On this day, 25 April 1974, Portugal’s fascist dictatorship was overthrown by a military coup, which was then followed by a working class uprising. Urban workers took over their factories and farm workers took over their farms in what would become known as ‘the Carnation revolution’, as few shots were fired and people adorned troops with carnations. A factor which added to the unpopularity of the regime was the long-running colonial war against independence movements in then-Portuguese Congo, Angola and Mozambique. After the revolution these former colonies all soon achieved independence. This is a great book about the revolution: http://bit.ly/2GxskFfhttp://bit.ly/2UTh93M
Speaking in Miami on 17 April, the 58th anniversary of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, National Security Advisor John Bolton announced the end of virtually all non-family travel to the island and new limits on the amount of money Cuban Americans can send home to family.
He confirmed that the US government would fully implement Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, allowing Cuban Americans to sue foreign companies with investments in any property nationalized after the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
For 23 years, Title III of the Helms Burton Act had been suspended by every US president as a result of opposition from foreign governments. When Helms Burton was enacted in 1996, the European Union filed a complaint with the World Trade Organisation and passed a law prohibiting EU members from complying it. Mexico, Canada and the UK also passed similar laws.
In response to the US measures, Josefina Vidal, who was a key negotiator with the US during the Obama rapprochement process and is the current Cuban ambassador to Canada said:
“This is a policy which is condemned to be defeated again…. They want Cuba to surrender. They want Cuba to abandon what Cuba is, to abandon its principles, and to submit Cuba again to the desires of the US. But that won’t happen.”
Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, the Cuban president recognized that the US had chosen a significant date to make the announcements and tweeted:
“58 Anniversary of Girón: The victory that #US does not forgive. John Bolton met with the defeated in Miami, to recall the eternal disgrace of these mercenaries. We will make each calendar day a #GirónAlways Bolton will be an eternal loser. #CubaWillWin”.
This bizarre bubble creature is a single living cell
By
Bec Crew
|
April 23, 2019
You know what’s weird? Looking at something large enough to hold in
your hand and knowing it’s made up of a single, solitary cell.
WE’RE USED TO thinking about cells as microscopic building blocks of life – more than 37 trillion of them knit together to create humans, and you need about 5 million
to make a fly. Of course, we learn in high school biology that there
are simple, single-celled organisms, but we’re used to them looking…
Microscopic. Impossible to perceive with the naked eye.
But then there’s bubble algae (Ventricaria ventricosa, formerly Valonia ventricosa), a species that is neither plant, nor animal, and at up to 9 cm in diameter, and is one of the largest single-celled organisms on Earth.
Found in tropical and subtropical ocean waters across the globe,
including off the coast of Australia, bubble algae sit among coral
rubble and mangroves, their unusual sheen making them appear like giant
pearls below the surface…
how did they learn to translate languages into other languages how did they know which words meant what HOW DID TH
English Person: *Points at an apple* Apple
French Person: Non c’est une fucking pomme
*800 years of war*
Fun fact: There are a lot of rivers in the UK named “avon” because the Romans arrived and asked the Celts what the rivers were called. The Celts answered “avon.”
“Avon” is just the Celtic word for river.
Fan Fact #2: When Spanish conquistadors landed in the Yucatán peninsula, they asked the natives what their land was called and they responded “Yucatán”. In 2015, it was discovered that in those mesoamerican languages, “Yucatán” meant “I don’t understand what you are saying”
W H E E Z E
I love entomology so much because so many words kind of happened by accident or by a native speaker trying to say “WTF are you saying?“
