Tag Archives: OddBox

Gaza… a nation revolting starvation

This time in Gaza was different when observing people’s louder voice of expressing the deterioration of their lives. From one side you cannot but see the heartfelt scenes of poverty , of humanity being taken to its edge , and from another side you see buildings,hotels, pochi restaurants and cafes, new cars, youth dressed with Nike and Adidas.

One of the most compelling comments I heard was from a taxi driver who expressed his concern and others rage on the building of another mosque . We don’t need more mosques .img_4428.png?resize=672%2C1455&ssl=1 I keep stressing on all the time as a Moslem who sees expensive built mosques where no cultural centers or services provided in paces where people lack the basics. As a secular person-maybe- I thought I am just another bad moslem when I complain .but hearing this is Gaza for me was beyond my expectations.

It came with no surprise that people are taking the streets in distress asking for better life.

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An Amazing Butterfly Irruption Is Swarming Across California

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Currently, skies in Southern California look like a scene out of Hitchcock—a little less moody, maybe, and a bit more ethereal. From Burbank to Redondo Beach to South Central Los Angeles and beyond, swarms of butterflies have been flitting throughout the air in a fever dream of irruption and migration. And with the overall numbers of these tiny, two-to-three-inch butterflies, known as painted ladies (Vanessa cardui), appearing to be down in the region (from around 300,000 in 2017 to 25,000 last year, according to one monitoring program), this magical burst of lepidopterans brings both wonder and hope.

The painted lady fluorescence is the result of an unusually rainy winter in California—and in the deserts in particular, which also helped spur this spring’s wildflower superbloom. In a statement, James Danoff-Burg, conservation director of the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens, said “the average annual rainfall in the Coachella Valley is three inches. This year, we had three and a half inches on Valentine’s Day alone.” Art Shapiro, an ecologist at University of California, Davis, who’s been studying butterfly migration since 1972, told CNN that “Painted ladies tend to thrive when there’s a superbloom because there are so many plants for the butterflies to lay their eggs on and for caterpillars to eat.” While these butterflies migrate from Mexico every year, through Southern California’s deserts, to the Pacific Northwest, they usually go relatively undetected because there aren’t quite so many of them.

This year’s phenomenon is referred to as an irruption. “The difference is that a migration is a seasonal occurrence,” says Matthew Shepherd of the Xerces Society, an invertebrate conservation nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon. “An irruption is a sudden and massive surge in population size that doesn’t happen each year. Essentially, there is a super-abundance of something that leads to a population that is so large that the pressure just keeps pushing the butterflies on the edges further and further is search of flowers.”

Another reason the critters are making their way up the coast from Mexico, where they winter in the Sonoran Desert, is because of this crowding. “The pressure of having so many butterflies in one area is forcing them outward,” says Shepherd. “The mass of host plants that the caterpillars eat is as important to this as the availability of nectar to fuel the adults. The butterflies are not so much leaving something behind, but moving in search of plants and areas that aren’t saturated with other painted ladies!”

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The small insects flitting through California’s vistas are cousins of the larger and more vibrant monarch, which faced critically low population numbers (down 85 percent) in California last year. Both butterflies are similar in color—orange and black with whispers of white—and are essential pollinators of the state’s plants. Tom Merriman, director of the Encinitas-based butterfly nonprofit Butterfly Farms, says that butterflies “can get into flowers bees can’t get to,” and that “monarchs are considered an indicator species that help us judge the condition of our environment.”

According to Merriman, the last time Southern California an event like this was in 2005, an El Niño year. (Then, I-5 was closed in Southern California due to the quantity of dead butterflies on the road surface, Shepherd says.) That wet year, there were estimated to be more than a billion painted ladies. Based on the butterflies that flew through Encinitas just yesterday, Merriman ventures that the region is seeing just as many. “They’re moving pretty quickly and can travel nearly 30 miles per hour and can cover up to 100 miles a day,” Merriman says. Occasionally, the ladies stop to sip nectar from flowers, and then continue their haste.

“Think cars traveling on the freeway, they’re all going the same direction but not really together,” Merriman says. “We think it’s going to go on for a few more weeks. They’re not going to be as dense—some will run out of energy and stop to feed and breed, some will run into predators, or worse, automobiles.”

The painted ladies are expected to stay, wherever they settle down, throughout the summer. Shepherd’s guess is that they’ll arrive in Oregon sometime in April. They’ll make offspring, and the ones flying north now will almost certainly be grandparents by July. For most of them, the Pacific Northwest will be the end of the road. “Painted ladies mostly die where they are at the end of the season,” Shepherd says, because their average life expectancy is two to four weeks. Then their descendants will travel back to Mexico in the fall.

For Sale: A POW Journal Documenting World War II’s ‘Great Escape’

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The 75th anniversary of World War II’s most iconic prisoner-of-war escape is less than two weeks away, on March 24, 2019. Just in time, Hansons Auctioneers in England is offering a rare relic of the daring feat: a diary that takes us inside the mind of one of the prisoners who planned it.

In its “Medals & Militaria” auction on March 22, 2019, Hansons will sell the journal that belonged to the late Royal Air Force Flight Lieutenant Vivian Phillips while he was held in the Nazis’ Stalag Luft III camp, in present-day Poland. According to the auction house, it is the only such diary believed to have survived not only the camp, “but also a forced march of hundreds of miles across Germany” later in the war. It is expected to sell, alongside Phillips’s medals, for around $20,000 (or, £15,000 to £18,000).

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Phillips was captured by the Nazis in May 1943, when his plane was shot down over Amsterdam during a bombing raid on a power station. He joined prisoners from a variety of countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, France, Norway, Latvia, and Belgium in Stalag Luft III, which the Nazis considered one of their more secure POW camps. That’s why Roger Bushell—a Royal Air Force pilot who had been shot down during the rescue at Dunkirk, and who had subsequently escaped from two German POW camps—was being held there when Phillips arrived. Undeterred, Bushell was planning another escape, despite the microphones that the Nazis had placed nine feet beneath the ground, and the sandy terrain that did not lend itself to tunnel construction.

As History details, the prisoners dug their tunnels—codenamed Tom, Dick, and Harry—via a trapdoor underneath a stove, which was kept lit in order to deter guards from approaching it. Slowly, they were able to dig beneath the range of the microphones, taking off their clothing so the guards wouldn’t notice any telltale sandy stains.

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“All this was done under the very noses of the guards,” wrote Phillips in his journal, one of those distributed to POWs by the Canadian Red Cross. He himself was one of the diggers, which Hansons says would have suited him as he was “rather short of stature and from Welsh coal-mining stock.” Phillips wrote that, eventually, he “graduated to a kind of foreman” in “charge of a gang of eight fellows…” A model of classic British stoicism, Phillips nonchalantly noted that “the whole thing was most efficiently run…” The operation inspired the 1963 Hollywood classic, The Great Escape.

When the time came for the prisoners to put their tunnels to use, they had to draw names at random so as not to overwhelm the makeshift passageways. Phillips’s name was not drawn, but he was actually lucky: Only three of the 76 escapees ultimately eluded the Nazis. The rest were caught within two weeks, and 50 of the prisoners—including Bushell—were then (illegally) executed on Hitler’s personal orders. (A postwar military tribunal found 18 Nazis guilty of war crimes for the executions; 13 of them were executed in turn.)

And so, even with all of the writings and drawings depicting daily life in the POW camp, and describing plans for the escape plot, the most striking section of Phillips’s journal may be the “In Memoriam” list, which names the executed captured prisoners and their countries of origin. It cements the journal as more than a record of brilliant enterprise in the face of fierce adversity, but as a testament to enduring humanity in times of brutality.

azspot: “Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only…

azspot:

“Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.”

British Writer Pens The Best Description Of Trump I’ve Read

Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren Finally Defend Ilhan Omar Against Racist Smear 

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In the face of a House resolution vote called in response to Ilhan Omar’s criticisms of powerful political lobbies and the actions of the Israeli government, Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders have spoken out to defend the Minnesota Democrat. They each released statements on Wednesday …

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