Rivière Banane: Un Cachalot Mort...Dead Sperm whale discovered....Angeschwemmter toter Pottwal

 

"Die Einwohner von Rivière Banane in Rodrigues wurden an diesem Sonntagmorgen, dem 20. Februar, Zeugen einer ungewöhnlichen Szene, nachdem ein Pottwal entdeckt wurde, der an den Strand gespült wurde. Nach unseren Informationen waren es lokale Fischer, die diese Entdeckung etwas früher machten und nachsehen wollten, ob das Säugetier noch lebt, aber leider ... Die Behörden wurden zum Tatort gerufen und sind noch vor Ort, um Proben zu entnehmen, die anschließend analysiert werden. Durch diese Proben können die genauen Ursachen ermittelt werden, die zum Tod des Wals geführt haben."-

 

"The inhabitants of Rivière Banane in Rodrigues witnessed an unusual scene on this morning of Sunday February 20 after the discovery of a sperm whale which washed up on the beach. According to our information, it was local fishermen who, a little earlier, made this discovery and went to check if the mammal was still alive, but alas... The authorities have been summoned to the scene and are still on site to take samples which will then be analyzed. Through these samples it can be determined the exact causes that caused the death of the cetacean." -

"Les habitants de Rivière Banane à Rodrigues ont assisté à une scène peu commune en ce matin du dimanche 20 février après la découverte d’un cachalot qui s’est échoué sur la plage.

Selon nos informations, ce sont des pêcheurs de la localité qui, un peu plus tôt, ont fait cette découverte et sont allés vérifier si le mammifère était toujours en vie, mais hélas…

Les autorités ont été mandées sur les lieux et sont toujours sur place pour effectuer des prélèvements qui seront par la suite analysés. À travers ces échantillons, l’on pourra déterminer les causes exactes ayant provoqué la mort du cétacé."

Source:

 

- Rodrigues : un cachalot échoué retrouvé sans vie sur la plage à Rivière Banane/Le Mauricien 20.02.2022

Coups de Couleurs...Himmel wie Gemälde...Skies over Mauritius

 

One of these days when the volcano ashes, in particularly the sulphor dioxide emmissions, of Tonga were still in the athmosphere making their way around the globe...Here photos from Mauritius.

Source:

Maurice Tourisme/ fbpage 13.02.2022

Valentine's Day...Tag der Herzen...Jour des Amoureux

 

Heute ist Valentinstag. Normalerweise für mich kein besonderer Tag, als ich jung war, interessierte sich noch niemand dafür in Deutschland und die Geschäftsidee dahinter hat mich nie überzeugt.Doch diese Herzen aus meiner twitter timeline fand ich jetzt mal würdig, hier erscheinen zu dürfen, also, allen Liebenden einen guten Tag und macht das Beste draus, immer!-

Today is Valentine's Day. Normally not a special day for me, when I was young nobody in Germany was interested in it and the business idea behind it never convinced me. But I found these hearts from my twitter timeline worthy of being allowed to appear here, so good day to all lovers and make the best of it, always!-

Aujourd'hui, c'est la Saint-Valentin. Normalement, ce n'est pas un jour spécial pour moi, quand j'étais jeune, personne en Allemagne ne s'y intéressait et l'idée commerciale derrière cela ne m'a jamais convaincu. Mais j'ai trouvé ces cœurs de ma chronologie Twitter dignes d'être autorisés à apparaître ici, alors bonne journée à tous les amoureux et profitez-en toujours !  

 

War on the horizon???

 

28.01.2022 - De Volkskrant, source

This was today in my Inbox as I have subscribed to the New York Times newsletter. This edition is about the conflict concerning Ukraine and Russia and the role of the US and European countries...Although I hate to bring this topic here in my blog, I think it deserves debate and knowledge.

My position is clear - war has to be avoided at all costs and the West should not play this power game in the name of protecting the Ukraine, seeing all the military preparations going on makes me sick to the core...

 

“This is not going to be a war of Ukraine and Russia. This is going to be a European war, a full-fledged war.”

Those, in the words of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, are the stakes of the crisis that has enveloped his country, now the site of the worst diplomatic dispute between Russia and the West in decades. Over recent months, Russia has massed about 130,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders, prompting fears of a full-scale invasion.

President Biden responded to the escalation this week by ordering about 3,000 additional troops into Eastern Europe, but has stressed that war is not inevitable. “If Russia is sincere about addressing our respective security concerns through dialogue, the United States and our allies and partners will continue to engage in good faith,” he said on Monday.

How should the Biden administration go about defusing the conflict, and what consequences, if any, should it impose on Russia if it fails? Here’s what people are saying.

Wait, how did we get here?

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine won its sovereignty from Russia in exchange for dismantling its nuclear arsenal, and for decades the country aligned itself with neither Russia nor the West. In 2008, however, Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yushchenko, sought membership in NATO, earning strong public support from President George W. Bush.

Russia saw this development as an act of aggression. “Were Ukraine to join NATO, the alliance would then have a 1,200-mile land border with Russia, a situation no major power would abide, no matter how loudly the Atlantic alliance claims to be purely defensive,” The Times editorial board explained.

The situation escalated in 2014, when Yushchenko’s more Russia-friendly successor was overthrown amid widespread protests.

Russia responded by annexing Crimea and backing separatists in Donbas, a Russian-speaking region in eastern Ukraine. The United States, in turn, reiterated its support for Ukraine’s NATO candidacy and provided $2.5 billion in military aid.

In recent weeks, President Vladimir Putin formally demanded that Ukraine never join NATO and that the organization withdraw troops and nuclear weapons from former Soviet countries. “The immediate aim, to be sure, is to return Ukraine to Russia’s orbit,” Lilia Shevtsova writes in The Times. But “Putin’s design is grand: to refashion the post-Cold War settlement, in the process guaranteeing the survival of Russia’s personalized power system.”

 Would Russia actually invade?

Some analysts and politicians doubt it. The Russian government has said repeatedly that it has no plans to launch an attack — and restraint might actually be in its best interests.

“Europeans and Ukrainians believe that a hybrid strategy — involving military presence on the border, weaponization of energy flows and cyberattacks — will serve him better” than a hot war, Ivan Krastev, a political scientist, writes in The Times. “By hardening the conflict, Mr. Putin could cohere his opponents. Holding back, by contrast, could have the opposite effect: The policy of maximum pressure, short of an invasion, may end up dividing and paralyzing NATO.”

The case for ‘peace through strength’

To some commentators, the United States has a moral imperative to do everything it can, short of mounting a ground war in Ukraine, to combat Russian aggression — and not just because Biden made a campaign promise to “hold the Putin regime accountable” for its crimes.

“Weakness makes conflicts more likely, not less likely,” Jim Geraghty argues in National Review. “If Putin concludes the U.S. and NATO isn’t really willing to strain itself to defend applicant country Ukraine, he might conclude the U.S. and other NATO states like Germany wouldn’t really come to the aid of member states like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.”

A more aggressive response would also serve the interests of the Ukrainian people, Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister, has argued. In a December Foreign Affairs piece, he called on the Biden administration to take three steps to safeguard Ukraine’s independence:

Make it plain to Russia that Ukraine is a future member of both the European Union and NATO and that its sovereignty is nonnegotiable. Prepare to enact sanctions in the worst-case scenario of an invasion. Provide more military assistance to Ukraine, including ammunition and air and missile defenses.

“Ukraine’s goal is simple: peace through strength,” he wrote. “For now, the United States and its European allies should talk to Putin to win time while strengthening Ukraine to the extent that Russia will simply have no feasible military option for invading it.”

Is there room for diplomacy in such a strategy? The Times columnist Bret Stephens doesn’t think so. “We should break off talks with Russia now: No country ought to expect diplomatic rewards from Washington while it threatens the destruction of our friends,” he writes. “Biden needs to stand tough on Ukraine in order to save NATO.”

The case for military restraint

As Fiona Harrigan points out in Reason, one immediate objection to U.S. military intervention is the absence of a popular mandate for it. “While the president is authorized under the Constitution to direct the U.S. Armed Forces, he can only do so following a congressional declaration of war,” she notes.

But it’s also not clear whether military aid would prove an effective deterrent. If Putin is indeed committed to invading Ukraine, Samuel Charap and Scott Boston of the RAND Corporation argue that he “is unlikely to be deterred by whatever U.S. military assistance can be delivered in the coming weeks.” They are not alone in that analysis.

In the view of Stephen Wertheim and Joshua Shifrinson, the Biden administration should instead pursue a diplomatic approach that supports Ukraine’s independence, but does not seek to tether it to the West through NATO. “Do Americans really wish to risk war with other great powers, near those countries’ borders and over issues of questionable importance to America’s security and prosperity?” they wrote in The Washington Post in December. “If the answer is no, the United States should halt the expansionist drift of its post-Cold War policies.”

If diplomacy fails, economic sanctions are another option with broad support among foreign policy experts. A survey of 362 international relations scholars found that nearly 90 percent of respondents would support their use in the event of an invasion.

With sanctions, however, the administration would face a difficult balance to strike between maximizing pressure on the Russian government and minimizing the suffering for ordinary Russian citizens (as well as for Europeans, who depend on Russian natural gas). Putin’s wealth is well concealed and difficult to target; more broad-based assaults on Russia’s financial system could raise prices of food and clothing, or, worse, cause a market crash that decimates pensions and savings accounts.

For now, the White House is reportedly preparing sanctions on oligarchs who are “in or near the inner circle of the Kremlin.” Bill Browder, once the largest foreign investor in Russia, believes this is the right idea: “If you ask any Russian dissident or opposition politician what would stop Putin, they would all point toward this strategy,” he writes for Time.

In the longer term, the Biden administration could try to broker a compromise called the Minsk II agreement. Initially proposed between Russia and Ukraine in 2015, it won the support of the European Union and the United Nations but was never implemented. On the one hand, the agreement would guarantee an independent Ukraine with Russian forces removed and separatists disarmed; on the other, it would promise full autonomy for the Donbas region and an end to Ukraine’s NATO ambitions.

“A new round of ‘Minsk talks’ will be held in Berlin in the second week of February,” Katrina vanden Heuvel notes in The Washington Post. “As we confront the worst U.S.-Russian confrontation in decades, isn’t it time for the United States to join with its allies to revive a path to a settlement that might lead to a stable peace?”

 

 Source:

- New York Times Newsletter

Feiertag im Doppelpack - Two public holidays in one...Happy Chinese New Year and 187 years of Abolition of Slavery!

Heute feiern wir das Chinesische Neujahrsfest, in Mauritius und damit auch bei uns in Rodrigues ein Feiertag...-

Today we celebrate Chinese New Year, in Mauritius, and therefor in Rodrigues too, itä a public holiday...

 Nach dem Jahr des Ochsen, dem stärksten Tier der 12 chinesischen Tierkreiszeichen und bekannt als "der gute Helfer" in der chinesischen Landwirtschaft, das für Fleiß, Stärke, Ehrlichkeit, Bodenständigkeit und Reichtum steht, treten wir jetzt ein in das Jahr des (Wasser-)Tigers.-

After the Year of the Ox, the strongest animal of the 12 Chinese zodiac signs, and known as "the good helper" in Chinese farming, and representing  diligence, strength, honesty, down-to-earth persistence, and wealth, we are now entering the Year of the (Water) Tiger.

A tiger at Edinburgh Zoo celebrating too the Chinese New Year

Als König aller Tiere in China steht der Tiger für Tapferkeit, Wettbewerbsfähigkeit, Unberechenbarkeit und Selbstvertrauen. Er ist zuversichtlich, charmant und beliebt, kann aber auch stur sein.-

King of all beasts in China the tiger stands for bravery, competitiveness, unpredictability and self-confidence. He is confident, charming and popular, but can also be stubborn.

 

Wishing everybody a prosperous and happy New Year

Kung Shee Fat Choy - 恭喜发财

 

Wie ich im Post Titel bereits angedeutet habe, ist es heute nicht unsere einzige Feier hier in Mauritius und Rodrigues, wir begehen auch den 187. Jahrestag der Abschaffung der Sklaverei. Der 1. Februar ist jedes Jahr ein Gedenktag, gewidmet den Sklaven unserer Region, nur durch den Mond haben wir den Zufall, dass das Chinesische Neujahrsfest auch auf diesen Feiertag gefallen ist.

As I mentioned in the post title, it is not our only celebration here in Mauritius and Rodrigues today, we celebrate too the 187th Anniversary of Abolition of Slavery. Every year on 1st of February it is a public holiday to commemorate the slaves of our region, only due to the moon we have the coincidence to celebrate two public holidays on the same day.

Please find more details about Slavery in Mauritius in following article

- The History And The Truth Behind The Abolition Of Slavery In Mauritius/Le Matinal 01.02.2022

 

Related dt./engl.:

- 01.Februar - Tag der Abschaffung der Sklaverei - Abolition of Slavery/01.02.2012