us down here on Earth,” says Shine. “They’ll call down looking for a wrench or something, and it’s not where we thought it was, so it’s the job of the stowage officer to go back through the history of where it was last seen and locate it.” It is the space equivalent of losing your keys and trying to remember where you last had them. The problem is that if you put down your spaceship keys, there is a good chance they will float off somewhere else.
“We’re looking over the astronauts’ shoulders so if we see something float away we’ll let the crew know,” says Shine. “A lot of the time we find things collected in vents.”
It’s always been the case that behind every astronaut there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of support staff. The difference today, as we enter an era of longer duration missions, is that they are just as likely to be an expert on comfort food or space station storage as a rocket scientist.

Rico says there's always things you never thought of, like losing a wrench...

Piracy on the high seas

Ian Urbina has a long article in The New York Times about a ship sinking that was a good thing:

Aboard the Bob Barker, in the South Atlantic:
As the Thunder, a trawler considered the world’s most notorious fish poacher, began sliding under the sea (photo) a couple of hundred miles south of Nigeria, three men scrambled aboard to gather evidence of its crimes. In bumpy footage from their helmet cameras, they can be seen grabbing everything they can over the next 37 minutes: the captain’s logbooks, a laptop computer, charts and a slippery two-hundred-pound fish. The video shows the fishing hold about a quarter full with catch and the Thunder’s engine room almost submerged in murky water. “There is no way to stop it sinking,” the men radioed back to the Bob Barker, which was waiting nearby. Soon after they climbed off, the Thunder vanished.
It was an unexpected end to an extraordinary chase. For over a hundred days and more than ten thousand nautical miles, across two seas and three oceans, the Bob Barker and a companion ship, both operated by the environmental organization Sea Shepherd, had trailed the trawler, with the three captains close enough to watch one another’s cigarette breaks and on-deck workout routines. In an epic game of cat-and-mouse, the ships maneuvered through an obstacle course of giant ice floes, endured a cyclone-like storm, faced clashes between opposing crews, and nearly collided in what became the longest pursuit of an illegal fishing vessel in history.
Industrial-scale violators of fishing bans and protected areas are a main reason more than half of the world’s major fishing grounds have been depleted and by some estimates over ninety percent of the ocean’s large fish like marlin, tuna and swordfish have vanished. Interpol had issued a Purple Notice on the Thunder (the equivalent of adding it to a Most Wanted List, a status reserved for only four other ships in the world), but no government had been willing to dedicate the personnel and millions of dollars needed to go after it.
So Sea Shepherd did instead, stalking the fugitive two-hundred-foot steel-sided ship from a desolate patch of ocean at the bottom of the Earth, deep in Antarctic waters, to any ports it neared, where its crews could alert the authorities. “The poachers thrive by staying in the shadows,” Peter Hammarstedt, captain of the Barker, said while trying to level his ship through battering waves. “Our plan was to put a spotlight on them that they couldn’t escape.”
The pursuit of the Thunder, until its sinking in April of 2015, pieced together from radio transmissions, interviews, ship records and reporting on board the Bob Barker and its fellow ship, the Sam Simon, demonstrates the anything-goes nature of the high seas, where weak laws and a lack of policing allow both for persistent criminality and, at times, bold vigilantism.
Illegal fishing is a global business estimated at ten billion dollars in annual sales, and one that is thriving, as improved technology has enabled fishing vessels to plunder the oceans with greater efficiency. While countries, with varying degrees of diligence, typically patrol their own coastlines, few ever do so in international waters, even though United Nations maritime regulations require them to hold vessels flying their flags accountable for illicit fishing.
That leaves room for organizations like Sea Shepherd, which describes itself as an eco-vigilante group, flies a variation of the Jolly Roger on its ships and often cites the motto, “It takes a pirate to catch a pirate.” In chasing the Thunder, Sea Shepherd’s goal was not just to protect a rapidly disappearing species of fish, its leaders said, but to show that flagrant violators of the law could be brought to justice.
Maritime lawyers question whether the group has legal authority for its actions— ranging from cutting nets and blocking fishermen to ramming whaling vessels— but Sea Shepherd claims its tactics are necessary. So do some Interpol officials.
“They’re maritime skip tracers,” one Interpol official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to talk to reporters. “And they’re getting results.”
Banned since 2006 from fishing in the Antarctic, the Thunder had been spotted there repeatedly in recent years, prompting Interpol to issue an all-points bulletin on it in December of 2013. The vessel was described as the most egregious of the ships then on its Purple Notice list, collecting over seventy five million dollars from illicit sales in the past decade, more than any other ship, according to agency estimates. The Thunder’s prime catch was toothfish, more popularly called Chilean sea bass, known on docks as “white gold” because its fillets often sell for thirty dollars a plate or more in upscale restaurants in the United States.
The Thunder’s status as a fugitive hardly slowed it down. By keeping its locational transponder turned off, it could fish and then slip in and out of ports undetected. The ship’s name and port registry, which have changed more than a half-dozen times, were not painted on its hull, the typical practice, but on a metal sign hung from its stern. (Sailors call such signs ,James Bond license plates, because they can be easily swapped out.) In March of 2015, the Thunder was stripped of its registration by Nigeria and became officially stateless, which meant that marine authorities from any country could board and arrest its crew.
“Sea Shepherd is doing what no one else will,” said Peter Whish-Wilson, an Australian senator. “The urgency of this problem has grown,” he added, “but the government response, from all governments really, has fallen.”
On its second day of prowling for the Thunder in December of 2014, the Barker spotted its prey. Appearing first as a red blip on an otherwise barren radar monitor, the vessel was moving slowly, at six knots, and heading against the tide of floating icebergs, some the size of tall buildings.
Captain Hammarstedt sailed within four hundred feet of the Thunder before reaching for a reference binder— an Interpol “mug shots” guide featuring silhouettes of illegal fishing vessels. He radioed the Thunder’s officers, most of them Spaniards or Chileans. Speaking through a translator, he warned that the Thunder was banned from fishing in those waters and would be stopped.
The Thunder responded: “No, no, no. Negative, negative. You have no authority to arrest this vessel. You have no authority to arrest this vessel. We are going to continue sailing, we are going to continue sailing but you have no authority to arrest this ship, over.”
“We do have authority,” the Bob Barker said. “We have reported your location to Interpol and to the Australian police.”
The poachers replied, “Okay, Okay, you can send our location, but you can’t board this ship, you can’t come in or arrest us.”
The Thunder’s crew, which had been working on its aft deck, abruptly disappeared below. The ship (a trawler that had been converted to do other types of deep-sea fishing) soon doubled its speed and made a run for it, the Barker close behind. They were in a stretch of Antarctic sea called the Banzare Bank, known among mariners as The Shadowlands, because it is among the planet’s most remote and inhospitable waters, nearly a two week journey to the nearest major port.
On that first night of the chase, 17 December 2014, Captain Hammarstedt made a note in his ship’s log: “Bob Barker will maintain hot pursuit and report on the F/V Thunder’s position to Interpol.”
While the Bob Barker chased the Thunder, the Sam Simon tracked another vessel wanted by Interpol, a ship called the Kunlun, eventually causing its captain to disembark in Phuket, Thailand, where it remains. The Simon also spotted another toothfish netter called the Yongding, which was soon detained as well.
The Thunder, though, was the top prize. When the Bob Barker began pursuing the vessel, the Sam Simon’s initial job was to remain in the Banzare Bank and pull up the fifty miles of illegal net that the Thunder left behind, evidence for a possible prosecution.
Hauling the nets was dangerous. The Sam Simon’s deck was slippery, cluttered, and partly frozen. The ship’s side walls were low. Tripping was easy. Marbled with slush, the polar water below was so cold that to fall would likely have meant death, not by drowning, but from cardiac arrest.
Consumer demand for toothfish skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s after a Los Angeles-based seafood wholesaler decided to rename the oily fish Chilean sea bass to make it more appealing to the American market. An ugly bottom dweller, found only in the earth’s coldest waters, the toothfish can grow over six feet long and weigh nearly three hundred pounds. The rebranding worked a little too well. More fishing boats targeted toothfish, and now some scientists say that its population is disappearing at an unsustainable rate, though it is unclear how fast.
The fish that the Sam Simon’s crew were pulling on board had been trapped underwater in the nets and were starting to decompose. With gas building up inside the carcasses, some of the fish exploded as they slammed onto the deck. Many members of the crew, most of them vegans, cried or vomited.
Gillnets, like those used by the Thunder, are dropped to the sea floor and form mesh walls sometimes many miles long. The nets are illegal in many parts of the world because they are undiscerning. For every four sea creatures netted by the Thunder, for instance, only one was a toothfish. The rest were thrown back to the sea, most of them dead.
Just before 6 am on 3 January 2015, Captain Siddharth Chakravarty, a 32-year-old Indian who had previously worked on chemical tankers, headed to bed. About twenty minutes after he fell asleep, the Sam Simon’s crew called his cabin. “We need you on the bridge,” the voice said. “It’s urgent.” He arrived to find his first mate, Wyanda Lublink, at the helm. Lublink, a no-nonsense former Dutch Navy commanding officer, pointed out the window at an iceberg— about seven stories tall, roughly a half-mile across— rapidly approaching the ship’s back deck.
“What are you waiting for?” Captain Chakravarty asked. “We have time,” one of the officers replied. “No, we don’t,” the captain said. Though the iceberg was still about a mile away, the wind was pushing it faster toward the ship, whose engines, which were turned off to save fuel, required about twenty minutes to warm up. “Clear the aft deck, now!” Captain Chakravarty ordered. “Start the engine immediately.”
Eighteen minutes later, about fifty feet from impact, the Sam Simon shoved through the pack ice, just barely avoiding the iceberg.
By late February of 2015, the Simon made its way to Mauritius, a small island nation in the Indian Ocean, where Captain Chakravarty met with Interpol and the local authorities.
Fishing boat captains have their superstitions, sweet spots, and, in gillnetting, their signature style, distinguished by knot ties, net grids, and rope splicing. Familiar with the unique characteristics of nets from the Thunder, Captain Chakravarty ticked off a 72-point list for the investigators. Before leaving, he handed over some of the Thunder’s nets. He took the rest of them, having been warned that they might be sold on the black market.
Built in 1969 in Norway, the Thunder had many names over the years (Vesturvón, Arctic Ranger, Rubin, Typhoon I, Kuko, and Wuhan N4) and was registered to fly the flag of as many countries (Britain, the Faroe Islands, the Seychelles, Belize, Togo, Mongolia, and most recently, Nigeria).
During its final months, the ship’s crew included forty men; thirty Indonesians, the Spanish officers, and the captain, Alfonso R. Cataldo, 48, a Chilean.
Some maritime records cite the Thunder’s operators as a Panama-registered company called Trancoeiro Fishing, but ownership is a mystery, shrouded by shell companies from the Seychelles, Nigeria, and Panama. Trancoeiro Fishing did not respond to requests for comment. Contacted through their families, three of the ship’s officers declined to comment, while others, including the captain, could not be reached.
After being spotted in Antarctica, the Thunder bolted north toward the Furious Fifties and Roaring Forties, a perilous strip of latitudes spanning the Southern and Indian Oceans. Winds there routinely top seventy miles per hour in storms, with waves reaching sixty feet tall.
The Barker’s Captain Hammarstedt, thirty, a baby-faced Swede, was respected by his crew for his seafaring skills and calm under fire. A decade of anti-whaling work had exposed him to a fair share of angry storms and violent confrontations. Still, he worried as he prepared to follow the Thunder into a huge low-pressure zone.
As the wider, heavier Thunder held firm over the next two days in the storm, the Bob Barker swayed back and forth, listing forty degrees as it was battered by fifty-foot waves. Below deck, fuel sloshed in the Barker’s tanks, splashing through ceiling crevices and filling the ship with diesel fumes. In the galley, a plastic drum tethered to the wall broke free, coating the floor in vegetable oil that bled into the cabins below. Half the crew was seasick. “It was like working on an elevator that suddenly dropped and climbed six stories every ten seconds,” Captain Hammarstedt recalled.
Emerging on the other side of the storm, the ships settled into several days of radio silence. As much a battle of wills, this endurance race was also a test of fuel capacities. While the Barker never left the Thunder’s trail, the Sam Simon split off several times to resupply. Each time the two vessels moved close enough to connect a refuel hose, the Thunder turned 180 degrees and sped toward them, wedging between them to disrupt the effort.
On 7 February 2015, tensions erupted. After the Thunder threw out fishing nets, Captain Hammarstedt tried blocking the ship’s path. The Thunder responded by charging toward the Barker. Captain Hammarstedt immediately pulled his throttle into reverse, avoiding a collision by about one yard.
The next day, the Thunder’s deckhands began preparing their nets, with officers radioing beforehand to alert the Barker that they intended to fish. “If you do, we will cut your nets,” Captain Hammarstedt threatened.
Moments later, as the Thunder’s mesh hit the water, he gave his crew the go-ahead. They began lifting and cutting the buoys, causing the nets to sink. Captain Cataldo, on the Thunder, exploded: “You are taking our buoys!” he said over the radio. “That is illegal. We are coming.”
The Barker responded that it had seized the fishing gear as evidence of a crime.
“We are coming next to you to get our buoys,” the Thunder’s captain replied angrily. “You have to give them back.” Shortly after, he added: “You started this war.”
Turning the chaser into the chased, the Thunder headed full throttle at the Bob Barker, which fled, its crew delighted that their adversary was wasting fuel. Three hours later, the Thunder’s captain returned to his original course.
Though its ships are unarmed, Sea Shepherd is not averse to confrontation. The group is best known for its anti-whaling campaigns, which have included ramming Japanese vessels. Some critics dismiss its work, depicted on Whale Wars, the Animal Planet television show, as counterproductive publicity stunts.
Headquartered in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Sea Shepherd spent more than a million dollars chasing the Thunder, and it has a fleet of five large ships, a half-dozen fast inflatables, a crew of more than a hundred, and units in more than a dozen countries, including the United States.
Much of its money is donated by celebrities, including Sean Connery, Brigitte Bardot, and Martin Sheen. The Bob Barker, currently flagged in the Netherlands, is named after the former host of the American television game show The Price Is Right, who gave five million dollars to buy the ship in 2010. The Sam Simon, which also flies a Dutch flag, was bought in 2012 for more than two million dollars, largely funded by, and named for, a creator of the television show The Simpsons.
Captain Hammarstedt said he draws the legal authority for actions like confiscating the Thunder’s nets from a provision in the United Nations World Charter for Nature that calls on nongovernmental groups to assist in safeguarding nature in areas beyond national jurisdiction.
Several maritime lawyers and international policy experts, though, said that obstructing fishing vessels and confiscating their gear is probably illegal. “But no one would prosecute this because it pales in comparison to what the Thunder was doing,” said Kristina Gjerde, an expert on high seas policy based at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a coalition of nonprofit groups and government agencies working on global maritime and environmental oversight. “Sea Shepherd knows this.”
Two months into the chase, having reached heavy seas in the Indian Ocean about four hundred miles southeast of South Africa, the Thunder sat high in the water, indicating that it had burned through much of its fuel.
The Simon and the Barker saw an opportunity and put five of their crew members in a small skiff. They carried a black trash bag with ten sixteen-ounce plastic bottles, caps wrapped in yellow tape. Inside each bottle was a note written in the Indonesian language, Bahasa, a message intended for the Thunder’s crew. “We have no intentions of putting you in trouble,” the 450-word note said. “We should work together.”
Pulling within range, the Sea Shepherd’s crew began throwing the bottles onto the Thunder’s deck. Moments later, a man appeared on the upper deck wearing a black ski mask. He hurled a chain that splashed into the water a couple of inches from the skiff’s twin outboard motors. Next, he threw a round metal tube, about the size of a roll of duct tape, that hit one of the Sea Shepherd’s crew members, forcing a retreat.
The distress call came at 6:39 am: “Assistance required, assistance required,” the Thunder’s captain pleaded over the radio. “We’re sinking.” The Thunder had collided with something, he said, possibly a cargo ship. “We need help.”
The Sea Shepherd officers were shocked. While they noticed some commotion on the Thunder, there was no hint of a collision. Still, they quickly agreed that the more spacious Sam Simon would take the Thunder’s crew on board. Captain Chakravarty called a meeting on his bridge. “We’re outnumbered two to one,” he warned. “This is very dangerous for us.”
Everyone was to change out of shorts and t-shirts and into uniform, he instructed. The guests were to be escorted on bathroom visits. There would be two-man watches from the upper deck at all times. No one was to ask any questions about fishing. “This is strictly a rescue operation now,” he said.
At 12:46 pm on 6 April 2015, the Sam Simon’s log noted of the Thunder: “Going down very fast.” By then, the trawler’s crew had moved into their rescue boats. Meanwhile, three Barker crewmen were climbing on board in hopes of salvaging evidence.
“I’m giving you ten minutes,” Captain Hammarstedt said in a radio call to his men.
After grabbing binders, charts, and computers from the bridge, they headed to the engine room, finding it almost completely submerged. In the galley, a defrosting chicken sat on the table.
Climbing down into the fish hold, Anteo Broadfield, an Australian serving as second mate, quickly became lightheaded. The air there was too thin, the refrigeration fumes too thick. Helmet camera footage shows hundreds of white plastic bags— stacks of wrapped fish (just trunks, with their heads, tails, and guts removed). “You need to go now,” the Barker radioed. Straining, the men lifted out one of the heavy fish bags before returning to their skiffs.
Once on the Sam Simon, the Thunder’s officers were surly and un-talkative. “Estupido!” one of them yelled, lunging at a Sea Shepherd photographer who was taking their pictures.
Captain Chakravarty contacted the nearest port officials in São Tomé and Príncipe, the small island nation off the coast of West Africa, and arranged for the police and Interpol officials to meet them.
On arrival, the Thunder’s senior crew members were arrested. In July of 2015, three officers were charged with a variety of counts, including pollution, negligence and forgery. Several other governments, including that of Spain, are considering charges against the ship’s owners for illegal fishing, and perhaps other crimes, including money laundering and tax evasion, according to the Interpol official who discussed the case on the condition of anonymity.
But losing the ship— and the evidence that went down with it, including the fish in the hold, onboard computers, various records, and fishing equipment— makes prosecution more difficult, Interpol and Sea Shepherd officials acknowledge. While relieved that the Thunder is no longer in action, the Sea Shepherd’s crew, along with law enforcement authorities, are suspicious about how the great chase ended. No other vessels had been near the Thunder before it sank, and its cabin doors were tied open rather than sealed shut to keep water out. That suggested the five million dollar ship might have been intentionally scuttled, possibly to avoid being seized by the police, according to the authorities in São Tomé and Príncipe and Sea Shepherd officials.
The Sam Simon crew remembered something else. As their ship carried the Thunder’s crew back to land, Captain Cataldo climbed onto a five-foot-high stack of his confiscated nets on the back deck. Stretching out, he went to sleep.But just before that, as the Thunder finally sank, he had pumped his fist and cheered.

Rico says good riddance to a bad thing and its men...

History for the day

On 28 July 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and World War One began, as declarations of war by other European nations quickly followed.

A dentist?

The Slatest has an article by Ben Mathis-Lilley about the lion killer:

The Telegraph reports that the well-known Zimbabwe lion which died earlier in July under potentially unlawful circumstances was killed by a Minnesota dentist and prominent bow-and-arrow hunter named Walter Palmer. Palmer was assisted by a professional hunter named Theo Bronkhorst, who reported the incident to authorities, The Telegraph writes, and Bronkhorst is scheduled to appear in court on 6 August 2015 alongside the owner of the land on which the lion (nicknamed Cecil) was killed after allegedly being lured out of the protected Hwange area.
Walter Palmer's previous exploits in "trophy hunting," The Telegraph notes, are well-documented; he's shown on this blog posing with an elk, a bighorn sheep, and (somewhat disturbingly) a leopard that he killed, and was written about in The New York Times in 2009. The Times and the Telegraph both note that, in 2008, Palmer pleaded guilty to charges that he made a false statement to Federal wildlife officials about the details of a black bear hunt in Wisconsin. He was sentenced to a year's probation.
The website for Palmer's dental practice says he is a North Dakota native who enjoys participating in activities during which he can "stay active and observe and photograph wildlife."
The Zimbabwe Professional Hunters and Guides Association acknowledged in a statement on its Facebook page that one of the individuals involved in the killing had committed a "violation of the ethics of ZPHGA" and has been suspended from the group.
The Guardian reports that police in Zimbabwe are "seeking the lion’s remains among the country’s taxidermists." The animal is thought to have been killed on 6 July 2015.

Rico says okay, first we pull out all Palmer's teeth without anesthetic (on live television, of course), then we shoot and behead him...

Here's his data (though he already took down his website):
Todd Palmer Dental
330 Heritage Place,  Faribault, Minnesotra 55021‎
(507) 332-8461
Feel free to call and abuse him. (Verbally, of course; we'll have to wait for the beheading.)

Missed a joke opportunity

The Slatest has an article by Josh Voorhees about politics:

"It shows that every single person here, seven billion people, including Donald Trump, came down through this chain," Zeresenay Alemseged, the chair of the anthropology department at the California Academy of Sciences, told President Obama as he showed him Lucy, the nickname given to the several hundred pieces of bone discovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s that represents the most complete skeleton of an early human ancestor ever discovered. Asked later why he encouraged the president to touch the roughly three-million-old fossils, Alemseged said: "Extraordinary people have extraordinary access."

Rico says no ancestry jokes, please, except about the Donald...

Pluto for the day

Slate has an article by Phil Plait about Pluto:

I’ve been expecting and seeing amazing images of Pluto from the close approach flyby of the New Horizons probe from mid-July. And, even though I knew the images taken once the spacecraft was past Pluto would be lovely, I still wasn’t quite prepared for just how awe-inspiring they would be.
Behold:

 

Oh, wow.
That was taken when New Horizons was about two million kilometers past Pluto, when the tiny rock and ice world was very nearly between the spacecraft and the Sun. New Horizons looked over its shoulder, back at Pluto, to capture this breathtaking picture.
The ring of light you are seeing? That’s Pluto’s atmosphere! Light passing through that cold, thin, nitrogen gas gets scattered, bent, and we see it as a halo surrounding the night side of Pluto.
The image (above) is surreal; both familiar and alien. We see a similar sort of photo every time there’s a solar eclipse. But as rare and lovely an event that is, this is no moon … it’s Pluto. Five billion kilometers from Earth, we see the dark side and eerie atmospheric glow of another world.
This image is more than just art. The brightness of the halo tells scientists how thick Pluto’s atmosphere is, how high it reaches. It also reveals the presence of haze, particles of ethylene and acetylene, in the atmosphere that extend up to a hundred and fifty kilometers above the surface! That’s unexpected; haze was expected lower in the atmosphere, but not so high up. Another mystery for scientists to ponder. Could this be pointing to weather, albeit ethereally thin weather, on Pluto?
Not only that, but another detector on New Horizons showed that the surface pressure on Pluto has decreased hugely over the past two years: the atmosphere has lost about half its mass! Pluto orbits the Sun on an ellipse, and is currently heading away from the Sun, getting colder. Its axis is tipped by 120° to its orbit (compare that to Earth’s 23° tilt), so it has extreme seasons as well. Did a huge amount of Pluto’s atmosphere freeze out over the past two years as parts of Pluto chill? That’s possible, but this is only one data point. We’ll be getting more data from the probe sent back to Earth over the next few months, and hopefully they will reveal what’s going on in Pluto’s air.
Art and science. Hand and hand, as always. But, wait, there’s more:

This image (above0 makes me very very happy. It shows the northern part of Sputnik Planum (the upper left part of the heart-shaped feature on the surface), the ice plains we’ve seen in earlier images. I speculated that the area looks very much like there’s been fluid flow, flooding, or seepage, where liquid has lapped up and filled in low lying areas near the hills and mountains nearby.
I was very close! Look specifically at the darker gray area where the flat region meets the hilly one. You can see swirls in the pattern, which is exactly what you expect if viscous ice has flowed around obstacles. What you’re seeing there is glacial flow on Pluto! But the ice in this case is not water ice, but nitrogen ice. At Pluto’s temperature, nitrogen ice should flow glacially, much as water ice does on Earth. That’s incredible.
Here’s another image, a mosaic of the Sputnik Planum region, this time to the south:

 

Again, powerful evidence that there’s bulk motion of fluids on Pluto. The infilled crater in the middle fills me with delight; the depression in the surface has been filled by nitrogen ice flowing into it. The glaciers appear to have flowed around and filled in the lower areas around the Hillary Montes as well.
The thin ice sheet is fascinating too; the polygonal shape to the segments indicates it can’t be too thick, which may be due to the surface cracking and making segmented sheets as the ice below it moves around.
Alan Stern, the New Horizons principal investigator, said that, if the ice is thick enough (tens to hundreds of meters) it could liquefy underneath, so the ice is moving on top of liquid nitrogen. This is not at all clear yet though.
All of this may be easier to see if you watch this amazing 3-D flyover animation made using the geometry deducted from these images:

Amazing. Simply amazing.
And, as always, let me say that these are still a drop in the bucket of the data we’ve received so far from New Horizons. These are still relatively low-resolution images; the high-resolution data still sit on the probe’s hard drive, slowly being transferred across the vast distance of the solar system back to Earth. It’ll be months before it’s all down and, as it dribbles in, we’ll see more and more incredible features on Pluto, and in much more detail than we have now. This is all still a taste of what’s to come. And, even then, this will be the best data we’ll have of Pluto for decades to come. Scientists will be planning their careers over these data.

Rico says the Universe continues to amaze...

Japanese theme park

Rico's friend Kelley forwards this:

Found this in an "abandoned places that are really creepy" photo essay:

FDA warning

InvestorPlace has an article by Karl Utermohlen about some over-advertised drugs:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a warning on type 2 diabetes drugs from several companies that may cause high levels of blood acid.
The drugs include AstraZeneca‘s Farxiga, Johnson & Johnson‘s Invokana , and Lilly and Boehringer‘s Jardiance. These can cause ketoacidosis, a condition where the body produces high levels of acid called ketones.
The type 2 diabetes drugs are SGLT2 inhibitors that cause blood sugar to be secreted in urine. The adverse effects from these substances may require hospitalization.
The FDA added that there have been at least twenty cases of acidosis resulting from the use of these drugs–all of which were emergency room visits or hospitalizations.  

Rico says this is why his doc didn't want him taking these...

Farming the wind

Diane Cardwell has an article in The New York Times about reaping (as opposed to sowing) the wind:

A few miles off the coast of Block Island, south of Rhode Island, a small flotilla has been gathering: crane vessels, tugboats and barges that began this week installing the fifteen-hundred-ton foundations of the nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm.
It’s a moment that its supporters have long anticipated, billing it as nothing less than the dawn of a new clean energy future for the United States, which lags Europe and China in harnessing ocean gusts for electricity.
It is a much more modest beginning than was originally expected. Only five turbines will spin in the waters off Rhode Island; other, more ambitious projects like Cape Wind in Nantucket Sound and its more than a hundred turbines remain stalled. But its backers see it as one that could lend credibility to other efforts.
“Steel in the water off Block Island is an important step in proving that offshore wind is a viable technology off the coast of the United States,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees leasing Federal waters. “Having an offshore wind project that people can see and understand and study will take away a lot of the concerns that folks had.”
Deepwater Wind, the company that is developing the farm, is pressing ahead. It holds a thirty-year lease on a parcel in Federal waters nearby— about 256 square miles about fifteen miles southwest of Martha’s Vineyard— with room for as many as 250 turbines.
And Hopper’s agency is pressing on with efforts to create a market. It sold two leases off the coast of Massachusetts in January, plans to sell more near New Jersey by the end of this year, and has begun identifying potential sites in the Carolinas.
But policy experts and business executives warn that without stable subsidies and mandates— and coordination among the states— offshore wind development will be limited to a few small demonstration projects. Along with Cape Wind, projects are stalled near Delaware, New Jersey, and New York.
How far and fast the market develops depends, analysts and experts say, on how strong of a commitment the country makes to renewable energy in general. “There are many good reasons why offshore wind has not been yet developed while other renewables have in the US” chiefly its high cost, said Paul Bledsoe, an energy consultant based in Washington and former climate adviser in the Clinton White House. “However, we’re still at a point where we have less than 10 percent renewable energy and if we are going to increase that number dramatically to somewhere near some of the major European countries, offshore wind will almost surely be part of that mix.”
That will take time. When the first offshore farm was built, in Denmark in 1991, developers were not thinking that it would suddenly become a mainstream form of energy, said Michael Hannibal, chief executive of the offshore division at Siemens Wind Energy, which supplied the turbines for that first plant. It took about a decade of testing and planning and putting in place a set of programs and generous subsidies for the market to begin taking off in Europe.
Part of what has driven the higher rate of adoption— especially in Britain, Denmark, and Germany— is that Europe lacks as many cheap, clean (or cleaner) alternatives that can replace coal, diesel, and nuclear plants. Electric rates are generally higher, natural gas is more expensive, and open land for wind and solar fields is harder to find than in the United States, making an expansion to the seas more economically viable.
In the UUS, the industry has been hampered by local opposition, fluctuating subsidies and a lack of specialized suppliers and expertise.
Offshore wind projects take a long time to plan and construct because they are more complicated and demand larger equipment that must function in the hostile environment of the high seas, said George Favaloro, a managing director in PricewaterhouseCoopers sustainable business solutions practice. The obstacles are surmountable, he said, but that would take an expectation that the industry will take off.
“We’re having a hard time making all that happen, frankly, because we’re rich in alternative sources of energy and rich in alternative sources of renewable energy,” he said. “It’s sort of a specialized set of circumstances now where this would be an attractive investment.”
That was what Block Island offered. Like many islands, its power prices are high because it is not connected to the mainland grid and depends on diesel for its electricity, and the state undertook an extensive planning process before designating the energy zone. With strong support from three governors over the seven years that Deepwater Wind, the developer, has worked on the project, it is about to come to fruition, said Jeffrey Grybowski, the chief executive. The first of the foundations should be hitting the water this week, he said, although that process has been delayed by rough seas, and that will continue for the next eight weeks until all five are in, anchored by piles driven twohundred feet into the ocean floor.
The turbines will not go in until next summer, although they are already under construction. The blades are sitting in a field in Denmark while the towers and nacelles are being put together.
He and others expressed optimism that the industry would get going, but added that it was important to have a project up and running to show not only policy makers, but also utility executives and regulators, that it was possible to get one through the permitting and financing process. After so many failures, he said, to get the industry going: “we need a success.”

Rico says his father, the noted oceanographer, comments that "this project, in its larger configuration, would have started more than a year ago if it hadn't been for the development of new and cheap methods for producing natural gas. This has shifted the energy market so much that otherwise new sources have been put on hold.".

Condoms for cannon

Rico's friend Kelley, also a military history junkie, forwards this photo, with the comment that he'd "seen them taping over the gun ports in the wings to keep mud, etc., out, but I've never seen them using condoms for 20mm cannons."

Honoring women

The recent tizzy over replacing poor Andrew Jackson with a woman has produced nothin but contention.
Rico says we should replace Grover Cleveland ( whom nobody cares about) on the thousand/-dollar bill with an appropriate female personage (anyone but Hillary, please).
Sure, you're not gonna be carrying them around in your wallet (nor will Rico, alas), but it will show her more respect than the measly twenty...

Dumb song for the day

Rico says if there's a song with dumber lyrics than The Mighty Quinn, he can't think of it...

Old problem, new solution

Megan Gibson has a Time article about a new approach to the refugee problem:

American property mogul Jason Buzi says he has a solution for the global migrant crisis: a new country just for refugees.
“We have a lot of stateless individuals all over the world right now,” Buzi told the Washington Post in an interview. “The idea is, if we could give them a state of their own, at least they’d have a place to live in safety and be allowed to live and work like everybody else.” “It’s almost shocking to me that nobody’s talking about this as a solution,” he added. Around the world, more than sixty million people have been displaced from their homes, with many living in large camps in poor conditions. State leaders, particularly in Europe, have struggled on how to address the influx of migrants into their countries.
Buzi claims he has already spent $15,000 out of his own pocket setting up a team to promote the new state, which he calls Refugee Nation. The mogul suggests that an unhibited island owned by another state might be suitable for the new country. He’s also hoping to get support from heavy weights to get the state set up, saying, “If you’ve got Angelina Jolie, for instance, behind it, it’s going to influence a lot more people and get more people to know about it.”
But when it comes to how the newly created state would function— socially, politically, and financially— Buzi says details will have to be worked out in the future. “Right now it’s a little like meeting a girl on a first date,” he told the Post, “I’m not thinking yet about what I’m going to name my children, right?”

Rico says you better think about what you're going to call all those children these migrants are going to have... (Maybe Norplant for all gravid females as a requirement for entry?) They could probably still get a deal for the non-tourist part of Baja California...

History for the day

On 27 July 1953, the Korean War armistice was signed at Panmunjom, on the border between Noth and South Korea, ending three years of fighting.

Satanic statue in Detroit

Nash Jenkins has a Time article about even-stupider-than-usual religious behavior:

A little before midnight on a recent Saturday, a crowd of around seven hundred gathered in an old industrial warehouse a few blocks from the Detroit River for what they’d been told was the “largest public satanic ceremony in history”. Most of them professed to be adherents of Satanism, that loosely organized squad of the occult that defines itself as a religious group. Others came simply because they were curious. After all, Satanists exist in the popular psyche as those who casually sacrifice goats and impregnate Mia Farrow with Lucifer’s child; if this ceremony was indeed unprecedentedly big, who knew what could be in store?
The reality of the event— and of the contemporary Satanic movement at large— was tamer, and, if the Facebook pictures speak the truth, harmlessly festive: a cross between an underground rave and a meticulously-planned Halloween party. They were there to publicly unveil a colossal bronze statue of Baphomet, the goat-headed wraith (photo) who, after centuries of various appropriations, is now the totem of contemporary Satanism. The pentagram, that familiar logo of both orthodox Satanists and disaffected teens, originated as a rough outline of Baphomet’s head.
The statue itself is impressive: almost nine feet tall, and weighing in at around a ton. The horned idol sits on a throne adorned with a pentagram, but it is the idol’s wings, and not his chair, that curiously evoke the Iron Throne from a certain celebrated HBO fantasy series. He has the jarring horns of a virile ram but the biceps of a guy who lifts four or five times a week. His legs, which are crossed, end, not in feet, but in hooves. It might seem more menacing if not for the two bronze-statue children standing on either side of him— a girl on his left; a boy on his right; both are looking up at him earnestly.
“Baphomet contains binary elements symbolizing a reconciliation of opposites, emblematic of the willingness to embrace, and even celebrate differences,” Jex Blackmore, who organized the unveiling, told Time late Sunday night. In a sense, the statue is a stress test of American plurality: at what point does religious freedom make the people uncomfortable?
Blackmore directs the Detroit chapter of the Satanic Temple, one of the few coherent organizations in a field that’s otherwise disorganized and dogmatically nebulous. The Satanic Temple has chapters in Florida and Finland, in Italy and Minneapolis. Its headquarters are in New York City, but the Detroit office is its first and largest outpost. Blackmore— who, by the way, uses a pseudonym for safety reasons— grew up in the Detroit metropolitan area and returned to the city to work with the Satanic Temple after attending a lecture on Satanism at Harvard.
Asked whether her group is a religious organization (or rather an anti-religious organization) she explains that it’s less of a church and more of an affinity group, built around what she repeatedly refers to as “Satanic principles.” It’s not the dogma you might expect. To quote from the group’s website:

The Satanic Temple holds to the basic premise that undue suffering is bad, and that which reduces suffering is good. We do not believe in symbolic “evil”.

Most vitally, though, the group does not “promote a belief in a personal Satan”. By their logic, Satan is an abstraction, or, as Nancy Kaffer wrote for The Daily Beast last year, “a literary figure, not a deity— he stands for rationality, for skepticism, for speaking truth to power, even at great personal cost.”
Call it Libertarian Gothic, maybe— some darker permutation of Ayn Rand’s crusade for free will. One witnesses in the Satanic Temple militia a certain knee-jerk reaction to encroachments upon personal liberties, especially when those encroachments come with a crucifix in hand. The Baphomet statue is the Satanic Temple’s defiant retort du jour.
“We chose Baphomet because of its contemporary relation to the figure of Satan and find its symbolism to be appropriate if displayed alongside a monument representing another faith,” Blackmore said. The monument she refers to is a six-foot marble slab engraved with the Ten Commandments, controversially situated on the grounds of the Oklahoma State Capitol. In 2012, state representative Mike Ritze fronted $10,000 out of his own pocket to have the marker installed in the shadow of the capitol’s dome, prompting the ire of those who believed it flagrantly violated the separation of church and state. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the state of Oklahoma; the Satanic Temple fought fire with fire. If the Christians could chisel their credo onto public property, the argument went, why couldn’t they?
The state didn’t agree, and rejected the Satanic Temple’s petition to place Baphomet’s statute on legislative property. The point is now moot, though: a month ago, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that the Ten Commandments monument violated the state constitution, a judgment that will probably stick in spite of an obstinate governor.
It seems there are battles left to fight, though. A Detroit pastor described the unveiling of the statue as “a welcome-home party for evil”. A Catholic activism group in the city actively encouraged people to attend mass at a local cathedral to speak out against the statue— a pray-in, if you will. Meanwhile, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson recently signed a bill that will put the Ten Commandments on a similar monument on the grounds of the State Capitol in Little Rock. The Satanic Temple may be planning a road trip.

Rico says that, if they were unveiling an equally-dubious statue of a Christian image (the Virgin Mary, say), nobody would have paid any attention...

Spaniard paid 50,000 Euros to kill lion

Tanya Basu has a Time article about stupid behavior by a rich human:

Cecil (video, above), one of Africa's most famous lions, was brutally murdered and beheaded in Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park earlier this month
Authorities are chasing a Spaniard who allegedly paid a park ranger fifty thousand euros to viciously kill and skin the lion.
One of Africa’s most famous lions, Cecil was murdered in an especially brutal manner, The Guardian reports. The thirteen-year-old lion had a GPS collar for an Oxford University research project, allowing authorities to track its movements.
Hunters lured the lion into leaving the park, a technique used by poachers to “legally” kill protected animals. The lion was shot with a bow and arrow. Authorities then tracked the injured animal for forty hours before hunters shot Cecil to death with a rifle, then skinned and beheaded him. Cecil’s headless body was found outside the town of Hwange.
“Cecil’s death is a tragedy, not only because he was a symbol of Zimbabwe, but because now we have to give up for dead his six cubs, as a new male won’t allow them to live so as to encourage Cecil’s three females to mate,” Johnny Rodrigues, head of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, said. “The two people who accompanied the hunter have been arrested but we haven’t yet tracked down the hunter, who is Spanish.”
Spain has a long history of importing lion heads as trophies from Africa. “From 2007 to 2012, Spain was the country that imported the most lion trophies from South Africa,” said Luis Muñoz, a spokesman for the Spanish anti-lion poaching and conservation group, Chelui4lions. “During this period, it imported over four hundred heads, compared to a hundred in Germany. Europe needs to ban these lion hunting trophies altogether.”
The Zimbabwe Professional Hunters and Guides Association has acknowledged the involvement of its members, but claims the lion was shot on a private safari and outside park borders. The country’s government has repeatedly rebuked this claim, noting Cecil lived within reserve borders and was protected.

Rico says the solution is obvious: public beheading (on national television, please; renting an Iranian to do it should be cheap) once they catch this idiot...

Can't eat rocks

The BBC has an article by Saffron Howden about land conflict in Australia:

Coal and gas mining continue to encroach on some of Australia's best farmland, pitting miners against farmers and creating a deep rift between the parties of the nation's ruling Conservative coalition.
In the 2006 movie Superman Returns, the young super hero plunges to Earth from planet Krypton, landing in the wide, undulating plains of Smallville, Kansas. His spacecraft pierces the region's rich black soils and, so the story goes, Superman is raised on this sweeping farmland where he learns to run and jump and fly.
A decade on from filming the Hollywood blockbuster, the real-life location, Breeza on the Liverpool Plains of rural New South Wales, Australia, is bracing itself, not against kryptonite, but against coal.
Earlier this month, Chinese company Shenhua received Australian government approval for a massive open-cut coal mine just three kilometers from tiny Breeza. The approval was one of the last hurdles in the company's mission to dig up ten million tons of black coal a year to ship from Newcastle, 170 miles to the east.
The rich soils of the Liverpool Plains have been farmed since the 1820s. The project has been almost eight years in the making, but it is only now that a very public fight has broken out between the region's competing stakeholders. With a physical footprint far larger than the city of Sydney, the Shenhua Watermark mine has been described by local farmers as agricultural genocide. It will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, over its thirty-year life span.
One such farmer, Fiona Simson, described the Liverpool Plains as an iconic agricultural region because of its outstanding natural resources. Simson, whose cropping farm is fifty kilometers from the proposed mine, is a former president of the NSW Farmers Association. "We must and will keep fighting," she told the BBC. "This project is not in the national interest."
The Liverpool Plains is often referred to as the food bowl of New South Wales, and is counted among the best agricultural land in Australia because of its fertile black soils, temperate climate, good rainfall, and rich surface and underground water resources.
The Association says fighting the mine is the most important challenge facing New South Wales farmers.
Shenhua says the mine will not damage the region's groundwater supplies and promises to look after vulnerable ecological communities.
Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt says the mine is subject to some of "the strictest conditions in Australian history".
But the approval has deepened a rift between Australia's governing Liberal party and its coalition partner, The Nationals, which has traditionally represented farmers, in a relationship already strained by the expansion of coal seam gas (CSG) mining over farming land.
Earlier this month, over a hundred people protested against CSG exploration in Gloucester, about three hundred kilometers north of Sydney. It was the fourteenth protest in that area, and one of hundreds of similar protests by farmers, Indigenous-Australian land owners, conservationists, and urban residents against the encroachment of coal and gas extraction onto rural, and in a few cases, urban land.
Agriculture Minister and Nationals member Barnaby Joyce, whose electorate of New England takes in the proposed Shenhua mine, has publicly condemned Hunt's decision to approve it. "I think it is ridiculous that you would have a major mine in the midst of Australia's best agricultural land," he wrote on his Facebook page.
The Deputy Prime Minister and leader of The Nationals, Warren Truss, seems to agree.
"The Nationals recognize the vital role that the coal mining industry plays in our national economy, but we believe that prime agricultural land should be preserved for its vital role in producing food for future generations," his spokesman told the BBC.
The Nationals' inability to hold back the tide of black coal has left many farmers frustrated, forcing them into unnatural alliances with environmentalists and the Greens party, and leading to the formation of groups like Lock the Gate. "We should not put our food bowl in jeopardy for the short-term benefit of a coal mine," says NSW Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham. "Our capacity to feed ourselves is obviously fundamental to the national interest," he says.
The Nationals have already felt the pinch of rural dissatisfaction at the ballot box. At the NSW election in March, the party lost the northern seat of Ballina to the Greens and nearby Lismore nearly went the same way.
There are a hundred and ten black coal mines across Australia. Another ninety new mines or expansions of existing mines are awaiting approval, according to Greenpeace.
In many cases, farmers who have worked the same land for generations are finding themselves forced off that land, says Greenpeace campaigner Dr. Nikola Casule. "These sorts of alliances [between farmers and environmentalists] are becoming more and more common," he says.
But Simson says the issue should not be about politics. "All sides of politics have had a hand in this," she says of the Shenhua mine. "The people in the region feel let down by not just the Nationals. If the Labor Party had still been in power, we'd potentially still be in the same situation now."

Rico says it's reminiscent of the shale oil fight in Pennsylvania...

Smuggling for the day

The New York Times has an article by Tom Mashberg and Max Bearak about smugglers in Africa:

The thirty or so guests enjoying spring rolls and white wine were gathered in a small third-floor gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to celebrate Subhash Kapoor (photo, center), a convivial Manhattan art dealer who had donated sixty miniature drawings of Indian aristocrats, deities, and beasts.
On this spring evening in 2009, Kapoor, owner of Art of the Past on Madison Avenue, stood atop the Indian art world. After his thirty-plus years in business, museums and collectors were paying seven figures for his Hindu, Buddhist, and South Asian antiquities. A nine-hundred-year-old dancing Shiva went to the National Gallery of Australia, a thousand-year-old bronze Ganesha to the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. Now, he was being toasted by the Met for a gift of artworks from his homeland.
“He had become quite a big fish, and he seemed thrilled,” said Eleanor Abraham, a fellow gallery owner in the crowd that night.
What no one in the room knew was that Kapoor was under investigation on two continents, suspected of running a hundred-million-dollar art smuggling operation.
Two years earlier, Indian officials had tipped American authorities that a company in West Nyack, New York, Nimbus Import Export, was about to receive seven crates from overseas labeled “marble garden table sets”. The contents were, in fact, three thousand pounds of stolen antiquities, the Indians said, and Nimbus’ owner was the proprietor of Art of the Past.
Today, American and Indian investigators say they have compiled an enormous dossier against Kapoor: emails and databases seized under search warrants; bank-transfer records and shipping forms; the testimony of former associates, including his office manager, who were arrested and have agreed to cooperate.
Much of the material has been the product of an investigation called Operation Hidden Idol. American authorities say they have concluded that the modest and esteemed Kapoor was, in volume and value, the most ambitious antiquities smuggler in American history, but Kapoor has adamantly denied doing anything illegal.
Their best evidence, they say, is an almost unimaginable 2,622 items, worth over a hundred million dollars, confiscated mostly from storerooms in Manhattan and Queens, and virtually all of it contraband from India.
James T. Hayes Jr., who oversaw the office of Homeland Security Investigations during much of the case, called Kapoor “one of the most prolific commodities smugglers in the world. We might see an individual with a handful of pieces,” he added. “What we haven’t seen is someone who basically created a black-market Sotheby’s.”
Kapoor’s case has been a cause célèbre in India and Australia. Many websites devoted to antiquities scandals, like Chasing Aphrodite and Poetry in Stone, have also questioned Kapoor-related acquisitions in museums around the world.
Since 2011, when Indian officials had him arrested on charges of theft and smuggling, Kapoor has been awaiting trial in a jail cell in Chennai, a port city on the Bay of Bengal formerly known as Madras. When that case is resolved, prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office hope to extradite him to face charges that include receiving stolen property. In April of 2015, they filed court papers asking for formal custody of Kapoor’s trove of merchandise so that it can eventually be returned to India and other nations. Officials are also urging unlucky Kapoor clients to surrender hundreds of costly treasures that they say were not his to sell. Museums in America and abroad, including institutions in Massachusetts, Ohio, Hawai'i, Singapore and Australia, are shedding rare holdings because they came from Art of the Past, which closed in 2012. The next year, investigators seized two statues Kapoor had boldly put on display inside the Indian-owned Pierre Hotel in New York City, trundling them through the lobby in front of aghast executives.
Kapoor, who started in the trade working alongside his father, rejects the allegations. His lawyer in India, S. Kingston Jerold, said his client dealt only in replicas and never exported or bought actual antiques. “They’ve cooked up the case, it’s all fixed up,” he said during an interview in his dim, overstuffed office in Chennai. “This case is fabricated for some other political purpose.”
It is a hard fall for a man long lauded by the international art market. In 2009, a prospering Kapoor told Apollo magazine that his gift to the Met— which has not been challenged as illicit— was “my way of giving back to the field.” Six years later, investigators say, Kapoor will be giving back nearly everything.
For almost a millennium, priests have climbed the ruined stone steps of the Varadharaja Perumal temple, in what is now the village of Suthamalli in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, and entered a moss-covered chamber where dozens of eleventh-century bronze and iron idols awaited prayers.
Balakrishnan Gurukkal, the latest in that line of priests, trod those steps on 14 April 2008, to celebrate the Tamil New Year. Though the site had once been a vital place of worship, locals now favored another temple nearby, and Gurukkal had not been there for months. He reached for the rusty lock on the flimsy metal gate and found it broken. He lit a candle and stepped inside. The idols were gone.
Within an hour, said Chelamma Kumar, who lives beside the weed-strewn temple in a thatch hut overshadowed by a white and lime-green water tower, “there was a big crowd and lots of police with sniffer dogs and all that.”
Some two hundred miles south of Chennai, the modest temple was just the kind of spot bandits and black marketers had targeted for years: rural, seldom visited, and barely secure, but laden with intricate, sensual statuary from the Chola period (300 BC to AD 1279). To major museums and wealthy collectors, such artifacts could be worth millions.
The Suthamalli site held thirty such statues, the police say, some brought over from another temple for “safekeeping” after a bungled burglary there in 1968. Some were for worship, others carried in an annual procession. “They were things we had managed to protect since our ancestors’ time,” said Gurukkal, conversing on a cot outside his house in July, shirtless in a red lungi. “I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to see them again.”
The theft had occurred a bit more than a month earlier, Indian investigators said. Since that time, the artifacts had sped from Suthamalli to Chennai to Hong Kong, then on to London, England and New Jersey; been falsely labeled inexpensive handicrafts; and been deposited in a New York City storage unit controlled by Kapoor. Scrubbed and restored, they would soon be displayed in his gallery, often identified as objects from private collections.
No one really knows when the looting Kapoor is accused of began. But India is a ripe target: it is home to thousands of remote shrines and archaeological sites with rare Hindu artifacts that sit unguarded. Vishakha N. Desai, a scholar at Columbia University who knew Kapoor, said government officials “show little concern for the protection of ancient heritage.”
Representatives from the Idol Wing of the Tamil Nadu Police Department in Chennai, which focuses on antiquities crimes, said Kapoor was already active in 2005 when he met with an associate, Sanjivi Asokan, at the five-star Taj Connemara hotel there.
Investigators say the men mapped out a straightforward scheme to rob dozens of ancient temples in Tamil Nadu that were watched, essentially, by no one.
Indian prosecutors believe that men Asokan hired to commit the break-ins would even spread tales of killer bees and bat infestations to keep villagers away from the targets. Asokan and Kapoor would then smuggle the artifacts out of India, the police say, and send them on serpentine journeys to the United States. “The scale and brazenness of the thefts is truly mind-blowing,” said S. Vijay Kumar, a private investigator from Singapore who grew suspicious after noticing that Kapoor was selling an extraordinary number of rare Indian idols out of New York City.
With Kumar’s help, the Idol Wing set about matching lustrous pictures from Kapoor’s catalogs with black-and-white images of the Tamil Nadu statues, which had been photographed in the 1960s by French archivists from a scholarly institute in India.
They saw that the objects being offered, in many cases for millions of dollars, bore a singular resemblance to pictures of religious icons that had disappeared from Tamil Nadu and other sites across India. In 2009, the Idol Wing distributed wanted posters of the statues.
Soon, three burglars suspected of being paid by Asokan were arrested with Suthamalli statuary in their possession, the police say. They implicated Asokan (who has been charged in India with theft and smuggling) and Kapoor.
After comparing notes with those of American investigators, Indian officials in October of 2011 issued an arrest warrant for Kapoor, who was then in Frankfurt, Germany for an exhibition, and German officials jailed him in Cologne. In July 2012, Kapoor, a United States citizen, was extradited to his homeland.
Back in Manhattan, Matthew Bogdanos, an assistant district attorney, and Brenton M. Easter, an agent with Homeland Security, were building their own case. According to court documents, an informant who visited Art of the Past in 2011 while fitted with a recording device discussed the sales of multimillion-dollar statues, including one titled Shiva Nataraja, or Dancing Shiva, with Kapoor. The Shiva had already been matched to one of the items missing from Suthamalli.
Kapoor is accused of skillfully falsifying paperwork to make his items appear legitimate. Some buyers intent on acquiring the objects could have been duped, officials say, but others likely tossed aside misgivings in a rush to augment their collections.
Convinced that Kapoor and his associates knew that most of his goods were contraband, the authorities raided his gallery and two of his storage units in January of 2012. They confiscated twenty million dollars in antiquities, seized decades of paperwork and computer data, and questioned Art of the Past’s office manager, Aaron M. Freedman.
Freedman, officials have said in court papers, has since linked Kapoor to countless illegal sales, fraudulent customs forms, fake invoices, and six-figure bank transfers to Asokan. After twelve raids from 2012 to 2014, officials had their 2,622 items in custody.
One big question lingers amid the fallout from the Kapoor case: how could a gallery owner run such a large smuggling operation, yet remain undetected for so long?
Chiefly, investigators say, Kapoor had a talent for importing black market antiquities under false pretenses. He routinely received approval from Indian customs officials to ship items free of inspection. And he relied on confederates in Hong Kong to mislabel his cargo and mix it with other freight to help obscure its trail.
Kapoor also counted on friends in the art trade to create fake letters claiming his contraband had a history of ownership outside India that predated the temple burglaries. One dealer in Singapore who vouched for him in writing was Paramaspry Punusamy, a former girlfriend. She became a witness against him in 2011, Indian officials said, after the two broke up and sued each other in Singapore, each claiming ownership of objects that were not truly theirs. “She is behind all this,” Kapoor’s lawyer, Jerold, said. “It is a case of revenge.” Punusamy, who was unavailable for comment, has not been charged but remains under investigation.
The museums and collectors who spent lavishly on artworks from Kapoor are unlikely to recoup their money. The National Gallery of Australia, for example, bought a dancing Shiva from Kapoor in 2008 for five million dollars. After an outcry from India, it returned the statue last fall, and is now suing Kapoor, whose assets have dwindled, for restitution.
The criminal case against Kapoor is less linear. A revolving door of prosecutors in India has slowed his trial to a glacial pace. Manhattan prosecutors, meanwhile, must wait until India is done.
Investigators say they are still trying to unravel Kapoor’s network, and they believe his hoard will surpass three thousand statues and relics taken from India, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Tibet. They also face the monumental task of determining where exactly the items came from and how to return them.
Today, the Varadharaja Perumal temple in Suthamalli is more or less abandoned. Without its precious inheritance, the temple has seen its long fall from glory into a mossy pile of rubble accelerate. Gurukkal visits Suthamalli only on the most auspicious days to light small clay oil lamps in the temple’s empty chamber. When told of the idols’ value on the international art market, his eyes bulged. Could it truly be that just one of the statues he had been visiting so casually was worth many times what he could hope to earn in a lifetime? “I don’t know whether Kapoor will get punished, but they need to return the idols to us,” said Gurukkal, overcoming his surprise. “That’s all we’re asking.”

Rico says it's amazing what people will pay for ancient religious crap...