Firebrand: Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said Palestinians and their president Mahmoud Abbas should ‘perish from this earth’
Aug. 31 (Daily Mail) –Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has distanced himself from an influential rabbi after he said Palestinians and their President Mahmoud Abbas should ‘perish from the world’.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual head of the religious Shas party in Israel’s government, gave a fiery sermon as Middle East peace talks were set to begin next week.
The 89-year-old rabbi – founder of the ultra-orthodox Shas Party – said: ‘Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this earth.
‘God should strike them and these Palestinians – evil haters of Israel – with a plague.’
Mr Netanyahu said Israel wanted to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians that would ensure good neighbourly relations.
A statement from his office said: ‘The comments do not reflect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s view or the position of the government of Israel.’
It added that Mr Netanyahu is going to the peace talks with a goal of ‘reaching an agreement with the Palestinians that will put an end to the conflict’.
Mr Abbas’ government responded angrily and demanded that the Israeli government put a stop to what it described as a ‘culture of hatred in Israel toward Palestinians’.
Peace talks: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has distanced himself from the comments ahead of negotiations with the Palestinians next week
U.S. State Department spokesman P.J.Crowley condemned the rabbi’s comments in a statement, saying they were ‘not only deeply offensive, but incitement such as this hurts the cause of peace’.
WASHINGTON (USA TODAY) — Government anti-poverty programs that have grown to meet the needs of recession victims now serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand.
More than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid, the federal-state program aimed principally at the poor, a survey of state data by USA TODAY shows. That’s up at least 17% since the recession began in December 2007.
“Virtually every Medicaid director in the country would say that their current enrollment is the highest on record,” says Vernon Smith of Health Management Associates, which surveys states for Kaiser Family Foundation.
The program has grown even before the new health care law adds about 16 million people, beginning in 2014. That has strained doctors. “Private physicians are already indicating that they’re at their limit,” says Dan Hawkins of the National Association of Community Health Centers.
More than 40 million people get food stamps, an increase of nearly 50% during the economic downturn, according to government data through May. The program has grown steadily for three years.
Here is an entire website dedicated to the truth about Gardasil and the suffering that cervical cancer vaccines cause.
Anger: Doctors have been told there is no legal obligation to seek parental consent before giving girls aged 12 the cervical cancer vaccine
Family rights campaigners have called for a change in the law after it was revealed that girls as young as 12 can be given the cervical cancer vaccine without their parents’ consent.
Doctors and nurses have been told they are under no legal obligation to seek the permission of the parent or guardian.
The jab is being offered to girls between 12 and 18 as part of a nationwide programme designed to protect them against the sexually transmitted HPV virus, which causes 70 per cent of cervical tumours.
Male volunteers on Fauzia Gilani campaign killed amid growing campaign of intimidation against women running for parliament
Afghan women line up to register as voters for parliamentary elections at a registration centre in Herat, Afgahnistan. Photograph: Jalil Rezayee/EPA
The bodies of five volunteers working for a female MP have been found riddled with bullets in western Afghanistan, amid a growing campaign of violent intimidation against women running in the country’s elections.
The men, aged between 20 and 35, were found dead by villagers in the Adraskan district of Herat province, some distance from where they were kidnapped by gunmen on Thursday while out campaigning for Fauzia Gilani.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of 10 of her campaign workers as they travelled in remote countryside. Five of the workers were released before the others were found dead.
The insurgent movement has not yet claimed responsibility for the murders, but Gilani – one of hundreds of women running in next month’s elections – said she believed the “enemies of Afghanistan” were responsible.
“These people were just my volunteers,” she said. “They were just trying to help – I wasn’t paying them any money.”
She said she did not know whether they were targeted because she is a woman, but said that in western Afghanistan, the “society is controlled by men”.
“They are in charge, and they don’t want a woman to be above them,” she said.
Antarctic cold snap kills millions of aquatic animals in the Amazon.
The San Julián fish farm in the Santa Cruz department of Bolivia lost 15 tonnes of pacú fish in the extreme cold.Never Tejerina
With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere’s recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country’s tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.
Scientists who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in recorded history.
“There’s just a huge number of dead fish,” says Michel Jégu, a researcher from the Institute for Developmental Research in Marseilles, France, who is currently working at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. “In the rivers near Santa Cruz there’s about 1,000 dead fish for every 100 metres of river.”
With such extreme climatic events potentially becoming more common due to climate change, scientists are hurrying to coordinate research into the impact, and how quickly the ecosystem is likely to recover.
The extraordinary quantity of decomposing fish flesh has polluted the waters of the Grande, Pirai and Ichilo rivers to the extent that local authorities have had to provide alternative sources of drinking water for towns along the rivers’ banks. Many fishermen have lost their main source of income, having been banned from removing any more fish from populations that will probably struggle to recover.
The blame lies, at least indirectly, with a mass of Antarctic air that settled over the Southern Cone of South America for most of July. The prolonged cold snap has also been linked to the deaths of at least 550 penguins along the coasts of Brazil and thousands of cattle in Paraguay and Brazil, as well as hundreds of people in the region.
Water temperatures in Bolivian rivers that normally register about 15 ?C during the day fell to as low as 4 ?C.
RICHMOND, Calif.(AP) — California officials are outfitting preschoolers in Contra Costa County with tracking devices they say will save staff time and money.
The system was introduced Tuesday. When at the school, students will wear a jersey that has a small radio frequency tag. The tag will send signals to sensors that help track children’s whereabouts, attendance and even whether they’ve eaten or not.
School officials say it will free up teachers and administrators who previously had to note on paper files when a child was absent or had eaten.
Calgary’s Motive Industries announced it will introduce an electric car whose bio-composite body is made from cannabis.
Photograph by: Handout, Motive Industries
Nathan Armstrong envisions a day when drivers will be rolling up to the curb in a car powered by an electric motor and covered with a body made from hemp.
The green vehicle’s design will be unveiled next month at the Electric Mobility trade show in Vancouver, but the Kestrel is part of a bigger plan by a Canadian consortium — including Armstrong’s Calgary-based Motive Industries — to build an environmentally friendly car in this country.
“It’s a design program that will put all the good eggs we’ve been thinking about into one basket,” said Armstrong, Motive’s president.
Project Eve, as the currently nameless group is called, isn’t starting from scratch.
Motive had been working on an entry for the Progressive Automotive X Prize competition, which will pit vehicles that get mileage of 2.4 L/100 km or better against each other in a race.
A mother whose son suffered severe brain damage after being given the MMR vaccine as a baby has been awarded £90,000 compensation.
Jackie Fletcher has campaigned for compensation for her son Robert – now 18 – because she believed his severe epilepsy was triggered by the jab.
Now a tribunal has ordered that the payment be made, after concluding that it could be “no coincidence” that he suffered his first seizure 10 days after being vaccinated.
All injections carry the risk of extreme reactions, and in rare cases, children have been left brain-damaged by them.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Chuck Norris is no pinko-liberal-commie, and Human Events is a very conservative publication. The two have come together to produce an important article, “Obama’s US Assassination Program.”
It seems only yesterday that Americans, or those interested in their civil liberties, were shocked that the Bush regime so flagrantly violated the FlSA law against spying on American citizens without a warrant. A federal judge serving on the FISA court even resigned in protest to the illegality of the spying.
Nothing was done about it. “National security” placed the president and executive branch above the law of the land. Civil libertarians worried that the US government was freeing its power from the constraints of law, but no one else seemed to care.
Encouraged by its success in breaking the law, the executive branch early this year announced that the Obama regime has given itself the right to murder Americans abroad if such Americans are considered a “threat.” “Threat” was not defined and, thus, a death sentence would be issued by a subjective decision of an unaccountable official.
There was hardly a peep out of the public or the media. Americans and the media were content for the government to summarily execute traitors and turncoats, and who better to identify traitors and turncoats than the government with all its spy programs.
What they’re not telling you is that more than 80 percent of the chicken meat bought at grocery stores is consistently contaminated with the exact same salmonella (http://www.naturalnews.com/021258.html). A more recent study conducted by Consumers Union found that two-thirds of grocery store chickens are contaminated every day! (http://www.naturalnews.com/028661_c…)
But you don’t hear warnings to “take your chicken back to the store!” or “it’s unsafe to eat your chicken!” Ever wonder why?
Or to phrase the question another way, why is salmonella so dangerous on your eggs, but completely safe on your chicken?
The answer is it’s not. It’s the exact same risk in both cases: Cook either one and you destroy salmonella entirely. Infected eggs are no more dangerous than infected chicken, and infected chicken is apparently so safe that it’s sold every single day at your neighborhood grocery store (without any warnings or alarms, I might add). Nobody at the FDA has even mentioned it is recent memory. Salmonella contaminated chicken is apparently a non-issue.
(NEWSCHANNEL 3) – Two state lawmakers in New York say they have a plan to keep people from getting sick.
They want their state to start forcing farmers to vaccinate chickens against salmonella.
The legislators say the vaccinations would only cost a penny per dozen eggs and could eliminate more than 100,000 salmonella cases each year if all US states passed this law.
As many as 1,500 people have gotten sick in the latest salmonella outbreak and more than half-a-billion eggs have been recalled.
Those health concerns are leading some shoppers to spend more to get organic eggs.
“You wouldn’t know that you were eating the same thing. It’s that different. It’s so much all I can say is more vibrant,” said Patti Rindy.
After years of drought, flash floods have destroyed harvests in Niger
Nineteen-month old Amina at Save the Children’s clinic for severely manlnourished children in Aguie, Niger, yesterday. Two of her siblings have already died within the past year HARRIET LOGAN/SAVE THE CHILDREN
Hundreds of thousands of children across central Africa are at risk of death from starvation and disease after flash flooding worsened an already chronic humanitarian crisis caused by drought.
Aid agencies warned yesterday that 10 million people are already facing severe food shortages, particularly in the landlocked countries of Chad and Niger, after a drought led to the failure of last year’s crops. As many as 400,000 children are at risk of dying from starvation in Niger alone, according to Save the Children.
Now unusually heavy rains have washed away this year’s crops and killed cattle in a region dependent on subsistence agriculture. Organisations including Oxfam and Save the Children say that the slow international response to the emergency means that only 40 per cent of those affected are receiving food aid. As many as four out of five children require treatment for malnutrition in clinics.
Such is the shortage of international aid that the United Nations World Food Programme has had to scale back its £57m operation to feed eight million people in Niger and instead concentrate its efforts on the most vulnerable – children under two – according to Oxfam.
Save the Children says the increased malnutrition rate could swiftly be followed by an increase in the number of children dying from disease because of floods in Niger caused by heavy rain over the past few weeks. “Stagnant pools of water have been contaminated by animal carcasses and are a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. This has increased the threat of malaria, respiratory disease and diarrhoea – the biggest killers of young children,” the organisation said.
Volcano erupts in Indonesia forcing thousands from homes
Villagers watch as a plume of smoke emerges from Mount Sinabung. Photograph: Tarmizy Harva/Reyters
(Reuters) — A volcano has erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumatra for the first time in four centuries, sending smoke 1,500 metres into the air and prompting the evacation of thousands of residents.
There are no reports of casualties so far, and aviation in the area is unaffected.
Mount Sinabung, in the north of Sumatra, began erupting around midnight after rumbling for several days. Lava was overflowing from its crater, the head of Indonesia’s vulcanology centre told Reuters news agency. The agency has placed the volcano on red alert, its highest level.
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.” – General Stanley A. McChrystal
A senior American staff officer has been sacked after publishing a rant against the bureaucracy and endless PowerPoint briefings at Nato’s Kabul headquarters.
Col Lawrence Sellin was sent home after generals read an opinion piece he had written revealing “little of substance” was done at the coalition’s joint command in Afghanistan.
He went on to paint a picture of a bloated organisation, swollen by the vanity of commanders, where endless slide show presentations are given to brief “cognitively challenged” generals.
A spokesman for the joint command confirmed Col Sellin, an army reservist with a PhD who was on his second tour of Afghanistan, had lost his job because of his remarks.
“He’s no longer working at the joint command, he has been sent back to his unit.”
“It is the industrialization tool for the entire US food supply”
“It brings all of Codex standards and guidelines into implementation”
“This bill means that no farmer can safe seed”
“If it does pass, you and I, our children, our loved ones will suffer and we will die”
Added: 22. August 2010
Dr Rima Laibow MD tells how massive public PUSH BACK has held of the forced industrialization of food bill, S.510 in the US Senate, since last November.
Now the PUSH BACK must continue or we risk the bill being rushed through in September as a “noncontroversial” unanimous consent bill. Action Item at www.healthfreedomusa.org to educate decision makers.
The Food Safety Modernization Act (S 510) Makes it Illegal To Grow, Share, Trade And Sell Homegrown Food
S 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the US. It is to our food what the bailout was to our economy, only we can live without money.
“If accepted [S 510] would preclude the public’s right to grow, own, trade, transport, share, feed and eat each and every food that nature makes. It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one’s choice. It will be unconstitutional and contrary to natural law or, if you like, the will of God.” ~ Dr. Shiv Chopra, Canada Health whistleblower
It is similar to what India faced with imposition of the salt tax during British rule, only S 510 extends control over all food in the US, violating the fundamental human right to food.
Monsanto says it has no interest in the bill and would not benefit from it, but Monsanto’s Michael Taylor who gave us rBGH and unregulated genetically modified (GM) organisms, appears to have designed it and is waiting as an appointed Food Czar to the FDA (a position unapproved by Congress) to administer the agency it would create – without judicial review – if it passes. S 510 would give Monsanto unlimited power over all US seed, food supplements, food and farming.
History
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton introduced HACCP (Hazardous Analysis Critical Control Points) purportedly to deal with contamination in the meat industry. Clinton’s HACCP delighted the offending corporate (World Trade Organization “WTO”) meat packers since it allowed them to inspect themselves, eliminated thousands of local food processors (with no history of contamination), and centralized meat into their control. Monsanto promoted HACCP.
In 2008, Hillary Clinton, urged a powerful centralized food safety agency as part of her campaign for president. Her advisor was Mark Penn, CEO of Burson Marsteller*, a giant PR firm representing Monsanto. Clinton lost, but Clinton friends such as Rosa DeLauro, whose husband’s firm lists Monsanto as a progressive client and globalization as an area of expertise, introduced early versions of S 510.
S 510 fails on moral, social, economic, political, constitutional, and human survival grounds.
1. It puts all US food and all US farms under Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, in the event of contamination or an ill-defined emergency. It resembles the Kissinger Plan.
2. It would end US sovereignty over its own food supply by insisting on compliance with the WTO, thus threatening national security. It would end the Uruguay Round Agreement Act of 1994, which put US sovereignty and US law under perfect protection. Instead, S 510 says:
COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS.
Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the United States is a party.
3. It would allow the government, under Maritime Law, to define the introduction of any food into commerce (even direct sales between individuals) as smuggling into “the United States.” Since under that law, the US is a corporate entity and not a location, “entry of food into the US” covers food produced anywhere within the land mass of this country and “entering into” it by virtue of being produced.
4. It imposes Codex Alimentarius on the US, a global system of control over food. It allows the United Nations (UN), World Health Organization (WHO), UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the WTO to take control of every food on earth and remove access to natural food supplements. Its bizarre history and its expected impact in limiting access to adequate nutrition (while mandating GM food, GM animals, pesticides, hormones, irradiation of food, etc.) threatens all safe and organic food and health itself, since the world knows now it needs vitamins to survive, not just to treat illnesses.
5. It would remove the right to clean, store and thus own seed in the US, putting control of seeds in the hands of Monsanto and other multinationals, threatening US security. See Seeds – How to criminalize them, for more details.
6. It includes NAIS, an animal traceability program that threatens all small farmers and ranchers raising animals. The UN is participating through the WHO, FAO, WTO, and World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) in allowing mass slaughter of even heritage breeds of animals and without proof of disease. Biodiversity in farm animals is being wiped out to substitute genetically engineered animals on which corporations hold patents. Animal diseases can be falsely declared. S 510 includes the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), despite its corrupt involvement in the H1N1 scandal, which is now said to have been concocted by the corporations.
7. It extends a failed and destructive HACCP to all food, thus threatening to do to all local food production and farming what HACCP did to meat production – put it in corporate hands and worsen food safety.
8. It deconstructs what is left of the American economy. It takes agriculture and food, which are the cornerstone of all economies, out of the hands of the citizenry, and puts them under the total control of multinational corporations influencing the UN, WHO, FAO and WTO, with HHS, and CDC, acting as agents, with Homeland Security as the enforcer. The chance to rebuild the economy based on farming, ranching, gardens, food production, natural health, and all the jobs, tools and connected occupations would be eliminated.
9. It would allow the government to mandate antibiotics, hormones, slaughterhouse waste, pesticides and GMOs. This would industrialize every farm in the US, eliminate local organic farming, greatly increase global warming from increased use of oil-based products and long-distance delivery of foods, and make food even more unsafe. The five items listed – the Five Pillars of Food Safety – are precisely the items in the food supply which are the primary source of its danger.
10. It uses food crimes as the entry into police state power and control. The bill postpones defining all the regulations to be imposed; postpones defining crimes to be punished, postpones defining penalties to be applied. It removes fundamental constitutional protections from all citizens in the country, making them subject to a corporate tribunal with unlimited power and penalties, and without judicial review. It is (similar to C-6 in Canada) the end of Rule of Law in the US.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with buying stock. My parents hold lots of BP stock, and they are hardly guilty of dumping the 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf. But this is one more step in a long line of actions by the Gates Foundation in which it is advocating policies and agricultural technologies that will directly benefit and profit Monsanto while screwing over the most vulnerable people on earth: hungry subsistence farmers in developing countries.
Roma people after being resettled from a camp near Lille, in northern France
France has come under increasing pressure to stop its mass expulsions of Roma when a United Nations human rights panel added its voice to the chorus of condemnation.
In recent weeks, French officials have dismantled more than 100 illegal camps and sent hundreds of Roma back to their homes in eastern Europe.
A report released yesterday by a UN anti-racism panel urged France to avoid its “collective repatriations” and expressed concern that members of the Roma community weren’t receiving full voting, education and housing rights in France.
“… the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right.”
Learn to read Sonia Sotomayor! Then start reading the constitution.
US supreme court likely to have to rule on issue of balancing national security and freedom of speech, says judge
Sonia Sotomayor described the balance between national security and free speech as ‘a constant struggle in this society’. Photograph: Ed Andrieski/AP
US supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor has said the court is likely to have to rule on the issue of balancing national security and freedom of speech due to WikiLeaks posting a cache of US military records about the Afghan war.
Sotomayor said the incident, which has been condemned by the Pentagon, was likely to provoke legislation in Congress that would require judicial scrutiny.
Her comments came in response to a question about security and free speech by a student at Denver university. The judge said she could not answer because “that question is very likely to come before me”. She said the “incident, and others, are going to provoke legislation that’s already being discussed in Congress, and so some of it is going to come up before [the supreme court]”.
WikiLeaks posted more than 76,900 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the Afghan war on its website last month, providing a devastating portrait of the war. They revealed how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents and how Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.
The publication of the files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, was one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The Pentagon has said the leak put the lives of US service personnel and Afghan informants at risk – a charge WikiLeaks denies.
Sotomayor said the balance between national security and free speech is “a constant struggle in this society, between our security needs and our first amendment rights, and one that has existed throughout our history.”
(Dictators and elite criminals do struggle with the constitution. That was the intent!!!)
From Academy Award® nominated filmmaker, Charles Ferguson (“No End In Sight”), comes INSIDE JOB, the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists, INSIDE JOB traces the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships which have corrupted politics, regulation and academia.
Narrated by Academy Award® winner Matt Damon, INSIDE JOB was made on location in the United States, Iceland, England, France, Singapore, and China.
They refuse to allow the yuan to strengthen because they know that once they do that it will mark the real end of the dollar era.So instead they are spending like crazy on infrastructure ahead of them allowing the dollar to plunge. Then the strong yuan will be employed to purchase all the commodities they need to utilize their infrastructure and the OECD gets priced out. To those that talk about yuan devaluation, you need to be specific. Devaluation versus what? Versus commodities generally along with other currencies? I can buy that argument very easily. Versus the dollar, highly doubtful. Why? The latest data says China owns $877.5 billion in U.S. treasuries.All they have to do is start dumping and the dollar is finished as the Fed will be forced to print so many dollars it will make Mugabe blush. People need to wake up.
(Mike Krieger, formerly a macro analyst at Bernstein, and currently running his own fund, KAM LP, summarizies the pretend reality we are all caught in now, knowing full well America is set on a crash course with reality at some point, yet sticking our collective heads in the sand, as the collapse will be some time in the “indefinite” future. In the meantime, banks will continue to boost US GDP by peddling “financial innovation” and restructuring advice to countries like Greece… and nothing else.)
Aug. 26 (Financial Times) — A number of the world’s biggest banks have launched international roadshows promoting the use of the renminbi to corporate customers instead of the dollar for trade deals with China.
HSBC, which recently moved its chief executive from London to Hong Kong, and Standard Chartered, are offering discounted transaction fees and other financial incentives to companies that choose to settle trade in the Chinese currency.
“We’re now capable of doing renminbi settlement in many parts of the world,” said Chris Lewis, HSBC’s head of trade for greater China. “All the other major international banks are frantically trying to do the same thing.”
HSBC and StanChart are among a slew of global banks – including Citigroup and JPMorgan – holding roadshows across Asia, Europe and the US to promote the renminbi to companies.
The move aligns the banks favourably with Beijing’s policy priorities and positions them to profit from what is expected to be a rapidly growing line of business in the future.
The phenomenon will accelerate Beijing’s drive to transform the renminbi from a domestic currency into a global medium of exchange like the dollar and euro.
The real Minority Report: U.S. police trial computer software that predicts who is most likely to commit a crime
Tom Cruise in Minority Report in which police were able to predict who was about to commit a crime
Police in America are to use Minority Report style computer programmes to predict who will commit crimes before they happen.
The software collates a range of variables then uses an algorithm to work out who is at the highest chance of offending.
In some cases it may even be able to predict where, when and how the crime will be committed.
Should trials prove a success the software could be used to help set bail amounts and suggest sentencing recommendations too.
It will be used by law enforcement agencies in Washington DC but could be rolled out nationwide if a success.
Its implementation is likely to spark an outcry from privacy campaigners and civil rights groups, not least because of the strong resemblance to the 2002 sci-fi thriller ‘Minority Report’.
AFTER 10 years of comparative slumber, the sun is waking up – and it’s got astronomers on full alert.
This week several US media outlets reported that NASA was warning the massive flare that caused spectacular light shows on Earth earlier this month was just a precursor to a massive solar storm building that had the potential to wipe out the entire planet’s power grid.
NASA has since rebutted those reports, saying it could come “100 years away or just 100 days”, but an Australian astronomer says the space community is betting on the sooner scenario rather than the latter.
Similar storms back in 1859 and 1921 caused worldwide chaos, wiping out telegraph wires on a massive scale.
The 2012 storm has the potential to be even more disruptive.
“The general consensus among general astronomers (and certainly solar astronomers) is that this coming Solar maximum (2012 but possibly later into 2013) will be the most violent in 100 years,” astronomy lecturer and columnist Dave Reneke said.
“A bold statement and one taken seriously by those it will affect most, namely airline companies, communications companies and anyone working with modern GPS systems.
“They can even trip circuit breakers and knock out orbiting satellites, as has already been done this year.”
Regardless, the point astronomers are making is it doesn’t matter if the next Solar Max isn’t the worst in history, or even as bad as the 1859 storms.
It’s the fact that there hasn’t been one since the mid-80s. Commodore had just launched the Amiga and the only digital storm making the news was Tetris.
No one really knows what effect the 2012-2013 Solar Max will have on today’s digital-reliant society.
Dr Richard Fisher, director of NASA’s Heliophysics division, told Mr Reneke the super storm would hit like “a bolt of lightning”, causing catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.
US government officials earlier this year took part in a “tabletop exercise” in Boulder, Colorado, to map out what might happen if the Earth was hit with a storm as intense as the 1859 and 1921 storms.
The 1859 storm was of a similar size to that predicted by NASA to hit within the next three years – one of decreased activity, but more powerful eruptions.
NASA said that a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences found that if a similar storm occurred today, it could cause “$1 to 2 trillion in damages to society’s high-tech infrastructure and require four to 10 years for complete recovery”.
Staff at the Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado, which hosted the exercise, said with our reliance on satellite technology, such an event could hit the Earth with the magnitude of a global hurricane or earthquake.
The reason for the concern comes as the sun enters a phase known as Solar Cycle 24.
All the alarming news building around the event is being fuelled by two things.
The first is a book by disaster expert Lawrence E. Joseph, Guilty of Apocalypse: The Case Against 2012, in which he claims the “Hurricane Katrina for the Earth” may cause unprecedented planetwide upheaval.
The second is a theory that claims sunspots travel through the sun on a “conveyor belt” similar to the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt which controls weather on Earth.
The belt carries magnetic fields through the sun. When they hit the surface, they explode as sunspots.
Weakened, they then travel back through the sun’s core to recharge.
It all happens on a rough 40-50-year cycle, according to solar physicist David Hathaway of the National Space Science and Technology Center in the US.
He says when the belt speeds up, lots of magnetic fields are collected, which points to more intense future activity.
“The belt was turning fast in 1986-1996,” Prof Hathaway said.
“Old magnetic fields swept up then should reappear as big sunspots in 2010-2011.”
Most experts agree, although those who put the date of Solar Max in 2012 are getting the most press.
They claim satellites will be aged by 50 years, rendering GPS even more useless than ever, and the blast will have the equivalent energy of 100 million hydrogen bombs.
Original version of Hitler’s Nuremberg laws transferred from vault in Californian library to National Archives in Washington
General George Patton
They are just four typewritten pages and one notorious signature. But the hastily written Nuremberg laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship, and laid the ground for the murder of millions of people within a decade.
Yet when the remaining Nazi leadership went on trial after the war, that original version of the Nuremberg laws was missing from the mass of documentary evidence of the persecution and extermination of Jews presented to the international court.
Forty-five years later it was revealed that the documents had been filched by General George Patton and then hidden away in the vault of a California library.
Today the four pages, signed by Hitler and stripping Jews of German citizenship, barring their marriage to those defined as Aryan and ultimately defining those consigned to the extermination camps, were reunited with other papers used at the war crimes trials now kept at the US National Archives in Washington.
Patton was notorious for defying orders as his army charged across Europe even while he was a stickler for discipline among his troops. In the waning days of the war a detachment of the US army’s counter-intelligence corps discovered the papers in Eichstätt, Bavaria. Patton appropriated them in breach of orders against looting and the collecting of souvenirs and for Nazi documents to be handed over to war crimes investigators.
“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaeda. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the TV watcher to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US.” – Robin Cook, Former British Foreign Secretary
After these elite criminals will have bankrupted and destroyed America they will propose the New World Order as the one and only solution to all the problems that they have created in the first place.
A classified CIA memo discussing the United States as a possible “exporter of terrorism” because of al-Qaeda recruitment in America has been posted on website, Wikileaks.
U.S. Marines and British soldiers on patrol in Musa Qala Photo: REUTERS
The three-page document addressed the hypothetical question of the impact on the United States if Americans were found to be operating abroad to carry out acts of terrorism.
The CIA memo, produced by the agency’s Red Cell ‘think tank’ set up after the September 11 attacks, does not appear to expose any state secrets and was dismissed by one government official as hardly a “blockbuster.”
It is the latest classified memo to be published by the whistle-blowing website, which last month released more than 70,000 secret military documents on the allied war in Afghanistan, prompting an FBI investigation.
It has threatened to release some 15,000 more, despite criticism that the leaks endangered the lives of sources and exposed sensitive intelligence gathering methods to enemy fighters.
The latest memo said the United States could lose leverage over allies to co-operate on terrorism, particularly on “extra-judicial activities”.
“Primarily we have been concerned about al Qaeda infiltrating operatives into the United States to conduct terrorist attacks, but AQ may be increasingly looking for Americans to operate overseas,” the document proposes.
“Undoubtedly al Qaeda and other terrorist groups recognise that Americans can be great assets in terrorist operations overseas.”
It said US citizens are valuable to terrorist organisations because they are harder to detect. They don’t fit the typical Arab-Muslim profile and can easily communicate with leaders through their “unfettered” access to the internet and other methods, the report said.
Food and Drug administration begins 60-day process to approve animal critics call a ‘frankenfish’
A genetically-modified AquAdvantage salmon, top, next to a control salmon of the same age. (AP)
US authorities today began the process to approve the first GM animal for human consumption.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a 60-day period of consultation and public meetings over whether to permit a GM strain of salmon to be eaten by humans, even though it has been called a “frankenfish” by critics. The approval process could take less than a year, and if it gets the green light the fish could be on the market in 18 months.
Environmentalists and scientists see the decision as marking a threshold. If it is approved it is likely to open the door to a large range of GM animals being raised for consumption. If not, scientists say that will have a negative effect on research, in part because there will be no money to be made from it.
Among the considerations by the FDA is whether, if the fish is approved for consumption, it must be labelled as genetically engineered.
The AquAdvantage salmon – a modified North Atlantic salmon – has been created by AquaBounty Technologies in Boston, Massachusetts, over 14 years at a cost of $50m. The company says the salmon grows at twice the speed of similar fish, cutting costs for farmers and greatly increasing production.
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