I gave a talk last week at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University to the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Many in the audience had pinned small red squares of felt to their clothing. The carre rouge, or red square, has become the Canadian symbol of revolt. It comes from the French phrase carrement dans le rouge, or “squarely in the red,” referring to those crushed by debt.
The streets of Montreal are clogged nightly with as many as 100,000 protesters banging pots and pans and demanding that the old systems of power be replaced. The mass student strike in Quebec, the longest and largest student protest in Canadian history, began over the announcement of tuition hikes and has metamorphosed into what must swiftly build in the United States – a broad popular uprising. The debt obligation of Canadian university students, even with Quebec’s proposed 82 percent tuition hike over several years, is dwarfed by the huge university fees and the $1 trillion of debt faced by U.S. college students. The Canadian students have gathered widespread support because they linked their tuition protests to Quebec’s call for higher fees for health care, the firing of public sector employees, the closure of factories, the corporate exploitation of natural resources, new restrictions on union organizing, and an announced increase in the retirement age. Crowds in Montreal, now counting 110 days of protests, chant “On ne lâche pas” – “We’re not backing down.”
The Quebec government, which like the United States’ security and surveillance state is deaf to the pleas for justice and fearful of widespread unrest, has reacted by trying to stamp out the rebellion. It has arrested hundreds of protesters. The government passed Law 78, which makes demonstrations inside or near a college or university campus illegal and outlaws spontaneous demonstrations in the province. It forces those who protest to seek permission from the police and imposes fines of up to $125,000 for organizations that defy the new regulations. This, as with the international Occupy movement, has become a test of wills between a disaffected citizenry and the corporate state. The fight in Quebec is our fight. Their enemy is our enemy. And their victory is our victory.
This sustained resistance is far more effective than a May Day strike. If Canadians can continue to boycott university classrooms, continue to get crowds into the streets and continue to keep the mainstream behind the movement, the government will become weak and isolated. It is worth attempting in the United States. College graduates in Canada, the U.S., Spain, Greece, Ireland and Egypt, among other countries, cannot find jobs commensurate with their education. They are crippled by debt. Solidarity means joining forces with all those who are fighting to destroy global, corporate capitalism. It is the same struggle. A blow outside our borders weakens the corporate foe at home. And a boycott of our own would empower the boycott across the border.
The din of citizens beating pots and pans reverberates nightly in cities in Quebec. The protesters are part of what has been nicknamed the army of the cacerolazo, or the casseroles. I heard the same clanging of pots and pans when I covered the protests against Manuel Noriega in Panama and the street protests against Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Quebec Premier Jean Charest, who despite Law 78 has been unable to thwart the street demonstrations, is the latest victim. I hope the next is Barack Obama or Mitt Romney; they, and Charest, are puppets manipulated by corporate power.
The importance of the Occupy movement, and the reason I suspect its encampments were so brutally dismantled by the Obama administration, is that the corporate state understood and feared its potential to spark a popular rebellion. I do not think the state has won. All the injustices and grievances that drove people into the Occupy encampments and onto the streets have been ignored by the state and are getting worse. And we will see eruptions of discontent in the weeks and months ahead.
If these mass protests fail, opposition will inevitably take a frightening turn. The longer we endure political paralysis, the longer the formal mechanisms of power fail to respond, the more the extremists on the left and the right – those who venerate violence and are intolerant of ideological deviations – will be empowered. Under the steady breakdown of globalization, the political environment has become a mound of tinder waiting for a light.
The Golden Dawn party in Greece uses the Nazi salute, has as its symbol a variation of the Nazi swastika and has proposed setting up internment camps for foreigners who refuse to leave the country. It took 21 seats, or 7 percent of the vote, in the May parliamentary elections. France’s far-right National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, pulled 18 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election. The right-wing Freedom Party in the Netherlands is the third largest in the parliament and brought down the minority government. The Freedom Party in Austria is now the second most popular in the country and holds 34 seats in the 183-seat lower house of the parliament. The Progress Party in Norway is the largest element of the opposition. The Danish People’s Party is Denmark’s third largest. And the Hungarian fascist party Jobbik, or the Movement for a Better Hungary, captured 17 percent of the vote in the last election. Jobbik is allied with uniformed thugs known as the Hungarian Guard, which has set up patrols in the impoverished countryside to “protect” Hungarians from Gypsies. And that intolerance is almost matched by Israel’s ruling Kadima party, which spews ethnic chauvinism and racism toward Arabs and has mounted a campaign against dissenters within the Jewish state.
The left in times of turmoil always coughs up its own version of the goons on the far right. Black Bloc anarchists within the Occupy movement in the United States, although they remain marginal, replicate the hyper-masculinity, lust for violence and quest for ideological purity of the right while using the language of the left. And they, or a similar configuration, will grow if the center disintegrates.
These radical groups, right and left, give to their followers a sense of comradeship and empowerment that alleviates the insecurity, helplessness and alienation that plague the disenfranchised. Adherents surrender the anxiety of moral choice for the euphoria of collective emotions. The individual’s conscience, a word that evolved from the Latin con (with) and scientia (knowledge), is nullified by personal sublimation into the collective of the crowd. Knowledge is banished for emotion. I saw this in Yugoslavia. And this is what happened in Germany during the Weimar Republic. The Nazis, who knew whom they could trust, forbade recruitment from the Social Democrats. They understood that the bourgeoisie liberals of that political stripe lacked the desired ideological rigidity. But the Nazis embraced recruits who defected from the Communist Party. Communists easily grasped the simplistic, binary view of the world that split human relations into us and them, the good and the evil, the friend and the enemy. They made good comrades.
“Comradeship always sets the cultural tone at the lowest possible level, accessible to everyone,” Sebastian Haffner wrote in his book “Defying Hitler,” which more and more looks like a primer on the disintegration of the early 21st century. “It cannot tolerate discussion; in the chemical solution of comradeship, discussion immediately takes on the color of whining and grumbling. It becomes a mortal sin. Comradeship admits no thoughts, just mass feelings of the most primitive sort – these, on the other hand, are inescapable; to try and evade them is to put oneself beyond the pale.”
William Butler Yeats, although he saw his salvation in fascism, understood the deadly process of disintegration:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Those of us who care about a civil society, and who abhor violence, should begin to replicate what is happening in Quebec. There is not much time left. The volcano is about to erupt. I know what it looks and feels like. Yet there is a maddening futility in naming what is happening. The noise and cant of the crowd, the seduction of ideologies of hate and violence, the blindness of those who foolishly continue to place their faith in a dead political process, the sea of propaganda that confuses and entertains, the apathy of the good and the industry and dedication of the bad, conspire to drown out reason and civility. Instinct replaces thought. Toughness replaces empathy. “Authenticity” replaces rationality. And the dictates of individual conscience are surrendered to the herd.
There still is time to act. There still are mass movements to join. If the street protests in Quebec, the most important resistance movement in the industrialized world, spread to all of Canada and reach the United States, there remains the possibility of hope.
While cocaine production ravages countries in Central America, consumers in the US and Europe are helping developed economies grow rich from the profits, a study claims
The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich “consuming” countries – principally across Europe and in the US – rather than war-torn “producing” nations such as Colombia and Mexico, new research has revealed. And its authors claim that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go after western banks in pursuit of the massive amount of drug money being laundered through their systems.
The most far-reaching and detailed analysis to date of the drug economy in any country – in this case, Colombia – shows that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries.
“The story of who makes the money from Colombian cocaine is a metaphor for the disproportionate burden placed in every way on ‘producing’ nations like Colombia as a result of the prohibition of drugs,” said one of the authors of the study, Alejandro Gaviria, launching its English edition last week.
“Colombian society has suffered to almost no economic advantage from the drugs trade, while huge profits are made by criminal distribution networks in consuming countries, and recycled by banks which operate with nothing like the restrictions that Colombia’s own banking system is subject to.”
His co-author, Daniel Mejía, added: “The whole system operated by authorities in the consuming nations is based around going after the small guy, the weakest link in the chain, and never the big business or financial systems where the big money is.”
The work, by the two economists at University of the Andes in Bogotá, is part of an initiative by the Colombian government to overhaul global drugs policy and focus on money laundering by the big banks in America and Europe, as well as social prevention of drug taking and consideration of options for de-criminalising some or all drugs.
The economists surveyed an entire range of economic, social and political facets of the drug wars that have ravaged Colombia. The conflict has now shifted, with deadly consequences, to Mexico and it is feared will spread imminently to central America. But the most shocking conclusion relates to what the authors call “the microeconomics of cocaine production” in their country.
Gaviria and Mejía estimate that the lowest possible street value (at $100 per gram, about £65) of “net cocaine, after interdiction” produced in Colombia during the year studied (2008) amounts to $300bn. But of that only $7.8bn remained in the country.
“It is a minuscule proportion of GDP,” said Mejía, “which can impact disastrously on society and political life, but not on the Colombian economy. The economy for Colombian cocaine is outside Colombia.”
Mejía told the Observer: “The way I try to put it is this: prohibition is a transfer of the cost of the drug problem from the consuming to the producing countries.”
“If countries like Colombia benefitted economically from the drug trade, there would be a certain sense in it all,” said Gaviria. “Instead, we have paid the highest price for someone else’s profits – Colombia until recently, and now Mexico.
“I put it to Americans like this – suppose all cocaine consumption in the US disappeared and went to Canada. Would Americans be happy to see the homicide rates in Seattle skyrocket in order to prevent the cocaine and the money going to Canada? That way they start to understand for a moment the cost to Colombia and Mexico.”
The mechanisms of laundering drug money were highlighted in the Observer last year after a rare settlement in Miami between US federal authorities and the Wachovia bank, which admitted to transferring $110m of drug money into the US, but failing to properly monitor a staggering $376bn brought into the bank through small exchange houses in Mexico over four years. (Wachovia has since been taken over by Wells Fargo, which has co-operated with the investigation.)
But no one went to jail, and the bank is now in the clear. “Overall, there’s great reluctance to go after the big money,” said Mejía. “They don’t target those parts of the chain where there’s a large value added. In Europe and America the money is dispersed – once it reaches the consuming country it goes into the system, in every city and state. They’d rather go after the petty economy, the small people and coca crops in Colombia, even though the economy is tiny.”
Colombia’s banks, meanwhile, said Mejía, “are subject to rigorous control, to stop laundering of profits that may return to our country. Just to bank $2,000 involves a huge amount of paperwork – and much of this is overseen by Americans.”
“In Colombia,” said Gaviria, “they ask questions of banks they’d never ask in the US. If they did, it would be against the laws of banking privacy. In the US you have very strong laws on bank secrecy, in Colombia not – though the proportion of laundered money is the other way round. It’s kind of hypocrisy, right?”
Dr Mejia said: “It’s an extension of the way they operate at home. Go after the lower classes, the weak link in the chain – the little guy, to show results. Again, transferring the cost of the drug war on to the poorest, but not the financial system and the big business that moves all this along.”
With Britain having overtaken the US and Spain as the world’s biggest consumer of cocaine per capita, the Wachovia investigation showed much of the drug money is also laundered through the City of London, where the principal Wachovia whistleblower, Martin Woods, was based in the bank’s anti-laundering office. He was wrongfully dismissed after sounding the alarm.
Gaviria said: “We know that authorities in the US and UK know far more than they act upon. The authorities realise things about certain people they think are moving money for the drug trade – but the DEA [US Drugs Enforcement Administration] only acts on a fraction of what it knows.”
“It’s taboo to go after the big banks,” added Mejía. “It’s political suicide in this economic climate, because the amounts of money recycled are so high.”
Anti-Drugs Policies In Colombia: Successes, Failures And Wrong Turns, edited by Alejandro Gaviria and Daniel Mejía, Ediciones Uniandes, 2011
Comment: Of course the profits flow northwards! What did people think was happening? That the CIA, MI6, the Mossad and banksters in Switzerland and Wall Street were just gonna let the locals rake it in? Like all other industries, the third world is nothing to the international banking mafia but a slave plantation, useful for only one thing: harvesting energy from.
Another conference over. Charlie Skelton talks to some of the 800 activists outside the gates to find out what they learned
What a Bilderberg it’s been. Big names, big money, big decisions, big crowds. Somewhere around 800 activists outside the gates (up from about a dozen in 2009), and inside? Well, here’s what we learned.
A Mitt Romney attendance?
Four eyewitnesses on the hotel staff told me Willard Mitt Romney was here at Bilderberg 2012. My four eyewitnesses place him inside. That’s one more than Woodward and Bernstein used. Romney’s office initially refused to confirm or deny his attendance as Bilderberg is “not public”. They later said it was not him.
So, was he being crowned, or singing for his supper? Will Mitt Romney follow in the august footsteps of Clinton, Cameron and Blair to have attended Bilderberg and then shortly become leader? Four years ago, Senator Obama shook off his press detail and nipped (many think) into Bilderberg. This exact same hotel.
Did Romney have to get down on one knee in front of David Rockefeller? This sounds flippant, but it’s a serious question: has Bilderberg switched allegiance? Are they going to toss away Obama after just one term?
I put this question to author and Bilderberg expert Webster Tarpley. Is Wall Street going to throw its chips in with Romney? “I think there’s a frisson that’s gone through the ruling class against Obama,” he says. The leak we had from the flirty hotel staffer corroborated this. “They don’t seem to like Obama very much,” he said.
Tarpley’s conclusion is this: “They want Romney and Mitch Daniels, who will run together as moderate rightists.” Governor Daniels of Indiana was on the official list.
You won’t see the names Mitt Romney or Bill Gates on the officially released Final List of Participants because, well, the list is a nonsense. It’s nothing like a complete list of people who attend Bilderberg. It’s a smokescreen, a bit of spin. So can we all, please, stop repeating it as gospel?
Attending Bilderberg 2012 as an ‘international’ participant was Bassma Kodmani.
So who is Bassma Kodmani? The answer to that question is also the answer to the question: what the hell is happening in Syria? This is where it gets interesting (and worrying) for Bilderberg followers.
Kodmani was at Bilderberg in 2008, the last time it was here in Chantilly. She is a member of the European Council on foreign relations – its parent group, the council on foreign relations, is a sort of über lobby group, a couple of rungs down from Bilderberg, but still hugely powerful.
There’s a lot of CFR/Bilderberg crossover. Honorary chairman of both is David Rockefeller; co-chairman of the CFR is Robert Rubin (he was here); and on the CFR’s board of directors are Fouad Ajami and Henry Kravis, both at Bilderberg 2012.
Bassma Kodmani is also the executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative. This body, set up in 2004 by the CFR, is helping to steer “a comprehensive process” of “democratic reform” in the region. In 2005, the Syrian National Council came into being. Bassma Kodmani was a founding member, and is on the executive committee. Kodmani is one of the SNC’s two spokespeople, alongside Radwan Ziadeh (who has a flawless Washington pedigree – look him up). According to its website, the SNC is a non profit public policy research organization register in the District of Colombia and headquartered in Washington DC. Just up the road.
I asked Tarpley about Kodmani. He doesn’t mince words. “She’s a Nato agent, a destabilizer, a colour revolution queen. The fact that Kodmani was there is a scary one for Syria”, says Tarpley.
To those gathered outside, at least, it looks increasingly like, at this year’s Bilderberg, the war of regime change got signed off. In the airport lobby, on the way home from Bilderberg, I looked up at a TV monitor to see Bilderberg attendee and CFR board member Fouad Ajami talking about how Syria is about to become another Libya. That sound you can hear? It’s all those juicy defence contracts being scratched out around Chantilly. Fuel the jets and open the champagne, boys. We’re going in.
A statement of support from Occupy London was read out at Occupy Bilderberg. A symbol of Anglo-American unity, like Bilderberg itself. The statement protested against (amongst other things): the rise of an undemocratic “technocracy” – a “network of cronies” in which financial “experts”, largely from the international banking community, who have been appointed rather than elected, are handed the reins of government.
So here you’ve got the (broadly speaking) liberal left protest movement, with its anti-corruption and pro-transparency agenda, finding common ground with US libertarians and an anti-Obama, anti-fascist, pro-union New Deal American like Webster Tarpley.
As Tarpley says: “Bilderberg creates a singularity, where a lot of seemingly disparate things come together.” That applies not just to the people inside – megabank money and government – outside the security cordon you’ve got Occupy Bilderberg rubbing shoulders with US veterans, German students who’ve flown over for the event, truckers from Michigan, Orthodox Jews, Ron Paul supporters, anarcho-syndicalists, academics and grandmothers.
Why? In the words of the statement from Occupy London: “the profound denial of a participatory, direct democracy which the Bilderberg Conference represents.”
There was speculation before the conference that on the Bilderberg agenda this year would be how to implement a unique EU internet ID. Who would be pushing that through? Step up Neelie Kroes, EU commissioner for digital agenda.
Presumably Eric Schmidt (Google) and Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) would have been sharing podium-space with Bill Gates at that session. That’s if there was one, of course.
Collin versus the new world order
I’m not sure global governance stands a chance against Collin Abramowicz. Here – by popular request – is a last blast from the frontline of the resistance:
Hopefully Collin and I will see you all again in 2013. You can email me at bilderberg2013@yahoo.co.uk – if we had 800 this year, I think we could be having ourselves a party. The Bilderburgers are on me.
Another terrorist taken out by Team Obama. Hope and Change is great, isn’t it?
In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that after the U.S. kills people with drones in Pakistan, it then targets for death those who show up at the scene to rescue the survivors and retrieve the bodies, as well as those who gather to mourn the dead at funerals: “the CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals.” As The New York Timessummarized those findings: “at least 50 civilians had been killed in follow-up strikes after they rushed to help those hit by a drone-fired missile” while “the bureau counted more than 20 other civilians killed in strikes on funerals.”
This repellent practice continues. Over the last three days, the U.S. has launched three separate drone strikes in Pakistan: one on each day. As The Guardian reports, the U.S. has killed between 20 and 30 people in these strikes, the last of which, early this morning, killed between 8 and 15. It was the second strike, on Sunday, that targeted mournersgathered to grieve those killed in the first strike:
At the time of the attack, suspected militants had gathered to offer condolences to the brother of a militant commander killed during another US unmanned drone attack on Saturday. The brother was one of those who died in the Sunday morning attack. The Pakistani officials said two of the dead were foreigners and the rest were Pakistani.
Note that there is no suggestion, even from the “officials” on which these media reports (as usual) rely, that the dead man was a Terrorist or even a “militant.” He was simply receiving condolences for his dead brother. But pursuant to the standards embraced by President Obama, the brother – without knowing anything about him – is inherently deemed a “combatant” and therefore a legitimate target for death solely by virtue of being a “military-age male in a strike zone.” Of course, killing family members of bombing targets is nothing new for this President: let’s recall the still-unresolved question of why Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone attack in Yemen two weeks after his father was killed.
I ask this sincerely: what kind of country targets rescuers, funeral attendees, and people gathered to mourn? If a Hollywood film featured a villainous King ordering lethal attacks on rescuers, funerals and mourners – those medically attending to or grieving his initial victims – any decent audience member would, by design, seethe with contempt for such an inhumane tyrant. But this is the standard policy and practice under President Obama and it continues through today. Recall the outrage that was sparked when WikiLeaks released its Collateral Murder video showing a U.S. Apache helicopter during the Bush era firing on unarmed rescuers, who had arrived to retrieve the initial victims who had been shot and were laying wounded on the ground. That tactic continues under President Obama, although it is now expanded to include the targeting of grieving rituals.
This explains why Obama now finds support for his conduct among the most radical right-wing factions in the U.S. Consider the debate that took place this weekend on MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes regarding President Obama’s kill list. In opposition to Obama’s drone policy – and harshly critical of him – were the ACLU’s Director of National Security Project, Hina Shamsi (who said: “There is no national security policy that poses a graver threat to human rights law and civil liberties than” Obama’s kill lists), and The Nation‘s Jeremy Scahill (who caused substantial controversy by denouncing Obama’s drone strikes as “murder). So it was the ACLU and The Nation as Obama’s harsh critics.
But the task of defending Obama fell to one of the most extremist right-wing militants in America: former George W. Bush speechwriter and co-founder of the far right RedState.com blog Josh Treviño, whose ideology and character are evidenced by past comments such as this and this. That is who MSNBC has to turn to in order to find a defense of Obama’s militarism. Joining the RedState.com founder in defending Obama was Col. Jack Jacobs, one of the key military officials in the Bush-era Pentagon propaganda program exposed by David Barstow.
Also defending Obama’s militarism this week was another former Bush speechwriter who wrote an entire falsehood-filled book advocating torture: The Washington Post‘s Marc Thiessen. He celebrated what he accurately called “the Obama-Bush doctrine” and wrote: “the two men’s counterterrorism policies are virtually indistinguishable – except in the liberal reaction to them” (though Thiessen, as is his wont, distorts reality when he claims that venues such as The New York Times Editorial Page and Amnesty International have failed to harshly condemn Obama: bothhave). Meanwhile, cited as a vocal Obama defender in The New York Times “kill list” article this week was Gen. Michael Hayden, the implementer of Bush’s illegal eavesdropping program while NSA chief who was then named CIA Director by Bush: “Mr. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director and now an adviser to Mr. Obama’s Republican challenger, Mr. Romney, commended the president’s aggressive counterterrorism record, which he said had a ‘Nixon to China’ quality.” This is not new: while the ACLU and others have harshly denounced Obama time and again, the hardest-core factions of the American Right have spent a couple of years now heaping praise on him for his behavior in this realm.
When it comes to his militarism, secrecy obsessions, and ongoing killing, that’s the company President Obama keeps. Many progressives like to fantasize that conservatives refuse to give President Obama credit no matter what he does, but that is absolutely false. While the ACLU and human rights groups have repeatedly sued the administration and denounced Obama himself in the harshest possible terms, while U.N. investigators formally condemn him, the the neocons and warmongers who were once so despised in progressives circles have watched as he has vindicated their record, and have, in return, become his most enthusiastic defenders. There’s an obvious reason this revealing, counterintuitive split is so acute, even if it’s one many progressives would prefer to ignore.
* * * * *
For those who now embrace the Cheney-Rove tactic of chanting the “Terrorist!” mantra to justify everything the President does: even The Washington Post now recognizes that many of Obama’s drone targets are not actually plotting against the U.S., because “the Obama administration has embraced a broader definition of what constitutes a terrorism threat that warrants a lethal response” (that includes two more relatives of Anwar Awlaki, related to him by marriage, whom the U.S. is now targeting in Yemen for death). The U.S. has been continuously killing people in the Muslim world for close to a full decade now. The amount of gullibility it takes to believe that the U.S. is merely killing “Terrorists” – over and over and over and over – is just staggering (and for those who do believe that there are so many Terrorists trying to attack the U.S. even after a decade of supposedly killing them over and over, you might ask yourself: why are there so many people so eager to attack the U.S.?). Along those lines, The Guardian‘s correspondent Paul Harris this weekend detailed the ways in which Obama has replicated, and in many instances exceeded, many of Bush’s once-controversial abuses.
Finally, after his condemnation this weekend on MSNBC of President Obama’s “kill list,” Jeremy Scahill noted: “I’ve been called a terrorist, a neo-Nazi, a traitor and a racist. I also want Romney to be president.” He adds: “Re-read some hate mail I got during Bush administration. Amazing how partisan lemmings sound so much alike, regardless of party.” Indeed, many of Obama’s hardest-core followers have not only embraced the core Bush/Cheney policies, but also the Rovian rhetoric used to justify them. As much as I was called an America-hating Terrorist-defender during the Bush years – and it was frequent – that’s the accusation hurled at me with far greater frequency now by the current President’s defenders. As Digby wrote this weekend: “there can be little doubt that this president, for whatever reason, has managed to persuade many liberals to support security policies they were adamantly opposed to just a few years ago.” That’s undoubtedly true, though it’s not just the policies finding ample support among Obama’s most enthusiastic followers but also the rotted mindset that accompanies them. Ask Jeremy Scahill about that.
UPDATE: Whenever this Obama policy is raised, it cannot be emphasized enough that “secondary explosions” – attacking those who rescue victims of an inital explosion – has, according to to official U.S. Government dogma, long been a hallmark of The Terrorists:
NASHVILLE, Tenn.- A scathing new report from Tennessee Congressman Marsha Blackburn says the crimes of TSA officers only a symptom of the problem.
On Monday, Blackburn released a report titled “Not on my Watch”: 50 Failures of TSA’s Transportation Security Officers”. The report lists 50 crimes committed by TSA agents, including two from Nashville International Airport.
Blackburn said that more needs to be done to keep bad apples out of the airport screening process.
“TSA needs to immediately remove themselves from the human resource business. This report details highly disturbing cases where pedophiles and child pornographers wearing federal law enforcement uniforms are not only patting down unsuspecting travelers, but in many cases stealing valuables from their bags. Enough is enough. It’s time for Congress to step in and demand accountability from Administrator Pistole,” said Blackburn.
Also as part of the report she points out that TSA employees act as law enforcement officers, but have little training, and aren’t screened as thoroughly as local police departments. She says the solution is to get the TSA out of law enforcement back to what they were originally set out to do.
Two local TSA employees were mentioned in the report one of them, accused statutory rapist Clifton Lyles, who worked at Nashville International Airport. Another local TSA employee was arrested for cooking meth.
A Louisiana man is in custody after allegedly biting the face off of another man. This latest “zombie” crime is at least the fourth reported cannibalistic incident since a Florida man stripped naked and chewed 80% of the face off a homeless victim.
Law Enforcement officials in Scott, Lousiana, confirmed that Car Jacquneaux, 43, attacked an unnamed victim and, using his teeth, tore parts of the man’s face off.
“During the attack, the suspect bit a chunk of the victim’s face,” said assistant police chief Kert Thomas. “He was clearly under the influence of some kind of drug.”
Local TV station KATC is reporting that a friend of the victim believes that Jacquneaux was under the influence of a street drug known as “bath salts.” The potent hallucinogen is known to cause, delirium, distress, psychosis and even homicidal behavior.
Interestingly, bath salts are also blamed for the first zombie attack in Florida.
The Louisiana victim is currently under medical supervision and is expected to recover.
A homeless man high on drugs and drunk on Four Loko growled and tried to bite off a police officer’s hand after he was arrested for disturbing customers in a Miami fast food restaurant.
The incident comes just two weeks after Rudy Eugene chewed the face off a homeless man in Miami. The frenzied 18-minute attack only ended when police shot Eugene dead.
In this new case, Brandon De Leon, 21, repeatedly banged his head against the patrol car’s Plexiglas and yelled, ‘I’m going to eat you.’ Both De Leon and Eugene are believed to have been under the influence of a potent drug, known as bath salts.
The shocking crimes have led to a safety warning issued to local police officers when they deal with Miami’s homeless population.
North Miami Beach police spotted De Leon having an argument with another man outside a Boston Market restaurant on Saturday.
According to an arrest report, the men’s fight blocked the restaurant entrance so no-one could come in or leave.
Officers arrested De Leon and Brian Yerdon, 33, for disorderly conduct.
At one point De Leon said ‘F*** you’ to officers, showing them his middle finger, the report states.
At the police station, De Leon tried to bite the officer who was taking his blood pressure and tending to his self-inflicted wounds. The police report noted that he ‘growled and opened and closed his jaw slamming his teeth like an animal would.’
Inside his cell, De Leon was put in leg restraints and a bite mask after he continued to bark, growl and bash his head, reported NBC Miami.
De Leon was found to be on bath salts – also known as Cloud 9 – and blood tests revealed levels of cannabis and Xanax. The tests also revealed an alcohol level of .29.
De Leon faces charges including disorderly conduct and resisting an officer with violence. He remains in jail on a $5,500 bond.
In court on Monday De Leon told the judge he could not remember what happened.
‘If I can say something your honor, I have no recollection of anything that happened that night,’ he said. It is not known whether De Leon has a lawyer.
Bath salts, referred to on the street as ‘the new LSD’ and sold as a cocaine substitute, contain amphetamine-like chemicals such as methylenedioxypyrovalerone.
Users of the drug report to feeling no pain. Its effects include paranoia, hallucinations, convulsions and psychotic episodes.
Toxicology results will determine whether Rudy Eugene was on bath salts when he pounced on Ronald Poppo, a 65-year-old homeless man he found sleeping on elevated train tracks by a Miami highway on May 26.
Footage of the attack shows Eugene stripping and punching his victim before he straddles him and starts to eat his face off.
It was almost 20 minutes until officer Jose Rivera shot Eugene shortly after he arrived. He shouted at the 31-year-old to stop but he simply got up and growled and continued eating at the man’s face.
Two teen brothers have been charged with what prosecutors call the brutal murder of a 15-year-old in Tacoma.
Luis Arroyo, 16, and Cristobal Arroyo, 14, have been charged with first degree murder in the death of Hector Hernandez-Valdez. Both have pleaded not guilty.
On the afternoon of June 1, the boys’ mother came home to find blood and a recycling bin in her living room, according to the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. When she noticed towels and “reddish-brown” stains on the floor, her sons claimed to be cleaning up “chili” that they had spilled while making lunch.
When the mother went upstairs to find a boy’s body lying on a sheet, she walked to a nearby police station to report the crime.
Meanwhile, police say the boys wrapped the victim’s body in a blanket and placed it in a recycling bin in the alley behind the residence.
Prosecutors say the victim had come to the home to meet with the older defendant, who subsequently attacked him in an attempt to steal his marijuana and cash. While the elder of the two stabbed the victim with a knife, his younger brother attacked him with a “large nail” in the back and neck, according to prosecutors.
“The brothers then moved the victim into the bathtub to ‘drain him,’” according to a press release from the prosecutor’s office. “The victim was still alive and making noises. One of the brothers cut his throat to kill him.”
Investigators say the victim suffered more than 34 stab wounds, and the blade of a knife “appeared to be broken off in the victim’s head.”
Prosecutors will charge the 16-year-old Arroyo as an adult in accordance with state law. A judge will determine at a later hearing whether to try the 14-year-old Arroyo as an adult as well.
Thomas D. Raffaele, a 69-year-old justice of the New York State Supreme Court, encountered a chaotic scene while walking down a Queens street with a friend: Two uniformed police officers stood over a shirtless man lying facedown on the pavement. The man’s hands were cuffed behind his back and he was screaming. A crowd jeered at the officers.
The judge, concerned the crowd was becoming unruly, called 911 and reported that the officers needed help.
But within minutes, he said, one of the two officers became enraged – and the judge became his target. The officer screamed and cursed at the onlookers, some of whom were complaining about what they said was his violent treatment of the suspect, and then he focused on Justice Raffaele, who was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The judge said the officer rushed forward and, using the upper edge of his hand, delivered a sharp blow to the judge’s throat that was like what he learned when he was trained in hand-to-hand combat in the Army.
The episode, Friday morning just after midnight – in which the judge says his initial complaint about the officer was dismissed by a sergeant, the ranking supervisor at the scene – is now the focus of investigations by the police Internal Affairs Bureau and the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
The judge said he believed the officer also hit one or two other people during the encounter on 74th Street near 37th Road, a busy commercial strip in Jackson Heights. But he said he could not be sure, because the blow to his throat sent him reeling back and he then doubled over in pain.
“I’ve always had profound respect for what they do,” Justice Raffaele said of the police, noting that he was “always very supportive” of the department during the more than 20 years he served on Community Board 3 in Jackson Heights before becoming a judge. At one point in the early 1990s, he added, he helped organize a civilian patrol in conjunction with the police. “And this I thought was very destructive.”
The justice, who sits in the Matrimonial part in State Supreme Court in Jamaica, Queens, was elected to the Civil Court in 2005 and the State Supreme Court in 2009. Justice Raffaele was among the judges around New York State who volunteered to perform weddings on the Sunday last summer when New York’s same-sex marriage law went into effect. The judge’s description of the confrontation and its aftermath, which he provided in a series of interviews, was corroborated by two people he knows who described the encounter in separate interviews.
Justice Raffaele and one of the men, Muhammad Rashid, who runs a tutoring center near where the encounter occurred, said they were on the street at that hour because the judge had spent most of that day and night cleaning out his parents’ house and Mr. Rashid had just helped him move two tables; he donated them to the tutoring center.
The judge said his parents had just moved to Houston; he had taken them to the airport that morning and the house’s new owner was to take possession the next day.
The judge said he was in “a lot of pain” and went with Mr. Rashid to the emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital Center, where a doctor examined his throat by snaking a tube with a camera on the end through his nose and down his throat to determine whether his trachea had been damaged. The doctor, he said, found no damage; Justice Raffaele was released and told to see his personal doctor for follow-up care.
When they first came upon the crowd, the judge said, he was immediately concerned for the officers and called 911. After he made the call, he said, he saw that one of the officers – the one who he said later attacked him – was repeatedly dropping his knee into the handcuffed man’s back.
His actions, the judge said, were inflaming the crowd, some of whom had been drinking. But among others who loudly expressed their concern, he said, was a woman who identified herself as a registered nurse; she was calling to the officer, warning that he could seriously hurt the unidentified man, who an official later said was not charged.
Justice Raffaele said that after the officer struck him and he regained his composure, he asked another officer who was in charge and was directed to a sergeant, who, like the officer who hit him, was from the 115th Precinct. He told the sergeant that he wanted to make a complaint.
The sergeant, he said, stepped away and spoke briefly with some other officers – several of whom the judge said had witnessed their colleague strike him – and returned to tell the judge that none of them knew whom he was talking about. As the sergeant spoke to the other officers, the judge said, the officer who hit him was walking away.
At the hospital, he said, he saw another sergeant from the 115th Precinct, who took his complaint. He also telephoned the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau. He said he was interviewed on Friday by a lieutenant and a sergeant from a special unit in the bureau called Group 54, which investigates complaints of excessive force.
Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said in an e-mail that all force complaints, whether they involve serious injuries or not, are referred to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency that investigates allegations of police misconduct that does not rise to the level of a crime. The department’s Internal Affairs Bureau investigates complaints of excessive force that involve serious injuries.
“In this instance,” he said, Internal Affairs “is reviewing the complaint because it was brought to its attention by the judge, not because of the level of injury.”
He did not respond to an e-mail with other questions about the episode.
Police investigators, apparently from Internal Affairs, visited a number of shops along 74th Street on Sunday, seeking to determine whether any had security cameras that might have recorded a fight Thursday night involving a police officer and two men, said Sunil Patel, the owner of Alankar Jewelers.
He said that he had security cameras, but that they did not capture any images of the confrontation because the store’s security gate blocks their view when the shop is closed.
The office of the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, is working with the Internal Affairs Bureau on the investigation, an official there said.
The administrative judge for civil matters for the State Supreme Court in Queens, Jeremy S. Weinstein, who oversees the court where Justice Raffaele sits, said he was surprised to learn of the encounter because of what he said was the judge’s personality.
“I think, universally felt, that he is one of the most soft-spoken, thoughtful, decent human beings around,” Justice Weinstein said. “I think his temperament is admired by certainly his colleagues in the bar and I believe the community that he served.”
Asked whether he intended to sue, Justice Raffaele said, “At this point, no, I don’t.”
He added: “I do feel that it’s important for this person to be disciplined. I don’t know if he should be an officer or not – what he was doing was so violent.”
An earthquake measuring 3.9 on the Richter scale hit the western Odisha region covering Balangir, Nuapada and Kalahandi on Saturday.
According to the Bhuabneswar Regional Meteorological Office, “The earthquake of slight intensity having its magnitude at 3.9 on the Richter scale occurred at 1.45 pm and the epicentre of the earthquake was located at latitude 20.1 degree North and longitude 82.9 degree East in Kalahandi district.”
The people of the three districts tossing under the impact of continued heat-wave condition, felt the tremor that caused vertical cracks in the buildings at some places but there was no reports of any loss of life and property, official sources said.
The earthquake in Kalahandi district was felt in parts of Bhawanipatna town, Kesinga, Junagarh, Dharmagarh, Golamunda and other areas, said an official of the local Met office in Bhawanipatna.
The people of the affected districts who felt the tremor for about 10-15 seconds along with a mild rumbling under earth were panicked and came out of their houses fearing mishap.
Meanwhile, with the pre-monsoon rains in some coastal, southern and northern areas, there was remarkable slide in the day’s temperature by at least four degrees Celsius on Saturday in the costal and southern districts.
However, there was no respite from the intense heat-wave conditions in western Odisha districts as the sunstroke deaths in the State rose to 32 officially against unofficial reports that heat-wave deaths had touched 140.
Twelve places recorded above 40 degrees Celsius on the day while it was between 43 and 46 degrees in nine places in the western districts.
According to Met office, Sundergarah was the hottest spot on the day with The maximum temperature of 45.8 degrees Celsius followed by 45.5 degrees at Hirakud and 45 degrees in three places- Sonepur, Titilagarah and Sundargarh. While Jharsuguda recorded 44.8 degrees, Talcher was at 44.2, Angul 43.6 and Bhawanipatna 43.5. In Balangir the day’s temperature was recorded at 41.5 degrees Celsius.
Though the temperature in the coastal areas was below 40 degrees, the State capital region recorded 40.5 degrees Celsius.
Meanwhile, the local Met office in its forecast said rain or thundershowers may occur at a few places over coastal Odisha and at one or two places over the interior parts.
However, the Met office warned that thunder squall accompanied with hail and gusty surface wind reaching a speed up to 60-70 km per hour may occur at one or two paces over the State during next 24 hours. In Bhubaneswar, the sky would remain partially cloudy and the maximum day temperature would be around 39 degrees Celsius, the office said.
A powerful earthquake has shaken Greece’s island of Rhodes and southwestern Turkey. No deaths or serious damage have been reported, but officials say six people were hurt in Turkey by jumping out of buildings.
The Athens Geodynamic Institute says the quake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.8 struck at a depth of 37 kilometres in the Aegean Sea at 3:44 p.m. (1244 GMT) Sunday. That is between the Greek island of Rhodes and western Turkey.
Turkey’s Kandilli Observatory gave a stronger preliminary magnitude of 6.0, with aftershocks of 4.9 and 4.7. Areas of Turkey shaken by the quake included the popular Aegean resort town of Oludeniz, the Aegean port of Izmir, and the Mediterranean city of Antalya.
Police in Rhodes said there are no reports of injuries or damage.
No serious casualties were reported in Turkey either, but officials said half a dozen people who jumped out of windows in panic over the temblor were injured.
These regions of Greece and Turkey are in seismically active areas and suffer frequent earthquakes.
A strong earthquake hit off the southwest coast of Turkey Sunday near a popular tourist resort, putting dozens of people in hospital, including some who jumped from buildings in panic, officials said.
The 6.0 magnitude quake struck off Oludeniz, a small Aegean Sea holiday resort near the city of Fethiye which is popular particularly with Britons.
No-one was killed, according to the national disaster management centre, but provincial health director Cihan Tekin said 59 people were hospitalised, most for psychological trauma.
“From the information we’ve gathered, 59 Turkish citizens are in hospital after the earthquake, including 54 in Fethiye,” Tekin was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency.
One person suffered a severe head injury jumping from a window out of fright, Tekin said, adding that two people suffered heart attacks.
“Some of people were admitted to hospital for fractures and cuts. But most were admitted for psychological trauma,” he said.
Tekin had earlier put the number of injured at six to seven people, saying: “They jumped in panic from balconies or windows.”
Oludeniz mayor Keramettin Yilmaz told the private NTV television network that the quake also caused material damage but no details were immediately available.
Oludeniz, a resort popular with British tourists, looks out at the brilliant turquoise waters of the Aegean Sea.
Turkey is crossed by several fault lines.
A powerful quake shook eastern Turkey on October 23 last year, killing more than 600 people. It was followed on November 12 by a 5.6-magnitude tremor that killed another 40 people in the same area.
In 1999, two strong quakes in heavily populated and industrialised parts of northwest Turkey killed 20,000 people.
Guatemalan volcanoe Fuego increased their activity in the last hours and the authorities recommended on Monday took all the necessary precautions with the surrounding air traffic. The Insivumeh reported white and blue plume up to 100 meters above the crater, with displacement to the southwest, in the case of Fuego volcano, whose height is 3,763 meters above sea level and is located between the departments of Sacatepequez, Chimaltenango and Escuintla (center south).
An inland lifeboat crew search a flooded caravan park near Aberystwyth. Photograph: Rnli/PA
Hundreds of residents and holidaymakers spent Saturday night in refuge centres after floodwater ravaged their homes and holiday caravans in west Wales.
Around 150 people were evacuated as caravan parks and villages near Aberystwyth were inundated when more than 5 inches (13cm), twice the local average rainfall for June, fell in 24 hours.
As high river levels remained a risk in some areas, police put the overall number of people who fled their homes at 1,000.
Andy Francis, of Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service, told the BBC: “There’s mass scale damage to caravan parks and private dwellings throughout the area.
“A lot of floodwater’s gone through them, leaving a huge amount of damage, and a residual danger as well from the biohazards; from sewerage, and other contaminants.
“Lots of sewers may have been damaged, and indeed gas and water supplies damaged, so my advice to anybody entering their properties this morning is to take sensible precautions.”
The Environment Agency said the rain had now passed the area while one flood warning for the River Teifi at Lampeter and Llanybydder remains in place.
Francis said high river levels remained a risk. “Please do not go near the water, it’s still extremely dangerous, and don’t try to drive through it either, because you will end up becoming a casualty and requiring rescue.”
Outside of Wales, flash floods also struck two villages near York, inundating properties. North Yorkshire fire crews said they pumped water out of Flaxton and Stockton-on-the-Forest after torrential rain on Saturday afternoon. The flooding was concentrated in Main Street in Flaxton and Sandy Lane in Stockton-on-the-Forest.
Meanwhile, tributes have been paid to the emergency services who ensured there were no serious casualties during the flooding in Wales. At one point, an inshore lifeboat team had to be airlifted to safety after getting into difficulties while helping to pluck a disabled man from a flooded caravan.
Four holiday camps along the River Lery were evacuated when the swollen waters breached its banks.
Dozens of people took refuge in a community centre in Talybont while three people were winched away from the Riverside caravan park in Llandre by RAF Sea King helicopters. Dyfed-Powys police said three people needed treatment for minor injuries.
Other rescues took place throughout the day at Aberystwyth Holiday Village in Penparcau, Sea Rivers caravan park in Ynyslas, Borth and Mill House caravan park in Dol-y-Bont, Borth.
Crews on Saturday battled a fast-moving wildfire in northern Colorado that has scorched about 8,000 acres and prompted several dozen evacuation orders. Larimer County Sheriff’s Office spokesman John Schulz said the fire was reported just before 6 a.m. Saturday in the mountainous Paradise Park area about 25 miles northwest of Fort Collins. The blaze expanded rapidly during the late afternoon and evening and by Saturday night, residents living along several roads in the region had been ordered to evacuate and many more were warned that they might have to flee. An evacuation center has been set up at a Laporte middle school. Officials didn’t specify how many residents had evacuated but said they had sent out 800 emergency notifications alerting people to the fire and the possibility that might have to flee. “Right now we’re just trying to get these evacuations done and get people safe,” Schulz told Denver-based KMGH-TV, adding that “given the extreme heat in the area, it makes it a difficult time for (the firefighters).” Temperatures near Fort Collins reached the mid-80s Saturday afternoon with a humidity level of between 5 percent and 10 percent. Ten structures have been damaged, although authorities were unsure if they were homes or some other kind of buildings. No injuries have been reported. The cause of the fire was unknown. Aerial footage from KMGH-TV showed flames coming dangerously close to what appeared to be several outbuildings and at least one home in the area, as well as consuming trees and sending a large plume of smoke into the air. Two heavy air tankers, five single-engine air tankers and four helicopters were on the scene to help fight the blaze, which appeared to be burning on private and U.S. Forest Service land and was being fueled by sustained winds of between 20 and 25 mph. “It was just good conditions to grow,” National Weather Service meteorologist Chad Gimmestad told The Associated Press. “The conditions today were really favorable for it to take off.”
Would like to remind EVERYONE that the same sort of thing happened at Byron Illinois nuclear power plant at the start of 2012 —- remember my chicago trip to measure??
There were mystery booms near byron nuclear plant west of chicago… then a mystery “tritium leak” that blew over downtown chicago…then a mystery EQ appeared on the USGS map a day later..
but NO radiation network or black cat systems stations were on at the time ..so we didn’t see what the actual numbers were..
Legionnaires’ disease in Edinburgh has claimed the life of a man in his 50s, as health authorities disclosed they were dealing with more than 30 confirmed and suspected cases. The man, who had other underlying health problems, died at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh on Tuesday. He was one of 15 people in a critical condition being treated in hospital, as the Health and Safety Executive stepped up their efforts to track the source of the outbreak. NHS Lothian said 13 men and two women aged between 33 and 74 were in a critical condition with the disease. They are being treated in intensive care in hospitals in the Lothian area. There were also 15 suspected cases affecting 10 men and five women, similarly concentrated on the Dalry, Gorgie and Saughton neighbourhoods of south-west Edinburgh. The number of people involved in the outbreak has escalated sharply in the past 48 hours, since the first case emerged on last Thursday. Industrial cooling towers in the area are believed to be a potential source of the outbreak and Edinburgh council environmental health staff have treated 16 cooling towers in an effort to halt its spread. One person among the 17 confirmed cases, initially involving men aged between 30 and 65, has already been sent home.
Dr Duncan McCormick, a consultant in public health medicine, said medical staff were now trying to identify other unidentified cases to establish the true scale of the outbreak. “I would like to reassure the public that household water supplies are safe and that Legionnaires’ disease cannot be contracted by drinking water,” he said. “Older people, particularly men, heavy smokers and those with other health conditions, are at greater risk of contracting the disease.” It might take up to 10 days before results are available, since legionella is difficult to culture. Meanwhile, those responsible for maintaining the towers have been advised to carry out additional chemical treatment to water in the systems as a precaution. Other possible sources are not being ruled out. Legionella bacteria is often found in rivers and lakes but can end up in artificial water supply systems, such as air conditioning systems, water services and cooling towers. Spread by minute droplets of water, it cannot be transmitted from person to person. Symptoms usually begin with a mild headache and muscle pain but become more severe after a day or two. These might include high fever, with a temperature of 40C (104F) or more, and increasing muscle pain and chills.
Once the bacteria infect the lungs, carriers may also experience a persistent cough, later including mucus or blood, shortness of breath and chest pains. A third of people with the disease will experience nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea or loss of appetite. About half may also experience changes to their mental state. Bacteriologist Hugh Pennington told BBC Radio Scotland that the disease was preventable. “Industrial water cooling towers are quite a common source of the bug. The bug lives in warm, fresh water. Basically disinfectant should be put in the water to stop the bug growing.” Legionnaires’ was a “very, very severe pneumonia” but it was often hard to track down the source,” Pennington added. “If there are several water cooling towers in an area you have to look at them all and find out which is the source of the bug.”
Biohazard name:
Legionnaires disease
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.
This past winter, an extended cold snap descended on central and Eastern Europe in mid-January, with temperatures approaching minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit and snowdrifts reaching rooftops. And there were the record snowstorms fresh in the memories of residents from several eastern U.S. cities, such as Washington, New York and Philadelphia, as well as many other parts of the Eastern Seaboard during the previous two years. File image courtesy AFP.
The dramatic melt-off of Arctic sea ice due to climate change is hitting closer to home than millions of Americans might think. That’s because melting Arctic sea ice can trigger a domino effect leading to increased odds of severe winter weather outbreaks in the Northern Hemisphere’s middle latitudes – think the “Snowmageddon” storm that hamstrung Washington, D.C., during February 2010.
Cornell’s Charles H. Greene, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, and Bruce C. Monger, senior research associate in the same department, detail this phenomenon in a paper published in the June issue of the journal Oceanography.
“Everyone thinks of Arctic climate change as this remote phenomenon that has little effect on our everyday lives,” Greene said. “But what goes on in the Arctic remotely forces our weather patterns here.”
A warmer Earth increases the melting of sea ice during summer, exposing darker ocean water to incoming sunlight. This causes increased absorption of solar radiation and excess summertime heating of the ocean – further accelerating the ice melt. The excess heat is released to the atmosphere, especially during the autumn, decreasing the temperature and atmospheric pressure gradients between the Arctic and middle latitudes.
A diminished latitudinal pressure gradient is associated with a weakening of the winds associated with the polar vortex and jet stream. Since the polar vortex normally retains the cold Arctic air masses up above the Arctic Circle, its weakening allows the cold air to invade lower latitudes.
The recent observations present a new twist to the Arctic Oscillation – a natural pattern of climate variability in the Northern Hemisphere. Before humans began warming the planet, the Arctic’s climate system naturally oscillated between conditions favorable and those unfavorable for invasions of cold Arctic air.
“What’s happening now is that we are changing the climate system, especially in the Arctic, and that’s increasing the odds for the negative AO conditions that favor cold air invasions and severe winter weather outbreaks,” Greene said. “It’s something to think about given our recent history.”
This past winter, an extended cold snap descended on central and Eastern Europe in mid-January, with temperatures approaching minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit and snowdrifts reaching rooftops. And there were the record snowstorms fresh in the memories of residents from several eastern U.S. cities, such as Washington, New York and Philadelphia, as well as many other parts of the Eastern Seaboard during the previous two years.
Greene and Monger did note that their paper is being published just after one of the warmest winters in the eastern U.S. on record.
“It’s a great demonstration of the complexities of our climate system and how they influence our regional weather patterns,” Greene said.
In any particular region, many factors can have an influence, including the El Nino/La Nina cycle. This winter, La Nina in the Pacific shifted undulations in the jet stream so that while many parts of the Northern Hemisphere were hit by the severe winter weather patterns expected during a bout of negative AO conditions, much of the eastern United States basked in the warm tropical air that swung north with the jet stream.
“It turns out that while the eastern U.S. missed out on the cold and snow this winter, and experienced record-breaking warmth during March, many other parts of the Northern Hemisphere were not so fortunate,” Greene said.
Europe and Alaska experienced record-breaking winter storms, and the global average temperature during March 2012 was cooler than any other March since 1999.
“A lot of times people say, ‘Wait a second, which is it going to be – more snow or more warming?’ Well, it depends on a lot of factors, and I guess this was a really good winter demonstrating that,” Greene said. “What we can expect, however, is the Arctic wildcard stacking the deck in favor of more severe winter outbreaks in the future.”
Core samples were collected at the sites noted in the North Pacific Ocean. Credit: Jonathan LaRiviere/Ocean Data View.
Until now, studies of Earth’s climate have documented a strong correlation between global climate and atmospheric carbon dioxide; that is, during warm periods, high concentrations of CO2 persist, while colder times correspond to relatively low levels. However, in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, paleoclimate researchers reveal that about 12-5 million years ago climate was decoupled from atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. New evidence of this comes from deep-sea sediment cores dated to the late Miocene period of Earth’s history.
During that time, temperatures across a broad swath of the North Pacific were 9-14 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today, while atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations remained low–near values prior to the Industrial Revolution.
The research shows that, in the last five million years, changes in ocean circulation allowed Earth’s climate to become more closely coupled to changes in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
The findings also demonstrate that the climate of modern times more readily responds to changing carbon dioxide levels than it has during the past 12 million years.
“This work represents an important advance in understanding how Earth’s past climate may be used to predict future climate trends,” says Jamie Allan, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research.
The research team, led by Jonathan LaRiviere and Christina Ravelo of the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), generated the first continuous reconstructions of open-ocean Pacific temperatures during the late Miocene epoch.
It was a time of nearly ice-free conditions in the Northern Hemisphere and warmer-than-modern conditions across the continents.
The research relies on evidence of ancient climate preserved in microscopic plankton skeletons–called microfossils–that long-ago sank to the sea-floor and ultimately were buried beneath it in sediments.
Samples of those sediments were recently brought to the surface in cores drilled into the ocean bottom. The cores were retrieved by marine scientists working aboard the drillship JOIDES Resolution.
The microfossils, the scientists discovered, contain clues to a time when the Earth’s climate system functioned much differently than it does today.
“It’s a surprising finding, given our understanding that climate and carbon dioxide are strongly coupled to each other,” LaRiviere says.
“In the late Miocene, there must have been some other way for the world to be warm. One possibility is that large-scale patterns in ocean circulation, determined by the very different shape of the ocean basins at the time, allowed warm temperatures to persist despite low levels of carbon dioxide.”
The Pacific Ocean in the late Miocene was very warm, and the thermocline, the boundary that separates warmer surface waters from cooler underlying waters, was much deeper than in the present.
The scientists suggest that this deep thermocline resulted in a distribution of atmospheric water vapor and clouds that could have maintained the warm global climate.
“The results explain the seeming paradox of the warm–but low greenhouse gas–world of the Miocene,” says Candace Major, program director in NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences.
Several major differences in the world’s waterways could have contributed to the deep thermocline and the warm temperatures of the late Miocene.
For example, the Central American Seaway remained open, the Indonesian Seaway was much wider than it is now, and the Bering Strait was closed.
These differences in the boundaries of the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, would have resulted in very different circulation patterns than those observed today.
By the onset of the Pliocene epoch, about five million years ago, the waterways and continents of the world had shifted into roughly the positions they occupy now.
That also coincides with a drop in average global temperatures, a shoaling of the thermocline, and the appearance of large ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere–in short, the climate humans have known throughout recorded history.
“This study highlights the importance of ocean circulation in determining climate conditions,” says Ravelo. “It tells us that the Earth’s climate system has evolved, and that climate sensitivity is possibly at an all-time high.”
Other co-authors of the paper are Allison Crimmins of UCSC and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; Petra Dekens of UCSC and San Francisco State University; Heather Ford of UCSC; Mitch Lyle of Texas A and M University; and Michael Wara of UCSC and Stanford University.
New sunspot AR1504 is crackling with impulsive M-class solar flares. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory photographed the extreme UV flash from one of them, an M2-class flare on June 10th at 0645 UT:
So far none of the blasts have been Earth directed, but geoeffective eruptions are possible in the days ahead as AR1504 turns toward Earth. NOAA forecasters estimate a 45% chance of more M-flares today.
NOAA forecasters estimate a 30% chance of polar geomagnetic storms during the next 48 hours as a pair of CMEs pass by Earth, possibly delivering glancing blows to our magnetic field.
As the solstice approaches on June 20th, the International Space Station is spending some extra time in the sun. Ironically, this means you’re more likely to see it in the night sky. Mark Humpage photographed three ISS flybys over his home in Lutterworth UK on June 10th:
“There were actually four flybys this evening at 2207, 2343, 0119 and 0256 hrs, however, the first was clouded out,” says Humpage. “I added a few bursts of flash just before the first flyby to light up the garden and then left the camera running all night. The following morning I extracted all the images and stacked them to produce the final composite.”
New research shows that the meteorite which crashed into the Earth 60 to 70 million years ago, wiping out dinosaurs, gave us large, red tomatoes as well. This can be deduced from a tomato genome analysis.
Scientists who mapped the tomato genome have established that the genome of the original tomato plant suddenly tripled in size about 60 to 70 million years ago.
“Such a big genome expansion points to extremely stressful conditions,” says René Klein Lankhorst, the Wageningen UR coordinator of the tomato genome research project.
“We suspect that the meteorite crash and the resulting solar eclipse had created conditions difficult for plants to survive.A distant ancestor of the tomato plant then reacted by expanding its genome considerably in order to increase its chances of survival.”When conditions subsequently improved again, this ancestor of the tomato got rid of a lot of genetic ballast, but the genetic base for fruit formation had already been developed by then, the tomato fruit acquired its red colour and certain genes which produced toxins disappeared, says Klein Lankhorst.
In this way, the tomato differentiates itself from a family member, the potato, which has no edible fruits.
The plant researchers could “look back” very far into the past by comparing the tomato plant genome with family members in the nightshade and other plant families. And they had the advantage of having almost mapped all the 35 thousand genes of the tomato, which made even small changes noticeable.
For example, a comparison of the locally produced vegetable crop with the wild ancestor Solanum pimpinellifolium (probably brought to Europe by the Spanish) showed that the genome of the Dutch tomato differs by only 0.6 percent from that of its wild ancestor from the 15th Century.
Dinosaurs roamed the Earth for around 180 Million years.
Image credit & copyright: National Geographic Society/Corbis So the tomato’s red color was acquired in part because of the meteor crash, as well as its edibility.
Incredibly, the genetic makeup of tomato plants all around the world can be traced to these tomato plant ancestors, proving the link between the dinosaur extinction causing meteor and the common red fleshy fruits.
MessageToEagle.com based on information provided by Wageningen UR
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MessageToEagle.com – We all know that tomatoes are red. That’s no news, but how did they become red and why are they not blue, purple or have any other color?
Dinosaurs roamed the Earth for around 180 Million years.
