Green group takes Dutch state to court over air pollution

DutchNews, August 21, 2017

Photo: Depositphotos.com

Environmental organisation Milieudefensie is taking the Dutch government to court this week, demanding it takes immediate action to ensure air quality meets official directives.

The case will be heard by judges in The Hague on Wednesday. Milieudefensie claims that the government has been damaging citizens’ health for years. ‘Every day we breathe in unhealthy air and that means tens of thousands of people get ill and thousands die as a consequence,’ a spokesman told the Parool. 

The paper said a recent health board report revealed the air quality in Amsterdam has not improved in recent years and concentrations of nitrogen dioxide have worsened.

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20TH KRYON SUMMER LIGHT CONFERENCE, US (7), June 2-4, 2017 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll) (Text version "The State of the Earth")

"... This is controversial. The planet can't just "change the water". It does it instead with a "reboot of life in the ocean" using the water cycle. Watch for evidence of this as it occurs, and then remember this channel. This weather cycle is to refresh the life in the ocean so that everyone on the planet will have needed food from the ocean. Gaia does this by itself, has done it before, and it does it for a reason - so it will not stagnate.

Dear ones, indeed, you have put compromising things into the air and the water, but it has not caused this cycle. We have said for a very long time, stop killing the environment! The reason? It's going to kill you, not Gaia. Gaia is spectacularly resilient and will survive anything you do. However, it is you who may not survive if you continue polluting. All this is starting to change with your awareness, and you're starting to see this and move with it. But Humans are not causing the current weather shift. This will be known eventually.

What is happening has happened before, and it's almost like a reboot for the oceans and it carries a lot of dichotomous events. You're going to see reports of a dying ocean, but at the same time you're going to see unusual reports of too many fish and other sea life in places that were supposed to have a decline. You're going to see the life cycle of the ocean itself start to change and reboot.  ..."

Bones, silver found in 18th-century Dutch wreck off UK

Yahoo – AFP, August 18, 2017

A diver works on the wreck of the Rooswijk, a Dutch East India Company ship
which sank in 1740, on the sea bed off the coast of Ramsgate, southeast England,
in a picture released by Historic England in London on August 18, 2017 (AFP Photo/)

London (AFP) - Maritime archaeologists said Friday they have begun excavating the wreck of a Dutch ship that sank off the English coast in 1740, recovering leather shoes, silver and the bones of its lost crew.

The Rooswijk, a Dutch East India Company ship, was on its way to what is now Jakarta when it went down with around 300 people and a large cargo of silver ingots and coinage aboard.

Following its discovery in 2005, most of the precious goods were removed, but a full excavation is now underway due to concerns it could be destroyed by shifting sands and currents.

Remains of some of the sailors who perished have been found preserved on the seabed 26 metres (85 feet) down, along with more coins, leather shoes, an oil lamp, glass bottles, pewter jugs and spoons and ornately carved knife handles.

"It's a snapshot of a moment in time," said Alison James, a maritime archaeologist at the Historic England cultural agency, while one her colleagues said it was like "an underwater Pompeii".

The items brought ashore for conservation also include wooden seaman's chests which will be x-rayed to see if they are contain cargo or personal possessions.

James told AFP it was a remarkable site: "It's incredibly well-preserved, it's a very early wreck and there's a lot of material on the seabed."

The wreck is under the legal protection and management of the British government, although the excavation is led and financed by the Dutch government, which also owns any finds.

The project is the largest of its scale on a ship from the Dutch East India Company, which lost a total of 250 vessels to shipwreck -- of which only a third have been located.

Secrets of the deep: Senegal's slave shipwreck detective

Yahoo – AFP, Jennifer O'MAHONY, 17 Aug 2017

Secrets of the deep: Senegal's slave shipwreck detective

Dakar (AFP) - Staring out to sea on a flawlessly sunny day, underwater archaeologist Ibrahima Thiaw visualises three shipwrecks once packed with slaves that now lie somewhere beneath Senegal's Atlantic waves.

He wants more than anything to find them.

Thiaw has spent years scouring the seabed off the island of Goree, once a west African slaving post, never losing hope of locating the elusive vessels with a small group of graduate students from Dakar's Cheikh Anta Diop University.

Goree was the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast between the 15th and 19th century, according to the UN's cultural agency UNESCO, and Thiaw believes his mission has a moral purpose: to heal the open wounds that slavery has left on the continent.

"This is not just for the fun of research or scholarship. It touches us and our humanity and I think that slavery in its afterlife still has huge scars on our modern society," he said, pulling on a wetsuit and rubber boots for the day's first dive.

Thiaw believes his native Senegal, with its own long and violent history of trade in human flesh, could tell the world more about how modern capitalism was founded on violence inflicted on African bodies.

"The Atlantic slave trade was the foundation of our modernity, so this is a history for all mankind," he added, referring to the so-called "Triangular Trade" of human labour for consumer goods between Africa, the Americas and Europe.

After making final checks on the magnetometer that will run up and down a painstakingly designated strip of seabed for traces of wreckage, Thiaw disappears under the surface of the dark green waves.

1,000 slave shipwrecks

African nations affected by the slave trade have never fully come to terms with it, Thiaw believes, and even today in countries like Senegal, a caste of people still refer to themselves as slaves.

The horrors of the so-called Middle Passage, or journey across the Atlantic, not only industrialised the trade of people but ripped entire societies from their roots.

"The umbilical cord between Africa and its diaspora was broken and in the ocean (slaves) were being seasoned to be other people, to adapt to other conditions," he notes.

Thiaw, who originates from a rural area of Senegal but went on to study in the United States, had become known for his research into slaves' living conditions on Goree island when he was approached three years ago by the US National Park Service and National Museum of African American History and Culture to find a west African base for their "Slave Wrecks" project.

They offered dive training, equipment and expertise and had already helped establish similar dive sites in Mozambique and South Africa, with one historic success.

Artifacts, including shackles and ballasts from the Sao Jose Paquete de Africa, a Portuguese slave vessel that sank in 1794 with more than 200 slaves on board, were dredged up off the coast of Cape Town in 2015.

Around 1,000 slave shipwrecks are believed to dot the seabed between Africa and the Americas, according to "Slave Wrecks" researchers, but few have been found.

Today's dive, like dozens before it, was unsuccessful.

Precious clues

"We found a modern shipwreck, a big one," the powerfully built Thiaw said, seawater running down his face, but "it's not really what we are looking for."

The trio of wrecks Thiaw seeks -- the Nanette, the Bonne Amitie and the Racehorse -- all disappeared off Goree in the 18th century, taking with them crucial evidence of how enslaved Africans were carried across the harrowing Middle Passage.

The key is building a team of Senegalese archaeological divers who will dedicate themselves to the task, as some of his students graduate and move on.

The overwhelming majority of slave ships were repurposed and simply rotted away after abolition, meaning the slave shipwrecks preserved by the sea will provide precious clues.

'Silence' around slavery

Thiaw complains that there is a lack of interest within Senegal for his work, especially at the institutional level where, he said, there was "very little funding for research".

"I think in Senegal there's a lot of silence surrounding the issue but I think the time is ripe that we start to teach our students and our children how to respect people of different or lower status, slave caste," he said.

Discrimination remains a problem in the country, with some people still referred to as slaves using the word "jaam" in the country's majority Wolof language.

"There are still people, who are still known to be slaves," he said. "Some of them would even tell you proudly: 'yes, I am a slave'."

Thiaw wants his nation to unflinchingly analyse "the most painful aspects of our history and the contradiction of our history", especially the lingering elements of a class system that designated some Senegalese as worthy only of serving others.

Senegal's past lies somewhere on the seabed between Dakar and Goree, but perhaps also its future.

"We know they are there," Thiaw said.

Death of baby dolphin triggers outrage in Spain

Yahoo – AFP, August 16, 2017

The baby dolphin died after being manhandled by bathers, the Equinac
conservation group said (AFP Photo/HO)

Madrid (AFP) - Spanish animal lovers reacted with fury on Wednesday after a baby dolphin approached a holiday beach, where it died as bathers played with it and took pictures.

A whale and dolphin conservation group, Equinac, said the incident occurred Saturday on the tourist beach of Mojacar, in the southeast of the country.

Bathers played with the dolphin in the shallows, inadvertently blocking her breathing hole and pulling her from the water for pictures, probably causing stress that proved fatal, it said.

The baby may have turned up on the beach because it was separated from its mother -- in which case, it could not have survived -- or because it was sick, Equinac suggested.

Twitter users responded with outrage.

"If you go to the beach, leave your stupidity at home," said one.

"Did you take selfies after it died?" asked another.

A Facebook posting by an animal rights party, Pacma, which blamed "harassment by bathers" for the mammal's death, was "liked" more than 4,800 times.

US Coast Guard won't 'break faith' with transgender members

Yahoo – AFP, Thomas WATKINS, August 1, 2017

US President Donald Trump's announced ban against transgender people
serving in the US military has sparked protests, like this one in New York's Times
Square last month, as well as headaches for leaders of the armed services
(AFP Photo/Jewel SAMAD)

Washington (AFP) - The head of the US Coast Guard said Tuesday he would not "break faith" with transgender personnel, after President Donald Trump said they would be banned from the military.

In a series of three tweets last week, Trump upended an Obama-era policy of more than a year that allowed transgender troops to serve openly.

His tweeted announcement came with little or no coordination with the Pentagon and landed while Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was on vacation, leaving the astonished department scrambling to come up with a coherent response.

Speaking at a Washington think tank, Admiral Paul Zukunft, who is the commandant of the Coast Guard, said the service had reached out to the 13 Coast Guardsmen who have come out as transgender.

"Very small numbers, but all of them are doing meaningful Coast Guard work today," he said.

The Coast Guard is a branch of the military and generally follows the Department of Defense on personnel matters.

Zukunft said he had read a story in The Washington Post about a young lieutenant who had undergone gender reassignment surgery and was worried about Trump's tweets that transgender troops would not be allowed to serve "in any capacity" in the military.

"I reached out personally to Lieutenant Taylor Miller, who was featured on the cover of The Washington Post last week," Zukunft told the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Taylor's family has disowned her. Her family is the United States Coast Guard. And I told Taylor, 'I will not turn my back. We have made an investment in you, and you have made an investment in the Coast Guard, and I will not break faith.' So that is the commitment to our people right now."

Pentagon awaits guidance

When asked whether Zukunft's comments meant the Coast Guard would disregard Trump's tweets, spokeswoman Lisa Novak told AFP: "Those comments are made by the commandant, and those are his own comments."

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she had not yet heard Zukunft's remarks.

"I know that the goal is to work with all of the relevant departments, primarily the Department of Defense, to lawfully implement that new policy," she said.

In a statement, the Coast Guard said it "follows closely with the DOD on human resources policies. We are currently in contact with them on how those policies may be effected."

Zukunft added that the Coast Guard had stood up a team of military lawyers following Trump's tweets.

In the six days since Trump's tweets, the White House has still not provided the Pentagon with clear directives on how it should implement a transgender ban, so the current policy remains in place for now.

The Pentagon has not been able to say whether Mattis was even consulted about the ban ahead of time or merely informed after the decision was made.

Meanwhile, the Palm Center think tank, which focuses on sexual minorities in the military, published a statement signed by 56 retired generals and admirals.

"This proposed ban, if implemented, would cause significant disruptions, deprive the military of mission-critical talent, and compromise the integrity of transgender troops who would be forced to live a lie, as well as non-transgender peers who would be forced to choose between reporting their comrades or disobeying policy," the statement read.