Chairman of the Management Board and the Group Executive Committee, Deutsche Bank AG
GBR
Agius, Marcus
Chairman, Barclays plc
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Ajami, Fouad
Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University
USA
Alexander, Keith B.
Commander, US Cyber Command; Director, National Security Agency
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Almunia, Joaquín
Vice-President – Commissioner for Competition, European Commission
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Altman, Roger C.
Chairman, Evercore Partners
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Apunen, Matti
Director, Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA
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Deputy Prime Minister for Economic and Financial Affairs
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Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
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Senator, and Chairman, General Council of Maine-et-Loire
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Berberoğlu, Enis
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Chairman and CEO, Telecom Italia
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Member of Parliament
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Brandtzæg, Svein Richard
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Minister for International Development Cooperation
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Governor, Bank of Canada
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Conti, Fulvio
CEO and General Manager, Enel S.p.A.
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Daniels, Jr., Mitchell E.
Governor of Indiana
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DeMuth, Christopher
Distinguished Fellow, Hudson Institute
USA
Donilon, Thomas E.
National Security Advisor, The White House
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Group Chief Executive, BP plc
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Elkann, John
Chairman, Fiat S.p.A.
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CEO, Airbus
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Vice Chairman, Global Head of Growth Markets, Goldman Sachs & Co.
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Federal Chancellor
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Executive Vice President, Haldor Topsøe A/S
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Ferguson, Niall
Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, Harvard University
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Flint, Douglas J.
Group Chairman, HSBC Holdings plc
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Fu, Ying
Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs
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Gallagher, Paul
Former Attorney General; Senior Counsel
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Giannitsis, Anastasios
Former Minister of Interior; Professor of Development and International Economics, University of Athens
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Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
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Chairman and CEO, The Washington Post Company
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Gruber, Lilli
Journalist – Anchorwoman, La 7 TV
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Gucht, Karel de
Commissioner for Trade, European Commission
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Halberstadt, Victor
Professor of Economics, Leiden University; Former Honorary Secretary General of Bilderberg Meetings
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Harris, Britt
CIO, Teacher Retirement System of Texas
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Co-founder and Executive Chairman, LinkedIn
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Professor of Economics, China Center for Economic Research, Peking University
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Huntsman, Jr., Jon M.
Chairman, Huntsman Cancer Foundation
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Ischinger, Wolfgang
Chairman, Munich Security Conference; Global Head Government Relations, Allianz SE
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Associate member, Russian Academy of Science; President, Russian International Affairs Council
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Izraelewicz, Erik
CEO, Le Monde
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Jacobs, Kenneth M.
Chairman and CEO, Lazard
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Johnson, James A.
Vice Chairman, Perseus, LLC
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Jordan, Jr., Vernon E.
Senior Managing Director, Lazard
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CEO, Palantir Technologies
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Executive Chairman, Manifest Energy, Inc
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Independent Member, House of Lords
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Senator for Massachusetts
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Director, Istanbul Policy Center and Professor of International Relations, Sabanci University
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Kravis, Marie-Josée
Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
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Vice President, European Commission; Commissioner for Digital Agenda
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President, Environmental Defense Fund
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Lamy, Pascal
Director-General, World Trade Organization
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Nonresident Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
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Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Johns Hopkins University
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President, Chairman and CEO, The Dow Chemical Company
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Deputy Chair, TD Bank Group
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CEO, Unilever PLC
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Premier of Alberta
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Counselor, Washington Institute for Near East Policy
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Prime Minister
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Vice Chairman, World Economic Forum
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Parliamentary Leader, Alliance 90/The Greens
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Minister of Finance
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CEO, Royal Dutch Shell plc
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Distinguished Visiting Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University
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Business Correspondent, The Economist
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Foreign Correspondent, The Economist
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BREAKING BILDERBERG NEWS 300 Pages Bilderberg Docs Additional Proof against Global Shadow Elite
A synopsis of the paperwork complete with hand written notes from a Bildeberg meeting in 1966 provide by an protected source due to the Whistleblower situation.
They discuss information found within the report dealing with One World Government, Eugenics Agenda, Population Control through the control of food. using education to sell people on One World Government. The danger of National Sovereignty. These glimpses into the meetings that took place back in 1966 are simply a sample of what is still going on today during these Bilderberg meetings.
Paving a highway across South America is providing lessons on the impact of road construction elsewhere. That’s what a University of Florida researcher and his international colleagues have determined from analyzing communities along the Amazonian portion of the nearly 4,200-mile Interoceanic Highway, a coast-to-coast road that starts at ports in Brazil and will eventually connect to ones in Peru.
The results of their five-year study provide a holistic picture of the social, environmental and economic effects of the highway project, including relationships with climate change. Among the findings:
+ Highway paving facilitates migration and population growth in communities, which can result in forest clearing and conflicts over natural resources.
+ Highway paving has left the Amazon rainforest more vulnerable to clearing with fire, which results in carbon emissions.
+ Improved access to markets may give people an economic boost, however, financial security is dependent on access to a range of diverse raw materials whose availability is declining in many areas.
“The vast majority of road studies look at only one of those pieces,” said Stephen Perz, a UF sociologist and lead author on the paper, which was published in March in the journal Regional Environmental Change. “But it is necessary to consider what is gained and what is lost by paving highways.”
The southwestern Amazon, situated along the borders of Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru, is considered a biodiversity “hot spot” because of its extreme variety of plant and wildlife species. Scientists are creating models to better understand how paving of the Interoceanic Highway increases deforestation and degrades forest habitats in this sensitive area.
Forest loss and degradation can cause an upsurge in susceptibility to future fires, which results in a forest-burning domino effect that raises carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change. At the same time, the Amazon’s worsening droughts, which are also associated with climate change, make fires more dangerous to forests.
Perz and his colleagues found that people are often ill-equipped to control fires by themselves and live in places that firefighters cannot access in time to extinguish outbreaks.
The Interoceanic Highway was a decades-long dream of many governments seeking to develop the Amazon and it was finally paved in 2010, although several side roads remain to be connected. The process of paving gave the researchers an opportunity to examine how a road brings opportunities as well as problems to local communities.
“For an anthropologist it’s hard, because you kind of romanticize people who live sustainably,” said paper author Jeffrey Hoelle, an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder who interviewed Brazilian families when he was a UF graduate student working on the study.
“But everyone has basic needs, and if the road gets people better access to education and health care, they are going to take advantage of it.”
The researchers say economic success in the region is dependent on whether the road gave people opportunities to use a diversity of materials from the rainforest and the ability to sell their products in regional markets. These factors ultimately contributed to whether communities showed resilience to rapid changes from development.
As construction continues and new roads become off-shoots from the highway, additional rainforest resources will be diminished. Previous roads through Brazil pushed rubber tappers away from their economic livelihood that once was provided by the indigenous rubber plant of the rainforest. This forced workers to relocate to local towns, where they were unprepared to find jobs, often resulting in urban poverty.
In June, world leaders will meet in Brazil at the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, otherwise known as the Rio+20, to discuss forests and patterns of production and consumption, among other topics.
It comes on the heels of recent protests in Brazil about proposed reforms legalizing the deforestation of millions of acres of the Amazon. And in Peru, protests continue to surround further road development that may venture into areas inhabited by some of the country’s isolated rainforest tribes.
The researchers in this study are using the information they gathered to contribute to a model that governments and communities can use when planning highways to avoid some of the negative outcomes of paving.
“Is the road good or bad? It depends on who you ask and what you choose to study,” Perz said. “But a broader planning approach requires an open, public process in which communities need to participate.”
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Research partners in Brazil, Bolivia and Peru include the following institutions: Amazonian University of Pando, Bolivia; Federal University of Acre, Brazil; and the National Amazonian University of Madre de Dios, Peru.
There are several larger environmental implications to the group’s findings, too. Because plants grow more efficiently under diffuse light conditions such as this, global photosynthetic activity could increase, pulling more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
One idea for fighting global warming is to increase the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere, scattering incoming solar energy away from the Earth’s surface. But scientists theorize that this solar geoengineering could have a side effect of whitening the sky during the day.
New research from Carnegie’s Ben Kravitz and Ken Caldeira indicates that blocking 2% of the sun’s light would make the sky three-to-five times brighter, as well as whiter. Their work is published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas have been increasing over the past decades, causing the Earth to get hotter and hotter. Large volcanic eruptions cool the planet by creating lots of small particles in the stratosphere, but the particles fall out within a couple of years, and the planet heats back up.
The idea behind solar geoengineering is to constantly replenish a layer of small particles in the stratosphere, mimicking this volcanic aftermath and scattering sunlight back to space.
Using advanced models, Kravitz and Caldeira-along with Douglas MacMartin from the California Institute of Technology-examined changes to sky color and brightness from using sulfate-based aerosols in this way. They found that, depending on the size of the particles, the sky would whiten during the day and sunsets would have afterglows.
Their models predict that the sky would still be blue, but it would be a lighter shade than what most people are used to looking at now. The research team’s work shows that skies everywhere could look like those over urban areas in a world with this type of geoengineering taking place. In urban areas, the sky often looks hazy and white.
“These results give people one more thing to consider before deciding whether we really want to go down this road,” Kravitz said. “Although our study did not address the potential psychological impact of these changes to the sky, they are important to consider as well.”
There are several larger environmental implications to the group’s findings, too. Because plants grow more efficiently under diffuse light conditions such as this, global photosynthetic activity could increase, pulling more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
On the other hand, the effectiveness of solar power could be diminished, as less sunlight would reach solar-power generators.
“I hope that we never get to the point where people feel the need to spray aerosols in the sky to offset rampant global warming,” Caldeira said. “This is one study where I am not eager to have our predictions proven right by a global stratospheric aerosol layer in the real world.”
The search for alternatives to fossil fuels has prompted growing interest in the use of wood, harvested directly from forests, as a carbon-neutral energy source. But a new study by researchers at Duke and Oregon State universities finds that leaving forests intact so they can continue to store carbon dioxide and keep it from re-entering the atmosphere will do more to curb climate change over the next century than cutting and burning their wood as fuel.
“Substituting woody bioenergy for fossil fuels isn’t an effective method for climate change mitigation,” said Stephen R. Mitchell, a research scientist at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Wood stores only about half the amount of carbon-created energy as an equivalent amount of fossil fuels, he explained, so you have to burn more of it to produce as much energy.
“In most cases, it would take more than 100 years for the amount of energy substituted to equal the amount of carbon storage achieved if we just let the forests grow and not harvest them at all,” he said.
Mitchell is lead author of the study published in the peer-reviewed journal Global Change Biology Bioenergy. Mark E. Harmon and Kari E. O’Connell of Oregon State University co-authored the study.
Using an ecosystem simulation model developed at Oregon State, the team calculated how long it would take to repay the carbon debt – the net reduction in carbon storage – incurred by harvesting forests for wood energy under a variety of different scenarios.
Their model accounted for a broad range of harvesting practices, ecosystem characteristics and land-use histories. It also took into account varying bioenergy conversion efficiencies, which measure the amount of energy that woody biomass gives off using different energy-generating technologies.
“Few of our combinations achieved carbon sequestration parity in less than 100 years, even when we set the bioenergy conversion factor at near-maximal levels,” Harmon said.
Because wood stores less carbon-created energy than fossil fuels, you have to harvest, transport and burn more of it to produce as much energy. This extra activity produces additional carbon emissions.
“These emissions must be offset if forest bioenergy is to be used without adding to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in the near-term,” he said.
Performing partial harvests at a medium to low frequency – every 50 to 100 years or so – could be an effective strategy, O’Connell noted, but would generate less bioenergy.
“It’s a Catch-22,” she said. “Less intensive methods of harvesting release fewer emissions but yield less energy. The most intensive methods, such as clear-cutting, produce more energy but also release more carbon back into the atmosphere, prolonging the time required to achieve carbon sequestration parity.”
Given current economic realities and the increasing worldwide demand for forest products and land for agriculture, it’s unlikely that many forests will be managed in coming years solely for carbon storage, Mitchell said, but that makes it all the more critical that scientists, resource managers and policymakers work together to maximize the carbon storage potential of the remaining stands.
“The take-home message of our study is that managing forests for maximal carbon storage can yield appreciable, and highly predictable, carbon mitigation benefits within the coming century,” Mitchell said. “Harvesting forests for bioenergy production would require such a long time scale to yield net benefits that it is unlikely to be an effective avenue for climate-change mitigation.”
The research was funded by a NASA New Investigator Program grant to Kari O’Connell, by the H.J. Andrews Long-term Ecological Research Program, and by the Kay and Ward Richardson Endowment.
This area is only 25 miles north of San Francisco, yet it is surrounded by 5 oil refineries, 3 chemical companies and scores of toxic waste sites. Health experts say the environment is taking a toll on residents’ health.
Homes stand amidst the Chevron oil refinery July 14, 2008, in Richmond, Calif. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
NORTH RICHMOND, Calif. — From the house where he was born, Henry Clark can stand in his backyard and see plumes pouring out of one of the biggest oil refineries in the United States. As a child, he was fascinated by the factory on the hill, all lit up at night like the hellish twin of a fairy tale city. In the morning, he’d go out to play and find the leaves on the trees burned to a crisp. “Sometimes I’d find the air so foul, I’d have to grab my nose and run back into the house until it cleared up.”
The refinery would burn off excess gases, sending “energy and heat waves that would rock our house like we were caught in an earthquake,” recalled Clark, now 68. When the area was engulfed in black smoke for up to a week after one accident, “nobody came to check on the health of North Richmond.”
With all of the frequent explosions and fires that sent children fleeing schools, parks and a swimming pool within a mile of the refinery, “we just hoped that nothing happened that would blow everybody up,” Clark said. “People still wonder when the next big accident is going to happen.”
For 100 years, people — most of them blacks — have lived next door to the booming Chevron Richmond Refinery built by Standard Oil, a plant so huge it can process 240,000 barrels of crude oil a day. Hundreds of tanks holding millions of barrels of raw crude dot 2,900 acres of property on a hilly peninsula overlooking the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay. About 5,000 miles of pipeline there move gasoline, jet fuel, diesel and other chemical products.
During World War II, African Americans like Clark’s family moved to homes in the shadow of this refinery because they had nowhere else to go. Coming to California looking for opportunity, they quickly learned that white neighborhoods and subdivisions didn’t want them.
The people of Richmond live within a ring of five major oil refineries, three chemical companies, eight Superfund sites, dozens of other toxic waste sites, highways, two rail yards, ports and marine terminals where tankers dock. The city of 103,701 doesn’t share the demographic of San Francisco, 25 miles to the south, or even Contra Costa County, or the state as a whole.
In North Richmond — the tiny, unincorporated neighbor of Richmond — Latinos, blacks and Asians make up 97 percent of the 3,717 residents, compared with 82.9 percent in Richmond and 59.9 percent in California, according to 2010 U.S. Census figures.
Most houses sell for below $100,000, among the lowest prices in the Bay Area, in the ZIP code shared with the Chevron refinery, and residents complain of a lack of paved streets, lighting and basic services. Short on jobs and long on poverty, there’s not a grocery store or cafe in sight. The median income in North Richmond — $36,875 in 2010 — is less than Richmond’s modest $54,012 and less than half of Contra Costa County’s $78,385.
Low-income residents seeking affordable homes end up sharing a fence line with a refinery and a cluster of other polluting businesses. They may save money on shelter, but they pay the price in health, researchers say.
Decades of toxic emissions from industries — as well as lung-penetrating diesel particles spewed by truck routes and rail lines running next door to neighborhoods — may be taking a toll on residents’ health. The people of Richmond, particularly African Americans, are at significantly higher risk of dying from heart disease and strokes and more likely to go to hospitals for asthma than other county residents. Health experts say their environment likely is playing a major role.
While most coastal cities breathe ocean breezes mixed with traffic exhaust, people in north and central Richmond are exposed to a greater array of contaminants, many of them at higher concentrations. Included are benzene, mercury and other hazardous air pollutants that have been linked to cancer, reproductive problems and neurological effects. People can’t escape the fumes indoors, either. One study showed that some of the industrial pollutants are inside Richmond homes.
It’s the triple whammy of race, poverty and environment converging nationwide to create communities near pollution sources where nobody else wants to live. Black leaders from the Civil Rights Movement called the phenomenon environmental racism, and beginning in the early 1980s, they documented the pattern at North Carolina’s Warren County PCBs landfill, Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” Chicago’s South Side, Tennessee’s Dickson County, Houston’s Sunnyside garbage dump and other places across the country.
About 56 percent of the 9 million Americans who live in neighborhoods within three kilometers of large commercial hazardous waste facilities are people of color, according to a landmark, 2007 environmental justice report by the United Church of Christ. In California, it’s 81 percent. Poverty rates in these neighborhoods are 1.5 times higher than elsewhere.
Those numbers, however, reflect a miniscule portion of the threats faced by nonwhite and low-income families. Thousands of additional towns are near other major sources of pollution, including refineries, chemical plants, freeways and ports.
Richmond is one of these beleaguered towns, on the forefront of the nation’s environmental justice struggle, waging a fight that began a century ago.
Nowhere else to go
In the San Francisco Bay Area, African Americans didn’t move next to an oil refinery by chance.
Early black settlers came to California as part of a migration between 1890 and the 1920s, many following family and friends to emerging industry in the East Bay. They escaped Jim Crow traditions of the South, but “lived a tenuous existence on the outer edges of the city’s industrial vision, trapped at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchy,” according to Sacramento State University professor Shirley Ann Wilson Moore in her book, “To Place Our Deeds.”
During World War II, blacks again arrived, mainly from southern states seeking jobs in shipbuilding plants built under government contract with industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. Henry Clark’s father, Jimmy Clark of Little Rock, Ark., came seeking opportunity as the first town barber.
Richmond turned to segregated housing in the decade after its 1905 incorporation. When Kaiser got the war contract for shipbuilding in 1941, most of Richmond’s African American population was concentrated in and around North Richmond. Early records describe North Richmond as bordering a garbage dump with few streetlights, scarce fire and police protection and unpaved streets turning to “muddy quagmires in the rain.”
The Richmond Housing Authority, in 1941, was told by the federal government to provide low-cost housing to the shipyard workers who swelled Richmond to a city five times its earlier size. But by 1952, no African American had lived in any of Richmond’s permanent low-rent housing. There was nothing in rentals or sales available to blacks in the central city.
Nonwhites were pushed to unincorporated North Richmond and other neighborhoods dominated by the refinery, chemical companies, highways, rail yards and ports.
“It was the only land available to them when they wanted to purchase property. People don’t put themselves in harm’s way intentionally,” said Betty Reid Soskin, 93, who moved to the Bay Area with her family when she was 8. She lectures on the African American experience in World War II at the National Historical Park’s Rosie the Riveter project in Richmond. “Real estate developers could determine where you lived. The local banker could determine who could get mortgages.”
“Social policy determines history,” Soskin said. “We have developed sensitivities to environmental injustice, and those sensitivities did not exist during that time.”
The pattern of neglect continues today, said the Rev. Kenneth Davis, who used to come to North Richmond from San Francisco in the 1970s to visit friends and blues clubs.
“It’s like we’re on an island,” Davis said. “No grocery store to get fresh fruits and vegetables and meat. The only things you can buy are drink and dope. There’s nothing but old nasty rotten food on the shelves and plenty of beer, wine and whiskey.”
Davis, who moved to a senior apartment in North Richmond in 2006, said he can see the refinery from his third-floor window, and blames Chevron and other companies for his chronic cough since moving here. As a pastor, he wonders about the deeper effects pollution and poverty. “I’m beginning to think there’s a correlation between the toxic fumes that we’re breathing and the violence that is so prevalent in our community.”
Joining the African Americans are newcomers from Laos, Latin America and the Pacific Islands, again seeking refuge and opportunity here amongst the factories and freeways in North Richmond.
The United Nations warned today that croplands in Niger and Mali are at imminent risk from Desert Locust swarms that are moving southward from Algeria and Libya.“How many locusts there are and how far they move will depend on two major factors – the effectiveness of current control efforts in Algeria and Libya and upcoming rainfall in the Sahel of West Africa,” a Senior Locust Forecasting Officer with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said Keith Cressman, said in a news release.Groups of locusts have recently been found in northern Niger, arriving from infestations further north.According to FAO, the Desert Locust swarms can be dense and highly mobile – varying from less than one square kilometre to several hundred square kilometres, with at least 40 million and sometimes as many as 80 million locust adults in each square kilometre of swarm, and able to travel about five to 130 kilometres or more in a day.A Desert Locust adult can consume roughly its own weight in fresh food per day, equivalent to about two grams every day. A very small part of an average swarm – or about one tonne of locusts – eats the same amount of food in one day as about 10 elephants or 25 camels or 2,500 people.FAO says locust-control efforts in the region are being hindered by continued insecurity along both sides of the Algerian-Libyan border. Political insecurity and conflict in Mali could also hamper monitoring and control efforts if the locusts reach that country.Locust infestations were first reported in southwest Libya near Ghat in January 2012 and in south-east Algeria. In late March, FAO warned that swarms could arrive in Niger and Mali by June. Continued rains and the resulting growth of vegetation led to the formation of swarms by mid-May.
FAO notes that both Algeria and Libya have been working hard to treat infested areas, covering a total of 40,000 hectares in Algeria and 21,000 hectares in Libya as of the end of May.
“In a normal year, Algeria and Libya would have been able to control most of the local swarms and prevent their movement towards the south, but insecurity along both sides of the Algerian-Libyan border is getting in the way of full access by local teams and by FAO experts who need to assess the situation,” Mr. Cressman said. “Libya’s capacity to carry out control efforts has also been affected in the past year.”
Niger last faced Desert Locust swarms during the 2003-05 plague that affected farmers in two dozen countries.
The FAO Commission for Controlling the Desert Locust in the Western Region has provided $300,000 in funding to tackle locust infestations in Libya, and FAO has added an additional $400,000 to address the problem.
One of FAO’s mandates is to provide information on the general locust situation to all interested countries and to give timely warnings and forecasts to those countries in danger of invasion.
Noah Goodman, right, and Michael Frank, both assistant professors of psychology, discuss their research at the white board that covers the wall in Goodman’s office.
Language is so much more than a string of words. To understand what someone means, you need context. Consider the phrase, “Man on first.” It doesn’t make much sense unless you’re at a baseball game. Or imagine a sign outside a children’s boutique that reads, “Baby sale – One week only!” You easily infer from the situation that the store isn’t selling babies but advertising bargains on gear for them.
Present these widely quoted scenarios to a computer, however, and there would likely be a communication breakdown. Computers aren’t very good at pragmatics – how language is used in social situations.
But a pair of Stanford psychologists has taken the first steps toward changing that.
In a new paper published recently in the journal Science, Assistant Professors Michael Frank and Noah Goodman describe a quantitative theory of pragmatics that promises to help open the door to more human-like computer systems, ones that use language as flexibly as we do.
The mathematical model they created helps predict pragmatic reasoning and may eventually lead to the manufacture of machines that can better understand inference, context and social rules. The work could help researchers understand language better and treat people with language disorders.
It also could make speaking to a computerized customer service attendant a little less frustrating.
“If you’ve ever called an airline, you know the computer voice recognizes words but it doesn’t necessarily understand what you mean,” Frank said. “That’s the key feature of human language. In some sense it’s all about what the other person is trying to tell you, not what they’re actually saying.”
Frank and Goodman’s work is part of a broader trend to try to understand language using mathematical tools. That trend has led to technologies like Siri, the iPhone’s speech recognition personal assistant.
But turning speech and language into numbers has its obstacles, mainly the difficulty of formalizing notions such as “common knowledge” or “informativeness.”
That is what Frank and Goodman sought to address.
The researchers enlisted 745 participants to take part in an online experiment. The participants saw a set of objects and were asked to bet which one was being referred to by a particular word.
For example, one group of participants saw a blue square, a blue circle and a red square. The question for that group was: Imagine you are talking to someone and you want to refer to the middle object. Which word would you use, “blue” or “circle”?
The other group was asked: Imagine someone is talking to you and uses the word “blue” to refer to one of these objects. Which object are they talking about?
“We modeled how a listener understands a speaker and how a speaker decides what to say,” Goodman explained.
The results allowed Frank and Goodman to create a mathematical equation to predict human behavior and determine the likelihood of referring to a particular object.
“Before, you couldn’t take these informal theories of linguistics and put them into a computer. Now we’re starting to be able to do that,” Goodman said.
The researchers are already applying the model to studies on hyperbole, sarcasm and other aspects of language.
“It will take years of work but the dream is of a computer that really is thinking about what you want and what you mean rather than just what you said,” Frank said.
South Carolina man starts urban garden to feed those in need, teach people how to grow food
By Jonathan Benson,
(NaturalNews) The relatively modest, two-and-a-half acre plot of formerly unused land behind the Wild Radish Health Store in Greenville, South Carolina, is quickly burgeoning into a cornucopia of organic squash, kale, blueberries and other fresh fruits and vegetables. Thanks to the vision of one local man with a heart for the needy, and the efforts of hundreds of his neighbors, the Greenville area will soon have access to free, organic produce as part of a new initiative known as The Generous Garden…
This guest post is by Non-psychologist, D.P. KYSER (aka CaptnDave), and entry in our non-fiction writing contest .
Let me preface this article with full disclosure. I am not a Psychiatrist! My background is mostly Naval Aviation (Wings of Gold, baby!), some sales, including owning my own business, running someone else’s much larger business, and lots of leadership experience. Currently I’m professionally teaching & training Military personnel.
First, if you’re freaked-out that The End-of-The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) is happening tomorrow, or December 21st, of January 13th, 2013: relax.
Stop it.
Just stop with the drama and don’t fall for the hype. Do I think trouble is coming? Absolutely. Preparedness is essential, but don’t panic.
Fortune favors the bold, and bold people are not panicked.
Let’s talk about the psychology and personalities of prepping; what drives people to behave the way do, and how we might use this information to better communicate with our spouse, and also friends & relatives that may be included in your prepper network, so you effectively communicate the reasoning behind your desire to be prepared and everyone can get “On-board” with the program.
I must first go back to Plato’s works on personalities. Plato postulated that there are four different basic personality types¹: Phlegmatic, Sanguine, Melancholy, and Choleric. Those of you that have received Sales training have probably seen versions of this (MBTI, Owls and Dolphins, etc.). I’ll spare you the boring College-level analysis of Plato’s work and ideas; I’ll give an overview of it by means of a short story analogy.
There’s a fire in a rather large building! The first person that shows up is the Phlegmatic. He stands there on the corner across the street and looks around timidly, and mumbles to himself, “Isn’t anybody going to do anything?” The second person to show up is the Sanguine. She looks at the fire and happily squeals “Wow, a fire, let’s get some weenies and have us a weenie roast!” (She’s not taking it seriously.) The third person that shows up is the Melancholy. He looks at the building on fire, and noticing the building is ten stories tall, and one-hundred feet wide by about 200 feet deep, pulls out his whiz-wheel and begins to calculate how much water it’s going to take to put the fire out. While the Melancholy is still calculating how many thousands of gallons of water are required, the Choleric shows up. He immediately looks at the first person and commands “You, call 911”, then to the other two people he yells “come on you two, grab that ladder and hose and let’s go!”
While you were reading this story, you’ve probably already thought to yourself, that one sounds like my friend, that one my spouse, and so on. Here’s the point; if we know how people behave, then maybe we can identify what in their personality is driving them to respond or to shut down, and enables us to better communicate with them.
Glow-in-the-dark cats? It may sound like science fiction, but they’ve been around for years. Cabbages that produce scorpion poison? It’s been done. Oh, and the next time you need a vaccine, the doctor might just give you a banana.
These and many other genetically modified organisms exist today because their DNA has been altered and combined with other DNA to create an entirely new set of genes. You may not realize it, but many of these genetically modified organisms are a part of your daily life — and your daily diet. Today, 45 percent of U.S. corn and 85 percent of U.S. soybeans are genetically engineered, and it’s estimated that 70 to 75 percent of processed foods on grocery store shelves contain genetically engineered ingredients.
Here’s a look at the some of the weirdest genetically engineered plants and animals already in existence — and many that are coming your way soon. (Text: Laura Moss)
The Charlotte Observerreported on an American Indian village unearthed in Morganton, North Carolina, in Catawba Meadows Park. Archaeologists have been pulling artifacts from the ground in Burke County for some time now. The Observer spoke to Emma Richardson, who has been part of the team researching the village.
Richardson told the Observer that village hugged the banks of the Catawba River in present-day Morganton, and was likely circled by a wooden palisade, with village structures rising in a meadow where gardens flourished thank sto the rich river-bottom soil.
“Richardson also imagines a day in the 16th-century when villagers may have looked up from their toil and seen Spanish explorers arrive,” Observer reporter Joe DePriest writes. “The story of this clash of cultures will be told in a major living history project going up on the actual site of the village, now occupied by Morganton’s Catawba Meadows Park.”
Eventually there will be a Catawba Meadows Archaeology Interpretive Center that will focus on the American Indians and Spanish explorers who lived in the Catawba Valley long before the English arrived on Roanoke Island on the coast of North Carolina. The center’s exhibit will also showcase artifacts found some ten miles away in the remains of another Indian village, this one called Joara, as well as artifacts from a fort built by Spanish explorer Juan Pardo in 1567. Scientists maintain that the fort was the first European settlement in the interior of the United States. Archaeologists have turned up thousands of pieces of history from the fort, including spike-like nails, lead balls for a harquebus, a type of gun. National attention in the form of National Geographic, Smithsonian and Archaeology magazines have been interested in the site. For more on this story, click here.
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Senate Democrats blast national security leak about cyberattack against Iran
By Jeremy Herb
Senate Democrats on Tuesday blasted leaks to the press about a cyberattack against Iran and warned the disclosure of President Obama’s order could put the United States at risk of a retaliatory strike.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, said the leak about the attack on Iran’s nuclear program could “to some extent” provide justification for copycat attacks against the United States.
“This is like an avalanche. It is very detrimental and, candidly, I found it very concerning,” Feinstein said. “There’s no question that this kind of thing hurts our country.”
The FBI opened its own probe Tuesday into who disclosed information on the Iranian attack, The Wall Street Journal reported. On Capitol Hill, the Senate Armed Service Committee promised hearings, while two Republican senators called for a special counsel investigation.
Several Democrats noted with alarm that the Iranian cyber leak is just the latest in a series of media reports that disclosed classified information about U.S. anti-terrorism activity.
“A number of those leaks, and others in the last months about drone activities and other activities, are frankly all against national-security interests,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “I think they’re dangerous, damaging, and whoever is doing that is not acting in the interest of the United States of America.”
Lech Walesa was once a trade-union activist. He was often arrested for speaking his mind against Communist oppression behind the Iron Curtain in Poland and for defying the Soviet Union. He was an electrician who, with no higher education, led one of the most profound freedom movements of the 20th century – Solidarity. He became president of Poland and swept in reforms, pushing the Soviet Union out of his homeland and moving the country toward a free-market economy and individual liberty. And President Obama doesn’t want him to set foot in the White House.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Polish officials requested that Walesa accept the Medal of Freedom on behalf of Jan Karski, a member of the Polish Underground during World War II who was being honored posthumously this week. The request makes sense. Walesa and Karski shared a burning desire to rid Poland of tyrannical subjugation. But President Obama said no.
Administration officials told the Journal that Walesa is too “political.” A man who was arrested by Soviet officials for dissenting against the government for being “political” is being shunned by the United States of America for the same reason 30 years later.
Meanwhile, one of the recipients of the Medal was Dolores Huerta, the honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. So socialist politics are acceptable, but not the politics of a man who stood up and fought socialism.
This revelation follows an eruption of outrage in Poland after President Obama referred in his remarks at the Medal of Freedom ceremony to “Polish death camps,” a phrase that Poles have battled since the end of the Cold War. The phrase suggests that Poles were complicit in Nazi concentration camps, which of course is not the case. In fact, Poles were exterminated in the camps.
The White House’s flippant response to the uproar caused the Polish president and prime minister to demand more thoughtful and personal reactions. But White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that the president has no plans to reach out to his Polish counterparts and has shrugged off the outrage in Poland.
Few observers are suggesting that President Obama’s written remarks noting “Polish death camps” were intentionally malicious. The comment was more likely a result of historical ignorance and careless inattention. This is the same ignorance and carelessness that would cause a president to turn away Lech Walesa and label him as “too political.”
Ironically, Lech Walesa shares a distinction with President Obama: They both won Nobel Peace Prizes. Walesa earned his in 1983 after years of fighting for peace and freedom, and being monitored, harassed, and jailed for it. President Obama received his award in 2009. Some may think that this would be enough of a bond for President Obama to set aside political differences for the greater good. But instead, President Obama treated Walesa the same way he treated the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, who was ushered out the White House kitchen past piles of garbage in 2010.
The likelihood is that President Obama didn’t want Walesa in the White House because Walesa has made critical remarks toward the president’s policies and in 2010 warned that the United States was slipping toward socialism. But rather than taking the mature and diplomatic path and respecting Walesa’s right to have a differing perspective, Obama chose to shun his lifetime of achievements.
Congratulating Walesa on his Nobel Prize in 1983, President Ronald Reagan said: “For too long, the Polish government has tried to make Lech Walesa a non-person and destroy the free trade-union movement that he helped to create in Poland. But no government can destroy the hopes that burn in the hearts of a people. The people of Poland have shown in their support of Solidarity, just as they showed in their support of His Holiness Pope John Paul II during his visit to Poland, that the government of that nation cannot make Lech Walesa a non-person, and they can’t turn his ideas into non-ideas.”
The White House should not treat President Walesa as a non-person, and they cannot turn his ideas into non-ideas.
US stocks waver, then rise, even though Spain warns that it could lose access to borrowing
Richard Drew, File/Associated Press – FILE – In this June 4, 2012, file photo, trader Lewis Vande Pallen, center, works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. US stock futures are sliding along with investor confidence in the ability of the world’s economic leaders to unravel Europe’s worsening debt crisis.
By Associated Press, Updated: Tuesday, June 5, 3:27 PM
NEW YORK — As world leaders searched for a way out of Europe’s mounting debt crisis, U.S. investors moved to the sidelines.The major market indexes closed modestly higher, after wavering between slight gains and losses throughout the morning. Trading volume was light and the stock moves were small. In Europe, markets were mixed.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 26.49 points, or 0.2 percent, to 12,127.95. It traded within a range of 75 points, one of the narrowest of the year.
Timothy McCandless, senior stock analyst at Bel Air Investment Advisors in Los Angeles, described Tuesday’s market as stuck in purgatory: The economy is not strong enough to represent a healthy recovery, but not weak enough for the Federal Reserve to do more to help.
“It’s wrestling with those two sides,” McCandless said. “We’re right in between.”
Finance ministers and central bank presidents from the world’s seven wealthiest nations held an emergency conference call to discuss how Europe can heal its weakest countries without alienating the stronger ones that have to foot the bill. Leaders are worried that Spain and Cyprus, which are scrambling for money to prop up their troubled banks, will soon need to be bailed out by their richer counterparts.
The debt crisis is still unraveling as the European Union struggles to keep its pieces together. We start today, June 4th in Germany where the DAX fell below 6,000 points today for the first time since January. Its effects are the result of Spain’s accumulating debt load. Some argue now is the time for the Central bank to step in and keep Spain from spiraling out of control. Trader Robert Halver with Baader Bank. The European Central Bank announced it will be meeting Wednesday June 6th and the Bank of England on Thursday June 7th to hash out monetary policies for corrective action. But corrective action cannot come fast enough. We take you to Spain where unemployment rates have dipped ever so slightly but still the numbers illustrate the dire situation the people of Spain are facing. This time last year records indicate that the jobless rate is up by 12.5 percent making Spain’s unemployment rate the highest in the Euro zone. Some 4.7 million people or 24 percent remain unemployed as shown by Spain’s Labor Ministry. Despite these grim tales Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is still insisting that Spain does not need assistance from the European Commission to clean-up its banking sector. Seen here during a meeting today with Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, instead called for the establishment of a central authority to oversee and coordinate euro zone fiscal policy. As Spain’s 10 year loan rates approach 7 percent Traders hold on tightly and anticipate some good news from this week’s Central Bank meetings.
CBO: Debt will be double GDP by 2037
By Erik Wasson
U.S. debt is on track to be nearly twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2037, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warned Tuesday.
The new CBO report states that increased entitlement spending driven by the retirement of the baby boomers and insufficient revenue is making the long-term outlook for the national debt increasingly dire.
Under CBO’s most likely scenario, in which lawmakers extend current tax rates and fail to curb entitlement spending, debt held by the public would reach 109 percent of the economy by 2026, and it would be almost 200 percent of GDP by 2037.
Many economists have warned that if debt held by the public approaches 100 percent of GDP, it can bring on the kind of fiscal crisis being felt in European countries today, in which governments must suddenly slash spending and laying off workers in the face of rising interest rates caused by spooked investors.
CBO’s latest prediction is similar to its 2011 report despite the $2.1 trillion in budget cuts enacted in last August’s debt-ceiling deal between the White House and Congress.
CBO said last year that debt as a share of GDP would reach 109 percent of the economy by 2023 — rather than 2026 — and would approach 190 percent in 2035.
In its new report, CBO says that if current policies continue, including allowing the Bush-era tax rates to increase in January and going forward with large cuts in payments to doctors under Medicare, the debt path would be less explosive. In that scenario, debt held by the public moves from 73 percent of GDP this year to 61 percent by 2022 and 53 percent by 2037.
Some of those hired as stewards had to spend the night before the pageant sleeping under London Bridge.
Coachloads of jobless people brought in to work unpaid on river pageant as part of Work ProgrammeA group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.
Up to 30 jobseekers and another 50 people on apprentice wages were taken to London by coach from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth as part of the government’s Work Programme.
Two jobseekers, who did not want to be identified in case they lost their benefits, said they had to camp under London Bridge the night before the pageant. They told the Guardian they had to change into security gear in public, had no access to toilets for 24 hours, and were taken to a swampy campsite outside London after working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain on the banks of the Thames on Sunday.
One young worker said she was on duty between London Bridge and Tower Bridge during the £12m river spectacle of a 1,000-boat flotilla and members of the Royal family sail by . She said that the security firm Close Protection UK, which won a stewarding contract for the jubilee events, gave her a plastic see-through poncho and a high-visibility jacket for protection against the rain.
Close Protection UK confirmed that it was using up to 30 unpaid staff and 50 apprentices, who were paid £2.80 an hour, for the three-day event in London. A spokesman said the unpaid work was a trial for paid roles at the Olympics, which it had also won a contract to staff. Unpaid staff were expected to work two days out of the three-day holiday.
The firm said it had spent considerable resources on training and equipment that stewards could keep and that the experience was voluntary and did not affect jobseekers keeping their benefits.
The woman said that people were picked up at Bristol at 11pm on Saturday and arrived in London at 3am on Sunday. “We all got off the coach and we were stranded on the side of the road for 20 minutes until they came back and told us all to follow them,” she said. “We followed them under London Bridge and that’s where they told us to camp out for the night … It was raining and freezing.”
A 30-year-old steward told the Guardian that the conditions under the bridge were “cold and wet and we were told to get our head down [to sleep]“. He said that it was impossible to pitch a tent because of the concrete floor.
The woman said they were woken at 5.30am and supplied with boots, combat trousers and polo shirts. She said: “They had told the ladies we were getting ready in a minibus around the corner and I went to the minibus and they had failed to open it so it was locked. I waited around to find someone to unlock it, and all of the other girls were coming down trying to get ready and no one was bothering to come down to unlock [it], so some of us, including me, were getting undressed in public in the freezing cold and rain.” The men are understood to have changed under the bridge.
The female steward said that after the royal pageant, the group travelled by tube to a campsite in Theydon Bois, Essex, where some had to pitch their tents in the dark.
She said: “London was supposed to be a nice experience, but they left us in the rain. They couldn’t give a crap … No one is supposed to be treated like that, [working] for free. I don’t want to be treated where I have to sleep under a bridge and wait for food.” The male steward said: “It was the worst experience I’ve ever had. I’ve had many a job, and many a bad job, but this one was the worst.”
Both stewards said they were originally told they would be paid. But when they got to the coach on Saturday night, they said, they were told that the work would be unpaid and that if they did not accept it they would not be considered for well-paid work at the Olympics.
Molly Prince, managing director of Close Protection UK, said in a statement: “We take the welfare of our staff and apprentices very seriously indeed.
“The staff travelling to the jubilee are completing their training and being assessed on the job for NVQ Level 2 in spectator safety after having completed all the knowledge requirements in the classroom and some previous work experience. It is essential that they are assessed in a live work environment in order to complete their chosen qualifications.
“The nature of festival and event work is such that we often travel sleeping on coaches through the night with an early morning pre-event start – it is the nature of the business … It’s hard work and not for the faint-hearted.
“We had staff travel from several locations and some arrived earlier than others at the meeting point, which I believe was London Bridge [pictured left], which was why some had to hang around. This is an unfortunate set of circumstances but not lack of care on the part of CPUK.”
The company said it had spent up to £220 on sponsoring security training licences for each participant and that boots and combat trousers cost more than £100.
Abi Levitt, director of development services at the charity, said: “We have been unable to verify the accuracy of the situation with either the people on work experience or the business concerned.
“We will undertake a review of the situation as matter of urgency. Tomorrow’s People believes strongly in the value of work experience in helping people to build the skills, confidence and CV they need to get and keep a job and we have an exemplary record going back nearly 30 years for our work with the long-term unemployed.”
San Luis Obispo, Calif. – Yes, I’m mad as hell again. I just read some bad news that should make every American mad as hell. In fact, two bad news items.First, as a U.S. Marine vet, I got angry reading that there have been more military suicides than war deaths the past decade. Yes, more Iraq and Afghan war vets have killed themselves than were killed by America’s enemies in combat. And more are expected as we had more than two million serve in the two wars.
Second, if the economic, psychological, political and moral consequences of the past two wars aren’t bad enough, many politicians and candidates – some of whom never served in the armed forces – are proposing that the full Congress pass the Ryan budget and force Pentagon generals to spend billions more than they requested.This is insane. More taxpayer money for the Pentagon war machine? Why? We’re winding down two wars. We’re dealing with the tragedy of vet suicides. These same politicians whining about the debt and taxes. So why do they want to increase Pentagon spending? Do we love war that much? Are they planning to start a new war? Let’s analyze this contradiction.
Yes, an epidemic: military suicides now exceed war deaths
The effort to increase Pentagon spending was already public knowledge since the House voted on the Ryan budget plan. But what really triggered the anger was a Newsweek feature, “We Pretend Our Vets Don’t Even Exist,” by Marine veteran Anthony Swofford. That put the spotlight on this new crisis, now an epidemic, one few are aware of, fewer care about.
Here are the hard facts: “About 18 veterans kill themselves each day. Thousands from the current wars have already done so. In fact, the number of U.S. soldiers who have died by their own hand is now estimated to be greater than the number (6,460) who have died in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Wake up folks. Something is wrong in our thinking. From the beginning we were in a trance, pretending the Iraq War would be short-lived, cheap and self-funded by oil revenues. Yes, from Day 1 the Iraq War was handled more like an economic stimulus program.
Remember, after 9/11 we were urged to focus on the economy, to spend, go to the mall shopping. Draft was unnecessary. And thanks to bonuses, we built a volunteer army, backed up by mercenaries, tens of thousands of private contractors.
We even hid photos of war casualties from the public, to sanitize the public’s brain.
War now an economic stimulus program, boosting taxes for investors
Treating war as an economic stimulus program became clear a decade ago in the early years of the Iraq war. That fact was stressed in a Huffington Post interview with Oliver Stone. Ryan Grim said that in a 2004 meeting President George W. Bush said to the Argentine prime minister: “All the economic growth that the U.S. has had, has been based on the different wars it had waged.”
Apparently that same ideology remains strong in today’s election politics.
Let’s put all this in the larger macroeconomic context. War should be about national defense. Wars should have nothing to do with scoring domestic political points. And yet, increasing the Pentagon budget has become a political hot button in today’s election drama.
This is insane: Do politicians plan to start new wars?
Ask yourself, are they already itching for a new war? After two exhausting wars? Eleven years? We put 2.3 million in Iraq and Afghanistan; 800,000 served multiple deployments, one of the big reasons for vet suicides. So why demand bigger budgets? Why in a time of national austerity? Why when they’re complaining about high taxes?
No, war shouldn’t be about domestic politics, but it is. And that’s bad news for taxpayers, for investors, for America’s values.
Somebody’s got to pay for all this. The taxes of all Americans will go up if the Senate passes the Ryan budget plan, forcing Pentagon generals to spend $554 billion in 2013, billions more than they requested. Plus it’ll add $6.2 trillion new debt and taxes over the next decade.
Yes, this is insane. A few private contractors will get richer but taxpayers will suffer in this zero-sum economics game.
National defense? No, it’s about getting rich, the rest pay the price
America is on a dangerous and costly path. Not just politicians. Americans love war, it’s in our genes. Congress spends over 50% our tax dollars on the Pentagon war machine. America spends 47% of the total military budgets of all nations in the world.
Why does the public tolerates such absurdities? Why do we hide this insanity deep in our collective conscience? Why are we planning new wars? Why do we see war as an economic stimulus program? The Iraq-Afghan “economic stimulus” strategy got us in the mess we’re in; are we really crazy enough to try it again?
Forget all the campaign rhetoric about national defense. That is not why our politicians want to spent trillions more on the Pentagon war machine. Politician are interested in reelection not national defense. They need votes and will keep military bases open because that means local jobs, satisfied voters.
They need campaign cash. Military contractors are great donors. Cutting war-related jobs is political suicide. So they pass big military budgets, waste billions on outdated weapon systems. Keep throwing money at the Pentagon war machine. Anything to get reelected. National defense is not a first priority; their job, their reelection is.
As a gung-ho teenager, I volunteered to serve with the Marines. I remember telling my dad I wanted to save the world from communism. Today I hate war. Hate war because I know that our leaders deceived us into going to war under false pretenses. I remember all the misleading propaganda about mushroom clouds, a self-funded quickie war paid for by oil revenues, while they dropped the ball on the real Afghan threat.
Now we’re looking at trillions in the unfunded future costs of these misguided wars, says Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, medical and other costs for the 35,000 wounded warriors. Worse, the manipulation is happening all over again with the proposed increases in the Pentagon budget.
Warning: America’s war-mongering psyche, adding new debt, is taxing
In fact, it’s obvious to see where these proposed budget plans are headed. The Iraq-Afghan wars were huge foreign policy blunders, wasted too many lives, added trillions in debt and squandered our nation’s integrity.
Some few got very rich, are now pushing for new wars. A crazy, dangerous ideology has taken over America’s collective conscience.
This mind-set is extremely dangerous. Our nation’s lost its moral compass. Our new capitalism has been so distorted that accumulating personal wealth means you can do virtually anything no matter how destructive to the public good.
Hopefully America will wake up soon, get mad as hell because this ideology did not work during the Iraq/Afghan Wars, and it will explode in our faces the next time. In addition to the war deaths … the veterans’ suicides … bloated Pentagon budgets … increasing taxes … and the destruction of our value system … this self-destructive “war-is-an-economic-stimulus-program” mind-set will inevitably weaken our national defense.
Remember Kevin Phillips, former Nixon strategist and author of many classics including American Theocracy and American Dynasty? Writing in the early days of the Iraq War, in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, he warned that “great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant, wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, and ultimately burning themselves out.”
Syrian rebels killed at least 80 government soldiers at the weekend, an opposition watchdog has said.
The attacks came after rebels warned they would act if Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, failed to observe a UN-backed ceasefire.
The latest violence, and Assad’s defiant speech to parliament on Sunday, raised questions about how long the UN and Arab League envoy, Kofi Annan, can realistically pursue his peace plan.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said local doctors had confirmed the names of 80 dead soldiers.
Insurgents told the British-based group they had killed more than 100 soldiers and destroyed some tanks in clashes across Syria, including in Damascus and Idlib province, in the north-west.
Syria’s state news agency reported the burial on Monday of 30 members of the security forces killed by rebels.
Some commanders in the rebel Free Syrian Army announced last week they would be “free of any commitment” to Annan’s peace plan if Assad failed to end violence by Friday. The massacre of at least 108 people, nearly half of them children, in the Houla area of Homs province on 25 May dealt a possibly fatal blow to Annan’s proposed ceasefire, which was supposed to have taken effect on 12 April.
A withdrawal of Syrian troops was at the top of Annan’s six-point plan to halt hostilities in Syria, the country the Assad family has controlled for 42 years.
“The Annan mission is essentially dead, and of course most western powers admit that,” said Michael Stephens, researcher at the Royal United Services Institute’s branch in Qatar.
“Houla changed the game completely in terms of what people were willing to accept and what they were not.”
However, Russia and China, wary of any western-led military intervention in Syria, say Annan’s plan is the only way forward. They have twice blocked UN security council resolutions that would have condemned Damascus, and perhaps led to sanctions. The position of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was in the spotlight at the start of a summit with EU leaders in St Petersburg.
Both Russia and Europe say they still support Kofi Annan’s plan, but EU nations would like Russia to press Assad harder to abide by a ceasefire demanded by the plan, and want him to step aside as part of a political transition.
China’s state newspaper, the People’s Daily, has warned that any western-backed military intervention would unleash even bloodier chaos, and warned that abandoning Annan’s plan could push Syria into full-scale war.
Going to war depends first on selling it. Gaining public support is vital. Previous articles discussed it. Walter Lippmann coined the phrase “manufacture of consent.”
Media scoundrels use it to manipulate and control public thinking and perceptions. News and information are filtered. Acceptable “residue” only is reported.
Dissent is marginalized. Government and dominant private interests are prioritized.
Michael Parenti explained:
“The enormous gap between what US leader do….and what American’s think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments….”
In their book titled “Propaganda and Persuasion,” Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell defined their topic as “the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.”
Richard Alan Nelson described the technique as follows:
“Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels.”
“A propaganda organization employs propagandists who engage in propagandism – the applied creation and distribution of such forms of persuasion.”
Propaganda has different forms. Advertisers use it to generate sales. So do politicians to get elected. Religious leaders use it to indoctrinate the faithful. So do nations to promote their agendas.
When war is planned, it’s used to create fear, demonize enemies, dehumanize them, falsely accuse them of atrocities and other crimes, and enlist public support for intervention for alleged humanitarian reasons.
In 1917, George Creel first used propaganda successfully to turn pacifist Americans into raging German-haters.
In his 1928 book titled “Propaganda,” Edward Bernays said it’s possible to “regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies.”
“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?”
“The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”
It’s also used to launch wars, trick enemies for strategic purposes, and deceive the public while waging them. Media scoundrels play a crucial role. People are manipulated to think aggressive wars are just ones.
Big lies launch them. None achieve peace, security and stability. One conflict begets others. Endless destructive cycles follow. Countless millions die. Vast destruction ravages countries. Human misery, not liberation, results.
Human needs go unmet. Wealth, power, and imperial interests only matter. Successful propaganda convinces people that what harms their well-being actually helps them.
Post-9/11, America waged multiple direct and proxy wars. They continue without end. Obama itches for more. Syria is target one, then Iran, then other nations for unchallenged US dominance. At issue is can humanity survive?
On June 1, Global Research published Russian journalist Marat Musin‘s firsthand observations of what really happened at Houla. He exposed media scoundrel misinformation and lies. Doing so provided a vital service.
Western-enlisted death squads bear full responsibility. Government forces and/or so-called pro-Assad shabbiha had no involvement.
Scoundrel media and Western officials provided fabricated accounts of what went on. It was classic, duplicitous propaganda. It rages to enlist public support for war.
Musin’s article is powerful reading. Circulating it widely is important. Only public rage can stop wars. Nothing else works. Knowing the truth and spreading it has impact. Imperial America and war profiteers fear that most.
It’s time ordinary people got radicalized for their own well-being. Focus first on ending imperial wars. Imagine what’s possible at peace. Imagine public needs prioritized over conquests and domination. If that’s not worth fighting for, what is?
Below is a snapshot of what Musin wrote. Read his article for the full account.
On May 25, Houla was attacked by hundreds of “bandits and mercenaries.”
Ar-Rastan-based Free Syrian Army terrorists were responsible.
Civilians abandoned the town of Ar-Rastan. Lebanese Wahhabi/Salafist extremists dominate the area. With foreign money and weapons, they carry out terrorist attacks.
When killer gangs entered “the lower checkpoint in the center of” Houla, they attacked pro-government residents.
“Many of those killed were ‘guilty’ of….dar(ing) to change from Sunnis to Shiites.” They were murdered in cold blood “with knives (or) shot at point blank range.”
Scandalous accounts blamed Assad. Government forces and/or supporters had nothing to do with it.
Musin called UN observers claiming they heard artillery fire “a bad joke.” Assad’s forces were in Homs, 50 kilometers away.
“After a visual inspection of (Houla), it is impossible to find traces of any of fresh destruction, bombing and shelling….Militants used heavy weapons and snipers…”
Official and scoundrel media reports wreak of inconsistencies and duplicity.
“Militants opened fire on virtually everyone who tries to get closer to (Houla). Before us a UN convoy was fired upon and two armored jeeps of the UN observers were damaged, when they tried to drive up to an army checkpoint in Tal Dow.”
“….(M)any of the militants are professional snipers.”
“….(B)andits even fired an automatic burst on our group of journalists….”
About 108 civilians were killed, including 38 or more young children. They were executed in cold blood. They were pro-government loyalists.
Musin discussed media disinformation, saying:
“To exert pressure on public opinion and change the positions of Russia and China, texts and subtitles in Russian and Chinese languages were prepared in advance, reading:
‘Syria – Homs – the city of Hula. A terrible massacre perpetrated by the armed forces of the Syrian regime against civilians in the town of Houla. Dozens of victims and their number is growing, mainly women and children, brutally killed by indiscriminate bombing of the CITY.’ “
“Two days later, on May 27, after the residents’ stories and video recordings made showed that the facts do not support the allegation of shelling and bombing, the bandits’ videos had undergone significant changes.”
“At the end of the text appeared this postscript: ‘And some were killed with knives.’ “
Musin reported what everyone needs to know and tell others. Pentagon war plans were ready months ago. Obama itches to attack Syria. Perhaps Houla or another planned incident will trigger it.
On Friday, Syria’s Human Rights Council representative, Faisal al-Hamwi, blamed Houla killings on terror gangs. They’re trying to incite sedition, he said.
“No sane person can believe some of this session’s sponsors when they show sorrow and pain for the victims at the time when they participate in killing the Syrians and shedding their blood,” he added.
On June 1, the Human Rights Council met to discuss Syria. Washington pressure assured its conclusions in advance.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, blamed Assad for killer gang crimes. She wrongly said the “Syrian military allegedly unleashed a barrage of heavy weapons on” Houla, “including artillery and tank fire….” She also blamed “pro-government Shabiha paramilitary groups….”
Doing so ignored clear evidence of responsibility. She wants government officials prosecuted at the International Criminal Court. Western and complicit regional states’ accountability wasn’t mentioned.
On June 2, the State Department claimed satellite images show Houla mass graves. Assad was named responsible. Alleged nearby artillery craters were also shown.
So-called images can be easily manipulated and/or fabricated. They can also be from other areas unrelated to Houla or Syria. State Department claims are spurious and unverified. So are scoundrel media reports about them.
On Friday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said preliminary government investigations showed a well-planned operation carried out by gunmen intent on violence, not a diplomatic solution to Syria’s conflict.
He blamed weapons and funding supplied foreign mercenaries.
Houla killings advanced the ball closer to war. Launching it could happen anytime, with or without Security Council authorization.
Doing so will ignite a regional firestorm. Imagine the potential catastrophic consequences. Future updates will cover more.
About the author
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book is titled How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War. purchase it here from Clarity Press.
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
Once again, the United States Supreme Court has proven Clarence Darrow, a civil liberties attorney and long-time advocate for the Constitution, correct in his assertion that “there is no such thing as justice – in or out of court.” In meting out this particular miscarriage of justice, the Supreme Court recently refused to hear the case of a pregnant woman who was repeatedly tasered by Seattle police during a routine traffic stop simply because she refused to sign a speeding ticket.
Malaika Brooks, 33 years old and seven months pregnant, was driving her 11-year-old son to school on a November morning in 2004, when she was pulled over for driving 32 mph in a 20 mph school zone. Instructing her son to walk the rest of the way to school, Malaika handed over her driver’s license to Officer Juan Ornelas for processing. However, when instructed to sign the speeding ticket – which the state inexplicably requires, Malaika declared that she wished to contest the charge, insisting that she had not done anything wrong and fearing that signing the ticket would signify an admission of guilt.
What happened next is a cautionary tale for anyone who still thinks that they can defy a police officer, even if it’s simply to disagree about a speeding ticket. Rather than issuing a verbal warning to the clearly pregnant (and understandably emotional) woman, Officer Ornelas called for backup. Officer Donald Jones subsequently arrived and told Brooks to sign the ticket. Again she refused. The conversation became heated. The cops called in more backup. The next to arrive was Sergeant Steven Daman, who directed Brooks to sign the ticket, pointing out that if she failed to do so, she would be arrested and taken to jail. Again, Malaika refused.
On orders from Sgt. Daman, Ornelas ordered a distraught Brooks to get out of the car, telling her she was “going to jail.” Malaika refused, and the second cop, Jones, responded by pulling out his taser electro-shock weapon, asking her if she knew what it was and warning her it would be used on her if she continued to resist. Brooks told him “No,” and then said, “I have to go to the bathroom, I am pregnant, I’m less than 60 days from having my baby.”
Jones and Ornelas then proceeded to discuss how best to taser the pregnant woman and forcibly remove her from the car. One officer said, “Well, don’t do it in her stomach; do it in her thigh.” Opening the car door, Ornelas twisted Malaika’s arm behind her back. Desperate, Brooks held on tightly to the steering wheel, while Jones cycled the taser as a demonstration of its capacity to cause pain.
With the taser in a “drive-stun” mode, Officer Jones then pressed the taser against Brooks’ thigh while Ornelas held her hand behind her back. Brooks, in obvious pain, began to cry and honk her car horn – hoping someone would help. Thirty-six seconds later, Ornelas pressed it into her left arm. Six seconds later, he again stunned her, this time on the neck. After being tasered numerous times, Brooks’ pregnant body eventually gave way. As Malaika fell over and out of the car, the officers dragged her onto the street, placing the pregnant woman face down on the pavement, handcuffing her and transporting her to jail.
While Malaika Brooks’ ordeal with the police did not seem to negatively impact her unborn child – she gave birth to a healthy baby girl two months after the altercation – Malaika bears permanent burn scars on her body where she was tasered by police. Thus, looking to the courts to hopefully right the wrong against her, Malaika sued the arresting officers, charging them with use of excessive force and violating her constitutional rights.
Unfortunately, this is where what happened to Malaika Brooks at the hands of the police – behavior that should be roundly condemned and prohibited – becomes yet another example of the cowardice of our justice system and the corrupt nature of life in a police state. Even though the Ninth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals recognized that Malaika posed no threat to anyone, nor did she pose a physical threat to the officers, that none of her offenses were serious, and that officers clearly used “excessive force” against her, the justices granted qualified immunity to the officers – a ruling that the U.S. Supreme Court ostensibly upheld when it refused to hear the case. In doing so, the courts have essentially given police carte blanche authority when it comes to using tasers against American citizens.
Indeed, this case highlights a growing trend in which police officers use tasers to force individuals into compliance in relatively non-threatening situations. Originally designed to restrain violent criminals, tasers are now used with impunity against individuals who pose no bodily harm to the police. Rowdy schoolchildren, the elderly, and mentally ill individuals are increasingly finding themselves on the receiving end of these sometimes lethal electroshock devices. Cops who have been shocked in the course of their training have described being tased as “the most profound pain,” and “like getting punched 100 times in a row.”
Police looking for absolute deference to their authority are quick to utilize tasers. For example, there have been a number of incidents where suspects of minor crimes and even completely innocent people were electroshocked into compliance by cops. In Florida, a 15-year-old girl was tased and pepper sprayed after being taken off of a bus following a disturbance. In Arizona, a run-away 9-year-old girl was tased as she sat in the back seat of a police car with her hands cuffed behind her back. In Oregon, police tased a blind and partially deaf 71-year-old multiple times in her own front yard. In another instance, a Florida woman, 12-weeks pregnant, was tased after refusing to submit to a strip search at a jail. She spontaneously miscarried seven days later. In Texas, a 72-year-old great-grandmother was tased after refusing to sign a speeding ticket.
While law enforcement advocates may suggest otherwise, these incongruous and excessive uses of force by the police are quickly becoming the rule, not the exception. A 2011 New York Civil Liberties Union report showed that of the eight police departments surveyed across the state, over 85 percent of taser uses occurred in cases where suspects were not armed. Incredibly, 40 percent of taser uses were aimed at the elderly, children, the mentally ill, or the severely intoxicated. And despite claims that tasers de-escalate tense situations, a Michigan State University study shows that suspects are more likely to be injured in incidences where police use stun guns (41% of the time), rather than when no stun gun is used (29% of the time).
Moreover, although tasers are touted as being non-lethal, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests otherwise. A study recently published by the American Heart Association has determined that taser shocks applied to the chest can lead to cardiac arrest. According to cardiologist Byron Lee, “This is no longer arguable. This is a scientific fact.”
Since 2001, over 500 people have died after being stunned with tasers. In a 2008 report, Amnesty International reviewed hundreds of deaths following taser use and found that 90 percent of those who died after being struck with a taser were unarmed. In late 2007, the United Nations Committee Against Torture declared that the use of tasers constituted a form of torture. Yet despite all of the evidence that tasers are dangerous, taser technology continues to rapidly advance. One of the most recent advances in taser technology is the X12 Taser shotgun, which fires taser rounds at a distance of up to 100 feet, adding nearly 80 feet in range compared to a regular handheld taser. It would not be a stretch to envision police using the X12 against protesters simply exercising their right to free speech and assembly under the First Amendment.
While it is tempting to paint all law enforcement officials as brutish thugs, I truly do not believe that is the case. I have known many honorable law enforcement officials who sincerely struggle with how best to balance the demands placed on them by higher ups in government with the need to treat those around them with respect and dignity.
As John Lennon once remarked, “The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn’t represent the people. It controls them.” Indeed, the varied expressions of the government’s growing power – the excessive use of tasers by police on non-threatening individuals, allowing drones to take to the skies domestically for purposes of surveillance, the government’s monitoring of our emails and phone calls, and on and on – which get more troubling by the day, are merely the outward manifestations of an inner, philosophical shift underway in how the government views not only the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but “we the people,” as well.
What this reflects is a move away from a government bound by the rule of law to one that seeks total control over the populace through the imposition of its own self-serving laws on the populace – laws carried out by a police force hired to do the government’s bidding.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book The Freedom Wars (TRI Press) is available online at http://www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org
If the government spies on you but brings no charges, you’ll never know.
A federal judge estimates that his fellow federal judges issue a total of 30,000 secret electronic surveillance orders each year – and the number is probably growing. Though such orders have judicial oversight, few emerge from any sort of adversarial proceeding and many are never unsealed at all. Those innocent of any crime are unlikely to know they have ever been the target of an electronic search.
In a new paper, called “Gagged, Sealed & Delivered” (PDF), US Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith bashes this culture of continuing secrecy. (Magistrate judges are important members of the federal judiciary; they handle many of the more routine judicial matters, such as warrant applications and initial case management.) In his work as a judge, Smith has become dismayed by the huge number of electronic surveillance orders he sees and by the secrecy that accompanies them.
When police execute a traditional search warrant, they generally bring with them a copy of that warrant and show it to the homeowner or target of the search. That’s not always the case, of course; sometimes warrants remain sealed while a case is in progress so as not to tip off a suspect.
But when surveillance enters the digital realm, secrecy becomes the norm. Digital “warrant-like” requests to access stored e-mail in an online account, or to wiretap an Internet connection, or to obtain “pen register” information, or to track a cell phone, are obtained from magistrate judges, many times in secret dockets that don’t even appear in the federal government’s official PACER document system. They come after one-sided (“ex parte”) proceedings in which only the government is heard. And they are generally sealed, only to be unsealed once a criminal case is filed. If no such charges are ever brought, the search warrants and the affidavits defending them can remain buried in the murkiest bits of the federal court system; even knowing that they exist can be a challenge. ISPs, which are often targets of such orders, may also be forbidden from disclosing them.
Most of this surveillance is governed by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 – a law so in need of reform that digital rights advocates and corporations alike have made it a key legislative priority. ECPA provides a host of tools to keep searches secret – so secret that they effectively avoid appellate review, making it difficult to know whether they are being properly issued.
Through a potent mix of indefinite sealing, nondisclosure (i.e., gagging), and delayed-notice provisions, ECPA surveillance orders all but vanish into a legal void. It is as if they were written in invisible ink – legible to the phone companies and Internet service providers who execute them, yet imperceptible to unsuspecting targets, the general public, and even other arms of government, most notably Congress and the appellate courts.
Judge Smith set out to find out how much ECPA surveillance exists in the US. Precise numbers were impossible to come by, even for one of the judges involved in issuing such orders, but Smith combined an earlier government survey with data from his own court’s docket to produce what sounds like a reasonable estimate.
His estimate finds that 50,000 sealed orders were likely generated by federal judges in 2006, the year the judge analyzes. With 60 percent of these presumed to be ECPA-related surveillance orders, Judge Smith finds that magistrate judges issued more than 30,000 secret electronic surveillance orders that year. To put that in context, “this volume of ECPA cases is greater than the combined yearly total of all antitrust, employment discrimination, environmental, copyright, patent, trademark, and securities cases filed in federal court,” he notes.
Smith isn’t calling for the abolition of surveillance or anything too terribly radical. He understands why notice of a warrant may be delayed – but he wants the system made far more accountable.
Perfect transparency in criminal investigations is neither practical nor desirable, but ECPA’s present system of gagging and sealing is surely overkill. If my diagnosis – that ECPA’s regime of secrecy has choked off the oxygen of appellate review necessary for a healthy regulatory scheme – is correct, then the cure is relatively straightforward: open up the information arteries. Greater transparency would enable meaningful oversight not only by appellate courts but also by Congress and the general public.
One simple way to do this would be to open sealed warrants automatically after some period of time. At the moment, most warrant orders are sealed indefinitely, only being unsealed if a prosecutor or investigator in the matter bothers to go back to the judge and bring up the issue. In Smith’s own “home court” in Houston, magistrate judges issued 3,886 sealed electronic surveillance orders between 1995 and 2007. In 2008, 99.8 percent of them still remained sealed.That’s especially bad news for those never charged with a crime, who will probably never learn that they were a target of government surveillance. And that number isn’t trivial. Smith estimates, based on some limited data released by the Department of Justice, that it’s “reasonable to infer that far more law-abiding citizens than criminals have been tracked in this fashion.”
The situation, says Smith, is bad for democracy and for a transparent judiciary. Fixing it will be up to Congress, which has to decide where to draw the line between personal privacy and the needs of law enforcement. In Smith’s view, any fix “will require the elimination of ECPA’s current gag, seal, and blindfold.”
The Pakistani police have arrested three US diplomats in the city of Peshawar for possession of illegal arms.Police officials told Dawn TV that the diplomats, along with three Pakistani nationals, were stopped at a routine checkpoint at the entrance to the Peshawar Motorway on Monday but they refused to allow the police to search their vehicles.
The police checked the “suspicious cars” anyway and discovered several assault rifles, pistols, and ammunition.
US Consul General Mary Richard visited the police station where the US nationals are being held for questioning and told the police they could keep the weapons but asked them to release the US diplomats.
In January 2011, Raymond Davis, a CIA agent operating under the cover of a diplomat, shot and killed two Pakistanis in Lahore, triggering a diplomatic crisis.
Pakistan charged him with murder, but Washington insisted that he was an “administrative and technical official” attached to its Lahore consulate and had diplomatic immunity.
Davis was finally allowed to leave Pakistan in March 2011 after a $2.4 million diyya (a form of monetary compensation or blood money) was paid to the victims’ families.
After the Davis incident, Islamabad ordered all CIA agents to leave the country, but according to local sources, there are still scores of CIA agents working in Pakistan.
A Long Island mortgage broker whose extensive cooperation with investigators helped break open one of the largest and longest-running insider trading frauds ever prosecuted was sentenced to just 2 years and 3 months in prison today, as the sentencing judge praised Kenneth Robinson for helping the FBI make damning secret recordings of his two co-conspirators.
Robinson, 45, of Long Beach, N.Y., got a sentence that was well below the roughly six to seven years recommended for him under federal sentencing guidelines. And his sentence came just a day after the same judge gave his two co-conspirators 12 years and nine years in prison, respectively.
The 12-year sentence handed down Monday to blue-chip corporate lawyer Matthew Kluger, a central figure in a 17-year insider-trading scheme that funneled $37 million in illicit profits to three white-collar professionals, is being hailed by U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman as the longest sentence ever imposed in an insider-trading case in the United States.
“It’s very clear to me that only one of the three defendants (charged in the case) is literally living in this world, living and breathing the air that we breathe,” said U.S. District Judge Katharine Hayden as she credited Robinson for both his cooperation with authorities and contriteness, while also distinguishing him from co-defendants who she said may still not grasp the impact and wrongness of their crimes.
“Of the three defendants, Mr. Robinson is the only person I can say that about,” Hayden added, referring again to her comment that he seemed to appreciate the full gravity of his crime. “The other two see the world in a very different way.”
Robinson, who wore a dark-blue suit and appeared somber-faced throughout the hearing in Newark, pleaded guilty in April 2011 – just days after the arrests and bust was announced by Fishman as the largest insider-trading case ever handled by New Jersey’s U.S. Attorney’s Office. The broad-shouldered, strapping mortgage broker admitted then to being the “middleman” between a big law-firm New York and Washington attorney, Kluger, and a longtime New York stock trader, Garrett Bauer.
For more than 17 years – starting back in 1994 – Robinson admitted, he’d gotten key insider information on Fortune 500 corporate merger and acquisition deals from Kluger – who had firsthand knowledge of the deals while working at prestigious firms like Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati PC – and then Robinson would pass on that information to Bauer. Bauer would then typically buy stock for the trio in companies involved in the deals before the deals happened, before later selling off the shares at hugely higher values.
“For the last year and three months, there hasn’t been an hour that’s gone by that I haven’t thought about the terrible mistakes I made,” Robinson told Judge Hayden just minutes before he was sentenced, his voice breaking with emotion at times, his eyes tearing up. “I’m truly ashamed for my actions.”
A husband and father, Robinson said that after FBI agents showed up at his Long Beach, N.Y. home with a search warrant in March 2011, he decided within hours to cooperate fully, which soon led to him making secret tapes of long phone calls with his co-conspirators, who often talked on the tapes about how to cover up their decades of insider trading — including how they’d gone to extremes such as throwing out iPhones and computers and suggesting that Robinson burn $175,000 in cash bills that may show fingerprints.
“I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to make those calls,” Robinson said of the telephone conversations he initiated and helped the FBI record. “These were my friends”
“I didn’t want to hurt them, but it was the right thing to do, I knew it,” he added, just moments after saying, “I knew I had to put my family first.”
Judge Hayden later said of Robinson’s words to the court, “They are heartfelt,” before adding, “One does generally have the sense that Mr. Robinson, of these three defendants, will return to the world and resume a place in it where he can hold his head up.” She also indicated that he should be rewarded for following through with his cooperation with investigators, who in turn had recommended to the judge that Robinson get a sentence below the guidelines range.
On Monday, Hayden made headlines when she sentenced Kluger to 12 years in prison, saying during his hearing, “People stay out of the stock market, in part, because they think it’s skewed toward the insiders.” She added, “The heart of the scheme was a lawyer earning hundreds of thousands of dollars at white-shoe firms, one after another.”
Kluger, after the hearing, was outspoken in calling the sentence he got “outrageous.” He also noted sarcastically that the sentence he received was actually one year more than the 11 years given to Raj Rajaratnam in New York last year in what has been called the largest insider trading fraud ever uncovered. “I guess it’s better to steal $68 million and be unwilling to accept what he did,” Kluger said, adding that he pleaded guilty to his crime last year and admitted wrongdoing, while Rajaratnam took his case to trial.
Bauer, who got nine years Monday, also pleaded guilty last year – though both his and Kluger’s plea came after they had been charged and knew of the FBI’s extensive recordings of their own words that were damning.
During his guilty plea in 2011, Robinson — who admitted to both conspiracy to commit securities fraud and two counts of securities fraud — also said he bought stock ahead of deals at least twice without using Bauer. One was the buying shares of 3Com before its 2009 acquisition by Hewlett-Packard, and another involved McAfee.
The three co-conspirators in the case admitted to trading on some 30 deals over the 17 years, including Bain Capital LLC’s 2007 acquisition of 3Com Corp. and Oracle Corp.’s 2009 buying of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
As the FBI closed in last year on Kluger and Bauer, the men seemed panicked in the recorded phone conversations. In one phone detailed in the government’s complaint, Bauer said,”I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep. I am waiting for the FBI to ride into my apartment. And I am on edge all night thinking that they’re coming in.”
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
Once again, the United States Supreme Court has proven Clarence Darrow, a civil liberties attorney and long-time advocate for the Constitution, correct in his assertion that “there is no such thing as justice – in or out of court.” In meting out this particular miscarriage of justice, the Supreme Court recently refused to hear the case of a pregnant woman who was repeatedly tasered by Seattle police during a routine traffic stop simply because she refused to sign a speeding ticket.
Malaika Brooks, 33 years old and seven months pregnant, was driving her 11-year-old son to school on a November morning in 2004, when she was pulled over for driving 32 mph in a 20 mph school zone. Instructing her son to walk the rest of the way to school, Malaika handed over her driver’s license to Officer Juan Ornelas for processing. However, when instructed to sign the speeding ticket – which the state inexplicably requires, Malaika declared that she wished to contest the charge, insisting that she had not done anything wrong and fearing that signing the ticket would signify an admission of guilt.
What happened next is a cautionary tale for anyone who still thinks that they can defy a police officer, even if it’s simply to disagree about a speeding ticket. Rather than issuing a verbal warning to the clearly pregnant (and understandably emotional) woman, Officer Ornelas called for backup. Officer Donald Jones subsequently arrived and told Brooks to sign the ticket. Again she refused. The conversation became heated. The cops called in more backup. The next to arrive was Sergeant Steven Daman, who directed Brooks to sign the ticket, pointing out that if she failed to do so, she would be arrested and taken to jail. Again, Malaika refused.
On orders from Sgt. Daman, Ornelas ordered a distraught Brooks to get out of the car, telling her she was “going to jail.” Malaika refused, and the second cop, Jones, responded by pulling out his taser electro-shock weapon, asking her if she knew what it was and warning her it would be used on her if she continued to resist. Brooks told him “No,” and then said, “I have to go to the bathroom, I am pregnant, I’m less than 60 days from having my baby.”
Jones and Ornelas then proceeded to discuss how best to taser the pregnant woman and forcibly remove her from the car. One officer said, “Well, don’t do it in her stomach; do it in her thigh.” Opening the car door, Ornelas twisted Malaika’s arm behind her back. Desperate, Brooks held on tightly to the steering wheel, while Jones cycled the taser as a demonstration of its capacity to cause pain.
With the taser in a “drive-stun” mode, Officer Jones then pressed the taser against Brooks’ thigh while Ornelas held her hand behind her back. Brooks, in obvious pain, began to cry and honk her car horn – hoping someone would help. Thirty-six seconds later, Ornelas pressed it into her left arm. Six seconds later, he again stunned her, this time on the neck. After being tasered numerous times, Brooks’ pregnant body eventually gave way. As Malaika fell over and out of the car, the officers dragged her onto the street, placing the pregnant woman face down on the pavement, handcuffing her and transporting her to jail.
While Malaika Brooks’ ordeal with the police did not seem to negatively impact her unborn child – she gave birth to a healthy baby girl two months after the altercation – Malaika bears permanent burn scars on her body where she was tasered by police. Thus, looking to the courts to hopefully right the wrong against her, Malaika sued the arresting officers, charging them with use of excessive force and violating her constitutional rights.
Unfortunately, this is where what happened to Malaika Brooks at the hands of the police – behavior that should be roundly condemned and prohibited – becomes yet another example of the cowardice of our justice system and the corrupt nature of life in a police state. Even though the Ninth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals recognized that Malaika posed no threat to anyone, nor did she pose a physical threat to the officers, that none of her offenses were serious, and that officers clearly used “excessive force” against her, the justices granted qualified immunity to the officers – a ruling that the U.S. Supreme Court ostensibly upheld when it refused to hear the case. In doing so, the courts have essentially given police carte blanche authority when it comes to using tasers against American citizens.
Indeed, this case highlights a growing trend in which police officers use tasers to force individuals into compliance in relatively non-threatening situations. Originally designed to restrain violent criminals, tasers are now used with impunity against individuals who pose no bodily harm to the police. Rowdy schoolchildren, the elderly, and mentally ill individuals are increasingly finding themselves on the receiving end of these sometimes lethal electroshock devices. Cops who have been shocked in the course of their training have described being tased as “the most profound pain,” and “like getting punched 100 times in a row.”
Police looking for absolute deference to their authority are quick to utilize tasers. For example, there have been a number of incidents where suspects of minor crimes and even completely innocent people were electroshocked into compliance by cops. In Florida, a 15-year-old girl was tased and pepper sprayed after being taken off of a bus following a disturbance. In Arizona, a run-away 9-year-old girl was tased as she sat in the back seat of a police car with her hands cuffed behind her back. In Oregon, police tased a blind and partially deaf 71-year-old multiple times in her own front yard. In another instance, a Florida woman, 12-weeks pregnant, was tased after refusing to submit to a strip search at a jail. She spontaneously miscarried seven days later. In Texas, a 72-year-old great-grandmother was tased after refusing to sign a speeding ticket.
While law enforcement advocates may suggest otherwise, these incongruous and excessive uses of force by the police are quickly becoming the rule, not the exception. A 2011 New York Civil Liberties Union report showed that of the eight police departments surveyed across the state, over 85 percent of taser uses occurred in cases where suspects were not armed. Incredibly, 40 percent of taser uses were aimed at the elderly, children, the mentally ill, or the severely intoxicated. And despite claims that tasers de-escalate tense situations, a Michigan State University study shows that suspects are more likely to be injured in incidences where police use stun guns (41% of the time), rather than when no stun gun is used (29% of the time).
Moreover, although tasers are touted as being non-lethal, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests otherwise. A study recently published by the American Heart Association has determined that taser shocks applied to the chest can lead to cardiac arrest. According to cardiologist Byron Lee, “This is no longer arguable. This is a scientific fact.”
Since 2001, over 500 people have died after being stunned with tasers. In a 2008 report, Amnesty International reviewed hundreds of deaths following taser use and found that 90 percent of those who died after being struck with a taser were unarmed. In late 2007, the United Nations Committee Against Torture declared that the use of tasers constituted a form of torture. Yet despite all of the evidence that tasers are dangerous, taser technology continues to rapidly advance. One of the most recent advances in taser technology is the X12 Taser shotgun, which fires taser rounds at a distance of up to 100 feet, adding nearly 80 feet in range compared to a regular handheld taser. It would not be a stretch to envision police using the X12 against protesters simply exercising their right to free speech and assembly under the First Amendment.
While it is tempting to paint all law enforcement officials as brutish thugs, I truly do not believe that is the case. I have known many honorable law enforcement officials who sincerely struggle with how best to balance the demands placed on them by higher ups in government with the need to treat those around them with respect and dignity.
As John Lennon once remarked, “The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn’t represent the people. It controls them.” Indeed, the varied expressions of the government’s growing power – the excessive use of tasers by police on non-threatening individuals, allowing drones to take to the skies domestically for purposes of surveillance, the government’s monitoring of our emails and phone calls, and on and on – which get more troubling by the day, are merely the outward manifestations of an inner, philosophical shift underway in how the government views not only the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but “we the people,” as well.
What this reflects is a move away from a government bound by the rule of law to one that seeks total control over the populace through the imposition of its own self-serving laws on the populace – laws carried out by a police force hired to do the government’s bidding.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book The Freedom Wars (TRI Press) is available online at http://www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org
A powerful earthquake has hit off the coast of south-eastern Taiwan, but no casualties or damage were reported on the island.
Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau said the quake struck on Wednesday at 9.08 a.m. (0108 GMT) and had a magnitude of 5.9. It put its epicentre about 52 kilometres southeast of the coastal city of Taitung.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the magnitude was 5.7. The quake was not felt in the capital of Taipei, about 400 kilometres north of the epicentre.
(Reuters) – The number of people killed in two earthquakes that struck northern Italy in May rose to 25 on Tuesday, as aftershocks continued to spread fear among residents in the area.
The latest victim was a woman admitted to hospital after being injured in the second of two deadly tremors to strike the area in just over a week, health authorities in Bologna said.
A man, also seriously injured by the second tremor, remains in hospital and his life is in danger, the authorities said.
A 6.0 magnitude earthquake on May 20 was followed by a similar-size quake nine days later, destroying businesses and making thousands homeless.
The quake was the most deadly to strike Italy since 2009 when a tremor partially destroyed the central city of L’Aquila killing about 300 people.
The epicenter of the latest quake lies to the north of the city of Modena in what is one of the most productive regions of Italy.
Damages have been estimated at around 5 billion euros but could be higher as tremors continue to shake buildings in the area, preventing any resumption of reconstruction work.
A LEADING seismologist has said yesterday’s earthquake off the west coast was “unexpected” and poses “very interesting questions for geologists”.
The earthquake, which registered a magnitude of four on the Richter scale, was recorded as 60km west of Belmullet, Co Mayo, at a depth of 3km, at 8.58am. It was the largest local seismic event ever recorded, according to Tom Blake of the Irish National Seismic Network (INSN) and the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies.
It was also the second-largest local earthquake on record in either Britain or Ireland, he said – the first being of 5.4 magnitude on July 19th, 1984, off the west coast of Wales and felt in Waterford and Wicklow.
A 2.7 magnitude tremor was recorded in Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare, in May 2010.
The Irish Coast Guard recorded instances of structural damage to houses in Erris, Co Mayo, yesterday and the British Geological Survey said the impact was felt in Galway, Mayo and Sligo.
The Geological Survey of Ireland said earthquakes of this magnitude at this depth were “not very unusual although not common”.
However, Mr Blake said that while the earthquake was classified as “moderate”, it was “significant” in that it challenged existing information about seismic activity off the west coast.
The location, just 23km south to southeast of the Corrib gas wells, prompted a call by Sinn Féin councillor for Mayo Rose Conway-Walsh for reassurance that this was not connected to seismic testing Shell EP Ireland was due to initiate on the Corrib gas field last Friday.
She also said many concerned residents wanted to know whether the existing Corrib gas infrastructure had been damaged.
North Mayo hostel owner Betty Schult said the earthquake had shaken the foundations of her 250-year-old stone cottage and she was concerned about the impact on the offshore pipeline for the Corrib gas project and the refinery, situated on bog.
Mr Blake said he had examined the seismic traces and they were “caused by earthquakes and nothing else”.
Shell EP Ireland said the seismic survey had not started and it had “no reason to believe that this event has had any impact on the sub-sea infrastructure”.
“However, as a precautionary measure, a visual inspection of the offshore infrastructure will be carried out in the coming days,” it said.
Phil O’Hara of Aclare, Co Sligo, reported a chunk of her chimney on the ground, while in Westport, Co Mayo, Lorella Errani said she was reading about the earthquake near her mother’s home in Ravenna, Italy, when she heard a “deep rumbling noise”.
The seismic activity was tracked in the Cliffs of Moher visitor centre in Co Clare and on the INSN network of permanent recorders.
The tremors had caused “no unusual wave activity”, said Irish Coast Guard officer Ray Malanaphy. The Coast Guard said it had confirmed this with two vessels working on the Corrib gas field.
Dr Brian McConnell of the Geological Survey said there could be some small aftershocks.
HAWAII VOLCANOES NATIONAL PARK, Hawaii: A large number of earthquakes has been rattling the Volcano area on Hawaii Island over the last few days. The quakes have been small, with no damage reported. Still, a handful of those temblors have been 3.0 magnitude and over.
The USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory’s “Recent Earthquakes in Hawaii” page shows a constant swarm of quakes surrounding the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, home of the active Kilauea Volcano. We took a screen grab of the screen of the USGS HVO earthquake page, and it shows the long list stretching all the way back to Friday, June 1st.
16 earthquakes have already registered on the list before noon on Tuesday, Hawaii time.
The GPS network recorded weak extension overall for the past few months with superimposed contraction and extension fluctuations corresponding to DI tilt events. Seismic tremor levels were generally low, decreasing from a peak around 11 am Sunday. A whopping thirty-three earthquakes were strong enough to be located beneath Kilauea volcano: 4 deep earthquakes below the southwest rift zone, 3 beneath the west edge of the summit area, 7 within and below the upper east rift, 1 north of the middle east rift zone, 7 on south flank faults, and 11 mostly shallow long-period (LP) earthquakes within the Koa`e Fault Zone beneath the Kulanaokuaiki Camp Ground; a quick check this morning showed no obvious new cracking on the surface near the campground.
The rise of the Kilauea summit lava lake level in Halemaumau crater continued with several overflows of the inner ledge. At Pu`u `O`o, scientists report lava also rose within the east collapse pit; to the southeast, lava flows continued to advance on the coastal plain.
At least 1,500 people needed medical attention for respiratory complications during the sandstorm that hit Kuwait Saturday and Sunday, according to statistics collected from hospitals and polyclinics around the state. Dr Shujaa Al-Enizy, director of the Rashid Center for Allergies, indicated that 414 patients stopped by on Sunday alone, compared to only 120 during the sandstorm on Thursday. All these patients suffer from chronic respiratory diseases who came for treatment for complications as a result of the bad weather, Al-Enizy added. Meanwhile, Al-Adan Hospital treated 445 children for respiratory problems on Saturday, according to head of the pediatric department Dr Marzouq Al-Azmi. Head of the emergency room at the same hospital Dr Ridha Janna indicated in the meantime that 34 men and 32 women received treatment the same day for the same reasons. In Jahra, head of the governorate’s health directorate Dr Abdul-Aziz Al-Farhoud noted that 275 people headed to medical facilities as of Sunday afternoon; 226 of whom to the Jahra Hospital. And in Farwaniya, deputy director of the Farwaniya Hospital indicated that 409 people were treated at his hospital including 90 children. The Amiri Hospital reportedly treated 90 people including 44 children for respiratory problems, while 64 people including 34 children were treated at the Mubarak Hospital
Firefighters are eyeing better weather conditions in their effort to control a 1,000-acre wildfire in the Medicine Bow National Forest in southeast Wyoming. Forest Service spokesman Aaron Voos says the forecast is for lighter winds and cooler temperatures on Wednesday and Thursday. The fire is burning about 20 miles northwest of Wheatland and about 5 miles southeast of Laramie Peak in an area mixed with ponderosa pine, brush and grass. Lightning is suspected to have started it on Sunday night and strong winds have caused it to spread rapidly. There is a church camp and other structures in the area but so far no structures are threatened. About 120 firefighters and a helicopter are on site, but fire managers are calling in four air tankers to aid the effort.
Conditions are improving after a rare snowstorm crippled travel in and around the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, leaving thousands without power. Various reports along with data accessed by Accuweather.com indicate that around 3-6 inches of wet snow fell Wednesday morning local time, causing numerous flight cancellations at Christchurch Airport. Additionally, TVNZ reports that about 3,000 people are still without power across suburbs of Christchurch. The strong storm system responsible for the rare event arrived Tuesday evening, bringing gusty winds and rain. Overnight, temperatures plummeted to the freezing point and rain changed over to wet snow. Snow is rare in Christchurch, according to Accuweather.com meteorologist Eric Wanenchak, with the city averaging “only 1-2 snow events per season.” While the snow cleared out by Wednesday afternoon as the storm system exited, near freezing temperatures will continue to create hazardous travel through the overnight hours as roads again become icy. Accuweather.com predicts a brief dry spell for Christchurch and the South Island of New Zealand for the next 24 hours, but an additional front could bring in more cold air along with additional snow showers Thursday night and Friday.
June 6, 2012 – JAPAN – 6/2/2012, contamination level of elementary and junior high school was measured in Koriyama Fukushima. The dosimeter calculates Bq/cm2. It is converted to Bq/m2 by multiplied by 10^4. It is the total of cesium 134 and 137. Koriyama is located approximately 34 miles (55 km) west of Fukushima Daiichi. –Fukushima Diary
With three more deaths reported on Tuesday, altogether 27 children have died so far in the last 11 days in Muzaffarpur and Gaya due to a mysterious disease. It is suspected that most of the children have succumbed to brain-fever, also called encephalitis, but the health department officials in Bihar have not confirmed the cause of the death yet.
“It is yet to be confirmed whether the deaths are due to encephalitis or any other ailment,” said Dr SP Singh, Director-in-chief, Health Services. Singh has sought a detailed report from the civil surgeons of the two districts.
Meanwhile, Health Commissioner Amarjit Sinha rushed to Muzaffarpur on Tuesday and took stock of the alarming situation. Altogether 19 children have died in the district due to ‘brain fever’. He assured the parents that those children admitted in Muzaffarpur hospitals would be shifted to Patna for best possible treatment.
Epidemiologists at the Trinidad-based Caribbean Epidemiology Centre (CAREC) have identified the mystery illness that has sickened scores of people, mainly tourists, and caused widespread concern and speculation at resorts in Providenciales. The Turks and Caicos Islands’ (TCI) Ministry of Health and Education (MOHE) and Environmental Health Department (EHD) said in a press statement that laboratory tests conducted at the CAREC Reference Laboratory have confirmed norovirus as the cause of the outbreak. Noroviruses, loosely referred to as “the hospital sickness” in some parts of the world, are transmitted directly from person to person and indirectly via contaminated water and food and are highly contagious. Outbreaks often occur in closed or semi-closed environments, including hospitals and cruise ships, where the infection spreads rapidly either by person-to-person transmission or through contaminated food.Many norovirus outbreaks have been traced to food that was handled by a single infected person. The infection usually requires little medical intervention other than supportive therapy and mostly resolves without incident. Investigations by public health authorities in the TCI are ongoing. The local team has recently been strengthened with the arrival of Dr Lisa Indar, food-borne diseases manager at CAREC, and Leslie Edwards, an epidemiologist also from CAREC. Additional assistance is being provided by the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) in the form of two environmental health officers with extensive experience working with the hotel industry. Infection control measures promoted throughout the TCI focus on proper hygiene, deep cleaning and sanitization, vital to prevent the spread of norovirus. Public health teams continue to conduct active surveillance at airports and affected hotels to educate and monitor the implementation of these measures. The Ministry of Health and Education (MOHE) and EHD have encouraged the public to practice healthy hygienic measures at all times, such as frequent hand washing, especially when preparing meals, before eating and after using the toilet. Anyone experiencing diarrhea, abdominal pain or vomiting has been advised to report to the nearest health care facility. Health surveillance team members continue to interview persons experiencing such signs and symptoms.
Meanwhile, the T CI Tourist Board has emphasised that TCI tourism remains open for business. Except for one or two properties on Providenciales, all airports, resorts, cruise port and auxiliary services across the country are providing the usual friendly and professional services that have become a trademark of Brand TCI. “We would like to encourage the travel public to be guided by official statements issued by local government and tourism officials on this subject,” the board said in a statement. “The entire country remains appreciative of your patronage and understanding during this period and we wish to reassure you that the Turks and Caicos Islands is a safe and warm destination to visit,” the statement concluded.
Biohazard name:
Norovirus Outbreak
Biohazard level:
1/4 Low
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses including Bacillus subtilis, canine hepatitis, Escherichia coli, varicella (chicken pox), as well as some cell cultures and non-infectious bacteria. At this level precautions against the biohazardous materials in question are minimal, most likely involving gloves and some sort of facial protection. Usually, contaminated materials are left in open (but separately indicated) waste receptacles. Decontamination procedures for this level are similar in most respects to modern precautions against everyday viruses (i.e.: washing one’s hands with anti-bacterial soap, washing all exposed surfaces of the lab with disinfectants, etc). In a lab environment, all materials used for cell and/or bacteria cultures are decontaminated via autoclave.
NAIVASHA 2012-05-28 | Kenya will be facing an acute food shortage in the coming months due to the mysterious maize disease which has affected 50 percent of the crop countrywide. Already Transnzoia and Uasin Ngishu Counties which produce 80 percent of the maize consumed in the country have lost over 50 percent of the produce to the disease. This came as the parliamentary committee on agriculture and Mps drawn from South Rift demanded compensation from the government over the losses. The Mps attributed the problem to the importation of contaminated grains by unscrupulous traders eager to make high profits. According to the legislators, the country stood to loose billions of shillings in the scam as more maize needed to be imported to address the deficit caused by the disease. According to Konoin Mp Julius Kones he had confidential information from KEPHIS which indicated that the disease was seed borne and not soil borne as the government was advocating. “Government agencies have tried to sway the debate towards a problem with soil which is an attempt to cover the real culprits for out problems,” He said that area leaders were ready to lead the farmers in major demonstrations if the matter was not addressed. “We want the government to compensate the affected farmers and supply them with fresh certified seeds with immediate effect,” His sentiments were echoed by Keiyo North Mp Lucas Chepkitony who termed the disease as serious and a threat to thousand of livelihoods. The Mp who is also the Vice in the parliamentary committee on agriculture accused the Ministry of agriculture for the current problem. He wondered how the contaminated maize ended up in the country yet there were government institutions mandated with inspecting imported grains. “Farmers have undergone losses running to millions of shillings yet the concerned ministry is sleeping on the job and taking us in circles,” he said. The Mps were addressing the press during the ongoing workshop on the process of budget making at Simba Lodge Naivasha. The chairman parliamentary committee on agriculture John Mututho termed the impasse as a major scam which could cost the country billions of shillings. He said that the committee had information as to who imported the contaminated grains adding that this would be presented in parliament. “Maize in Transnzoia and Uasin Ngishu Counties have been affected and this could see the price of 2kg packet of maize flour shoot to Sh300,”
Big Brother refuses to allow citizens to rescue harvest
By Jack Minor
GREELEY, Colo. – Farmers in Colorado are watching their fields dry up amid one of the worst droughts in the state’s history.
But just a few feet beneath them, the water is so plentiful it’s flooding basements and causing septic systems to overflow.
Yet the government will not permit farmers to pump the water to save their crops.
With a lower-than-normal snowpack, farmers in northeastern Colorado who rely on the South Platte River are facing severe water shortages in which they are not able to even water some of their crops.
Dennis Hoshiko, a fourth-generation onion farmer with 2,500 acres, said he has let around 15 percent of his land sit fallow this season because of a lack of water.
“We have entire sections where the seeds were planted a month ago in dry earth, and they have not sprouted yet because they have not been watered.”
While it may seem to be a case of battling Mother Nature, the problem could be solved if government officials would simply flip a switch.
Many of the farmers have wells that draw groundwater for use in situations like this. But in 2006, the Colorado Supreme Court ordered 440 wells shut down and curtailed the pumping of another 1,000.
Under long-established Colorado water doctrine, water is distributed under the principle of first in use, first in right whereby prior users have senior rights to junior users. The decision to shut down the wells came about during a historic drought in the early 2000s that caused water in the South Platte River to become scarce.
Senior right holders such as the cities of Boulder, Centennial, Highlands Ranch and Sterling, which had experienced phenomenal growth in the 1990s, became concerned their water supply in the river basin was being depleted by junior water-right well owners who were pumping water from the Alluvium Aquifer, which flows into the South Platte River Basin.
Following the shutdowns, the volume of water discharged into the artificial recharge systems in the South Platte Basin has increased, reaching more than 350,000 acre-feet in 2009. The increase in ground water has now come to the point where local basements are being flooded, causing damage to the homes.
Doug Leafgren, president of Northern Colorado Geotech, which conducts soil and percolation testing, said his organization has noticed higher groundwater levels during their subsurface investigations in the county over the past four or five years.
Glen Fritzler, a farmer who operates the nationally known Fritzler Corn Maze that has been featured on the “Today” show, said he has spent more than $50,000 in home repairs because of flooding over the past few years.
While the flooding is a concern, Fritzler said the rising groundwater levels are causing area septic systems to fail, forcing human waste to rise to the surface.
Leafgren said septic systems require four feet of soil above a “limiting zone” to work effectively.
“If an older system previously maintained four feet of suitable soil, but groundwater has since decreased this zone, there is potential for contamination of the groundwater system with human waste,” he said. “It could also be possible that higher groundwater would cause the waste to come to the ground surface.”
Despite the rising ground-water levels, officials still refuse to let the farmers turn on their wells, and that means many farmers will be out of water in the next few weeks.
“If we are not allowed to turn our wells on, our crops will dry up and we will lose everything,” Fritzler said. “What is so maddening is that we have the water we need right under our feet, and it is so plentiful it is flooding our basements. We cannot use it.”
Recognizing the severity of the situation, the state legislature recently passed a bill commissioning a study, but it is not required to be completed until June 1, 2013. There is no provision in the legislation requiring officials to permit farmers to turn the wells on before then.
State Sen. Scott Renfroe, one of the bill’s sponsors, said the legislation originally had those provisions, but it was stripped from the final legislation.
“It was not stripped by Democrats, because in Colorado water knows no party lines,” he said. “The opposition came from those who have senior water rights which are generally the big cities such as Denver and Boulder.”
Renfroe said he agrees the wells need to be turned on now. However, he said the study is at least a step in the right direction.
“We have farmers who are hurting from both a lack of water and rising water table,” he said. “Some have said the salt content is so high their soil only has two years of productive use left.”
Renfroe added: “This study should have been done five years ago when the wells were first turned off. I know it’s a baby step, but it’s a huge accomplishment when you consider the environment at the capital. There are many people who want to maintain the status quo. I understand the concerns of senior water holders, and this legislation has a lot of protections for them, but we need to find a way to benefit everybody.”
Fritzler said while he is glad the study will be conducted, he and other farmers cannot wait until next year.
“I have enough irrigation water from the South Platte for perhaps two to three more weeks. The only way we could go beyond that would be for Denver to get significant rainfall every three to five days and that isn’t going to happen.”
Hoshiko said he is in better shape than many farmers, because he has been able to purchase senior water rights but noted that many farmers are not as fortunate.
“Last night I saw a 14-year-old boy shoveling ditches and getting ready to do flood irrigation after the sun went down, and right beside him is a well that is capable of producing 1,200 gallons a minute, but they can’t touch it,” Hoshiko said. “The crops are sitting in dry dirt because we are in one of the worst droughts in Colorado history and we can’t use the water that is right under our feet.”
He said what is frustrating is that droughts like the current one are precisely the reason the wells were drilled.
“Our predecessors built these wells years ago to get us through droughts like this. If they were alive today they would slap us silly for how we are wasting this resource.”
Earth is rapidly headed toward a catastrophic breakdown if humans don’t get their act together, according to an international group of scientists.
Writing Wednesday (June 6) in the journal Nature, the researchers warn that the world is headed toward a tipping point marked by extinctions and unpredictable changes on a scale not seen since the glaciers retreated 12,000 years ago.
“There is a very high possibility that by the end of the century, the Earth is going to be a very different place,” study researcher Anthony Barnosky told LiveScience. Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology from the University of California, Berkeley, joined a group of 17 other scientists to warn that this new planet might not be a pleasant place to live.
“You can envision these state changes as a fast period of adjustment where we get pushed through the eye of the needle,” Barnosky said. “As we’re going through the eye of the needle, that’s when we see political strife, economic strife, war and famine.” [ Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth ]
The danger of tipping Barnosky and his colleagues reviewed research on climate change, ecology and Earth’s tipping points that break the camel’s back, so to speak. At certain thresholds, putting more pressure on the environment leads to a point of no return, Barnosky said. Suddenly, the planet responds in unpredictable ways, triggering major global transitions.
The most recent example of one of these transitions is the end of the last glacial period. Within not much more than 3,000 years, the Earth went from being 30 percent covered in ice to its present, nearly ice-free condition. Most extinctions and ecological changes (goodbye, woolly mammoths) occurred in just 1,600 years. Earth’s biodiversity still has not recovered to what it was.
Today, Barnosky said, humans are causing changes even faster than the natural ones that pushed back the glaciers — and the changes are bigger. Driven by a 35 percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the start of the Industrial Revolution, global temperatures are rising faster than they did back then, Barnosky said.
Likewise, humans have completely transformed 43 percent of Earth’s land surface for cities and agriculture, compared with the 30 percent land surface transition that occurred at the end of the last glacial period. Meanwhile, the human population has exploded, putting ever more pressure on existing resources. [ 7 Billion Population Milestones ]
“Every change we look at that we have accomplished in the past couple of centuries is actually more than what preceded one of these major state changes in the past,” Barnosky said.
Backing away from the ledge The results are difficult to predict, because tipping points, by their definition, take the planet into uncharted territory. Based on past transitions, Barnosky and his colleagues predict a major loss of species (during the end of the last glacial period, half of the large-bodied mammal species in the world disappeared), as well as changes in the makeup of species in various communities on the local level. Meanwhile, humans may well be knotting our own noose as we burn through Earth’s resources.
“These ecological systems actually give us our life support, our crops, our fisheries, clean water,” Barnosky said. As resources shift from one nation to another, political instability can easily follow.
Pulling back from the ledge will require international cooperation, Barnosky said. Under business-as-usual conditions, humankind will be using 50 percent of the land surface on the planet by 2025. It seems unavoidable that the human population will reach 9 billion by 2050, so we’ll have to become more efficient to sustain ourselves, he said. That means more efficient energy use and energy production, a greater focus on renewable resources, and a need to save species and habitat today for future generations.
“My bottom line is that I want the world in 50 to 100 years to be at least as good as it is now for my children and their children, and I think most people would say the same,” Barnosky said. “We’re at a crossroads where if we choose to do nothing we really do face these tipping points and a less-good future for our immediate descendents.”
Among them is the hottest place on Earth. But where exactly is it?
To answer that question is not as easy as it might seem.
This question is in fact still widely debated because, how the temperature is measured plays an important role when scientists attempt to decide what place is hotter than the other.
Many people think the hottest place on Earth is Al Azizyah, Libya, with a recorded temperature of 136 degrees Fahrenheit (57.8 Celsius).
In Death Valley, California, USA, temperature 134 Fahrenheit in 1913, which makes it another very hot spot on this planet.
But there are also other places where the temperature can be extreme.
We can take for example Lut, a huge desert located in the eastern region of Iran. It is an amazing, but extremely inhospitable place where few, if any organisms can survive. On one occasion, NASA’s satellite Aqua recorded surface temperatures as high as 71 °C (159 °F)!
Lut Desert as seen from space by the International Space Station. Image credit: NASA
In 2004, ecologist Steve Running visited the Flaming Mountain, a ridge of dark red sandstone on the edge of the Taklimakan Desert and the Tian Shan range.The surface of the mountain is said to reach temperatures of 50 to 80°C (122 to 175°F) in the summer, and a nearby tourist center marks the spot with a huge golden thermometer. It is the hottest place in China, if not the world, or so says the local lore.And that got Running thinking: exactly where is the hottest place on Earth? With some colleagues at the University of Montana, he did some research and found that the location of the world’s hottest spot changes, though the conditions don’t. Think dry, rocky, and dark-colored lands.
In July 1913, observers in Furnace Creek, California-Death Valley-watched the thermometer reach 56.7°C (134°F) and declared it to be the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth. But just nine years later, on September 13, 1922, a weather station in El Azizia, Libya, recorded a temperature of 58.0°C (136.4°F).
Measurements of MODIS (Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) installed on NASA’s satellite “Aqua” from 2003 – 2005 testify that the hottest land surface on Earth is located the Lut desert, where land surface temperatures reach here 70.7 degrees C (159-160 degrees F).
“Yet most of the places that call themselves the hottest on Earth are not even serious contenders,” says Running. The reason is partly about where the measurements are made. But it is also a tale about how temperature is measured.
“The World Meteorological Organization has approximately 11,119 weather stations on Earth’s land surface collecting surface temperature observations,” notes David Mildrexler, also from the University of Montana. “When compared to the 144.68 million square kilometers of land surface, that’s one station every 13,012 square kilometers.”
“The Earth’s hot deserts-such as the Sahara, the Gobi, the Sonoran, and the Lut-are climatically harsh and so remote that access for routine measurements and maintenance of a weather station is impractical,” he adds. “The majority of Earth’s hottest spots are simply not being directly measured by ground-based instruments.”
That’s where satellites come in and that is what we have to keep in mind when considering the hottest place on Earth.
For the time being, the Lut desert with its incredible 71 °C (159 °F) remains Earth’s hottest spot.
Underground Neutrino Experiment May Solve
One Of The Universe’s Biggest PuzzlesMessageToEagle.com – In the biggest result of its kind in more than ten years, physicists have made the most sensitive measurements yet in a decades-long hunt for a hypothetical and rare process involving the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei.
If discovered, the researchers say, this process could have profound implications for how scientists understand the fundamental laws of physics and help solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries—including why there is more matter than antimatter and, therefore, why regular matter like planets, stars, and humans exists at all.
The experiment, the Enriched Xenon Observatory 200 (EXO-200), is an international collaboration that includes the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and is led by Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratory.
The EXO-200 experiment has placed the most stringent constraints yet on the nature of a so-called neutrinoless double beta decay.
In doing so, physicists have narrowed down the range of possible masses for the neutrino, a tiny uncharged particle that rarely interacts with anything, passing right through rock, people, and entire planets as it zips along at nearly the speed of light.
The collaboration, consisting of 80 researchers, has submitted a paper describing the results to the journal Physical Review Letters.
In a normal double beta decay, which was first observed in 1986, two neutrons in an unstable atomic nucleus turn into two protons; two electrons and two antineutrinos—the antimatter counterparts of neutrinos—are emitted in the process.But physicists have suggested that two neutrons could also decay into two protons by emitting two electrons without producing any antineutrinos.”People have been looking for this process for a very long time,” says Petr Vogel, senior research associate in physics, emeritus, at Caltech and a member of the EXO-200 team. “It would be a very fundamental discovery if someone actually observes it.”
A neutrino is inevitably produced in a single beta decay. Therefore, the two neutrinos that are produced in a neutrinoless double beta decay must somehow cancel each other out.
This large copper cylindrical vessel is the Enriched Xenon Observatory 200′s (EXO-200) time projection chamber, the part of the detector that contains the liquid xenon, isotopically enriched in xenon-136. The photo shows the chamber being inserted into the cryostat, which keeps the experiment at extremely low temperatures. (Credit: EXO)
For that to happen, physicists say, a neutrino must be its own antiparticle, allowing one of the two neutrinos to act as an antineutrino and annihilate the other neutrino. That a neutrino can be its own antiparticle is not predicted by the Standard Model—the remarkably successful theory that describes how all elementary particles behave and interact.
If this neutrinoless process does indeed exist, physicists would be forced to revise the Standard Model.
The process also has implications for cosmology and the origin of matter, Vogel says. Right after the Big Bang, the universe had the same amount of matter as antimatter. Somehow, however, that balance was tipped, producing a slight surplus in matter that eventually led to the existence of all of the matter in the universe. The fact that the neutrino can be its own antiparticle might have played a key role in tipping that balance.
In the EXO-200 experiment, physicists monitor a copper cylinder filled with 200 kilograms of liquid xenon-136, an unstable isotope that, theoretically, can undergo neutrinoless double beta decay. Very sensitive detectors line the wall at both ends of the cylinder. To shield it from cosmic rays and other background radiation that may contaminate the signal of such a decay, the apparatus is buried deep underground in the DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico, where low-level radioactive waste is stored. The physicists then wait to see a signal.
The process, however, is very rare. In a normal double beta decay, half of a given sample would decay after 1021 years—a half-life roughly 100 billion times longer than the time that has elapsed since the Big Bang.
One of the goals of the experiment is to measure the half-life of the neutrinoless process (if it is discovered). In these first results, no signal for a neutrinoless double beta decay was detected in almost seven months’ of data—and that non-detection allowed the researchers to rule out possible values for the half-life of the neutrinoless process. Indeed, seven months of finding nothing means that the half-life cannot be shorter than 1.6 × 1025 years, or a quadrillion times older than the age of the universe. With the value of the half-life pinned down, physicists can calculate the mass of a neutrino—another longstanding mystery. The new data suggest that a neutrino cannot be more massive than about 0.140 to 0.380 electron volts (eV, a unit of mass commonly used in particle physics); an electron, by contrast, is about 500,000 eV, or about 9 × 10-31 kilograms.
More than ten years ago, the collaboration behind the Heidelberg-Moscow Double Beta Decay Experiment controversially claimed to have discovered neutrinoless double beta decay using germanium-76 isotopes. But now, the EXO-200 researchers say, their new data makes it highly unlikely that those earlier results were valid.
The EXO-200 experiment, which started taking data last year, will continue its quest for the next several years.
MessageToEagle.com via California Institute of Technology
Region 1494 (S18W06)
produced an M2/1b at 06/2006Z associated with Type II (est. speed
1148 km/s) and Type IV radio sweeps. An associated CME was first
visible in SOHO LASCO C2 imagery at 06/2036Z. Further analysis will
be conducted as more images become available to determine
geoeffectiveness. A filament eruption was observed in SDO AIA 193
imagery around 05/1945Z near N12W10. The CME was first visible in
STEREO COR 2 imagery at 05/2039Z. The majority of the ejecta appears
to be north of the ecliptic plane, however, there is a weak
Earth-directed component. A model run is in progress to determine
geoeffectiveness. The Penticton 10 cm Flux value was estimated due
to flare enhancement.
Was this peculiar event a result of extraordinary auroras or gigantic solar flares?
Why are there no ancient astronomical records describing such an unusual event?
Scientists detected the mysterious radiation burst when looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings that formed during the AD 775 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere.
The increase in 14C levels is so clear that the scientists, led by Fusa Miyake, a cosmic-ray physicist from Nagoya University in Japan, conclude that the atmospheric level of 14C must have jumped by 1.2% over the course of no longer than a year, about 20 times more than the normal rate of variation.
“The work looks pretty solid,” says Daniel Baker, a space physicist at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, Colorado. “Some very energetic event occurred in about AD 775.”Cosmic rays normally account for the steady production of carbon-14 in our atmosphere.Carbon-14 is mildly radioactive. Sooner or later, the carbon-14 atoms in a dead plant or animal decay away and by measuring the amount of remaining 14C it’s possible to estimate the age of plant and animal up to about 60,000 years old
The big mystery scientists are now trying to solve is to determine where those gamma rays originated.
To our best knowledge, only floods of ?-rays from supernova explosions or proton storms from giant solar flares can produce a 14C spike. But neither seems likely, Miyake says, because each should have been large enough to have had other effects that would have been observed at the time.
Is a massive supernova responsible for the mysterious ancient radiation burst? Image credit: NASAA massive supernova, for example, should have been bright enough to produce a ‘new’ star visible even in the daytime, as was the case for two known supernovae in AD 1006 and AD 1054. Such an explosion would have needed to be brighter than either of these, Miyake says, because those events were not large enough to leave traces in the 14C record.
One possibility is that ancient astronomers did not record the event because it occurred in the far southern skies, which was the reason why they couldn’t see it. However, if it did happen, today’s X-ray and radio astronomers should have found signs of a “tremendously bright” remnant of the explosion, Miyake point out.
As for solar flares, he says, anything that could have produced the required amount of super-high-energy protons would have vastly exceeded the most intense solar outburst ever recorded. In addition, such a gigantic flare would probably have destroyed the ozone layer, with devastating ecological consequences.
An extraordinary aurora should have been documented by ancient astronomers. Image credit: Daniel HershmanDaniel Baker believes it is too early to dismiss solar flares as these are sometimes associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) – huge eruptions of magnetically charged plasma from the Sun’s atmosphere that send streams of charged particles towards Earth.
It might be possible, he says, for CMEs to be accompanied by conditions in which an unusual number of protons are accelerated to super-high energies, even without the flare itself being “ridiculously strong”.
Cosmic rays hitting Earth. Credit: NSF/J. Yang“We know much more these days about how important proton acceleration is at the shock fronts that precede CME structures as they propagate towards Earth,” Baker says. “I would like to think about whether a strong CME moving directly towards Earth could have produced the intense proton population that impacted Earth’s atmosphere.”
“It would be fascinating,” Baker adds, “if there were some record in China or in the Middle East that reported powerful aurora or some other such event” around the same time as the observed 14C increase.
Was a massive supernova, or giant solar flare responsible for the radiation burst that took place over 1200 years ago? We do not know. Perhaps it was caused by something scientists have not yet considered, or maybe we speculating about an event that took place on Earth rather than in space…
Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun’s atmosphere, magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth’s atmospheric chemistry and climate. SDO provides images with resolution 8 times better than high-definition television and returns more than a terabyte of data each day.
On June 5 2012, SDO collected images of the rarest predictable solar event–the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. This event happens in pairs eight years apart that are separated from each other by 105 or 121 years. The last transit was in 2004 and the next will not happen until 2117.
The videos and images displayed here are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum. The red colored sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171 angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is filtered visible light. 304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun, which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum.
Something terribly fishy is going on at the fishing port of Ohara (pronounced Oh-hara) in Isumi City of Chiba Prefecture, and it has nothing to do with espionage or political corruption. There are tons and tons of dead sardines washing up on the shore, and not only is the sight disturbing, but the huge amount of dead fish is literally smelling up the entire surrounding area. According to the news, the dead fish started washing up around noon of June 3rd, and as of early afternoon on June 4th, the situation still remained pretty much out of control. The amount of dead sardines that has washed up is thought to total several dozen metrics tons, so you can imagine how bad the smell of rotting fish must be. We’ve seen the pictures uploaded onto Twitter, and the port looks completely filled with fish – it almost looks like a carpet of sardines. It doesn’t seem likely that any fishing boats will be setting sail from this port soon. There are also, of course, the usual posts and comments on the internet on how this could be an omen, a sign of a coming great natural disaster. When we inquired with a local inn, we were told that the port was scheduled to be closed from June 1st to 5th, but given the emergency, local fishermen are currently out in full force trying to resolve the situation. Already more than 2 full days into the bizarre occurrence, the smell has to be almost unbearable, but the people of Ohara still have no idea when they will be able to get rid of all the sardines. We sincerely hope they will be able to solve the problem quickly.
Biohazard name:
Mass Die-off (Fish)
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
China’s northwestern Gansu province has reported an outbreak of the highly epidemic H5N1 bird flu virus in poultry, the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) announced Wednesday. More than 6,200 chickens at a farm in a village in Luyang, a town in Jingtai county, showed symptoms of suspected avian flu Friday, and 260 of them have died, according to the MOA. The National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory on Tuesday confirmed the epidemic was H5N1 bird flu after testing samples collected at the farm, the MOA said. Local authorities have sealed off and sterilized the infected area, where a total of 18,460 chickens have been culled and safely disposed of in order to prevent the disease from spreading since the case was confirmed, according to the MOA. A team was dispatched by the ministry to the quarantined area to guide epidemic prevention and monitoring. Bird flu, or avian influenza, is a contagious disease of animal origin caused by viruses that normally infect only birds and, less commonly, pigs. It can be fatal to humans.
Biohazard name:
H5N1 – Highly pathogenic avian influenza virus
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
A massive, 66-foot concrete dock mysteriously washed up on the Oregon shore this week. And officials are trying to figure out if the floating structure had traveled all the way from Japan after the March 2011 tsunami.
Local affiliate KATU reports that the dock has a placard with Japanese writing that they are attempting to translate. In addition, the station traced a phone number on the placard to a business located in Tokyo.
The Oregon Parks and Recreation Department sent a picture of the placard to the Japanese consulate in Portland for review.
“We don’t know where it’s from,” said Chris Havel with the parks department. “We don’t know if it’s from Japan or not but we have to eliminate those possibilities as we go forward.”
Even if the dock did travel thousands of miles to reach the shores of Oregon, it did not defy physics to get arrive there. While the structure is nearly 70 feet long, 7 feet tall and 19 feet wide and made of concrete and metal, it was also reportedly designed to float.
The dock was first spotted floating offshore but has now made its way to land. Kirk Tite was walking along the beach on Tuesday with his two sons and described the dock as a “massive hunk of concrete and metal covered in sea creatures.” They also found a Japanese symbol and imprint on tires attached to the dock, although those could simply indicate that the tires themselves were made in Japan.
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While most coastal cities breathe ocean breezes mixed with traffic exhaust, people in north and central Richmond are exposed to a greater array of contaminants, many of them at higher concentrations. Included are 
Maize1
MessageToEagle.com – There are many extreme places on our wonderful Earth.
MessageToEagle.com – In the biggest result of its kind in more than ten years, physicists have made the most sensitive measurements yet in a decades-long hunt for a hypothetical and rare process involving the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei.
MessageToEagle.com – It remains a cosmic mystery. Some time between AD 774 and AD 775, our planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown origin.
Is a massive supernova responsible for the mysterious ancient radiation burst? Image credit: NASAA massive supernova, for example, should have been bright enough to produce a ‘new’ star visible even in the daytime, as was the case for two known supernovae in AD 1006 and AD 1054. Such an explosion would have needed to be brighter than either of these, Miyake says, because those events were not large enough to leave traces in the 14C record.
An extraordinary aurora should have been documented by ancient astronomers. Image credit: Daniel HershmanDaniel Baker believes it is too early to dismiss solar flares as these are sometimes associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) – huge eruptions of magnetically charged plasma from the Sun’s atmosphere that send streams of charged particles towards Earth.
