by Staff Writers Majuro (AFP) Marshall Islands (AFP) May 8, 2013
A drought has left areas of the Marshall Islands facing “dire” water shortages with aid agencies scrambling to ship relief to affected communities, officials in the Pacific nation said Wednesday.
With almost no rainfall since late last year on some of the northern islands, the government this week issued a disaster declaration as villages began rationing water to preserve supplies.
“We’ve got 3,700 people without drinking water, the situation is dire,” national water advisor Tom Vance said on Wednesday following a trip to Mejit Island.
Health officials said water tanks were running low and water from wells had turned brackish, making it unsafe to drink. Without rain, the only other source of liquid for the islanders is coconuts.
The Marshall Islands have declared a state of disaster in the north of the archipelago. Photograph: Doug Wilson/Corbis
About 6,000 people who live on the remote Marshall Islands in the Pacific are facing an acute shortage of fresh water as a severe drought worsens.
A state of disaster was declared in the north. Australia announced it would provide AU$100,000 (£65,335) for emergency desalination units. The US has also donated several reverse-osmosis machines, which convert salt water into fresh water.
There is no end in sight to the drought, with fine weather forecast for at least the next 10 days. The drought has also affected the food supply, hitting crops such as breadfruit, bananas and taro.
Casten Nemra, who chairs the national disaster committee, said many large families were surviving on as little as 4.5 litres of water a day.
Corn plants dry in a drought-stricken farm field near Fritchton, Ind., last summer.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Say the words “crop insurance” and most people start to yawn. For years, few nonfarmers knew much about these government-subsidized insurance policies, and even fewer found any fault with them. After all, who could criticize a safety net for farmers that saves them from getting wiped out by floods or drought?
But consider this: According to a , crop insurance allowed corn and soybean farmers not only to survive last year’s epic drought, but it also allowed them to make bigger profits than they would have in a normal year. A big chunk of those profits were provided through taxpayer subsidies. In fact, crop insurance has grown into the largest subsidy that the government provides to America’s farmers.
Economist from Iowa State University carried out the new analysis. It was commissioned by the , a long-time critic of agricultural subsidies.
“We really saw, in 2012, how the crop insurance program performs,” he says. “It kind of reveals itself.”
What’s revealed, first of all, is the fact that the vast majority of farmers are signing up for a version of insurance that Babcock calls the “Cadillac.” This kind of policy covers two different kinds of losses: lower harvests or lower prices.
Here’s why it’s Cadillac insurance and why it ends up costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Last year, farmers got a poor harvest. At the same time, because corn and soybeans were in short supply, prices soared, which benefited farmers greatly. The insurance, however, paid farmers for the lost yield — but paid them at the higher, post-drought market price. Essentially, farmers reaped the drought’s benefits, yet were protected from its harm.
“Those farmers made more money than they anticipated making when they planted the crop. That’s clear,” says Babcock.
No this is not a tangent about biblical prophecy or religious dogma. While I am a spiritual person I belong to no organized religion. I have , however, had premonitory dreams where I have seen things like the Gulf Oil Disaster, The Fukushima Tsunami and the consequent Nuclear Disaster. I have even had others that have as of yet not occurred and I hope it stays that way as they were more horrible than the two mentioned here. Those of you who understand that we are all connected to Source will understand that premonitory dreams have nothing to do with religion or belief in a particular faith. It is rather the realization of a connection that is expressed to us in a manner in which we will understand to a certain degree. The interpretations of the dreams are a whole other matter. That is the responsibility of the individual who received the message, as I believe they are given ways to understand what the content of the message meant. Either that or we who receive them are mentally unbalanced
Now , I am not asking anyone to believe in my dreams nor will I go into detail as that has no bearing on what I have put together here. My question is what if the Planet X theories and the Mayan Calendar theories that were disseminated and became bigger than life were actually disinfo? What if in actuality the truth were even more sinister? What if the agenda was one so heinous, so horrible that even when confronted with it one would recoil and say that is not possible?
The truth is that in the last few years and not just during the Administration of Obama. Just in case anyone thinks this is an Anti- Obama Agenda. What if the greater agenda at hand has never been about a Cataclysmic end but rather a more mundane disaster created by men? What if the New World Order Agenda would stop at nothing to achieve it’s goal. No I’m not crazy although sometimes I wish I were just so I could stop worrying about the outcome of the items I see falling into place for the termination of life as we know it as a Nation.
I have put together here articles and videos that I have come across in the last few years that may hold some clues to the event that could be in our future. Am I saying that it is written in stone? No, of course not. However, anyone with discernment would understand that there is a disturbing precedent being set forth here. For what purpose? One can only guess.
All I ask is that you view this with an open mind and think for yourselves. That is all I can do , that is all anyone can do. We cannot convince anyone, we cannot force anyone to see what we see. All we can do is set the information before you and allow you to come to your own conclusions. If you do not agree, that is your right. All I ask is that those who do not and feel a need to comment do so in a respectful manner. Any nasty, vulgar or hateful comments will be deleted and go unaddressed.
I have debated on whether I should post this for sometime now. I had not done so because I did not want to anger or offend anyone. However, yesterday I saw an article that clinched it for me and I can remain silent no longer. That article had to do with the dismantling of the Air Defense System on U.S./Mexico Border. You will find that it is the last article listed on this post at the bottom of the page. Do with it as you will. I have done what my conscience has moved me to do . I have presented the information that I have here. There are more, far too many to place on one blog post. Items such as the Patriot Act, Garden Plot, agenda 21, NDAA, SOPA, PIPA, Waters of The United States Amendment, The Food Safety and Standardization Act , the constant and ever increasing barrage on our freedoms, rights and Constitution , Codex Alimentarius, the legitimization of poisons in our foods and water , the assault on alternative medicine and therapies, the criminalization of feeding the hungry and the homeless, the militarization of Police, etc ., etc., etc. However, I believe that I have put together a good bit of the information that sets the wheels in motion for those who want to see.
AMERICAN JUDGMENT DAY AND THE FINAL BATTLE FOR PLANET EARTH
By Paul McGuire
NewsWithViews.com
Billions of people on planet Earth do not understand that we are now approaching the final battle for our world and that everything we see happening is connected with that battle. The ancient Greek god, Prometheus gave man fire and the destructive forces of that fire have set the world aflame. The god Prometheus was a type of Lucifer, the temporary prince of this world. Prometheus represented human will and the search for scientific knowledge at all costs. For example, the race for the creation of the atomic bomb and modern Transhumanism represent Prometheus.
Mary Shelley used the term The Modern Prometheus as the subtitle to her novel Frankenstein (1818). Frankenstein was the foreshadowing of the dark side of Transhumanism and genetic engineering.
According to the Biblical account, Lucifer was the most powerful angelic being, and in his lust to be God he led a revolution of one third of the angels in a war against God, so that he could seize God’s throne. This multi-dimensional battle began in the Garden of Eden, where the personal God created a man and woman in His image, using His precise DNA code.
The plans to implement martial law in America have been taking shape for decades, hidden behind “Continuity of Government” contingency planning. Now, with public outcry over the banker bailout bill at fever pitch, all of the pieces are in place for the U.S. Army to start policing American citizens.
Freedoms are disappearing, government powers growing
The idea of suspending the Constitution was first presented in the mid 1980s during the Reagan administration.
No less a thug than the drug-dealing, murder-ordering, terrorist-supporting Oliver North was knee deep in the program.
Since then every US president – George Bush Sr, Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr, and Barack Obama – have steadily created oppressive laws and legal systems to “fight terrorism” while simultaneously violating basic Constitutional rights.
Simultaneously with this, the US military has received training on how to suppress the rights of and even attack US citizens on US soil. US police have been increasingly militarized and new armed federal agencies have spouted like weeds.
Why?
Doesn’t the US have enough serious problems to attend to without the need to laboriously create new “programs” to fight non-existent or government manufactured problems?
Instead the ONLY thing the US government has done consistently over the last 30 years (besides wage illegal wars and give Wall Street criminals a “get out of jail free” card) is create new secret “internal security” laws, bureaucracies, infrastructure and armed bodies. For more The “War on Terror” is a Fraud: videos, click here
President Barack Obama speaks in the National Archives beneath a mural of the Constitutional Convention, which depicts James Madison handing the final draft of the Constitution to George Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
(CNSNews.com) – During Barack Obama’s first term as president of the United States, the debt of the federal government increased by $5.8 trillion, which exceeds the combined debt accumulated under all presidents from George Washington through Bill Clinton.
The new federal debt accumulated in Obama’s first term equaled approximately $50,521 for each of household in the country.
On Jan. 20, 2009, when Obama was first inaugurated, the total debt of the federal government was $10,626,877,048,913.08, according to the U.S. Treasury. As of the close of business on Jan. 17, the last day reported by the Treasury before Obama’s second inauguration, the total debt of the federal government was $16,432,631,489,854.70.
Thus, from Obama’s first inauguration to his second, the federal government’s debt grew by $5,805,754,440,941.62.
Pretty speeches that show an Agenda way beore Sandy Hook ever happened.
Blame on an assault weapon that has been proven never to have entered Sandy Hook Elementary
Hypocrisy stating that assault weapons should not be allowed on the streets but rather on the battlefield. When his Administration is responsible for how many guns and assault weapons were allowed to be put in the hands of Mexican Cartel members?
Investigation: US ATF Secretly Arming Mexican Drug Cartels (Mar 3, 2011 – CBS)
Uploaded on Mar 4, 2011
March 3, 2011. CBS Evening News. Gun Walking. Interview with ATF Federal agent John Dodson. ATF was intentionally sending heavy weaponry to Mexican drug cartels. The secret operation was called Fast and Furious.
Medical Examiner FULL Press Conference – Sandy Hook School Mass Shooting
Published on Dec 17, 2012
12/15/2012
Connecticut Chief Medical Examiner H. Wayne Carver provides an update to the media after he and his team examined the victims’ bodies at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown following Friday’s mass shooting.
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com
(NaturalNews) While the U.S. government is desperately attempting to disarm the American population by rolling out Adolf Hitler-style gun control, it is simultaneously arming itself to the teeth, buying up 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition and now stockpiling it at ammo depot stations around the country.
The hypocrisy of it all is stunning. While screaming, “GUNS ARE BAD!” to American farmers, ranchers and citizens, the government is buying up billions of dollars worth of guns and ammo itself. This isn’t ammo to be used in a foreign theater of war, by the way, it’s ammo that can only be used domestically, against the American people. (The hollow point ammo violates international war treaties and so cannot be used in international war actions.)
To help us all visualize the hypocrisy in the government’s gun control schemes, I came up with our latest Counterthink cartoon.
Feel free to post this cartoon on your own website, but please give credit to the original source, which is NaturalNews.com / Counterthink.com.
In addition to purchasing 450 million rounds of hollow point .40 caliber ammo, the U.S. government has also purchased:
• Over one million rounds of hollow-point .223 rifle ammo
• Over half a million rounds of non-hollow-point .223 rifle ammo
• 220,000 rounds of 12 gauge shotgun #7 ammo (target ammo)
• Over 200,000 rounds of 12 gauge shotgun #00 buckshot ammo (tactical anti-personnel ammo)
• 66,000 rounds of 12 gauge shotgun slugs (tactical anti-personnel, anti-vehicle rounds)
• Over two million rounds of hollow-point .357 Sig JHP (hollow-point) pistol ammo (anti-personnel)
• Over four million rounds of .40 S&W JHP (hollow-point) pistol ammo (anti-personnel)
• Over 60,000 rounds of .308 match grade anti-personnel sniper rounds (BTHP)
• Plus, hundreds of thousands of additional rounds of .38 special, .45 auto, 9mm, 7.62×39 (AK rifle) ammo, and others.
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com
(NaturalNews) You can tell a lot about a person by assessing what they purchase. It’s called “consumer profiling,” and corporations do it all the time. That’s how those grocery store loyalty discount programs work, by the way — they profile your psychology by analyzing what you’re buying. From that information, they can target you for coupons, mailers and other marketing campaigns that “magically” speak to your particular interests. It’s not magic, of course; it’s just behavioral profiling.So what happens if we profile the purchasing behavior of the U.S. government? What do we find?Bullets, bullet-proof roadside checkpoint booths, and anti-radiation pills.
450 million rounds of hollow points to be used against the American people
Just a few weeks ago, the federal government initiated a contract for acquiring 450 million rounds of .40 caliber ammunition. “The special hollow point effectively passes through a variety of barriers and holds its jacket in the toughest conditions,” says a press release from the award winner, ammunition manufacturer ATK. (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/atk-secures-40-caliber-ammunition-co…). This ammo is for the Department of Homeland Security as well as ICE.
Question: What does DHS intend to do with 450 million rounds of barrier-piercing hollow point ammunition?
The really important answer is that no one buys hollow point bullets for target practice. They’re too expensive. Practice ammo is always FMJ ammo (Full Metal Jacket), meaning it has a solid tip. But the far more expensive hollow point ammo is ballistically designed to shred internal organs upon impact. It’s the kind of ammo used by police officers who want to shatter the bad guy’s sternum as quickly as possible and thereby bring him to the ground where he bleeds out from internal tissue trauma.
The DHS is a domestic agency. It does not fight wars overseas. It almost exclusively concerns itself with the American people on American soil. That the DHS is contracting to buy 450 million rounds of hollow point ammo can only mean DHS plans to need this ammo to be used against the American people.
Do the math: That’s almost two bullets for every man, woman and child in America — all in the hands of a government agency that says you should spy on your fellow citizens because they might be terrorists. The message is clear: Government is good, citizens are bad. And DHS feels it needs 450 million rounds of hollow point ammo to keep the American people in line, apparently. For what other purpose would so much hollow point ammo be purchased?
Bullet-proof roadside checkpoint booths
If you’re still not convinced that the USA is rapidly devolving into a fascist police state with TSA and DHS goons feeling your genitals at the airport and randomly searching your bags on city busses, DHS has now bought tens of millions of dollars worth of bullet-proof roadway checkpoint booths featuring level-3 bulletproof glass (http://www.prisonplanet.com/after-huge-ammo-buy-dhs-purchases-bullet-…).
It forces us to ask the obvious question: For what purpose does the DHS need thousands of bulletproof checkpoint booths?
Once again, the answer is obvious: To quickly erect “show us your papers” checkpoints on roadways, highways and key traffic points nationwide.
And in Houston, the TSA has unleashed a network of bus-riding secret agents to spy on citizens and search their bags on city busses. What’s next, are they going to feel your genitals on the bus, too? You might be hiding a bomb in your anus, you know…
Do you think it is a coincidence that DHS is sourcing 450 million rounds of hollow point bullets at the same time it is buying thousands of bulletproof checkpoint booths and hardened armored assault vehicles?
You may have also noticed cable barriers being installed along the medians of roadways across the country, by the way. Where there used to be just open grass, they are now pouring concrete, setting metal posts, and connecting them with multiple strands of high-strength steel cables. Have you figured out the purpose of these yet?
Isn’t it obvious? They’re designed to make it impossible for people to pull a U-turn and avoid the checkpoint booths that will soon be appearing! (And staffed by DHS and TSA agents wielding .40 hollow point bullets, no less.)
Are you starting to see the bigger picture here?
$400,000 in radiation fallout pills
In addition to the hollow point ammo and the bulletproof checkpoint booths, the U.S. government has also purchased $400,000 worth of potassium iodide pills — the kind of pills you take to avoid damage to your thyroid in the wake of radioactive fallout.
This is being done, of course, in anticipation of yet more problems at Fukushima, where just one more explosion or earthquake could unleash a hellstorm of radioactive pollution affecting virtually the entire planet. (http://www.prisonplanet.com/army-stockpiles-anti-radiation-pills-to-p…)
Isn’t it interesting that the U.S. government is purchasing massive quantities of radiation protection pills, but when the Fukushima disaster struck in 2011, President Obama urged the American people to “do nothing” and assured them that they did not need to buy potassium iodide pills?
So here we have yet another case where the U.S. government is getting prepared while urging American citizens to AVOID getting prepared!
Isn’t it time YOU got prepared?
By the way, I’m hosting a LIVE, streaming home defense how-to event on May 8th. Learn more at: www.HealthRangerLIVE.com
Why would DHS need so many bullets and booths?
It’s obvious that DHS is buying all this gear to be used against the American people. But why?
Here, I reveal a rational list of possible explanations for this behavior. These are what I see as possible situations that would result in DHS activating their plans to take over America’s roadways and set up armed checkpoints across the nation:
• Fukushima disaster followed by radiation wave. This would result in a mass of refugees fleeing the West Coast.
• Grid down. This is a worst-case scenario, actually, which would result in mass death across U.S. cities. Huge outflows of refugees would be met by DHS checkpoints. Admittedly, some of these checkpoint booths might actually be handy for small cities and towns to protect themselves from fleeing desperate refugees from the larger cities.
• Financial collapse followed by social unrest. In this scenario, the checkpoints would be used to limit travel and control a very unhappy population.
• False flag terror attack followed by declaration of Martial Law. The checkpoints would be used like they were in East Germany. “Show us your papers!” Anyone who doesn’t have the right papers gets arrested, beaten, raped, tasered and thrown in one of Obama’s secret prisons authorized by the NDAA.
• Pandemic outbreak and quarantine of cities. In this scenario, the checkpoints would be used to keep people IN the cities, preventing their escape. (Escape from New York, eh?)
• No emergency at all: DHS could decide to just implement all the checkpoints even without any event happening. It could all be put in place merely as part of their prisoner training agenda, which the TSA has been carrying out for years in the airports. Sort of a “get used to living in a police state” psychological tactic. I have no doubt that even if thousands of these checkpoints were put in place right now, all the government-worshipping, boot-licking Americans would bow down and praise the DHS for “keeping them safe” by borrowing a page right out of Nazi Germany.
Some people just love oppression, it turns out. I’m pretty sure they’re vaccine damaged.
Record gun sales across America… what does it mean?
DHS is without a doubt gearing up for something big. Yeah, BIG. At the same time, Americans are buying firearms in record numbers — as in millions of guns a month.
My friend, a deputy Sheriff who runs a gun store, says he has to “pull 20 strings” just to keep rifles in stock. They are flying off the shelves like nothing he’s ever seen before in over two decades of business. Multiple firearms companies in the USA have publicly announced they are REJECTING all new orders from retailers because they are so backlogged in manufacturing guns that they can’t even keep up.
By my estimates, Americans have already purchased over 10 million firearms in just the first four months of 2012. And the numbers just keep growing.
What’s going on with all this?
Regardless of what you think about firearms, the honest answer is that Americans are legally and lawfully arming to the teeth. They are stockpiling ammo like never before. They’re buying emergency medical supplies and stored food. One home builder I know told me he’s working on a luxury subdivision in a major U.S. city where every single homeowner opted to build a “bunker room” inside the house as an add-on. (I had no idea…)
If you don’t run in these circles, you may not be aware of all this. But I’ve got friends in law enforcement, in the military, former intelligence officers, people in the food industry, and so on. They feed me info on a regular basis, and what they’re telling me is that both the government and the (informed) public are all stockpiling like never before, and a lot of people are getting nervous about the possibility of Martial Law or government confiscation of food, farms, guns, gold and more.
If this is all news to you because you’ve never heard this before, you should be even more concerned because it means you’re probably behind the curve on all this. If you don’t own a firearm, rest assured that most of your neighbors probably do by now (depending on where you live, of course). And huge numbers of them are also taking classes and seminars on how to use those firearms in self defense. Just call any of the major instructional schools (Gunsight, Thunder Ranch, etc.) and ask them yourself. You’ll find out that their classes are all sold out, or that they’re added new classes like mad in order to keep up with the demand.
How can we avoid conflict?
You’ve probably already figured out that all this purchasing of guns and ammo could be a disastrous recipe if the government begins to see the American people as the enemy. There are signs this is already under way, with even the Boy Scouts now being trained to target U.S. veterans as if they were enemy terrorists.
In a recent interview on the Alex Jones Show, survival author James Wesley Rawles (www.SurvivalBlog.com) warned that any government attempt to disarm the U.S. public would be disastrous and end in total failure. The American people are already armed to the teeth, and they’re getting even MORE armed by the day. Yet Attorney General Eric Holder has been conspiring with Janet Napolitano to try to outlaw the Second Amendment by running guns into Mexico and blaming the resulting gun violence on lawful gun owners. This is the whole “Fast & Furious” fiasco (http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=50807).
There is also talk that if Obama is reelected, he may seek to ban all semi-auto firearms, which means most ranch rifles, handguns and even many shotguns. This is also driving large numbers of people into the gun shops to buy up the available inventory like never before. In the gun shop I visit in Austin, there’s a poster on the wall of President Obama, labeled, “Salesman of the Year.” Truth be told, no President has resulted in more guns getting into the hands of private citizens than Obama!
Even the parts backlog is getting bad. I’ve run into this myself: Just ordering gun parts has turned into a nightmare, with 2-3 month wait times on many parts. I recently tried to purchase some new holster gear and had to wait 8 weeks for it. When I spoke to the retailer, they told me “Everything is being bought up by returning veterans” who are gearing up at home.
Something huge is taking shape, and my Spidey Sense is getting a really bad vibe about it. I can only hope and pray that whatever comes down does not involve the government making a really bad miscalculation and thinking it can nullify the Bill of Rights and try to disarm the American public. That would be a terrible mistake that could result in a huge loss of life. What government needs to do right now is find some humility and stop destroying the United States Constitution and crushing our rights and freedoms.
Yet, regrettably, that’s not what I see happening. All across the country, I see government (both national and local) becoming more arrogant, more combative, and more thuggish in their behavior. Just look at the inexplicable actions of the Michigan DNR which now unleashes arms “hit squads” of government agents to mass slaughter farmers’ livestock using armed farm raids (http://www.naturalnews.com/035585_Michigan_farms_raids.html).
Or look at Darrin McBreen’s recent visit to Roswell, GA, where brutish-looking local cops warned the InfoWars crew to “stop filming the City Hall” and backed this up by claiming “There is no such thing as public property in Georgia.” (Yeah, seriously. This recording was played on national radio.)
In California, we’ve got the illegal and highly suspect raids against raw dairy farmers, and in Pennsylvania, cops steal children away from mothers in hospitals and have them forcibly vaccinated (i.e. sterilized) as part of a population control agenda.
Government is not getting less arrogant, but MORE arrogant across this nation. And I fear it can only end in something disastrous. The People will not put up with tyranny forever. There is a point beyond which people figure they have nothing left to lose and they take action to restore their fundamental liberties. This is the lesson of history, repeated over and over again, nation by nation, throughout recorded human history.
Where will YOU be in all this?
I urge you to stay safe
I plan to be hunkered down at a ranch in Austin, Texas. Got my chickens, goats, rain barrel and ranch rifle. I’ll be joining forces with the local Sheriff to stop looters, if it comes to that, and I’ll be growing medicinal herbs to use in first aid treatment (I’ve actually already planted quite a collection). Who knows, I may end up running refugee duty, providing emergency medical care to refugees fleeing the city of Austin itself.
Now, you may not agree with my analysis of all this, but these contract numbers don’t lie. DHS is really buying hundreds of millions of ammunition rounds. Private citizens are really buying millions of guns every month. And even if you don’t believe in owning firearms yourself, this is nevertheless the reality of what’s happening around you. I urge you to have a strategy that deals with this reality in an informed, compassionate and yet determined way. Things are shifting rapidly. The government is in mass stockpiling mode. Citizens are convinced something big is about to happen. We’re four months into 2012 and there are a lot of people who think December, 2012 is going to be a chaotic time (I personally don’t believe in all the Mayan calendar stuff, but that’s just my view).
I know I’ll be ready, but I’m concerned that many NaturalNews readers aren’t as ready as they should be. I want you to do well through hard times. I want you to be safe, to have crucial skills, and to be part of the solution rather than the problem. People who fail to get prepared become part of the problem, but people who get prepared in advance can help provide critical supplies and skills to their local community, thereby reducing the burden on law enforcement and emergency services.
Be part of the solution. Get prepared now for whatever might be coming. And think hard about why DHS is contracting to acquire 450 million bullets to be used domestically.
The writing is on the wall, folks. If you can’t read it when it’s all this blazingly obvious, there’s not much else I can say to help ya.
2) Get a seat at my upcoming LIVE streaming even on May 8th. Details are found at: www.HealthRangerLIVE.com
3) Keep reading NaturalNews and other top alternative news sites which are really becoming the new mainstream news sites. Infowars.com, NoMoreFakeNews.com, NaturalNewsRadio.com, and so on. At these sites, you’ll learn a wealth of information about what’s really coming down (Fukushima, Martial Law, War with Iran, etc.).
Stay informed and you’ll stay safe. That means you can save yourself from becoming a desperate refugee when the SHTF.
My preparedness philosophy, by the way, is:
1) Get prepared and get out of the big cities.
2) Stockpile now while you still can.
3) Support local law enforcement to restore order.
4) Share resources to help those less fortunate.
5) Grow your own food and medicine, and share seeds!
6) Resist tyranny. Restore the Republic.
A news report today indicates that the Social Security Administration has purchased 174,000 rounds of ammunition, adding the agency to a growing list of federal agencies that have purchased multithousands of rounds of ammo over the last six months.
The type of ammunition government agencies are buying is troublesome to many observers. The agencies have purchased hollow point bullets which are designed to expand once they enter their target in order to do the most damage to the victim.
Not only has the Social Security Administration purchased multithousands of rounds of hollow point bullets but so have the Department of Homeland Security and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Sources have further indicated that ammunition and firearms have been delivered to multiple agencies of the federal government, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Internal Revenue Service, among others.
The official explanation for the ammunition is preparation for the possibility of civil unrest during a national emergency, such as a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, or a complete economic collapse.
At the end of July, two of Congress’s most virulent gun haters, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Representative Carolyn “What’s a Barrel Shroud?” McCarthy (D-NY), introduced S. 3458 and the identical H.R. 6241 in their respective Congressional chambers. Called the “Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act of 2012,” S. 3458/H.R. 6241 would not only ban ammunition sales over the internet, but would require federal licensing of ammunition dealers, mandate burdensome record keeping on the part of said dealers, and require them to report sales of more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition within a five day period to any one customer.
The method by which the bills would ban online sales, incidentally, is by requiring would-be buyers to present photo identification at the point of purchase–a requirement that we are told (by the same sorts of people who tend to favor restrictive gun laws) is “vote suppression,” and “racist,” when imposed on would-be voters.
Lautenberg’s and McCarthy’s latest attempt to infringe on that which shall not be infringed came, as is typical for them, right on the heels of an atrocity to exploit–this time the Aurora, Colorado theater massacre, for which the accused shooter had stocked up with 6,000 rounds (not 60,000, as the reliably anti-gun Bill O’Reilly hysterically claimed) of ammunition.
Here’s what Lautenberg and McCarthy said about the legislation in their press release:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has awarded defense contractor ATK with an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) agreement for .40 caliber hollow point ammunition. According to an official ATK press release, U.S. agents will receive a maximum of 450 million rounds over a five-year period.
The following is an excerpt from the press release:
ATK announced that it is being awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) agreement from the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (DHS, ICE) for .40 caliber ammunition. This contract features a base of 12 months, includes four option years, and will have a maximum volume of 450 million rounds.
ATK was the incumbent and won the contract with its HST bullet, which has proven itself in the field. [...]
“We are proud to extend our track record as the prime supplier of .40 caliber duty ammunition for DHS, ICE,” said Ron Johnson, President of ATK’s Security and Sporting group.
The hollow point, of course, features a pitted or hollow tip intended to expand upon entering its target. ATK says its ammunition is “engineered for 100-percent weight retention, limits collateral damage, and avoids over-penetration” — all hallmarks of the hollow point.
Terror threats appear to be on the rise as FEMA has rushed a $1 Billion order of dehydrated food in the event of attacks on domestic targets in the US.
This is also coming on the heels of one of the largest terror drills performed by the US Navy on American soil, as Operation Solid Curtain is taking place this week.
In an article Tuesday from the Beaufort Observer, many of the largest suppliers of dehydrated foods in the country are dropping their distributors and customers to dedicate their resources to supplying a billion dollar FEMA request and purchase.
One of the nation’s largest suppliers of dehydrated food has cut loose 99% of their dealers and distributors. And it’s not because of the poor economy. It’s because this particular industry leader can no longer supply their regular distribution channels. Why not? Because they’re using every bit of manufacturing capacity they have to fulfill massive new government contracts. Look, the government has always been a customer of the industry to some extent. But according to our sources, this latest development doesn’t represent simply a change of vendor on the government’s part. It’s a whole new magnitude of business.
What does America stand for? That question is a lot more complicated than you might think. Our Founding Fathers established a Republic that was based on a set of shared values that were embodied in the text of the U.S. Constitution. But today, many of our politicians openly disregard the Constitution whenever they want and it has become fashionable to mock the U.S. Constitution. For example, the New York Times recently published a piece by Georgetown University Professor Louis Michael Seidman entitled “Let’s Give Up On The Constitution” in which he publicly called the Constitution “archaic” and “downright evil”. This is a man that has been teaching constitutional law to the next generation of lawyers at one of the top universities in the nation for nearly 40 years. Unfortunately, Seidman is not an aberration. The truth is that law schools all over America are absolutely packed with professors that teach that we should consider the U.S. Constitution a “living, breathing document” that must “evolve” as society evolves. They also teach that when we find something in the Constitution that does not work for us today that we should just ignore it. In fact, in his New York Times article Seidman insisted that “constitutional disobedience” is “as old as the Republic”. But if we can just ignore the U.S. Constitution whenever we want, where does that leave us? Should we be able to ignore all laws when they are not convenient for us?
Personally, I strongly believe that we should follow the U.S. Constitution, and there are millions of others out there that agree with me. If we want to amend the Constitution, there is a procedure for doing that, but it is not easy. Our founders did that to try to ensure that any changes to our Constitution would reflect an overwhelming consensus of the American people.
But today America is more divided than ever before. We can’t seem to agree on much of anything. We are at a period in our history when we desperately need to come together, but instead we are constantly at each other’s throats.
Is there anything that truly unites us anymore?
In the old days, if you would have asked people to give you a one word definition of America, many people would have responded by naming important values such as “freedom” and “liberty”.
Sadly, much of the country appears not to even value those things any longer. One poll found that 51 percent of all Americans believe that “it is necessary to give up some civil liberties in order to make the country safe from terrorism.” Other surveys have found similar results.
Not only that, we continue to elect control freak politicians from both political parties that appear to be obsessed with constantly eroding our freedoms and liberties. There are literally millions of ridiculous laws, rules and regulations that govern even the smallest details of our lives, and the government is constantly inventing new ways to watch, track, register, monitor and control all of us. If you doubt this, please see this article and this article. If we continue down this path, we are going to end up in a very dark place as a nation.
Well, what about economics?
Aren’t we united by a common economic philosophy?
Sadly, no we are not.
In the old days, Americans overwhelmingly believed in free market capitalism and overwhelmingly rejected socialism, but now that is rapidly changing.
According to a stunning Pew Research Center survey, 49 percent of Americans in the 18 to 29 age bracket have a positive view of socialism while only 46 percent of Americans in that same age bracket have a positive view of capitalism.
So what will the future look like if we continue to see this kind of shift among our young people?
And of course we have not had anything even close to a true free market system in the United States in a very, very long time. Our economy is dominated by a partnership between the federal government and the monolithic predator corporations that dominate our society. Individuals and small businesses that try to compete are being absolutely suffocated. Our Founding Fathers were very suspicious of all large concentrations of power, and they sought to greatly limit the power of both the federal government and of the big corporations. But today we have gone totally in the other direction.
Well, is there anything else that truly unites America?
What about religion?
Of course it is true that the overwhelming majority of the early colonists were Christian, and even 50 years ago it would have been accurate to say that America was a “Christian nation”, but that is definitely no longer the case today.
The number of Americans with no religious affiliation has absolutely exploded in recent years. It has grown by a whopping 25 percent over the past five years, and meanwhile the percentage of people that identify themselves as “Christians” in America is dropping like a rock. In fact, one poll found that the percentage of Protestants in the United States has dropped below 50 percent for the first time ever. For many more shocking numbers that show the precipitous decline of Christianity in America, please see this article.
So what fundamental principles do most Americans actually agree on?
And I am not talking about things like “American Idol is going downhill” or “Justin Bieber gets too much attention”.
Is there still a core set of shared values that the entire nation can agree upon?
If not, where does that leave us?
Unfortunately, I think that it leaves us in a very difficult place. The divisiveness that we have seen in Washington D.C. in recent years is just the tip of the iceberg. We are living in a nation today that is more divided than I can ever remember. A whole host of opinion polls have shown that anger and frustration in America are rising to very dangerous levels, and instead of focusing on the real reasons for our problems we all tend to point the fingers at one another.
In America today, we have been trained to group ourselves together by certain “categories” and to see those on the other side as “the enemy”. This is a very dangerous thing. It keeps the American people from coming together to fix the very serious problems that are facing our country.
The truth is that we are being divided in dozens of different ways today. The following are just a few of the ways we are currently being divided…
Remember Homeland Security’s recent big ammo shopping spree? Well. FEMA Ordered to Prepare For ‘Mass Fatality Planning’ in Bill Introduced Into Congress 06 Oct 2012 H.R. 6566: To amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to require the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide guidance and coordination for mass fatality planning, and for other purposes. This Act may be cited as the “Mass Fatality Planning and Religious Considerations Act“. Section 504 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 314) is amended by adding at the end the following new subsection: “(c) PREPAREDNESS FOR MASS FATALITIES. In carrying out this section, the Administrator shall provide guidance to and coordinate with appropriate individuals, including representatives from different communities, private sector businesses, non-profit organizations, and religious organizations, to prepare for and respond to a natural disaster, act of terrorism, or other man-made disaster [nuclear melt-downs, CIA false flags, and pharma-terrorists' pandemics] that results in mass fatalities”. Accordig to GovTrack.us, ‘This bill was assigned to a congressional committee on September 28, 2012, which will consider it before possibly sending it on to the House or Senate as a whole.’ [Why are WE always the guinea pigs for the US government's chemtrail spraying, biological weapons testing, false flags, pandemics, and scopolamine-fuelled shooting sprees? Why not bank on and plan for your OWN demise -- for once -- instead of OURS? --LRP]
Homeland Security finishing acquisition of millions of rounds of high-powered ammo
Published: 13 August, 2012, 20:17
Reuters / Jason Reed
The Department of Homeland Security is rushing to finish the acquisition of 750 million rounds of high-power ammunition that has already raised many eyebrows. In one week, the DHS should start expecting an arsenal that will make some armies jealous.
The DHS has updated a solicitation originally posted on the Federal Business Opportunities website earlier this year, now answering questions from prospective contractors about an inquiry the agency published back in April. All responses to the DHS’ request for hundreds of millions of rounds of high-power ammunition must still be sent in by August 20, but now the federal agency designated to thwart terrorism on the home front has answered some questions about what exactly they are looking for in terms of being able to blow stuff up.
In April, the DHS first published a solicitation “for commercial leaded training ammunition (CLTA) of various calibers for law enforcement officer firearms training courses” to be used at facilities in the states of Georgia, New Mexico, Maryland and South Carolina, as well as other unnamed DHS offices across the country. At the time the DHS demanded hundreds of thousands of test rounds for an array of ammunition types, including 209,000 rounds of #00 buckshot 8-pellet bullets for 12 gauge guns and more than 2 million shots for a .357 Sig Caliber. With their solicitation set to expire in less than a week, though, the DHS has taken it upon themselves to answer questions from contractors interested in their very pricey proposal.
In the latest amendment, published online over the weekend, the DHS answers such pressing questions as, say, “Would a 223 Rem 64Grain soft point round be acceptable?” in response to their initial request for 1.1 million rounds of .223 Rem Caliber 62.64 Grain JHP. (And, if you’re wondering, the official DHS-authored answer is, “Yes, that would be acceptable.”)
The DHS does not, however, answer why exactly they want to give its federal agents tasked with counterterrorism around 750 million rounds of ammo. On paper the proposal says their request is to fulfill training exercise requirements, but why is the DHS equipping their officers with the know-how to shoot a basketball-size hole in a human body?
And for those not keeping score, already this year the DHS has asked for upwards of 150 sets of full-body armor specifically to prepare law enforcement for any protests at the 2012 Democratic and Republican National Conventions, the 2013 Presidential Inauguration and other events of national significance. Oh, and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has admitted that she wants the agency to accumulate more surveillance drones to conduct domestic surveillance for the sake of “public safety.”
But don’t worry: millions of rounds of high-powered ammo, stealth surveillance craft and an army of heavily armored federal agents is all for your own security.
According to the 2001 Executive Order that established the DHS signed by then-President George W Bush, the agency “will coordinate the executive branch’s efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States.”
Bill mandates federal agency to respond to “funeral homes, cemeteries, and mortuaries” being “overwhelmed”
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
October 5, 2012
The United States Congress has passed a bill which mandates the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to prepare for “mass fatality planning” and funeral homes, cemeteries and mortuaries being “overwhelmed” in the aftermath of a mass terror attack, natural disaster or other crisis.
The bill, H. R. 6566 or the Mass Fatality Planning and Religious Considerations Act, was posted on the govtrack.us website this morning having been approved by the House on September 28.
The legislation amends the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to direct FEMA to “provide guidance and coordination for mass fatality planning, and for other purposes.”
Noting the necessity for emergency preparedness in relation to terror attacks, natural disasters and man-made disasters, the bill instructs FEMA to be sensitive to the fact that Jews and Muslims require bodies to be buried within 48 hours of death.
“Funeral homes, cemeteries, and mortuaries could be overwhelmed should mass fatalities arise from a natural disaster, act of terrorism, or other man-made disaster,” states the legislation.
Should the bill be given the green light by the Senate, the full amended text to the Homeland Security Act will state;
“Preparedness for Mass Fatalities- In carrying out this section, the Administrator shall provide guidance to and coordinate with appropriate individuals, including representatives from different communities, private sector businesses, non-profit organizations, and religious organizations, to prepare for and respond to a natural disaster, act of terrorism, or other man-made disaster that results in mass fatalities.”
“This is just one of those things that makes the stomach turn: the people who brought us the National Defense Authorization Act (authorizing the detention of US citizens on US soil) now deem it prudent to prepare for mass fatalities on US soil,” writes Simon Black.
“FEMA, as you may recall, is the same organization that couldn’t get bottles of water delivered to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina… and held up hundreds of seasoned volunteer emergency service workers from entering the city for several days of mandatory sexual harassment training.”
The legislation will only serve to stoke more paranoia that the federal government is preparing for mass civil unrest that could lead to a declaration of martial law and require lethal force to be used, as it was during Hurricane Katrinawhen police were ordered to shoot looters.
The Department of Homeland Security has been arming itself to the teeth over the course of the last six months, purchasing ammunition in jaw-dropping quantities.
As we reported last month, following controversy over its purchase of around 1.2 billion bullets in the last six months alone, the DHS has put out a new solicitation for over 200 million more rounds of ammunition, some of which are designated to be used by snipers.
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.
While Fukushima Poisons And Sets Us All Up For A Slow Death And Not a Damn Thing Is Being Done About It. The Tragedy Of Colorado Is Being Used To Fast Forward An Unconstitutional Agenda. Can Anyone Say Psy-Ops?
Problem is the Fukushma disaster and its ramifications do not serve to further t he unconstitutional agenda of Gun control and Disarming the People. therefore we and our children are left in the dark being poisoned by the very air we breath and the food we eat, even the water that we drink because of Fukushima Radiation and not a word is said.
Why are so many allowing their attention to be misled? Yes the deaths are a tragedy no one is denying that. However , history has a way of repeating itself and if the Agenda of Gun Control is rammed down our throats the Tragedy in Colorado will seem like a walk in the park. Our Sovereignty, Our Way Of Life, Our very existence is on the line and no one wants to see it. Why the Apathy towards a disaster that can clearly affect us all Globally , not just locally? Why is no one more concerned? Are we asleep or just kidding ourselves?
Wake up people and smell the bacon burning because we are way past the cooking phase.
Fukushima Nosebleeds, Suicides, and Cultural Dilemmas with Japan Gov’t LIES
[NOTE: Half-life is the time taken for a radioactive substance to decay by half.] * Cesium-134 ~ 2 years * Cesium-137 ~ 30 years * Iodine-131 ~ 8 days * Plutonium-239 ~ 24,200 years * Ruthenium-103 ~ 39 days [Ruthenium is a fission product of uranium-235.] * Ruthenium-106 ~ 374 days * Strontium-90 ~ 28.85 years [Strontium-90 is a product of nuclear fission and is found in large amounts in spent nuclear fuel and in radioactive waste from nuclear reactors.] * Uranium-234 ~ 246,000 years * Uranium-235 ~ 703.8 million years * Uranium-238 ~ 4.468 billion years
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A piece of a building believed to have washed onto Newport’s beaches from Japan’s recent quake and Tsunami is something both tourists and locals are viewing with concern as more dead sea life and other junk from Japan’s crisis continues to wash ashore.
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EUGENE, Ore. — The crisis in Japan has spawed new warnings about radiation effecting drinking water and food Tokyo, while local environmentalists here in the Eugene region think there could be ramifications here along the West coast if Japan’s nuclear reactors are not fully reparied.
Meanwhile, this post-Tsunami period along the nearby central Oregon coast – in Newport and other communities that depend upon “Spring Break” business as a boost after a long winter — “has been very quiet, with no Spring Break crowds in sight,” said one Newport business owner.
Tsunami’s wrath continues along area beaches
The never ending recession and nuclear radiation crisis in Japan is still felt along the central Oregon coast where Spring Break is way down, while tourist seem wary of just how “clean” the beach air and Pacific; meanwhile, post-Tsunami waves – blown in on currents from Japan — bring in all sorts of stuff with news, to include chilling images of people in Tokyo under a water ban due to high radioactive iodine levels that are also causing vegetable contamination and “infection” fears.
The U.S. government has also reacted to Japan’s nuclear reactors leaking radiation, and has ordered new safety checks of all nuclear reactors in the United States, after it was disclosed that 14 American nuclear reactors had “problems.” As Japan’s radioactive crisis continues so do fears along America’s West coast that more ill wind — in the form of new earthquake triggered Tsunami’s or even radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant – will continue to put radioactive particles into the atmosphere. On Thursday morning, Japan’s public television station “NHK” reported “spreading radiation levels worldwide.”
For example, the United Kingdom’s Health Protection Agency says the recent radiation levels that are usually around 2.7 millisieverts (mSv) is now over 8.0mSv in some parts of the West coast of Britain in Cornwall and other regions that receive air current flows from the Japan region. Moreover, high 7, 8 and 9 mSv along the West coast, with a report from British Columbia that radiation is “not normal.”
Moreover, both the BBC and Japanese national television reports out Thursday note how “the tap water alert in Tokyo is anxiety levels soaring over the nation’s food and water supply. Residents in Tokyo are reportedly clearing the supermarket shelves of tap water. Also, milk, spinach and other vegetables from areas near the Fukushima plant were found to have radiation levels higher than regulated standards.”
Radiation drives people from homes, as they also lose water and food
In addition, NHK broadcasts on Thursday morning included news from the Fukushima prefecture – where the nuclear plant began a meltdown after the recent quake in Japan – that the Japanese government has order people to not eat “certain vegetables” because they may be contaminated. Fear of “infection” from the many horrors of radiation sickness is also spreading, reports the NHK.
Meanwhile, there’s a black lash against nuclear reactors when people ask ‘is nuclear energy worth a devastating accident that takes away one’s water and vegetables?’ According to a recent CBS News poll about 50 percent of Americans are against nuclear energy and say they want a cleaner environment and safe energy sources.
Smoldering nuclear reactors and high cost of food and gas hurt locals
Accidents can be devastating, “just look what happened in Japan,” said one Spring Break tourist along Newport’s trendy Nye Beach Wednesday while the lack of whale sightings – due to the gray whales’ northward migration being disrupted by the recent Tsunami – has bummed-out the kids who look forward to this whale watch week along the central Oregon coast.
The whale’s migration is a serious to whale watch fans who come to the central Oregon coast this time each year to enjoy the gray whale pods that sometimes put on a show with a dozen or more huge whales jumping up out of the sea and splash down.
Now, there’s a clear and present danger that whales, other sea life and man may be in real danger as people who once lived in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture area – that was famed for its lush and beautiful surroundings and many organic gardens and ancient nature centers, are now “latterly banned from Paradise, because the earthquake proved that nuclear accidents can happen without any way to prevent it,” said a local mother and teacher during a Spring Break whale watching visit Wednesday.
News from Japan’s NHK public television Thursday noted that the government is warning residents of Tokyo – and millions of visitors, to included many Americans – not to give babies “less than a year old, to drink any tap water.”
The warning has caused massive stockpiling of bottled water throughout Tokyo with stores, vending machines emptied while panic Japanese people wearing soiled face masks and shocked looks in their eyes, scurry home to seal themselves in their homes with duct-tape due to fears that radiation may be reaching their lungs and other vital organs.
Also, NHK TV in Japan reported “regular release of radiation” has been reported over the past 10 days with engineers risking their own lives to cool down the damaged nuclear reactors where spent fuel rods are spewing dangers radioactive radiation and contamination.
NHK also noted there fears of “infection” have entered the hearts and minds of not only Japanese people – that were interviewed on NHK TV – but also here along the Oregon coast that’s seen a dramatic drop in Spring Break tourism due to the recent Tsunami and its continuing after-shocks with news from the Japanese government that they’ve received reports of radiation coming from their reactors being measured along America’s West coast. NHK has broadcast numerous reports about their country’s earthquake having a devastating impact on other country’s that report high health and economic concerns.
Post-Tsunami period an “after-shock” for coastal people
“It doesn’t help that we get radiation from Japan, but gas is now over $4 and the year before last was bad, last year was really bad and so far this year with the Tsunami and all, it’s getting ridiculous to do business,” explained Steven, a seller of antiques and collectables in the trendy Nye Beach area of Newport that faces the Pacific and far off Japan.
On Wednesday, for example, a large slab of concrete measuring nearly 14 feet across and 11 feet high – as it rocked under the pressure of curious seagulls – there were few Spring Break fans who usually cram this popular beach that features a lighthouse and miles of free beaches where the dogs were out again after a nearly two weeks of being kept indoors due to Tsunami and post-quake radiation fears from Japan.
“It’s good to be out again, and breathing the air. The dogs needed it,” said one Newport local on Wednesday.
World Health Organization issue radiation warning signs
According to a BBC report Thursday morning, there’s new World Health Organization and United Nations health advisories that have been sent out in special message and news release with guidance on how to detect “infection” from radiation.
The BBC reports: “Exposure to moderate levels of radiation – above one gray (the standard measure of absorbed radiation) – can result in radiation sickness, which produces a range of symptoms. Nausea and vomiting often begin within hours of exposure, followed by diarrhea, headaches and fever.
“After the first round of symptoms, there may be a brief period with no apparent illness, but this may be followed within weeks by new, more serious symptoms. At higher levels of radiation, all of these symptoms may be immediately apparent, along with widespread – and potentially fatal – damage to internal organs. Exposure to a radiation dose of four gray will typically kill about half of all healthy adults.
For comparison, radiation therapy for cancer typically involves several doses of between one and seven gray at a time – but these doses are highly controlled, and usually specifically targeted at small areas of the body.”
Japan’s nuclear reactor crisis spawned by the Manhattan Project 70 years ago
Here in Eugene at the University of Oregon, there’s been numerous recent lectures on the Japanese nuclear meltdowns, via programs such as the Environmental Law Conference and “Nuke Info Night” that call for a transition from nuclear to solar and other safe energy sources. In addition, April marks the 70th anniversary of the “Manhattan Project” that was partiality developed at universities and nuclear plants in the Pacific Northwest and California in the Spring of 1961.
At the same time, the University of Oregon’s “Japanese Student Organization” has put up a website SendaiEarthquakeRelief.org to coordinate information sharing, nuclear radiation education and fundraising efforts.
Today, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is no longer repressed, but “transfigured with what’s happening now in Japan,” said one University of Oregon exchange student involved with the school’s Japanese Student Organization.
Moreover, students here are more concerned about what will be happening once Spring Break is over than just having fun while school is out with no cares in the world. “This issue of nuclear bombs and radiation is a shadow hanging over all human endeavor right now. I can’t think of anything more important that our futures under the cloud of radiation that’s now hurting so many people in Japan,” said one student who’s volunteering over Spring Break.
Looking back at the Manhattan Project’s terror and legacy
What’s chilling about the Manhattan Project documents are views from the project’s leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the pilot of the aircraft “Enola Gay” that dropped the first atomic bomb on the people of Japan.
Visitors to the Air and Space Museum in Washington can view a special exhibit about the Enola Gay and read words from its pilot Paul Tibbetswho, on Aug. 5, 1945, formally named his B-29 bomber “Enola Gay” after his mother. On Aug. 6, the Enola Gay left its base on Tinian Island in the Marianas with Tibbets at the controls, headed for history over Hiroshima. The atomic bomb, codenamed Little Boy, was dropped over Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. local time. It produced a vast mushroom-shaped cloud that rose into the stratosphere. This haunting image would soon become the definitive marker of nuclear explosions.
“Radiation sickness would nearly double the initial death tool to well over 100,000 people during the subsequent years, and that was out of a population of 350,000 in Hiroshima at the time. To this day, there are more people dying in Japan from radiation sickness,” states the Smithsonian’s records.
The pilot, Paul Tibbets (who died in 2007 at age 92) who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, later commented:
“When I level out (after dropping the bomb) the nose is a little bit high and as I look up there the whole sky is lit up in the prettiest blues and pinks I’ve ever seen in my life. It was just great. I tell people I tasted it. ‘Well,’ they say, ‘what do you mean?’ When I was a child, if you had a cavity in your tooth the dentist put some mixture of some cotton or whatever it was and lead into your teeth and pounded them in with a hammer. I learned that if I had a spoon of ice cream and touched one of those teeth I got this electrolysis and I got the taste of lead out of it. And I knew right away what it was.”
Experts explained that “what it was” was the impact of the atomic bomb exploding. With a temperature at its core of around 60 million degrees Celsius — far hotter than the surface of the Sun – the bomb’s after action reported noted that “the initial flash vaporized some of the Japanese people and turned everyone openly exposed to it for around half a mile around into a fused carbon relic.”
As with the Tsunami “shock wave” after the recent massive quake in Japan, so too was a shock wave after the bomb hit Hiroshima, say experts, and “that initial flash killed more than 100,000 more people and flattened nearly as many buildings in the process.”
Even more strange is the reaction to the bomb’s devastation by visitors to the Air and Space Museum today, say media analysts today who view “Americans as too comfortable in their own lives to even consider or imagine what it must have been like to be there in Japan when the bombs dropped, and even today as radiation from next generation atomic bomb technology is killing and forcing people to leave their homes.”
Even more chilling is J. Robert Oppenheimer’s view on what he and his team of scientists created with the Manhattan Project some 70 years ago next month.
“If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of the Manhattan Project and of Hiroshima,” said Oppenheimer in his “Letters and Recollections.”
Nukes and nuclear reactor radiation a clear and present danger today
In a world where the United States and Russia still have more than 20,000 nuclear weapons — and Iran, North Korea and terrorists want to get their hands on nukes— what President Obama’s arms control and recent arms reduction treaties with Russia is all important.
“China, the only major nuclear power adding to its arsenal, is estimated to have 100 to 200 warheads. The treaty being negotiated says nothing about the nearly 15,000 warheads, in total, that the United States and Russia keep as backups — the so-called hedge. And it says nothing about America’s 500 short-range nuclear weapons, which are considered secure, or Russia’s 3,000 or more, which are chillingly vulnerable to theft,” stated a recent editorial in Washington after the recent meltdown of nuclear reactors spewing radiation into the atmosphere in Japan.
At the same time, recent congressional testimony from Homeland Security, the FBI, CIA and other agencies that monitor nukes what may be in the hands of terrorists, note that “we can’t ignore dirty bombs as a threat.”
In brief, dirty bombs are a kin to what’s happening now at the leaking nuclear reactors in Japan. A bomb destroys a nuclear reactor and causes a meltdown resulting in radiation being released. Thus, radiation is “dirty” because it can’t be cleaned-up and it goes on killing human life for long periods of time.
“Think of the dangers of radioactivity like glow-in-the-dark paint,” states an exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) in nearby Portland. “Unlike modern luminous paint, which has to be activated by bright light, storing up energy to release later, radium lows constantly from its natural radioactive energy.”
The vast power of the nuclear Genie out of the Bottle
Also, there’s the problem of nuclear fusion that some scientists say is a clear and present danger at vulnerable nuclear reactors today.
For example, experts say that the Manhattan Project atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan at the end of WW II were “the equivalent of around 20,000 tons of TNT, while today’s nuke’s average about one million tons of TNT.”
Meanwhile, radioactive materials have been detected throughout Japan, China, in Europe and even here in Eugene and up and down the West coast, say experts who monitor the nuclear energy industry for radioactivity.
The ongoing nuclear reactor disaster and crisis that’s still going on in Japan is a reminder of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, say experts who worry about the nuclear “Genie getting out of the Bottle.”
Three Mile Island, for example, caused concern about the concept of the “China Syndrome,” that was also portrayed in the movie of the same name.
During a “China Syndrome,” say scientists, “the overheating reactor eats through the land beneath it and goes on to melt is way into the Earth’s core while releasing massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere.”
At the same time, a “Nuclear Winter” occurs when global nuclear war or even a series of nuclear reactors impact the climate.
The famed American atmospheric chemist Richard P. Turco coined the term Nuclear Winter in 1983 when explaining to the United Nations that it’s “manifested by significant surface darkening over many weeks, subfreezing land temperatures persisting for up to several months, large perturbations in global circulation patterns, and dramatic changes in local weather and precipitation rates creating a harsh ‘nuclear winter’ in any season.
Not surprisingly, scientists today are fearful of the same sort of nuclear winter in the wake of the recent and ongoing crisis in Japan.
“On June 6, 2011, the Fort Calhoun pressurized water nuclear reactor 20 miles north of Omaha, Nebraska entered emergency status due to imminent flooding from the Missouri River. A day later, there was an electrical fire requiring plant evacuation.
Then, on June 8th, NRC event reports confirmed the fire resulted in the loss of cooling for the reactor’s spent fuel pool. The discussion includes specific details of the technical failures at Fort Calhoun, the risks of coolant loss at overcrowded “spent” fuel pools, and the national hazards of nuclear facilities along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and other water sites during the current period of floods and climate change.”
I may or may not post the other parts to this, as it was exceedingly strenuous on my comp for some reason, I guess because of all the overlays and whatnot I added. Incase I don’t post the rest, here is the link to watch it on youtube:
“If the American people learn that the motivations for all of this was to make a case to deprive them of their Second Amendment rights or to make a case to further the (Justice) department’s ability to further regulate gun rights within the United States, that would make them very angry,” said Rep. Trent Franks.
“We have an administration that has said ‘don’t let a good crisis go to waste’ and you wonder if this was actually a manufactured crisis,” Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) said on Fox News back in the summer.
Southwestern areas of the United States, reeling from its worst drought in 50 years, may have 10 percent less surface water within a decade due to global warming, a study said Sunday.
While rainfall is forecast to increase over northern California in winter and the Colorado River feeding area, warmer temperatures will outstrip these gains by speeding up evaporation, leaving the soil and rivers drier, a research paper said.
Texas will likely be dealt a double blow with declining rainfall and an increase in evaporation, said the paper based on weather simulations and published in Nature Climate Change.
Overall for the area, “annual mean runoff in 2021-2040 is projected to be 10 percent less than in the second half of the 20th century,” co-author Richard Seager of Columbia University told AFP.
This “is a very significant decline given the stress on Colorado River-based water resources” for agriculture and household use, he added.
Runoff is rainfall not absorbed by the soil, running overland or in rivers.
According to the paper, California obtains most of its water from snow on the Sierra Nevada mountain range, while the Colorado River is fed from tributaries created by melting winter snowfall and summer rainfall.
The river provides water to seven US states and Mexico.
Texas, for its part, uses water from rivers and groundwater within its own borders, said the paper.
Average annual runoff for the region overall should drop by about 10 percent, and about 25 percent in spring for the Colorado tributary headwaters.
“Drying intensifies as the century advances,” added the paper.
“These projected declines in surface-water availability for the coming two decades are probably of sufficient amplitude to place additional stress on regional water resources.”
A buoy used to help guide barges rests on the bank after the water level dropped on the Mississippi River near Wyatt, Mo., this year. Some barge operators have lightened their loads or stopped running altogether because of low water levels. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Persistent drought conditions in the upper Midwest are threatening the nation’s waterways, with the mighty Mississippi River so low that barge traffic has been affected and may be forced to halt.
Over 90 barges have been either stranded or grounded due to low water in recent weeks, according to the Waterways Council Inc. (WCI), a public policy organization representing shippers and ports.
Low water levels are also likely to increase due to continuing dry conditions, compounded by the actions of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who have orders to reduce water flow from the Missouri River into the Mississippi.
“This could be a major, major impact at crisis level,” said Debra Colbert, senior vice president of WCI, according to Associated Press. “It is an economic crisis that is going to ripple across the nation at a time when we’re trying to focus on recovery.”
The main river in America’s largest river system, the Mississippi cuts through, or borders, 10 states, incorporating both the Missouri and the Ohio rivers as it travels from Minnesota in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south.
The Mississippi’s rich silt plains form one of America’s richest agricultural regions, spawning a comprehensive inland river transport system replete with ports, shipping lanes, locks, and levees.
According to Veronica Nigh, an economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), the impact on freight is critical. Around 60 percent of U.S. corn and 45 percent of soybeans travel down the Mississippi for export. Coal, fertilizer, gas, and oil go up the river on the return journey.
“We’re experiencing water levels that have really been unprecedented for the last 50 or 60 years,” Nigh said on the AFBF website. “We’re getting close to the record low for the Mississippi that was set in 1940.”
It is an economic crisis that is going to ripple across the nation at a time when we’re trying to focus on recovery.
—Debra Colbert, senior vice president of Waterways Council Inc.
“With these low water levels, barges are only being loaded to 70 to 75 percent of their normal capacity,” she said.
According to Nigh, transportation by barge is cheaper and more efficient, one barge moving as much tonnage as 70 trucks.
It “saves consumers money, because they pay less for their products. It helps farmers. It helps businesses stay competitive in an export market,” she said.
Missouri Inflow Reduced
The National Weather Service has predicted “drier than average conditions” over winter for upper Midwest states. This will particularly impact the critical 180-mile stretch of river between the mouth of the Missouri River just north of St. Louis and the mouth of the Ohio River, an area that will be impacted by Army Corp of Engineers (USACE) plans.
The USACE, which manages the waterways, will reduce the amount of water released into the Mississippi from Gavins Point Dam on the Missouri River in South Dakota. The Missouri River provides around 60 percent of the water into the Mississippi but it is also impacted by the drought, and the Army corps says it is obliged, under orders from Congress, to ensure the smaller river remains at a certain level.
Maj. Gen. John W. Peabody, commander of the Mississippi Valley Division of the USACE, said the corps has been dredging continuously since July in an attempt to keep waterways clear, and has also been storing water where it can. Water stored in an area north of Iowa will be released, and the impact noticeable in about 3 weeks, he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“We have to start thinking that we may not be able to have the water we are accustomed to for an extended period of time,” Peabody said. “That means we are going to have to husband our resources for when the situation gets truly dire. And in my personal estimate, we are not there yet.”
Last year the Mississippi River region was in crisis because of floods, water levels lapping at the top of flood walls. A year later the area is enduring an exceptional drought. According to a report by the Mississippi River Commission, river water levels have plunged to “near historic levels”, dropping over 50 feet in some areas over the course of the year.
“Such wide variations in stages over successive years have never before been witnessed,” the report states.
Dr. Jeff Masters, meteorologist with the Weather Underground, says the drought impacting the United States this year is the worst since 1954. While damage costs from the impact of Hurricane Sandy are likely to be high around $50 billion, Masters says the cost of the 2012 drought will be higher, with estimates ranging between $75 and $150 billion.
More than 2.5 million acres of pinyon pine and juniper trees in the American Southwest during the past 15 years, killed by drought and mountain pine beetles
Pinyon pine forests near Los Alamos, N.M., had already begun to turn brown from drought stress in the image at left, in 2002, and another photo taken in 2004 from the same vantage point, at right, show them largely grey and dead. (Photo by Craig Allen, U.S. Geological Survey).
New research concludes that a one-two punch of drought and mountain pine beetle attacks are the primary forces that have killed more than 2.5 million acres of pinyon pine and juniper trees in the American Southwest during the past 15 years, setting the stage for further ecological disruption. The widespread dieback of these tree species is a special concern, scientists say, because they are some of the last trees that can hold together a fragile ecosystem, nourish other plant and animal species, and prevent serious soil erosion.
The major form of soil erosion in this region is wind erosion. Dust blowing from eroded hills can cover snowpacks, cause them to absorb heat from the sun and melt more quickly, and further reduce critically-short water supplies in the Colorado River basin.
The findings were published in the journal Ecohydrology by scientists from the College of Forestry at Oregon State University and the Conservation Biology Institute in Oregon. NASA supported the work.
“Pinyon pine and juniper are naturally drought-resistant, so when these tree species die from lack of water, it means something pretty serious is happening,” said Wendy Peterman, an OSU doctoral student and soil scientist with the Conservation Biology Institute. “They are the last bastion, the last trees standing and in some cases the only thing still holding soils in place.”
“These areas could ultimately turn from forests to grasslands, and in the meantime people are getting pretty desperate about these soil erosion issues,” she said. “And anything that further reduces flows in the Colorado River is also a significant concern.”
It’s not certain whether or not the recent tree die-offs are related to global warming, Peterman said. However, the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that while most of the United States was getting warmer and wetter, the Southwest will get warmer and drier.
Major droughts have in fact occurred there, and the loss of pinyon pine and juniper trees would be consistent with the climate change projections, Peterman said.
Pinyon pine and juniper are the dominant trees species in much of the Southwest, routinely able to withstand a year or two of drought, and able to grow in many mountainous areas at moderate elevation. The trees are common in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, and may have expanded their range in the past century during conditions that were somewhat wetter than normal.
In some places up to 90 percent of these trees have now died, many of them during a major drought in 2003 and 2004. The new research concluded that most of the mortality occurred in shallow soils having less than four inches of available water in about the top five feet of the soil column.
Most of the tree mortality, the scientists said, was caused by trees being sufficiently weakened by drought that opportunistic bark beetle epidemics were able to kill the pinyon pine, and the vascular system of the juniper ceased to function.
Traditionally, pinyon pine and juniper were not considered trees of significant value. They were occasionally used for firewood, but otherwise small and not particularly impressive.
They perform key ecosystem functions, however, not the least of which is stabilizing soils and preventing erosion. They also provide some food in the form of pine nuts and juniper berries, and store carbon in their biomass, and in the soils beneath their canopies.
Obama Closing Air Defense System on U.S./Mexico Border: Texas & America Vulnerable to Attack from Low Altitude Missiles and Aircraft
Call your Congressmen and Senators immediately and demand that the recent budget cuts do not affect the security of America’s borders. The Federal Government wastes billions of dollars on things they should not even be involved in, but securing our country’s borders is one of the jobs that the federal government is actually supposed to do!
Obama has always pushed massive cuts in the military as part of any budget cuts he will accept in fiscal deals. Obama seems to be getting what he wants, and it will leave America’s borders vulnerable to attacks and other infiltrations.
Air Force’s Air Defense Radar Systems along U.S./Mexico Border will SHUTDOWN on March 15th, 2013
On January 17th, 2013, Exelis Systems Corporation sent out an email (see email below) to all of its employees informing them that on March 15th, 2013 all TARS Air Defense Mission Operations will permanently cease. These TARS Air Defense sites were under the control of the United States Air Force. On January 15th, 2013, the Air Force informed Exelis (the defense contractor running the TARS sites) that the TARS sites will be shut down. Exelis tried to then negotiate with the Department of Homeland Security to see if they would take over the vital project, but it seems as though those negotiations have failed. What does this mean?
This means the southern border of the United States of America will be more vulnerable to attack from low flying aircrafts, low altitude missiles, and other infiltrations such as smuggling.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one Exelis employee had this to say about the announced closure of the TARS sites:
Drought in the Horn of Africa delays migrating birds
by Staff Writers
Copenhagen, Denmark (SPX)
This is a photo of a thrush nightingale. Credit: Mikkel W. Kristensen and University of Copenhagen.
Details of the migration route was revealed by data collected from small back-packs fitted on birds showing that the delay resulted from an extended stay in the Horn of Africa.
The extensive 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa had significant consequences for European songbirds such as thrush nightingale and red-backed shrike. These birds visit northern Europe every spring to mate and take advantage of ample summer food resources.
However, their spring migrating route from southern Africa to northern latitudes passes directly through the Horn of Africa, where the birds stop to feed and refuel for the next stage of their migration.
Our research was able to couple the birds’ delayed arrival in Europe with that stopover in the Horn of Africa. Here they stayed about a week longer in 2011 than in the years before and after 2011. Because of the drought, the birds would have needed longer to feed and gain energy for their onward travel, causing delayed arrival and breeding in Europe.
This supports our theory that migrating animals in general are dependent on a series of areas to reach their destination, says Associate Professor Anders Tottrup from the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen.
Data loggers as a backpack The late spring arrival of European songbirds such as thrush nightingale and red-backed shrike perplexed researchers and bird watchers in 2011.
This mystery was even greater considering these songbirds’ tendency to arrive progressively earlier over the last 50 years as climate change has made its impact.
By placing small data loggers on the backs of several birds in the autumn before their migration to Africa, and retrieving them in the spring when the birds returned to Europe, the scientists were able to trace the migration route and stopover sites.
These data revealed a delay in the particular stopover in the Horn of Africa. Additionally, it was noted that other migrating birds not passing through the Horn of Africa arrived in Europe at the expected time.
We have reconstructed 26 migration routes based on data from the small “data backpacks” weighing just 1 gram. This new technology provides us with a detailed picture of the birds’ migration and stopovers.
It is brand-new territory to be able to track animals this small over such great distances, says Associate Professor Kasper Thorup from the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen.
Delayed breeding The birds’ late arrival in 2011 also meant a similarly late breeding year.
There are no signs of implications on the birds’ breeding success and thereby the size of the population. But it is possible that we haven’t yet seen the full effect of the delayed year, concludes Anders Tottrup.
The research was carried out in collaboration with Lund University in Sweden.
The city states of the ancient Mayan empire flourished in southern Mexico and northern Central America for about six centuries. Then, around A.D. 900 Mayan civilization disintegrated.
Two new studies examine the reasons for the collapse of the Mayan culture, finding the Mayans themselves contributed to the downfall of the empire.
Scientists have found that drought played a key role, but the Mayans appear to have exacerbated the problem by cutting down the jungle canopy to make way for cities and crops, according to researchers who used climate-model simulations to see how much deforestation aggravated the drought.
“We’re not saying deforestation explains the entire drought, but it does explain a substantial portion of the overall drying that is thought to have occurred,” said the study’s lead author Benjamin Cook, a climate modeler at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a statement. [Dry and Dying: Images of Drought]
Using climate-model simulations, he and his colleagues examined how much the switch from forest to crops, such as corn, would alter climate. Their results, detailed online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggested that when deforestation was at its maximum, it could account for up to 60 percent of the drying. (The switch from trees to corn reduces the amount of water transferred from the soil to the atmosphere, which reduces rainfall.)
Other recent research takes a more holistic view.
“The ninth-century collapse and abandonment of the Central Maya Lowlands in the Yucatán peninsular region were the result of complex human–environment interactions,” writes this team in a study published Monday (Aug 20) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The team, led by B.L. Turner, a social scientist at Arizona State University, concurs that by clearing the forest, the Mayans may have aggravated a natural drought, which spiked about the time the empire came to an end and population declined dramatically.
But this is just one contributing factor to their demise, Turner and colleagues write, pointing out that the reconfiguration of the landscape may also have led to soil degradation. Other archaeological evidence points to a landscape under stress, for instance, the wood of the sapodilla tree, favored as construction beams, was no longer used at the Tikal and Calakmul sites beginning in A.D. 741. Larger mammals, such as white-tailed deer, appear to have declined at the end of empire.
Social and economic dynamics also contributed. Trade routes shifted from land transit across the Yucatán Peninsula to sea-born ships. This change may have weakened the city states, which were contending with environmental changes. Faced with mounting challenges, the ruling elites, a very small portion of the population, were no longer capable of delivering what was expected of them, and conflict increased.
“The old political and economic structure dominated by semidivine rulers decayed,” the team writes. “Peasants, artisan – craftsmen, and others apparently abandoned their homes and cities to find better economic opportunities elsewhere in the Maya area.”
In the midst of one of the worst droughts to hit our state in recent history, the Democrat leadership in the Senate made the incredibly poor decision to leave Washington for the August work period before taking up a critical disaster relief package that would have helped farmers, ranchers and families across Missouri — leaving our nation’s producers with greater uncertainty while trying to recover from extreme weather conditions.
This drought has taken a devastating toll on agriculture, which is a key economic driver in Missouri and nationwide. Agriculture supports some 16 million jobs across America, and Missouri has the second highest number of farms of any state and is the second highest state for cow-calf operations .
While agriculture is a business of significant risk, farmers and ranchers have worked hard to learn and develop methods to manage this risk. This includes investing in technologies to defend against drought and disease in order to produce more with less.
The families who own and run these farms and ranches represent less than 2 percent of America’s population, but they raise enough food and fiber to feed the nation and a lot of the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, some circumstances cannot be planned for, nor can they be managed without help. This is the worst and widest reaching drought to grip the United States in decades, and it isn’t over.
At the end of July, all of Missouri’s counties were designated a state of “severe” to “exceptional” drought — representing the worst level of drought possible. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently added 218 counties from 12 drought-stricken states to its list of natural disaster areas, bringing the overall total to 1,584 counties in 32 states — more than half of all the counties nationwide.
According to the USDA’s crop report, half of the nation’s corn crop is now in rated in the worst condition, of “poor” to “very poor,” with Missouri topping the list as one of the hardest hit states. Meanwhile, approximately 73 percent of the domestic cattle inventory nationwide is located in an area that has been impacted by this drought, and 59 percent of America’s and 99 percent of Missouri’s pasture and rangeland is in “poor” to “very poor” condition, compared to 38 percent a year ago.
I’ve talked to many livestock producers who are being forced to decide whether to continue to feed their livestock or liquidate their herds. For the few that have been able to put up hay, they are already taking it back out of the barn to feed — well before the normal feeding time in the winter months.
Undoubtedly, the best solution to assist our farmers and ranchers would be for Congress to pass a long-term Farm Bill that includes funding for these disaster programs — a solution that I have repeatedly called for, and one that I will continue to call for when Congress returns in September. I voted for the Senate bill, and the House will take up a long-term bill as soon as possible.
Without these key disaster relief programs, farm families are left with few options to make it through this drought. The decision made by the Senate majority to leave Washington before passing much-needed disaster assistance is shameful and irresponsible. The House and Senate left Washington without adjourning, and the Senate could still figure out how to pass the bill and respond to this disaster now.
Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. This op. ed. was first published in the Springfield News-Leader.
A strong earthquake struck the main island of the Solomon Islands on late Wednesday evening, destroying an unknown number of houses and causing injuries, seismologists and local officials said on Thursday. No tsunami warning was issued. The 6.5-magnitude earthquake at 10:20 p.m. local time (1120 GMT) was centered about 39 kilometers (24 miles) southwest of Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands. It struck about 22.9 kilometers (14.2 miles) deep, making it a shallow earthquake, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Emergency management officials in Honiara said they have received reports that a number of houses in settlements near the epicenter were destroyed and damaged, injuring at least one person. But the extent of the damage in the remote area was not immediately clear, and officials were still working to determine if there were other victims. The USGS estimated that some 137,000 people on Guadalcanal island may have felt moderate to strong shaking, while 348,000 others may have felt light shaking. The tremors caused scores of people to run out of their homes and flee inland or to higher ground in fear of a tsunami, which was not generated. Both the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) and the Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Center (JATWC) said there was no threat of a tsunami and did not issue a warning. “A destructive tsunami was not generated based on earthquake and historical tsunami data,” PTWC said in a bulletin.
SYDNEY : A strong 6.5-magnitude earthquake hit the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean late Wednesday, the US Geological Survey said.
The tremor, which was just 22 kilometres (14 miles) deep, had its epicentre on the south coast of the island of Guadalcanal, 39 kilometres southwest of the capital Honiara.
The US Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a statement saying: “Based on all available data, a destructive Pacific-wide tsunami is not expected.”
The Solomons National Disaster Management Office could not be reached but Australia said that the quake was unlikely to pose a risk of a tsunami.
“It’s just the usual Pacific kind of event, they get earthquakes of this size regularly,” duty seismologist Mark Leonard told AFP.
“It’s unlikely that it’s going to cause any grief at all.”
The Solomon Islands form part of the Ring of Fire, a zone of tectonic activity around the Pacific Ocean that is subject to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
In 2007, a tsunami following an 8.1-magnitude earthquake killed at least 52 people in the Solomons and left thousands homeless.
Leonard said an earthquake of the magnitude experienced Wednesday would need to be much more shallow to cause that kind of impact.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Seismologists say a mild earthquake widely felt throughout Southern California was centered along the coast west of downtown Los Angeles.
No injuries were reported.
The U.S. Geological Survey says the magnitude-3.7 quake struck at 3:18 a.m. Wednesday. The quake initially was reported as a magnitude-3.8, but seismologist Kate Hutton says it was later found to be a 3.74 so it was downgraded.
The epicenter was 2 miles east-southeast of Marina del Rey near Culver City and Inglewood. A Sheriff’s Department dispatcher says it “wasn’t much of a quake” and no one called about it.
Dozens of people from as far away as Riverside and the San Fernando Valley logged onto the USGS website to report feeling the jolt.
Fire Department spokesman Matt Spence says firefighters rolled out of stations citywide and surveyed 470 square miles. No infrastructure or other damage was found.
000
WEPA42 PHEB 251128
TIBPAC
TSUNAMI BULLETIN NUMBER 001
PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER/NOAA/NWS
ISSUED AT 1128Z 25 JUL 2012
THIS BULLETIN APPLIES TO AREAS WITHIN AND BORDERING THE PACIFIC
OCEAN AND ADJACENT SEAS...EXCEPT ALASKA...BRITISH COLUMBIA...
WASHINGTON...OREGON AND CALIFORNIA.
... TSUNAMI INFORMATION BULLETIN ...
THIS BULLETIN IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY.
THIS BULLETIN IS ISSUED AS ADVICE TO GOVERNMENT AGENCIES. ONLY
NATIONAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO MAKE
DECISIONS REGARDING THE OFFICIAL STATE OF ALERT IN THEIR AREA AND
ANY ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN IN RESPONSE.
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME - 1121Z 25 JUL 2012
COORDINATES - 9.8 SOUTH 160.2 EAST
DEPTH - 114 KM
LOCATION - SOLOMON ISLANDS
MAGNITUDE - 6.6
EVALUATION
A DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMI WAS NOT GENERATED BASED ON EARTHQUAKE AND
HISTORICAL TSUNAMI DATA.
THIS WILL BE THE ONLY BULLETIN ISSUED FOR THIS EVENT UNLESS
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION BECOMES AVAILABLE.
THE JAPAN METEOROLOGICAL AGENCY MAY ALSO ISSUE TSUNAMI MESSAGES
FOR THIS EVENT TO COUNTRIES IN THE NORTHWEST PACIFIC AND SOUTH
CHINA SEA REGION. IN CASE OF CONFLICTING INFORMATION... THE
MORE CONSERVATIVE INFORMATION SHOULD BE USED FOR SAFETY.
THE WEST COAST/ALASKA TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER WILL ISSUE PRODUCTS
FOR ALASKA...BRITISH COLUMBIA...WASHINGTON...OREGON...CALIFORNIA.
000
WEIO23 PHEB 250034
TIBIOX
TSUNAMI BULLETIN NUMBER 001
PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER/NOAA/NWS
ISSUED AT 0034Z 25 JUL 2012
THIS BULLETIN IS FOR ALL AREAS OF THE INDIAN OCEAN.
... TSUNAMI INFORMATION BULLETIN ...
THIS MESSAGE IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY.
THIS BULLETIN IS ISSUED AS ADVICE TO GOVERNMENT AGENCIES. ONLY
NATIONAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO MAKE
DECISIONS REGARDING THE OFFICIAL STATE OF ALERT IN THEIR AREA AND
ANY ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN IN RESPONSE.
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME - 0028Z 25 JUL 2012
COORDINATES - 2.5 NORTH 95.8 EAST
LOCATION - OFF W COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATRA
MAGNITUDE - 6.6
EVALUATION
A DESTRUCTIVE WIDESPREAD TSUNAMI THREAT DOES NOT EXIST BASED ON
HISTORICAL EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI DATA.
HOWEVER - THERE IS A VERY SMALL POSSIBILITY OF A LOCAL TSUNAMI
THAT COULD AFFECT COASTS LOCATED USUALLY NO MORE THAN A HUNDRED
KILOMETERS FROM THE EARTHQUAKE EPICENTER. AUTHORITIES IN THE
REGION NEAR THE EPICENTER SHOULD BE MADE AWARE OF THIS
POSSIBILITY.
THIS WILL BE THE ONLY BULLETIN ISSUED BY THE PACIFIC TSUNAMI
WARNING CENTER FOR THIS EVENT UNLESS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
BECOMES AVAILABLE.
THE JAPAN METEOROLOGICAL AGENCY MAY ISSUE ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
FOR THIS EVENT. IN THE CASE OF CONFLICTING INFORMATION...THE
MORE CONSERVATIVE INFORMATION SHOULD BE USED FOR SAFETY.
A level five would mean that the residents living near the crater would have to be evacuated, while level three warns people not to approach the volcano.
A volcano in Sakurajima in southern Japan has erupted, spewing volcanic ash onto Kagoshima City. The eruption at one of Japan’s most active volcanoes caused ash to cover roads. Residents of Kagoshima donned face masks to protect themselves while sweeping away the ash. The volcano has erupted over 600 times this year and is expected to continue its intermittent eruptions. Currently, the volcano warning there is at level three out of a possible five levels. A level five would mean that the residents living near the crater would have to be evacuated, while level three warns people not to approach the volcano.
MEMPHIS TN
ST LOUIS MO
LINCOLN IL
PEACHTREE CITY GA
SPRINGFIELD MO
TULSA OK
WAKEFIELD VA
MOUNT HOLLY NJ
LITTLE ROCK AR
WILMINGTON OH
LOUISVILLE KY
NASHVILLE TN
CHARLESTON WV
GREENVILLE-SPARTANBURG SC
CLEVELAND OH
NEWPORT/MOREHEAD CITY NC
CHARLESTON SC
JACKSONVILLE FL
INDIANAPOLIS IN
BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC
STATE COLLEGE PA
PITTSBURGH PA
WILMINGTON NC
RALEIGH NC
More than 800 people from four northern Manitoba First Nations have been flown to Winnipeg and Brandon due to forest fires near their home communities. Officials said people deemed the most vulnerable, such as those with asthma and other breathing conditions, were flown out first, while others may follow if the fire situation gets worse. “We didn’t have anybody who was acutely distressed from smoke inhalation but we did have folks with runny eyes, coughing, sore throats, which is a normal effect from being involved with the forest fires,” said Janice Lowe from the Brandon Regional Health Authority. The Manitoba Association of Native Firefighters is looking after the evacuations and asked both Brandon and Winnipeg to host the evacuees, due to the large number. “This is the largest evacuation that we’ve handled in recent times,” said Brian Kayes from the City of Brandon. On Monday, the province said 77 forest fires are burning in Manitoba. As of July 20, more than 360 firefighters were battling the blazes, with 12 water bombers and 31 helicopters being used. Fires are currently burning in northeastern and western, central and eastern parts of Manitoba, said officials. The largest numbers of fires are currently burning in the northeastern part of Manitoba. Officials from the Manitoba Association of Native Firefighters said people had to leave Red Sucker Lake First Nation, Wasagamack First Nation, St. Theresa Point First Nation and Garden Hill First Nation. They said it’s tough to determine how long people could be out of their homes, due to the unpredictable nature of forest fires. They said, however, people should be prepared to be out of their homes for approximately three to seven days. Community members said homes are not currently at risk of burning. Some evacuees, however, said leaving was still difficult. “Some people don’t want to go because they don’t want to leave their homes,” said Eric Wood from Garden Hill Public Health.
More federal firefighters were being deployed to bone-dry Nebraska, where a huge wildfire is threatening more structures and two smaller fires are still out of control. The handful of people living in Sparks, a gateway to canoeing and tubing on the Niobrara River, were on alert for possible evacuation. A 14-mile stretch of the valley already has been evacuated. While a cold front is expected to provide some relief, highs Wednesday will still be in the mid-90s. The front may also bring some rain, but major storms aren’t likely to develop near the fire. Plus, storms could also bring lightning and spark new fires. Hot, windy weather on Monday helped the main Fairfield Creek Fire expand to 58,000 acres, or nearly 92 square miles. Two other smaller fires about 20 miles east of the main fire had burned more than six square miles. And Tuesday’s high temperature again topped Officials estimate the fires, which have already destroyed at least 10 homes, are about 25 percent contained. Some 200 federal firefighters were being sent to join the more than 300 crews already on the front lines. Four helicopters are also fighting the fires, and three firefighters have been injured. Much of the fire-swept land near the river is rugged, forested and populated with cabins, so only 17 residences had been evacuated as of Tuesday morning.
Reports from Macedonia say two foresters died and one was critically injured on July 24 while trying to put out a forest fire. Four other people — including a teenage boy — were hospitalized after strong winds fanned the flames of the forest fire near Strumica, about 100 kilometers southeast of Skopje. About 50 acres of pine forest was burned before the fire eventually was extinguished by rain. Agriculture Minister Ivo Kotevski said, arson is suspected. The fire appeared to have been started as a result of “carelessness.”
BARCELONA, Spain, (ENS) – Four people have died in two giant wildfires now devastating northeastern Spain’s Catalonia region. Since they blazed up on the weekend, the fires have injured at least 100 people and scorched about 10,000 hectares (38 square miles). Authorities have ordered 150,000 residents to shelter in their homes.
One fire has charred the forests of Costa Brava, one of Spain’s most popular beach and resort destinations.
Inland, the town of La Junquera, in the border area between France and Spain, is at the center of a second huge fire, that police believe was started by a discarded cigarette.
Smoke billows over the Catalonian town of Terrades, July 23, 2012 (Photo by Celia Santacreu)
All four of those who died were French. One man died of a heart attack while trying to protect his home in the Catalonian town of Llers, and another died from burns.
A father and his 15-year-old daughter lost their lives while trying to escape the flames by jumping down a cliff in the Costa Brava town of Port Bou.
Flames forced the father and daughter, as well as three of their family members and some 150 other visitors, out of their cars as they were returning to France from the Spanish coast.
As ash from the Costa Brava fire reaches Barcelona this morning, Spanish firefighters say they are starting to gain control because strong winds that initially fanned the flames have now abated.
Temperatures have soared to over 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees F.) in the stricken area, and water levels in reservoirs are low there and across the country, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment.
Planes are dropping water in an effort to douse the raging fire in the border area between France and northern Catalonia, but until the fires are under control several cross-border roads connecting Barcelona with France have been closed.
Other fires are taking their toll across southern Europe.
In Croatia, hundreds of firefighters have been called up to battle fires all along the Adriatic coast.
Fire threatens the Croatian town of Crikvenica (Photo by Nika G.)
A firefighter died Monday while putting out a fire near Moscenicka Draga on the Istria peninsula, while other fires blaze near Pula at the southern tip of the peninsula.
At least 350 firefighters battled a large fire near the coastal town of Crikvenica, a favorite vacation spot for residents of the nearby Croatian capital of Zagreb.
Homes in Crikvenica were in danger Monday but the firefighters defended them. Residents fled and gathered to watch the situation from a safe distance.
One of the most serious fires has caused locals and tourists to flee the Croatian coastal towns of Selce and Novi Vinodolski.
In the popular resort town of Selce on a long, sandy beach, more than 1,500 visitors were forced to evacuate the Selce autocamp and nearby Club Adriatica.
“The situation is very serious, everyone is trying their best. Houses are in danger, and some have already been victim to the fires,” Slavko Gaus from the county fire department, told the “Croatian Times.”
Thick smoke has forced authorities to close the D8 road, and also the Adriactic highway, reported daily newspaper “24sata.”
More fires are burning on the islands of Rab and Mljet and near the town of Sibenik, located in central Dalmatia where the river Krka flows into the Adriatic Sea.
A firefighter died and 1,500 tourists were evacuated after forest fires fanned by strong winds broke out on Croatia’s Adriatic coast Monday, with the interior minister warning of a “very difficult” scenario.
“The situation is very difficult … we are doing everything possible to protect people’s lives and property,” Interior Minister Ranko Ostojic told commercial Nova television, as the fires continued to blaze out of control in the increasingly popular tourist area.
“Everything is ready for (further) evacuations,” said the minister, who visited the coastal resort of Selce, close to the northern port of Rijeka, where some 150 firefighters were battling the blaze.
A 45-year firefighter died while battling another blaze that broke out near Moscenicka Draga on the Istria peninsula, fire service official Slavko Gaus told national HRT television.
That fire was brought under control later in the day.
The inferno broke out in the morning in the hinterland of Rijeka, some 180 kilometres (110 miles) southwest of Zagreb, and spread towards Selce.
Strong winds of more than 100 kilometres (60 miles) an hour made tackling the fires very difficult as water-bombing planes could not be used, the authorities said.
In Selce some 1,500 tourists from two campsites, mostly Slovenians and Austrians, were evacuated while a number of other tourists left a nearby hotel, officials said.
Part of the Adriatic coastal highway was closed, police said.
The resort was cut off from electricity and phone lines were down, Nova television reported, showing footage of people in Selce covering their faces with scarves to protect themselves from the thick smoke and ashes.
The roofs of several houses also caught fire.
In fellow former Yugoslav republic Macedonia, 14 people were injured, five of them seriously, in a forest fire at Strumica, 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of Skopje, the country’s farm minister said.
The minister, Lupco Dimovski, said there was information suggesting that this fire may heave been started deliberately
Australia’s feral camel population has dropped by an estimated 250,000 in recent years, but the arid outback is still home to the world’s largest wild herd, officials said Tuesday.
The Australian Feral Camel Management Project said about 750,000 camels were thought to roam the country’s desert heartland.
“Between 2001 and 2008, it was estimated that there could have been as many as a million feral camels in the outback,” said Jan Ferguson, the managing director of Ninti One, which manages the project.
“Since then, however, there has been a major drought, the feral camel management programme has come into effect and population survey techniques have been improved.”
Camels, first introduced as pack animals to help early settlers in the 19th century, roam wild in the states of Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland in the east, as well as the Northern Territory.
About 85,000 were culled under a plan to reduce their impact on sensitive areas and native animals but Ferguson said some populations were still too dense.
Wildlife scientist Glenn Edwards said the latest monitoring, under which about 50 camels fitted with special collars were tracked using satellites, provided a clearer picture of the extensive damage they caused.
“Feral camels can travel 70 kilometres (43 miles) in one day, and hundreds of kilometres within a week, over incredibly harsh terrain,” he said.
“We know that when they herd, they can converge on a natural waterhole used by native animals, and drink it dry within days.
“This has a devastating effect on the local flora and fauna and shows exactly why we need to control the population density of these animals.”
With few natural predators and vast sparsely-populated areas in which to roam, feral camels have put pressure on native Australian species by reducing food sources, destroying habitat and spreading disease.
During some of the worst months of drought, thousands of thirsty camels even besieged a remote town in search of water, leaving residents scared to leave their homes.
Tropical storm Khanun destroyed scores of houses, buildings and transportation infrastructure in southern parts of North Korea this week, killing at least seven people in the reclusive state, state-run media reported on Friday. It weakened quickly over North Korea before Khanun’s remnants dissipated over China. The state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Friday that flooding triggered by Khanun caused significant damage and casualties in the southern regions of North Korea. It said at least seven people were killed in Kangwon Province, but few other details about casualties were released. “Many hectares of farmland were inundated in Kangwon province and some dwelling houses, public buildings, railways, roads, bridges, breakwaters, electric supply and communication networks were destroyed,” KCNA said in its report, adding that some areas saw up to 200 millimeters (7.8 inches) of rain. “The water supply system was paralyzed in Wonsan and Munchon cities, suspending the provision of drinking water to citizens.” In South Hwanghae province, several houses were destroyed in Haeju City and Jaeryong County while large areas of cropland were submerged in Unchon County. The report did not say whether there were casualties in South Hwanghae province, or in any other regions of North Korea. In South Korea, Khanun also caused flooding, power outages, and affected major transportation systems. One fatality was reported in North Gyeongsang province when the wall of a home collapsed, officials said.
A derecho, the kind of storm that knocked out power to millions in Washington last month, may accompany bad weather forecast for New York City and the rest of the Northeast tomorrow, the U.S. Storm Prediction Center said.
There’s a moderate chance the rare windstorm will develop in an area from Indiana to Massachusetts, the center said on its website. The region is also at risk for severe thunderstorms, hail and possible tornadoes after noon, according to John Hart, a meteorologist at the agency’s Norman, Oklahoma, offices.
“The environment is going to be favorable for considerably severe weather right across the area even if we don’t get a derecho,” Hart said by telephone.
Last month, a derecho knocked out power to at least 4.3 million people from New Jersey to North Carolina as it unleashed winds of as much as 91 miles (146 kilometers) per hour, as powerful as a Category 1 hurricane. Twenty-four deaths were linked to the storm and its aftermath, according to the Associated Press.
A derecho is defined as an event that has wind gusts of at least 58 mph and leaves a swath of damage for 240 miles, according to the storm center’s website.
A storm that swept from Chicago to Kentucky yesterday also seems to have met the definition of a derecho, Hart said. Yesterday’s storm wasn’t as intense as the one that struck the mid-Atlantic, including Washington, on June 29, he said.
Predictions Difficult
Hart said derechos are hard to predict because they require that a number of atmospheric elements come together.
“There is no way to have high confidence in such a forecast,” Hart said. “We decided the risk of that scenario happening was high enough that we would highlight it.”
The area from western Ohio to southern New England will probably be in the path of severe storms tomorrow afternoon, Hart said. New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Cincinnati all have a 45 percent chance of severe thunderstorms, high winds and hail.
Severe storms between the large airline hub cities of Chicago, New York and Atlanta often disrupt air travel throughout the U.S. Such fast-moving storms, which may include tornadoes, accounted for about $8.8 billion in insured losses in the U.S. in the first six months of 2012, according to the Insurance Information Institute in New York.
A much expected downpour bypassed Beijing Wednesday but battered the neighboring city of Tianjin, flooding many downtown streets and vehicles. As of 11 a.m. Thursday, the maximum precipitation had exceeded 300 millimeters, Tianjin’s meteorological center said in a press release. It said the city proper received an average rainfall of 147 mm, while the outer Xiqing district, one of the worst-battered areas, received 309.8 mm. The local fire prevention bureau sent 190 fire engines and 1,140 rescuers to help rescue flood stranded vehicles and pedestrians. The rain had largely stopped by midday, but the center issued another orange alarm at 11:10 a.m., warning residents of a further rainstorm. The downpour has paralyzed traffic in downtown Tianjin, drowning many roads. Dozens of vehicles were stranded on Baidi road in Nankai district after their engines died in the flood. Many pedestrians complained they had to trek in knee-deep water. In some sections of Xianyang Street, flood water was waist deep. On the badly flooded Friendship Road in Hexi district, five workers kept watch next to sewage wells whose manholes had been removed for faster drainage.
The rain disrupted air traffic at Tianjin’s airport, where 20 flights were canceled and 34 delayed.8 The first flight, an incoming flight from Shanghai, landed in Tianjin after the rain subsided at 11:32 a.m., and the first departing flight took off at 12:08 p.m., according to the airport’s official website. Railway transportation, however, was largely unaffected, including the express rail link to Beijing, the city’s railway authorities confirmed. Vegetable prices were up at the city’s major wholesale markets Thursday. “Each kilo is at least 0.4 yuan — about 30 percent — more expensive than yesterday,” said Cui Hongqing, a wholesaler at Hongqi Market. Cui predicted further price hikes Friday as the rain devastated crops and increased transportation costs. China’s capital Beijing was on guard against heavy rain Wednesday, fearing a repeat of Saturday’s mayhem. Saturday’s downpour, which the local weather bureau described as the “heaviest in 61 years,” killed at least 37 people — some were drowned in private cars. Many office workers were allowed to go home early Wednesday for safety considerations, and city authorities bombarded mobile phone subscribers with text message warnings of an imminent downpour. The much expected rain, however, did not fall in Beijing. The capital was still overcast Thursday, as the central weather bureau has forecast rain in seven northern China provinces and municipalities, including Beijing, over the coming three days.
Scores of people were injured and trees were ripped from the ground as a typhoon lashed Hong Kong packing winds in excess of 140 kilometres (87 miles) an hour, officials said Tuesday.
Authorities issued a hurricane warning for the first time since 1999 as Typhoon Vicente roared to within 100 kilometres of Hong Kong shortly after midnight, disrupting dozens of flights to the regional hub.
The alarm was downgraded to a strong wind warning by mid-morning as the cyclone passed to the west and weakened over the southern Chinese coast.
The storm brought down hundreds of trees and sent debris crashing into downtown streets as commuters made their way home from work on Monday evening, when people were told to seek shelter.
Ferry, bus and train services were suspended or ran at reduced capacity, the port and schools were closed, and 44 passenger flights were cancelled. More than 270 flights were delayed.
The stock exchange was also closed for the morning but reopened in the afternoon after authorities gave the all clear to go back to work.
“We haven’t experienced this for 10 years. I could hardly walk, the wind kept pushing me,” marketing research manager Alpha Yung, 28, told AFP as she went to work in the almost deserted streets.
Mignon Chan, a 21-year-old marketing assistant, said the storm was “crazy”.
“Last time I suffered this kind of weather I was small. It’s chaotic here, trees fell down, people fell down, but I still have to work. That’s the worst part,” she said.
Almost 140 people sought medical treatment and 268 people took refuge in storm shelters, officials said. Seventy-one people remained in hospital including one who was in a serious condition.
Local media reported that more than 100 commuters stayed in the Tai Wai train station overnight, unable to get home after services were suspended.
A landslide occurred in the upscale Peak neighbourhood but there were no casualties as a result, officials said.
“The wind and rain were pounding on my windows at home last night — bam, bam, bam — they were so strong that I couldn’t sleep,” security guard Tony Chan said as he cleared shattered glass on the street outside an office tower.
Ocean Park tourist attraction said it would remain closed for the day to carry out a “thorough inspection” of the property for possible storm damage.
In the nearby territory of Macau, three major bridges over the city’s harbour were closed overnight as the typhoon approached, the government said.
Mainland offcials said the typhoon hit Taishan city in Guangdong province at 4:00 am (2000 GMT Monday). There were no immediate reports of casualties but officials said damage was still being assessed.
Flash floods in West Sumatra of Indonesia on Tuesday evening have killed eight people and caused massive infrastructure damage, local officials said on Thursday. Heavy rains caused the river in Padang city overflowed its banks at about 6:30 p.m. Tuesday when people were breaking their fasting, Ade Edward senior official at the local disaster management and mitigation agency said. “Eight people are dead in the floods and scores of buildings and bridges have collapsed,” he reported from Padang, the capital of West Sumatra province. Edward said that the floods had seriously damaged over 90 houses, 11 mosques, five bridges and one health clinic. Some rescuers are still trapped in the flooded areas, he added. The rescuers had difficulty in reaching some areas where water level was chest-deep, said Edward. The local authorities had delcared a state of emergency and warned residents who live near the rivers to be on alert. More than 250 people are taking shelter in their relative houses or mosques, said Edward.
Beijing authorities have reportedly ordered Chinese media to stick to positive news about record weekend floods, after the death of at least 37 people sparked fierce criticism of the government.
Censors also deleted microblog posts criticising the official response to the disaster in China’s rapidly modernising capital, which came at a time of heightened political sensitivity ahead of a 10-yearly handover of power.
City propaganda chief Lu Wei told media outlets to stick to stories of “achievements worthy of praise and tears”, the Beijing Times daily reported, as authorities tried to stem a tide of accusations that they failed to do enough.
Many Beijing residents took to the country’s popular microblogs, or weibos, to complain that some of the deaths could have been prevented if better warnings had been issued and the city’s ancient drainage systems modernised.
A call by the Beijing government for donations to an emergency flood relief fund was also criticised by microbloggers, with many ridiculing the authorities for asking ordinary people to pay for the damage.
On Tuesday, over 72,000 postings on a microblog thread focused on the call for donations were deleted.
David Bandurski, who monitors China’s Internet censorship at the Hong Kong-based China Media Project, said most of the microblog postings censored in China over the last two days related to the Beijing floods.
“There could be a number of reasons for this, but the overarching reason could be the upcoming change of leadership at the (Communist Party’s) 18th Party Congress,” Bandurski told AFP.
“This is an important political meeting, so when people are pointing responsibility at local government incompetence, everyone goes into sensitive mode… no one wants to take responsibility for anything.”
This year’s Congress will see President Hu Jintao step down from his position as head of China’s ruling Communist party in a leadership change that will usher in a new generation of leaders expected to be led by Vice President Xi Jinping.
Authorities were still clearing up the damage from Saturday’s disaster as the country’s top leaders gathered in Beijing on Monday for a meeting addressed by Hu that was given front-page coverage in state newspapers.
The China Daily, a state-run English-language newspaper with a predominantly foreign readership, ran an editorial on Tuesday urging Beijing authorities to improve the drainage system, which it said “leaves much to be desired”.
But much of China’s state-run media steered away from critical stories, focusing on human interest angles of residents helping each other out.
Senior Beijing leaders at an emergency meeting late Monday urged greater efforts to find those still missing, identify the bodies and repair flood-damaged roads.
But residents in the worst hit district of Fangshan on the mountainous southwestern outskirts of China’s sprawling capital told AFP the government was doing little to help find their missing loved-ones.
“The government doesn’t help at all, every family is responsible for searching for their own family members,” said Wang Baoxiang, whose 30-year-old nephew had been missing since going out in Saturday’s rains.
According to official assessments released Monday, seven people remained missing, but in the badly hit Fangshan district, locals told AFP reporters that at least 10 people were missing in one small village.
Tuesday’s Beijing Daily quoted mayor Guo Jinlong as saying any increases in the death toll should be reported immediately, amid suspicion that the authorities may be underplaying the impact of the floods.
Guo also urged journalists to “correctly guide public opinion”, code words in China that which mean to only portray the government in a positive light.
“The news media has played a very good role in timely reporting the developments in emergency response operations, correctly leading the public opinion… and playing a role in boosting morale,” Guo said.
“The focus of our rescue work and news propaganda must now be moved toward the suburban areas, especially those areas severely hit by the disaster like Fangshan.”
The IDF’s top physician has ordered a base in the Golan sealed and cleansed, and its soldiers screened, amid a spreading bacterial infection
By Gabe Kahn
IDF checkpoint
Israel news photo: Flash 90
IDF chief medical officer Gen. Itzik Kreis on Tuesday ordered the Yoav base in the Golan Heights quarantined after several soldiers fell ill with a bacterial infection.
Arutz Sheva has learned many soldiers at the base, including soldiers working in the kitchens, complained of itching all over their bodies.
As a result, the base has been sealed and a full sanitization effort is underway. All equipment, personal belongings, textile goods, and even personnel files are being removed in order to be cleansed.
Arutz Sheva further learned that all mattresses on the base were removed and will be replaced. Hazmat teams are spraying and disenfecting structures, vehicles, and grounds, as well.
Meanwhile, IDF medical personnel are screening soldiers and isolating those affected to ensure the infection does not spread.
The IDF spokesperson’s office has thus far declined to comment on the exact nature and full extent of the infection.
More than 40 workers at a nuclear power station in northern India have been exposed to tritium radiation in two separate leaks in the past five weeks. The first accident occurred on June 23 when 38 people were exposed during maintenance work on a coolant channel at the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station in Rawatbhata, senior plant manager Vinod Kumar said. Two of them received radiation doses equivalent to the annual permissible limit, he said, but all those involved have returned to work. In a second incident last Thursday, another four maintenance workers at the plant were exposed to tritium radiation while they were repairing a faulty seal on a pipe. India is on a nuclear power drive, with a host of plants based on Russian, Japanese, American and French technology under consideration or construction.
The country’s growing economy is currently heavily dependent on coal, getting less than 3% of its energy from its existing atomic plants, and the government hopes to raise the figure to 25% by 2050. But environmental watchdogs have expressed concerns about safety in India, where small-scale industrial accidents due to negligence or poor maintenance are commonplace and regulatory bodies are often under-staffed and under-funded. The director of the Rajasthan power station, C.P. Jamb, confirmed the second accident to AFP but said the radiation was within permissible limits and posed no health threat. “The workers were exposed to radiation from 10 to 25 per cent of the annual limit,” Jamb said. “Such minor leakages keep on happening but they cause no harm.” C.D. Rajput, director of the unit where the leak happened, also said the radiation exposure “was well under the limits and all the workers are working normally”. No explanation was immediately available as to why the first incident at the plant took a month to emerge.
For several days this month, Greenland’s surface ice cover melted over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations. Nearly the entire ice cover of Greenland, from its thin, low-lying coastal edges to its two-mile-thick center, experienced some degree of melting at its surface, according to measurements from three independent satellites analyzed by NASA and university scientists. On average in the summer, about half of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet naturally melts. At high elevations, most of that melt water quickly refreezes in place. Near the coast, some of the melt water is retained by the ice sheet and the rest is lost to the ocean. But this year the extent of ice melting at or near the surface jumped dramatically. According to satellite data, an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface thawed at some point in mid-July. Researchers have not yet determined whether this extensive melt event will affect the overall volume of ice loss this summer and contribute to sea level rise. “The Greenland ice sheet is a vast area with a varied history of change. This event, combined with other natural but uncommon phenomena, such as the large calving event last week on Petermann Glacier, are part of a complex story,” said Tom Wagner, NASA’s cryosphere program manager in Washington. “Satellite observations are helping us understand how events like these may relate to one another as well as to the broader climate system.”
Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was analyzing radar data from the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Oceansat-2 satellite last week when he noticed that most of Greenland appeared to have undergone surface melting on July 12. Nghiem said, “This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: was this real or was it due to a data error?” Nghiem consulted with Dorothy Hall at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Hall studies the surface temperature of Greenland using the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. She confirmed that MODIS showed unusually high temperatures and that melt was extensive over the ice sheet surface. Thomas Mote, a climatologist at the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga; and Marco Tedesco of City University of New York also confirmed the melt seen by Oceansat-2 and MODIS with passive-microwave satellite data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder on a U.S. Air Force meteorological satellite. The melting spread quickly. Melt maps derived from the three satellites showed that on July 8, about 40 percent of the ice sheet’s surface had melted. By July 12, 97 percent had melted.
This extreme melt event coincided with an unusually strong ridge of warm air, or a heat dome, over Greenland. The ridge was one of a series that has dominated Greenland’s weather since the end of May. “Each successive ridge has been stronger than the previous one,” said Mote. This latest heat dome started to move over Greenland on July 8, and then parked itself over the ice sheet about three days later. By July 16, it had begun to dissipate. Even the area around Summit Station in central Greenland, which at 2 miles above sea level is near the highest point of the ice sheet, showed signs of melting. Such pronounced melting at Summit and across the ice sheet has not occurred since 1889, according to ice cores analyzed by Kaitlin Keegan at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather station at Summit confirmed air temperatures hovered above or within a degree of freezing for several hours July 11-12. “Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time,” says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data. “But if we continue to observe melting events like this in upcoming years, it will be worrisome.” Nghiem’s finding while analyzing Oceansat-2 data was the kind of benefit that NASA and ISRO had hoped to stimulate when they signed an agreement in March 2012 to cooperate on Oceansat-2 by sharing data.
The deputy chairman of the Astronomy Society in Jeddah and member of the Arab Federation for Space Science and Astrophysics, astrophysicist. Sharaf al-Sufiyani revealed that meteorite debris fell on Al-Shifa mountain last Sunday near the village of Al-Ajbel. He pointed out in his statement to the daily Medina newspaper today that the meteorite debris comprises large rocky pieces which before landing disintegrated into smaller pieces and landed on various locations. One of the dwellers told him that there are two other locations similar debris has fallen. Regarding the timing of the meteorite’s falling, Al-Sufiyani said that it would be too difficult to determine the exact timing which requires specialized laboratories, but it looks not too old because parts of the debris are still scattered on the surface and if it is old then it would have been buried under the ground and would have been too difficult to find. He also said that should this meteorite have fallen on a house or heavily populated region it would have inflicted gross damage. However, thanks to divine providence , our planet earth is surrounded by an atmospheric layer which prevents the landing of lots of meteorite debris onto mother earth otherwise it would have caused a great disaster that is many folds of its weight. Meteorites are universal rocky formations orbiting outer space and whenever these pass through the stratosphere the earth attracts them and so they fall onto earth. Such meteorites burnout as a result of friction against air and if burned before arrival onto earth, scientists call them meteorites however should they land on earth they are called universal debris.
A case of anthrax has been confirmed in an injecting drug user in Lanarkshire. The area’s health authority said the patient was being treated at one of its hospitals and was in a critical but stable condition. NHS Lanarkshire believes the patient could have contracted the anthrax bacteria from a contaminated batch of heroin circulating in the area. Anthrax is an acute bacterial infection most commonly found in hoofed animals such as cattle, sheep and goats. It normally infects humans when they inhale or ingest anthrax spores, but cannot be passed from person to person. Symptoms can include a raised, itchy, inflamed pimple which turns into a blister with extensive swelling. The lesion is usually painless, and will later turn into a black eschar. f left untreated the infection can spread to cause blood poisoning. It can take up to a week for symptoms to develop after a person comes into contact with anthrax. Dr David Cromie, consultant in public health medicine at NHS Lanarkshire, said: “It is possible that heroin contaminated with anthrax may be circulating in Lanarkshire and potentially other parts of Scotland.
“There have been recent reports of anthrax from contaminated heroin in other western European countries, the most recent reported outbreak being in Germany. “It is important that drug users are aware of the particular dangers involved when they are injecting heroin.” Dr Cromie said injecting drug users known to Lanarkshire addiction services were being contacted to alert them to the problem. “The advice to drug users is to avoid all heroin use, which we recognise may be very difficult for drug users to follow,” he said. “Muscle-popping, skin-popping, and injecting when a vein has been missed are particularly dangerous. “Smoking heroin carries much less risk than injecting it. If there is any pain or swelling around an injection site drug users should seek urgent medical attention.” The worst outbreak of anthrax in the UK for 50 years occurred among drug users in Scotland between 2009 and 2010. A total of 119 cases were recorded with a total of 14 deaths during the outbreak.
Biohazard name:
Heroin containing anthrax
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.
Symptoms:
Status:
confirmed
Today
Biological Hazard
Canada
Province of Prince Edward Island, [Watershed region]
Watershed groups on P.E.I .are wading through rivers and streams Wednesday, checking to see if there are any dead fish. Parts of the Island got heavy rain Tuesday night and there’s concern about sediment that could have run into streams. Fred Cheverie, head of the Souris Watershed group, said about 75 millimetres of rain fell in that area. “So we’re just out checking the streams … the water’s pretty high in most of all the streams,” Cheverie said. “Everything looks good so far, we haven’t encountered anything. We hit some crucial zones so things are looking pretty good. We definitely have some red water. Some siltation in the water all right but everything’s no problem so far.” Other watershed groups and environment officials are also checking streams.
Biohazard name:
Mass. Die-off (fishes)
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Symptoms:
Status:
25.07.2012
HAZMAT
United Kingdom
England, Gravesend [Cascades Leisure Centre, Thong Lane]
A swimming pool had to close after a chlorine leak – just as the school holidays got under way. Fire crews were called to Cascades Leisure Centre, Thong Lane, Gravesend, at 10.30pm yesterday. The pool remained closed today on what was expected to be one of the hottest days of the year so far, but was expected to re-open as soon as it had been given the all-clear by plant engineers. Ambulance crews were put on standby today, but did not attend. A Kent Fire and Rescue spokesman said: “We were called out to a chemical drum that had a spillage in the swimming pool plant room. The building was evacuated as a precaution. “Crews in chemical suits removed the chemical and handed back to building management at about 1am.” A Gravesham council spokesman said: “There was a chemical incident at Cascades Leisure Centre about 10pm last night. “The incident was in the pool plant room and involved a chemical reaction in the system. The fire and rescue service was called. The pool was empty at the time. “The pool remains closed this morning as a precautionary measure. The water has been replaced and the chemicals changed. Suppliers are coming to site to investigate the incident.”
25.07.2012
HAZMAT
USA
State of Minnesota, Willmar [Rice Park (wading pool)]
A Willmar city worker was treated at Rice Memorial Hospital for a chemical reaction experienced while performing maintenance work Tuesday on the Rice Park wading pool. The man’s identity and condition were not released. The pool had been closed for the maintenance work, and no children were endangered, reported Willmar Police Capt. James Felt. Emergency responders were waiting to meet with the worker to learn what chemical or chemicals he was using and apparently spilled in the small maintenance building at the pool site. A Willmar EMS team transported the worker by ambulance to the hospital while Willmar police, fire and the Kandiyohi County Rescue and the Hazardous Materials Emergency Assistance Team, or HEAT responded shortly after 1 p.m. Tuesday. Police cordoned off the area around Rice Park, located between Second and Third Streets and Rice and Kandiyohi Avenues. Police evacuated residents in several homes on Third Street located downwind of the pool for about 1½ hours. Officers also diverted traffic.
About 10 or 11 people were in their homes at the time and very cooperative with the need to evacuate, according to Willmar Police Sgt. Michael Markkanen. “If it had to happen, it was not a bad time to do it,’’ he said. Few people were at home, and most homes were sealed with their air conditioning units running. Also, a steady, southeast breeze of about 8.5 miles per hour kept any possible fumes from the heavy-traffic area of First Street South, only a block from the park. The decision to evacuate the area was based on the initial concern that chlorine or another hazardous material could be leaking. Two Willmar firefighters, also members of the Kandiyohi County Hazardous Material Emergency Assist Team, donned hazardous material suits to enter the pool building. They isolated the chemicals used by the worker, and placed them in a sealed container for safe transportation and handling. As they worked, two other members of the hazardous materials team waited in standby, and two Willmar firefighters using self-contained breathing apparatus also were in standby. City Administrator Charlene Stevens said the name of the employee will not be released due to privacy concerns. Steve Brisendine, director of Willmar Community Education and Recreation, said information to him was not complete as of Tuesday afternoon. His department oversees the operations of the wading pool.
Researchers lower plankton nets over the side during a scientific expedition in northern waters. Credit: Beth Stauffer/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
For the first time, scientists have identified tropical and subtropical species of marine protozoa living in the Arctic Ocean. Apparently, they traveled thousands of miles on Atlantic currents and ended up above Norway with an unusual-but naturally cyclic-pulse of warm water, not as a direct result of overall warming climate, say the researchers.
On the other hand: arctic waters are warming rapidly, and such pulses are predicted to grow as global climate change causes shifts in long-distance currents.
Thus, colleagues wonder if the exotic creatures offers a preview of climate-induced changes already overtaking the oceans and land, causing redistributions of species and shifts in ecology. The study, by a team from the United States, Norway and Russia, was just published in the British Journal of Micropalaeontology.
The creatures in question are radiolaria-microscopic one-celled plankton that envelop themselves in ornate glassy shells and graze on marine algae, bacteria and other tiny prey.
Different species inhabit characteristic temperature ranges, and their shells coat much of the world’s ocean bottoms in a deep ooze going back millions of years; thus climate scientists routinely analyze layers of them to plot swings in ocean temperatures in the past. The new study looks at where radiolarians are living now.
In 2010, a ship operated by the Norwegian Polar Institute netted plankton samples northwest of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, about midway between the European mainland and the North Pole. When the coauthors analyzed the samples, they were startled to find that of the 145 taxa they spotted, 98 had come from much farther south-some as far as the tropics.
Furthermore, the southern radiolaria were in different sizes and apparently different stages of growth for each species, indicating they were reproducing, despite the harsh conditions.
It was the first time since modern arctic oceanographic research began in the early 20th century that researchers had spotted a living population of such creatures in the northern ocean.
Coauthor O. Roger Anderson, a specialist in one-celled organisms at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said, “When we suddenly find tropical plankton in the arctic, the issue of global warming comes right up, and possible inferences about it can become very charged. So, it’s important to examine critically the evidence to account for the observations.”
He said the invaders were apparently swept up in the warm Gulf Stream, which travels from the Caribbean into the north Atlantic, but usually peters out somewhere between Greenland and Europe. Oceanographers have previously shown that sometimes pulses of warm water penetrate along the Norwegian coast and into the arctic basin; such pulses have occurred in the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s.
Further, the authors say that well-dated fossils of foraminifera-protozoans closely related to radiolaria-found on the arctic seafloor suggest that warm-water plankton may have temporarily established themselves at least several times before-around 4200 and 4100 BC, and again around 220, 370 and 1100 AD.
“All the evidence is that this isn’t necessarily immediate evidence of global warming of the ocean,” said Anderson. Lead author Kjell Bjorklund, of the University of Oslo Natural History Museum said of the invaders, “This doesn’t happen continuously-but it happens.”
That said, oceanographers have noted that such pulses seem to be coming more often and penetrating further-”exactly what one would expect from global warming,” said Rainer Froese, an oceanographer at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research who tracks fish global populations. Could this be the start of a switch in currents predicted by climate models?
The most recent pulse began in the early 1980s, and has lasted more or less to the present. Even without that, the arctic ocean itself is warming rapidly; with progressive loss of summer sea ice over past decades, average surface temperature has gone up as much as 5 degrees centigrade (9 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1950 in some patches.
Physical oceanographers have different ideas on the mechanics of how more southerly water–and the things living in it–may arrive in the arctic. However, most agree that it will happen if climate keeps warming, said Arnold Gordon, head of Lamont’s division of ocean and climate physics, who was not involved in the research.
For one, a countercurrent running near Greenland, the North Atlantic Polar Gyre, normally wards off the Gulf Stream; but that gyre is predicted to slow with warming. Atlantic currents might also respond to changing wind patterns, or to the increasing fresh water now pouring into the northern ocean from melting sea ice and glaciers. Either way, this could draw more southerly water into the north, said Gordon.
Louis Fortier, an arctic oceanographer at Laval University in Quebec, said of the recent injections of southerly waters, “Whether or not [such] intrusions are signs of this predicted increased advection in response to climate change, nobody can tell yet, I believe. But for me, the observations so far certainly support the models.”
Paul Snelgrove, a specialist in cold-ocean studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland, agreed. “The question is, are these kinds of incursions becoming more frequent and stronger? If it continues, the case would become more persuasive. Right now, this study is not a definitive test, but it seems like an intriguing teaser as to what might happen.”
Whatever the answer, this is the first time a living population of southern radiolaria has been found so far north. Radiolaria live only about a month, so it must have taken 80-some generations for some species to make the five- to seven-year trip, say the authors. On the way, successive generations could have adapted to colder waters.
In 2009, the surface water in the sample area measured an extraordinary 7.5 degrees C (about 45.5F). A year later, when the samples were taken, it was down to a more normal level of 3.5C (38F), and yet the radiolarians were still there.
However, the fast-changing nature of the ocean makes their presence in the arctic hard to interpret, said Paul Wassman, an arctic biologist at the University of Tromso in Norway. Marine creatures routinely travel vast distances on currents.
Water temperatures may vary widely in the same latitude. Populations of some creatures may live for a while in a narrow tongue of temperate water, then wink out once that gets too diluted, he said.
Bjorklund, Anderson and their coauthor Svetlana Kruglikova of the P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanography in Moscow note that it is uncertain whether the southern invaders are still there; they have not gotten any new samples since 2010.
In any case, changes in global ocean ecology are already being detected in many places. Warmer-water species are marching poleward, much as creatures are on land, where butterflies have been shifting ranges northward about 6 kilometers per decade, and amphibians and migratory birds are breeding an average of two days earlier.
A 2011 global study on the impact of climate change on fisheries says that many marine species are moving poleward or into deeper, cooler waters in response to warming–among other places, along the U.S. east coast, the Bering Sea, and off Australia.
The North Sea, off Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, has warmed about 2 degrees F in the last 50 to 100 years; there, 15 of 36 fish species studied have moved northward; fish more common nearer the Mediterranean-anchovy, red mullet, sea bass-are being caught by commercial fishermen, while cod, which prefer colder waters, are moving out.
There is also evidence that zooplankton similar to the radiolaria are shifting northward in the North Atlantic. In the Pacific, poisonous algal blooms harmful to the shellfish industry are being detected farther north, into Alaskan waters.
In the arctic itself, earlier and faster melting of sea ice in the summer appears to be shifting plankton species assemblages toward smaller types. This could ultimately damage the food web that feeds much larger creatures, including seals, walruses and whales, said Jody Deming, a biologist at the University of Washington who studies arctic microbes.
In an email, Deming said the new paper “presents an intriguing observation (warmer species making it into Arctic waters and surviving at least on the short term), but without more knowledge of how living radiolarians fit into the larger ecosystem, as both prey and predator, potential impacts on the whole ecosystem cannot be predicted reliably or at all really.”
The big question, said Bjorklund, is what happens next. In the future, radiolaria may serve as useful indicators of how currents, and ecology, are changing. There are at least 60-some radiolaria species peculiar to the arctic; they may be quite different from the new arrivals, but too little is known about the life cycles of either group to say how either will react if they meet on a long-term basis, and how this might affect arctic ecosystems.
Of the southerly radiolaria, Bjorklund said, “Will they adapt? Will they perish? Will they mix with the native fauna?” He said that he and his colleagues are anxious to receive new samples to find out.
Copies of the paper, “Modern incursions of tropical Radiolaria in the Arctic Ocean” are available from the authors or the Earth Institute press office.
[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.]
Small, short explosion rocks Cleveland Volcano in Aleutians
The Alaska Volcano Observatory says a small explosion at Cleveland Volcano in the Aleutian Islands may have sent up a small ash cloud
Associated Press
The Alaska Volcano Observatory says a small explosion at Cleveland Volcano in the Aleutian Islands may have sent up a small ash cloud.
Clouds prevented satellite observation of an ash cloud.
The observatory says the explosion at 1:12 p.m. Wednesday was of short duration and similar to small events in December. Those explosions created ash clouds that dissipated quickly and did not affect air traffic.
Cleveland Volcano is a 5,675-foot peak on an uninhabited island 940 miles southwest of Anchorage.
Time to ditch the umbrella? 20 million hit by drought in southeast England
By Ian Johnston, msnbc.com
London has an undeserved reputation as a rainy city, with “things to do” when the U.K. capital is wet a popular topic of conversation among tourists.
But this year could see that image shattered in dramatic fashion, with much of southeast England gripped by a serious drought currently affecting about 20 million people.
Restrictions on the use of water were imposed Thursday from the southeast coast to the River Humber in the north and almost as far west as Wales.
By the time the Olympics comes to London in July, further controls could be introduced that will prevent aircraft, London’s famous double-decker buses and other vehicles from being washed. Other restrictions are also likely.
Brits revel in gloom ahead of London Olympics
Those arriving for the greatest show on Earth, may find a parched, somewhat grubby city. The event itself, however, will be exempt, so rest assured there will be water in the diving pool, the rowers will not in find themselves marooned and the smiles of the synchronized swimmers will remain fixed.
(Reuters) – About 4 million hectares of crops are suffering from a severe drought in China that has hit 13 provinces including the major farming province of Sichuan in southwest China, state news agency Xinhua said.
The drought has left 7.8 million people and 4.6 million livestock without adequate drinking water in provinces including Yunnan, Hebei, Shanxi and Gansu as of Thursday, Xinhua said.
The dry spell has dried reservoirs and threatens spring planting, the agency said, citing the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.
The province of Yunnan in southwest China, which borders Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, is so far the worst hit, Xinhua said, without giving details.
China, which has just 6 percent of the world’s fresh water resources but a fifth of its population, is frequently gripped by drought.
Last year parts of the country suffered their worst drought in 50 years, officials said, with rainfall 40 to 60 percent less than normal, damaging crops and cutting power from hydroelectric dams.
A drought in the top sugar-producing province of Guangxi last year also led to a surge in imports as China tried to ease tight sugar supply.
(Reporting by Koh Gui Qing, editing by Jane Baird)
Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says
Kate Ravilious
for National Geographic News
Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet’s recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist’s controversial theory.
Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Get an overview: “Global Warming Fast Facts”.)
Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.
In 2005 data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide “ice caps” near Mars’s south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.
Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.
“The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars,” he said.
Booms and Light Flashes in Baraboo, Wisc. – April 5, 2012
Uploaded by Sheilaaliens on Apr 5, 2012
http://sheilaaliens.net/?p=501 “BARABOO (WKOW) — It’s not just Clintonville–Baraboo Police are investigating weekend reports of booms and flashes of light.
Neighborhoods on Baraboo’s southwest side woke early Sunday morning to a loud boom and less than an hour later, another one. Both booms accompanied by a flash of light. More than a dozen callers described the sounds of an explosion, blasting dynamite or a gunshot.
A police officer on duty was parked along 8th Street at about 1:45 a.m. Sunday when he heard the boom and saw the flashing light. He immediately thought a transformer blew.
“When those things go off they make a really loud pop and usually there’s a flash of light as they’re surging off the electricity,” says Chief Mark Schauf.
But it wasn’t. Alliant Energy told authorities they had no outages or transformer problems.
27 Storm Track meteorologists say it is highly unlikely that what Baraboo experienced was weather related, because no storms traveled through the area–leading Schauf to the only explanation he can think of…fireworks.
“There’s no evidence to suggest that there’s anything other than a man made cause at hand,” he says.
But many of those who’ve heard it say it sounded much more intense. We talked to a few people in Baraboo who say they heard the booms but had no idea what it was.
Many people have commented on our Facebook page, some saying the fireworks explanation is plausible, others say there has to be something else authorities are missing.
Police say there’s little they can do now, unless the city hears more booms.”
After receiving reports of a massive die-off of dolphins along Peru’s north coast, BlueVoice Executive director Hardy Jones traveled to the scene. Working with Dr. Carlos Yaipen Llanos, Hardy covered 135 kilometers of beach and found 615 dead dolphins. At the moment he cause is unknown. Research into the die-off will continue.
NOTE THIS VIDEO DOES NOT IMPLY THE WORLD IS GOING TO END IN 2012
JANUARY FEBUARY and MARCH 2012 BIBLE PROPHECY UNFOLDING CLINTONVILLE BOOMS, RUMBLING, EARTHQUAKES, STRANGE WEATHER AND EARTH CHANGES. CALAMITY UPON THE EARTH.
Tepco Reports Another Radioactive Water Leak at Fukushima Plant
By Tsuyoshi Inajima
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said as much as 12 tons of radioactive water leaked from a pipe at its crippled Fukushima nuclear station, the second such incident in 11 days at the same pipeline, raising further doubts about the stability of the plant.
Part of the water may have poured into the sea through a drainage ditch, Osamu Yokokura, a spokesman for the utility, said by phone. The company known as Tepco stopped the leak from a pipe connecting a desalination unit and a tank today, he said.
“There will be similar leaks until Tepco improves equipment,” said Kazuhiko Kudo, a research professor of nuclear engineering at Kyushu University, who visited the plant twice last year as a member of a panel under the Nuclear and Industry Safety Agency. “The site had plastic pipes to transfer radioactive water, which Tepco officials said are durable and for industrial use, but it’s not something normally used at nuclear plants,” he said. “Tepco must replace it with metal equipment, such as steel.”
Tepco has about 100,000 tons of highly radioactive water accumulated in basements at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear station nearly 13 months after the March 11 quake and tsunami caused meltdowns and the worst radiation leaks since Chernobyl. The tsunami knocked out all power at the station, causing cooling systems for reactors to fail. The utility was forced to set up makeshift pumps to get cooling water to the reactors, with most of it then draining into basements.
China Builds Scores of Dams in Earthquake Hazard Zones
TORONTO, Canada, April 4, 2012 (ENS) – More than 130 large dams built, under construction, or proposed in western China’s seismic hazard zones could trigger disasterous environmental consequences such as earthquakes and giant waves, finds a new report from the Canadian watchdog group Probe International.
The report shows that 98.6 percent of the dams being constructed in western China are located in high to moderate seismic hazard zones.
The location of large dams near clusters of recorded earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 4.9, and especially when the earthquake focal points are also close to the surface, “is cause for grave concern,” said the report’s author geologist “John Jackson.”
John Jackson is a pseudonym for a geologist with detailed knowledge of western China who wishes to remain anonymous to protect his sources.
Water rushes through the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in central China (Photo by Marshall Segal)
In a worst-case scenario, Jackson reports, dams could collapse, creating a giant wave that would inundate everything in its path, including downstream dams, causing great loss of life and property.
Should a dam suffer catastrophic collapse, says Probe International Executive Director Patricia Adams, Chinese citizens could direct their anger to the hydropower industry for threatening their lives with dangerous dams.
[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.]
Significant increase in the activity of the volcano Nevado del Ruiz, Colombia
BY: T
Nevado del Ruiz seems to be getting closer to a new eruption. INGEOMINAS reports that during the last week, there has been a significant increase in the activity of the volcano, which can be summarized as follows:
- From March 27, there have been phases of volcanic tremor pulses related probably to deep magma movements
- Since the last week, there were seismic signals interpreted with rock fracturing, i.e. dike intrusions, located west of the active crater. Similar seismic activity was observed prior to the eruptions in November 1985 and September 1989, although this time it is less energetic.
- On March 29 at 10:54 local time, for a period of 25 minutes, there were over 135 earthquakes located south of Arenas crater at a depth of about 4 km.
- From 04:00 am local time on 31 March, there has been a significant increase in seismicity of events associated with fluid movements and fracturing of rock located in the active crater.
- SO2 emissions continue at high levels.
According to the diagnosis made so far, INGEOMINAS expects an eruption in the coming weeks, but smaller in size than those in November 1985 and September 1989.
A 1.2-magnitude earthquake hit Shanghai Monday night just as a brief thunderstorm struck, causing no casualties but raising public concern online because of the coincidental timing.
It also happened to occur a day after the local seismological bureau had dismissed any possibility that Shanghai might suffer serious damages should another major tsunami be unleashed by a powerful earthquake off Japan.
A prediction by a Japanese government-commissioned panel of another big Japan earthquake had made headlines in local media, with locals fearing the predicted 34-meter-high tsunami waves, caused by a potential 9.0-magnitude earthquake near the Japanese coast, would inundate Shanghai.
Just as locals breathed a sigh of relief reading a no-worry clarification from the seismological authority, many were surprised Monday night to feel several seconds of strong building shaking from the local earthquake.
The city’s seismological bureau said the 1.2-magnitude quake took place at 11:27pm, with the epicenter in Minhang District at a depth of just 10 kilometers.
Given its shallow depth, the slight-magnitude quake was still obvious enough to be felt by many locals, seismological officials said.
“Did I just feel an earthquake? Who else felt the same?” read a post, and many like it, sweeping through Weibo.com, a twitter-like social-networking platform, minutes after the quake. Curious netizens discussed the scope of affected areas by reporting where they felt it.
Hosepipe bans affecting about 20 million customers have been introduced by seven water authorities in parts of southern and eastern England.
People who flout the bans, which follow one of the driest two-year periods on record, face fines of up to £1,000.
Suppliers Thames, Southern, South East, Anglian, Sutton and East Surrey, Veolia Central and Veolia South East have all introduced “temporary use bans”.
The government has urged householders to be “smarter about how we use water”.
Using a hosepipe to water a garden, water plants, fill a pond not containing fish, or clean outdoor surfaces are all banned as are filling and maintaining ornamental fountains.
But exemptions are in place for grass and surfaces used for national and international sports which means the Olympic and Paralympic games will be unaffected.
Disabled people with blue badges are exempt, while some businesses, including car washing firms, will also be allowed to continue using hosepipes in most areas.
And some drip irrigation systems featuring perforated hoses are allowed…..
“Extreme weather is fast becoming the new normal. Canada and much of the United States experienced summer temperatures during winter this year, confirming the findings of a new report on extreme weather.”
Extreme weather is fast becoming the new normal. Canada and much of the United States experienced summer temperatures during winter this year, confirming the findings of a new report on extreme weather.
For two weeks this March most of North America baked under extraordinarily warm temperatures that melted all the snow and ice and broke 150-year-old temperature records by large margins.
Last year the U.S. endured 14 separate billion-dollar-plus weather disasters including flooding, hurricanes and tornados.
A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released Mar. 28, provides solid evidence that record-breaking weather events are increasing in number and becoming more extreme. And if current rates of greenhouse gas emissions are maintained, these events will reach dangerous new levels over the coming century.
Massive Gas Leak Could Be the North Sea’s Deepwater Horizon
—By Julia Whitty
A natural gas well in the North Sea 150 miles off Aberdeen, Scotland, sprung a massive methane leak on March 25. The 238 workers were all safely evacuated. But the situation is so explosive that an exclusion zone for ships and aircraft has been set up around the rig, reports the Mail Online. And nearby rigs have been evacuated, reports the New York Times:
Royal Dutch Shell said it closed its Shearwater field, about four miles away, withdrawing 52 of the 90 workers there; it also suspended work and evacuated 68 workers from a drilling rig working nearby, the Hans Deul.
But that’s not the worst of it. The platform lies less than 100 yards/meters from a flare that workers left burning as crew evacuated. The French super-major oil company owner of the rig, Total, dismissed the risk, while the British government claimed the flame needs to burn to prevent gas pressure from building up. But Reuters reports:
[O]ne energy industry consultant said Elgin could become “an explosion waiting to happen” if the oil major did not rapidly stop the leak which is above the water at the wellhead.
The circumstances that ended the last ice age, somewhere between 19,000 and 10,000 years ago, have been unclear. In particular, scientists aren’t sure how carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, played into the giant melt.
New research indicates it did in fact help drive this prehistoric episode of global warming, even though it did not kick it off. A change in the Earth’s orbit likely started of the melt, setting off a chain of events, according to the researchers.
The ambiguity about the end of the ice age originates in the Antarctic. Ice cores from the continent reveal a problematic time lag: Temperatures appeared to begin warming before atmospheric carbon dioxide increased. This has led scientists to question how increasing carbon dioxide – a frequently cited cause for global warming now and in the distant past – factored into the end of the last ice age. Global warming skeptics have also cited this as evidence carbon dioxide produced by humans is not responsible for modern global warming.
But the data from Antarctica alone offer too narrow a perspective to represent what was happening on a global scale, according to lead study researcher Jeremy Shakun of Harvard University…..
[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.]
By Michael,
Call your Congressmen and Senators immediately and demand that the recent budget cuts do not affect the security of America’s borders. The Federal Government wastes billions of dollars on things they should not even be involved in, but securing our country’s borders is one of the jobs that the federal government is actually supposed to do!
