brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

Thailand’s air force confirmed on Wednesday that the country is preparing to buy six Swedish Gripen fighter planes in a deal worth 3.7 billion kronor ($560 million). Air force chief Chalit Phukphasuk also told reporters that a decision would be made after December’s general election on whether to buy a second batch of six Saab Gripens.

A source close to the air force said that Thailand had initially planned to replace its ageing F-5E fighters with US F-16 Fighting Falcons. But the deal eventually fell through since the Americans were “not allowed by their laws to sell weapons to countries whose governments have been ousted in coups.”

Owe Wagermark, director of communications for Gripen International, was delighted with Wednesday’s announcement.

“This is absolutely fantastic. It is an important step with regard to our positioning and is incredibly positive for Gripen. It means that we will retain our position as global leaders,” he told a news agency.

Ola Mattsson, secretary general of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (Svenska Freds), was considerable less enthusiastic.

“It should be completely out of the question for Sweden to sell Gripen planes to Thailand. It’s a military dictatorship,” he said.

Mattsson listed secular tensions in southern Thailand and an arms race in South East Asia as further reasons not to sell.

“The Swedish state shouldn’t contribute to a rearmament spiral in the region. Such a move runs contrary to our foreign and security policy,” he said.

Since assuming power in a military coup last year, the Thai government has approved a 66 percent increase in military spending.

Russia’s Su-30s were long tipped to get the nod ahead of Gripen and the US F-16s. Prior to being removed from his post, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is reported to have been close to signing a deal for the Russian fighters.

But last year’s military coup would appear to have tipped the balance in Gripen’s favour.

BANGKOK, Thailand — Women in several countries have begun sending their panties to Myanmar embassies in a culturally insulting gesture of protest against the recent brutal crackdown there, a campaign supporter said Friday.

“It’s an extremely strong message in Burmese and in all Southeast Asian culture,” said Liz Hilton, who supports an activist group that launched the “Panties for Peace” drive earlier this week.

The group, Lanna Action for Burma, says the country’s superstitious generals, especially junta leader Gen. Than Shwe, also believe that contact with women’s underwear saps them of power.

To widespread international condemnation, the military in Myanmar, also known as Burma, crushed mass anti-regime demonstrations recently and continues to hunt down and imprison those who took part.

Hilton said women in Thailand, Australia, Singapore, England and other European countries have started sending or delivering their underwear to Myanmar missions following informal coordination among activist organizations and individuals.

“You can post, deliver or fling your panties at the closest Burmese Embassy any day from today. Send early, send often!” the Lanna Action for Burma Web site urges.

“So far we have had no response from Burmese officials,” Hilton said.
On the Net:

* http://lannaactionforumburma.blogspot.com

In memory

Vernon Bellecourt, WaBun-Inini, a member of the Anishinabe/Ojibwe Nation and longtime leader in the American Indian Movement, died on Oct. 13 of pneumonia at the age of 75.

Bellecourt, one of 12 children and older brother of AIM co-founder Clyde Bellecourt, was born on the White Earth Chippewa Reservation in Minnesota in 1931. It is estimated that unemployment on the reservation was 95 percent when the Bellecourt children were growing up.

Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt co-founded the American Indian Movement in 1968 in Minneapolis, an organization of and for Native people that was inspired by the Black Panther Party. AIM sought to defend the community against police brutality, racism, poverty and oppression.

Vernon soon joined and was a lifelong activist in the organization. By its militant example and defense of Native peoples trying to stop the theft of their land and resources, AIM helped instill a renewed pride across the Native nations of the United States.

AIM led a 71-day takeover of the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation beginning Feb. 27, 1973, after U.S. marshals laid siege to a community meeting that sought AIM’s assistance against the repressive and corrupt tribal government. More than 300 federal agents surrounded the camp with armored personnel carriers, over 130,000 rounds of ammunition, and constant gunfire. Two AIM activists were murdered by government agents.

For this, the American Indian Movement leaders, including the Bellecourts and Banks, were severely repressed. Over 60 people on the reservation were murdered by police and vigilantes in the next two years, culminating in the June 26, 1975, shoot-out at Pine Ridge, where two FBI agents were killed after raiding the reservation.

The most egregious injustice against AIM activists was the frame-up and persecution of Leonard Peltier. Because two AIM members, Dino Butler and Bob Robideau, were acquitted of the FBI deaths by a federal jury in Iowa by reason of self-defense, the FBI decided the only remaining defendant charged but not yet tried had to pay. Leonard Peltier had sought refuge in Canada and was therefore not tried along with Butler and Robideau, or he also would have been acquitted.

The FBI falsified evidence to get Peltier extradited. Despite a lack of evidence, witness coercion by the FBI, and numerous irregularities, Peltier was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. To this day, he remains in a U.S. federal prison at Lewisburg, Penn., despite international and national demands for his freedom.

It is in this context of extreme U.S. government repression of the American Indian Movement that the continued resistance of leaders like the Bellecourts, Banks, Bill Means and many other Indigenous leaders is best appreciated.

An internationalist

Bellecourt was an internationalist, supporting the Palestinian, Irish, Venezuelan, Cuban, Libyan, Nicaraguan and many other causes.

When the CIA intensified its counterrevolutionary war in Nicaragua in the mid-1980s by recruiting Indigenous Miskito leaders who had joined the Contra forces, Bellecourt traveled to the country to defend the Nicaraguan revolution.

He prided himself on his uncompromising anti-imperialist stance, and recently returned from Venezuela where he traveled to express appreciation to Hugo Chávez for the Bolivarian revolution’s heating-fuel deliveries to Native communities in Minnesota.

In recent years, Bellecourt was nationally known as a spokesperson in the campaign against racist anti-Indian symbols of sports teams through the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and Media.

In 1997, he drew national attention to this anti-racist fight when he, Juan Reyna and Juanita Helphrey and other coalition members set fire to an effigy of the extremely offensive Cleveland baseball team’s Chief Wahoo, during the baseball World Series at Cleveland’s Jacobs Field. He was arrested but charges were later dropped.

In a 1995 interview with Sinn Fein, Bellecourt stated, “AIM sees the Washington Redskins, the Atlanta Braves basketball team, Kansas City Chiefs and Cleveland Indians baseball teams with their grinning buck-toothed mascot Chief Wahoo as demeaning the beautiful culture of the Indigenous nations of the Americas. We are a living people with a vibrant culture and we refuse to have our identity trivialized and degraded. Indians are people, not mascots for America’s fun and games.”

Bellecourt was a strong opponent of the U.S. genocide and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he spoke at several ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) anti-war rallies since 2003 in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation extends its deepest condolences to his family, comrades and friends. We pledge our continued solidarity with the Native struggle for self-determination and justice.

Vernon Bellecourt, presente!

The Bellecourt family is collecting donations to help pay for medical and burial costs. Donations and cards can be sent to:

Clyde Bellecourt
3953 14th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55407

It’s one of the golden rules of the natural world – birds live in trees, fish live in water.

The trouble is, no one bothered to tell the mangrove killifish.

Scientists have discovered that it spends several months of every year out of the water and living inside trees.

Adaptable: The killifish can alter the way it breathes

Hidden away inside rotten branches and trunks, the remarkable creatures temporarily alter their biological makeup so they can breathe air.

Biologists studying the killifish say they astonished it can cope for so long out of its natural habitat.

The discovery, along with its ability to breed without a mate, must make the mangrove killifish, Rivulus marmoratus Poey, one of the oddest fish known to man.

Around two inches long, they normally live in muddy pools and the flooded burrows of crabs in the mangrove swamps of Florida, Latin American and Caribbean.

The latest discovery was made by biologists wading through swamps in Belize and Florida who found hundreds of killifish hiding out of the water in the rotting branches and trunks of trees.

The fish had flopped their way to their new homes when their pools of water around the roots of mangroves dried up. Inside the logs, they were lined up end to end along tracks carved out by insects.

Dr Scott Taylor of the Brevard County Environmentally Endangered Lands Programme in Florida admitted the creatures were a little odd.

“They really don’t meet standard behavioural criteria for fish,” he told New Scientist magazine.

Although the cracks inside logs make a perfect hiding place, conditions can be cramped. The fish – which are usually fiercely territorial – are forced to curb their aggression.

Another study, published earlier this year, revealed how they alter their bodies and metabolism to cope with life out of water.

Their gills are altered to retain water and nutrients, while they excrete nitrogen waste through their skin.

These changes are reversed as soon as they return to the water.

Previously their biggest claim to fame was that they are the only known vertebrate – animal with a backbone – to reproduce without the need for a mate.

Killifish can develop both female and male sexual organs, and fertilise their eggs while they are still in the body, laying tiny embryos into the water.

They are not the only fish able to breathe air. The walking catfish of South-east Asia has gills that allow it to breathe in air and in water.

The climbing perch of India can suffocate in water unless it can also gulp in air.

Dhaka – Shawwal 06, 1428/ October 17, 2007 – At least 100 people were feared drowned after an overcrowded ferry capsized in southern Bangladesh yesterday, officials said.
Witnesses said more than 100 people, many holidaymakers, were trapped in the sunken vessel. The ferry with about 250 people on board was caught in a tropical storm in Shariatpur district, nearly 85 km south of the capital Dhaka, officials said. Meanwhile, a powerful rainstorm also killed at least 18 people in mudslides and house collapses and injured 100, officials said yesterday. A woman and her two children were among those killed in a mudslide at Betbunia in the southeast.
Weather officials said nearly 225 mm of rain fell overnight in Chittagong port city, severing road links with the Chittagong Hill Tracts further to the southeast. The storm originating in the Bay of Bengal made landfall around Monday midnight, a weather official said, adding more rains were forecast across the country over the next couple of days. At least 20 fishing boats were reported missing at sea, police said. Streets in Chittagong were under knee-deep water, forcing authorities to shut down offices and schools, a resident said by telephone from the city. Normal life was also disrupted at Cox’s Bazar, the country’s main tourist resort, following the rainstorm.