From daily The Morning Star in Britain:
“People were trusting the firefighters’ words. And the firefighters relied on the system. The system should never have deceived them. The system let them down”, she said.
Firefighters were not to know that the local Tory council, which owned the tower, and its arm’s-length management organisation (almo), had prejudiced the safety of the building and its residents through a botched refurbishment.
Far from the doors and windows being fire-resistant, they were compromised through replacement by inferior products.
The almo fitted panels as adornments to the outside of the tower, which, far from resisting the blaze, helped conduct it at high speed up and around the tower.
The council authorised a cheaper version of the panels, justifying Fire Brigades Union leader Matt Wrack’s charge that “the government and local council gave priority to saving money over protecting people.”
That reality emerged clearly in the days after the disaster when local people began questioning what had gone wrong.
Yet there has been an insidious campaign in recent weeks to blame firefighters for telling residents to follow guidance they had been given, ignoring the reality that they had no reason to do otherwise.
Alarm bells rang when Scotland Yard announced a police investigation into the “remain indoors” advice, suggesting that individual fire service members could be at risk of prosecution.
Both firefighters and residents were betrayed by decisions taken by penny-pinching politicians to skimp on safety measures and to compound their crime by failing to check how these economies had affected the fire safety of Grenfell.
Rigorous checking of panelling, rather than acceptance of advertisers’ claims, could have laid bare the reality of a tragedy waiting to happen and prevented it from so doing.
Residents, firefighters and other emergency services personnel went through hell at Grenfell. Their hell is ongoing.
This 2016 video says about itself:
Conceived in the open sea, tiny spaceship-shaped sea urchin larvae search the vast ocean to find a home. After this incredible odyssey, they undergo one of the most remarkable transformations in nature.
From Lund University in Sweden:
Sea urchins see with their feet
June 12, 2018
Sea urchins lack eyes, but can see with their tentacle-like tube feet instead, previous research has indicated. Now, researchers at Lund University in Sweden have tested their vision in a new study, and shown that while sea urchins have fairly low resolution vision — it is good enough to fulfill their basic needs.
“Sea urchins are currently the only animals that have been shown to see without having eyes. They see using light-sensitive cells in their tube feet, which resemble tentacles and, like the spines, are all over the body. You could say that the entire sea urchin is one single compound eye”, says John Kirwan, who conducted the study as a part of his doctoral thesis, together with colleagues at Lund University.
The tube feet have other functions besides registering light. They are used for feeding and in some species are used by the sea urchin for locomotion. Others are used to attach to surfaces or as levers to correct its position when upside down.
John Kirwan studied the sea urchin species Diadema africanum. The experiments placed the animals in water inside strongly illuminated cylinders that had various dark images on the walls.
“Ordinarily, sea urchins move towards dark areas in order to seek cover. When I notice that they react to certain sizes of images but not to others, I get a measurement of their visual acuity”, explains John Kirwan.
To obtain further data, he carried out another experiment in which he showed rapidly growing figures above the sea urchins, as a way of conjuring up an image of an approaching predator. He then registered how large the figures had to be before the sea urchins would defend themselves by directing their spines towards the shadow above.
The acuity of vision was calculated using X-ray tomography and electron microscopy.
John Kirwan’s calculations show that of the 360 degrees surrounding the sea urchin an object must take up between 30 and 70 degrees for the sea urchin to see it. Humans only need an object to take up 0.02 degrees in order to detect it, making it clear that their eyesight is poor in comparison with human eyesight.
“However, this is still sufficient for the animal’s needs and behaviour. After all, it’s hardly poor eyesight for an animal with no eyes”, John Kirwan concludes.
After 7 April 2018 came 8 April 2018. We were in the Wolong Balangshan mountains in China. This is a BBC video about Temminck’s tragopan. A bird species which we might have seen there, but did not see.
This video is about another animal species which we might have seen, but didn’t.
The video says about itself:
6 November 2017
We did see these yaks when we came above 3,000 meter.
The higher we went, the more snow we saw.
Not only on the mountain tops further away …
… but also close to us.
Then, on a slope above us, a beautiful male Chinese monal.
A bit further, in the snow, this male dark-breasted rosefinch.
Yellow-billed choughs flying.
A bit further, this Alpine accentor.
And then, above us, this blue sheep. Snow leopards eat blue sheep. So, though we did not see snow leopards, we did see wildlife living in their biotope.
Stay tuned, as there will be more on the birds of the mountains above Wolong!
Paris to commemorate Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners founder
The council of the French capital’s fourth arrondissement, a sector which includes the gay village Le Marais, is set to commemorate Mr Ashton as “a role model for young people” after Communist Party councillors proposed a street or public place be named after him.
The former general secretary of Britain’s Young Communist League played a key role in building support for Britain’s striking miners among the gay community during the 1984-1985 dispute.
Deputy mayor Evelyne Zarka, who moved the motion, was inspired after seeing Mr Ashton’s story in the film Pride, which she said made her laugh and cry.
Ms Zarka said it was the action of Mr Ashton and his comrades that had advanced the cause of gay rights, leading to its adoption as policy by the British labour movement.
“His strength, his humanity and his courage make him a source of inspiration. The French Communist Party and especially this part of Paris value highly Mark Ashton and his fight”, she said.
“I hope our generation will find a way to bring an end to homophobia and HIV in order to give our children a better world to live in”, said Ms Zarka.
Mr Ashton died due to an illness contracted while HIV positive in 1987. He was aged just 26.