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Anshel Pfeffer
Information Clearing House 2013-01-29 17:52:00
According to the report, the explosion in Fordow seriously damaged many of the centrifuges in the plant and trapped underground 240 employees who have yet to be rescued. But if this is true, why have the major news networks dismissed it? The Internet has been abuzz over the last couple of days with an uncorroborated report regarding a huge explosion in the underground uranium enrichment plant at Fordow in Iran. According to the report, the explosion seriously damaged many of the centrifuges in the plant and trapped underground 240 employees who have yet to be rescued. If this is true, it will be the most serious sabotage caused yet to the Iranian nuclear program. If this is true. The main problem with the report is that no supporting evidence has appeared so far from any reliable sources to corroborate it, nor have verifiable statements been released from an official source in Iran or any other country. Most main Western news organizations with contacts and sources in the intelligence community have steered well away from the story. (In Israel, only the tabloid Yedioth Ahronoth, which splashed the story on the front page of its Sunday edition, took notice of the story.) By Monday morning, a few respectable media organizations seemed to be taking the news more seriously than when it first emerged, but carried little information or details that could verify the report. | |
Comment: The UN backs Iran's stance that there was no explosion at Fordow.
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Land Destroyer Report
2013-01-29 17:38:00
Documents allegedly "hacked"belonging to UK-based defense contractor Britam (official website here) appear to show the company considering an offer from Qatar to use Libyan chemical weapons in Homs, Syria in order to frame both the Syrian and Russian governments. The plan involves using Britam's Ukrainian mercenaries and Soviet-era chemical weapon shells brought in from Libya's large, Al Qaeda-linked, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) controlled arsenals.
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Bruce Riedel
Daily Beast 2013-01-20 17:32:00
The overthrow of the Saudi royals is finally a possibility. In an excerpt from a new Brookings Institution briefing book for Obama's second term, Bruce Riedel on what a catastrophe it would be for Obama. Saudi Arabia is the world's last absolute monarchy. Like Louis XIV, King Abdullah has complete authority to do as he likes. But while a revolution in Saudi Arabia is still not likely, the Arab Awakening has made one possible for the first time, and it could come in President Obama's second term. Revolutionary change in the kingdom would be a disaster for American interests across the board. Saudi Arabia is America's oldest ally in the Middle East, a partnership that dates to 1945. The United States has no serious option for heading off a revolution if it is coming; we are already too deeply wedded to the kingdom. Obama should ensure the best possible intelligence is available to see a crisis coming and then try to ride the storm. Still , the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a proven survivor. Two earlier Saudi kingdoms were defeated by the Ottoman Empire and eradicated. The Sauds came back. They survived a wave of revolutions against Arab monarchies in the 1950s and 1960s. A jihadist coup attempt in 1979 seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca but was crushed. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda staged a four-year insurrection to topple the Sauds and failed less than a decade ago. Saudi al Qaeda cadres remain in the kingdom and next door in Yemen. | |
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David Edwards
Raw Story 2013-01-29 17:14:00
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Monday said the U.S. Constitution was "dead, dead, dead" and lashed out at school child who he said had visited the high court with the wrong view of the document. During a lecture at Southern Methodist University to promote their second book together, SMU law professor Bryan A. Garner noted that "my political beliefs are different from those of Justice Scalia," according to The Dallas Morning News. Garner explained that he was in favor of marriage rights for LGBT people and additional laws to control firearms. | |
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Diving Blackhawks, blank rounds of machine gun fire, strafing runs, troops rappelling from choppers, and road blockades. Local police + military. All over the skies of Miami at night, just a few days ago. According to this local TV clown in the video, this event was for the purposes of "meeting requirements," preparing for overseas military drills, and making sure the equipment is in check. Can you say schmuck? The paramilitary personnel chose to conduct this just as a Miami Heat game was coming to a conclusion and traffic and people were clogging in the streets. And of course, no one knew this was only a show, and not the real thing. Again, here's the official story for the hopelessly hapless who believe it: |
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CBS Miami
2013-01-25 16:10:00
Some members of the U.S. military were busy in Miami Thursday night as they conducted exercises in Downtown Miami. CBS4 captured video of Black Hawk helicopters flying over the city as part of a joint military training exercise. | |
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Jessica Willey
KTRK 2013-01-28 16:06:00
The sight of Army helicopters and the sound of gunfire created a lot of concern Monday afternoon in one Houston neighborhood. We received a lot of phones calls, Tweets and Facebook posts from worried neighbors, wondering what was going on. SkyEye 13 HD was over the south side where at first look, it appeared there was a massive SWAT scene happening. With military helicopters flying above her southeast Houston neighborhood, Frances Jerrals didn't know what to think. | |
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Ahmed Al-Haj
Associated Press 2013-01-29 14:56:00
Yemeni authorities have seized a ship in the nation's territorial waters carrying explosives and weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles, the state news agency reported Tuesday. The U.S. said the ship came from Iran. The report said Yemen's coast guard intercepted the ship last week in an operation coordinated with the U.S. Navy. It did not say why news of the interception was not announced earlier. The report said the vessel's eight crew members were Yemenis. | |
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Jim Forsyth
WOAI News Radio 1200 2013-01-15 14:48:00
A Texas lawmaker says he plans to file the Firearms Protection Act, which would make any federal laws that may be passed by Congress or imposed by Presidential order which would ban or restrict ownership of semi-automatic firearms or limit the size of gun magazines illegal in the state, 1200 WOAI news reports. Republican Rep. Steve Toth says his measure also calls for felony criminal charges to be filed against any federal official who tries to enforce the rule in the state. "If a federal official comes into the state of Texas to enforce the federal executive order, that person is subject to criminal prosecution," Toth told 1200 WOAI's Joe Pags Tuesday. He says his bill would make attempting to enforce a federal gun ban in Texas punishable by a $50,000 fine and up to five years in prison. | |
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Paul Bedard
Washington Examiner 2013-01-20 14:44:00
In the most strident warning over gun control to President Obama yet, the Utah Sheriffs' Association is pledging to go to war over any administration plan to take guns away, even if it means losing their lives. Calling the Second Amendment a sacred right of citizens to protect themselves from "tyrannical subjugation," the association state elected sheriffs said in a new letter, "we are prepared to trade our lives for the preservation of its traditional interpretation." Theirs is the first meaningful proof that some in law enforcement and the military are preparing to fight federal forces if the president wins his goal of sweeping gun control. | |
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Antonio Pampliega
Agence France-Presse 2013-01-29 14:25:00
The bodies of at least 65 young men, all executed with a single gunshot to the head or neck, were found on Tuesday in a river in Aleppo city, adding to the grim list of massacres committed during Syria's 22-month conflict. The gruesome discovery came as international envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi was scheduled to brief the United Nations Security Council in New York. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 65 bodies were found in the Quweiq River, which separates the Bustan al-Qasr district from Ansari in the southwest of the city, but that the toll could rise significantly. A Free Syrian Army officer at the scene, Captain Abu Sada, said at least 68 bodies had been recovered and that many more were still being dragged from the water, in a rebel-held area. A senior government security source said many of the victims were from Bustan al-Qasr and had been reported kidnapped earlier. | |
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RT.com
2013-01-29 14:17:00
DARPA has revealed the ARGUS-IS its mega digital camera - with a 1.8-gigapixel resolution. The camera is expected to take clear images of objects as small as 15 centimeters from an altitude of six kilometers. DARPA has revealed the ARGUS-IS its mega digital camera - with a 1.8-gigapixel resolution. The camera is expected to take clear images of objects as small as 15 centimeters from an altitude of six kilometers. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is an agency of the US Department of Defense, has finally revealed details of their next-generation eye in the sky - the ARGUS-IS. The super high-resolution photo system is expected to be attached to drones and used for precision guided air surveillance. The so called "Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance - Imaging System" (ARGUS-IS) is described as one of the highest-resolution surveillance systems in the world. | |
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RT.com
2013-01-29 14:14:00
Ron Paul said US assistance to the French intervention in Mali is a sign that the Obama administration is creeping into another war - especially since questions about the extent of US involvement remain largely unanswered. The recently retired congressman outlined his fears in his weekly column, "Texas Straight Talk". Paul said that while the US has only announced its transport and intelligence assistance to the French initiative, "this is clearly developing into another war". "President Obama last week began his second term by promising that 'a decade of war is now ending,'" Paul wrote. "As he spoke, the US military was rapidly working its way into another war, this time in the impoverished African country of Mali." Paul believes that unanswered questions about possible US involvement on African soil further indicates that Obama has been more active in the conflict than he admits, and that Congress has been kept out of the loop. | |
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Amanda Marcotte
Raw Story 2013-01-29 14:07:00
I reported two days ago on a New Mexico state legislator named Cathrynn Brown who introduced a bill banning abortion for rape victims that required jail time for rape victims who dare refuse to continue a pregnancy forced upon them. She got a lot of attention for this, and so she's now doing what Republicans do when caught being too openly hostile towards victims of gender-based violence, and backtracking. Now she claims she didn't mean for women seeking to end rape-induced pregnancies to see jail time for "destroying evidence" (yeah right), and she's rewriting the bill to clarify that you'll only do time if you help a rape victim end a pregnancy. Which means that providers will be threatened with jail. But just to be clear: She's specifically trying to ban abortion for rape victims. She wants New Mexico to be a state where any man can decide at any point in time to forcibly impregnate a woman, and that woman is barred legally from doing anything about it. | |
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David Edwards
Raw Story 2013-01-29 13:53:00
A Catholic bishop who was instrumental in creating California's Proposition 8 says that same sex marriage is a natural impossibility and granting marriage rights for LGBT couples "is like legalizing male breastfeeding." Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone recently told the Catholic Herald that the "truth is clear" that it "discriminates against no one" to insist that children have a mother and a father. "Every child has a father and a mother, and either you support the only institution that connects a child with their father and mother or you don't," he insisted. "Adoption, by a mother and father, mirrors the natural union of a mother and father and provides a balanced, happy alternative for when a child may not be reared by their biological parents." Cordileone warned Catholics not to use the Bible as a defense when arguing against marriage rights because "you will play into their hands and they will say you use religion to control people." | |
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| Society's Child |
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RT.com
2013-01-29 17:18:00
A 22-year-old Ohio father was arrested for posting a photo on Facebook of himself holding his baby daughter and a BB gun. Dominic Gaines was charged with child endangerment for posing in a photo with his 1-year-old daughter, Paradise Gaines, while also holding what was mistaken for a deadly weapon. Police say the gun was positioned too close to the baby girl to be considered safe. The child's mother discovered the picture and the maternal grandmother called the police. Authorities in Colerain Township, Ohio, initially believed that Gaines was holding a handgun . "It's really been blown out of proportion," the young man's father, Wilson Dykes, told Fox 19, further explaining that the BB gun was pointed toward the ground. While in court on Monday, Gaines referred to the incident as a misunderstanding and explained that he was playing with the gun while visiting relatives, WLWT reported. "What had happened was he had his nephews over, as well as his daughter, they were all playing. He was playing with a BB gun with his nephews. His brother walked in and wanted to take a picture of him with his daughter, he incidentally happened to be holding the BB gun in the picture," said attorney Andy Schoenling. | |
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Philip Caulfield
NY Daily News 2013-01-29 16:29:00
Dustin Canup, 20, and Sareena Morrison, 18, schemed to blackmail a man offering his 6-year-old daughter for sex and kidnap the child. Undercover police busted them with weapons and handcuffs at a motel in Loveland, Colo. A Colorado couple was busted in a disturbing scheme to lure child sex abusers to a hotel room, rob them and then kidnap their children, authorities said. Dustin Canup, 20, and Sareena Morrison, 18, were busted at a motel in Loveland on Friday in a sting set up by undercover police, Denver's Channel 7 reported. Cops said the pair posted messages on Internet sex sites targeting men willing to sell their children for sex. After receiving a tip from someone who had seen their posting, Loveland police reached out to the couple posing as a man willing to pimp out his 6-year-old daughter, the station reported. | |
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John Hall
The Independent 2013-01-29 16:26:00
Neil Heslin was testifying at a local hearing on firearm control at the time The father of a six-year-old boy who was killed in the Sandy Hook school massacre has reportedly been heckled by pro-gun activists while testifying at a local hearing on firearm control. Neil Heslin, whose son Jesse was among the 27 victims of last month's massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, was giving an emotional account of his son's death when activists apparently interrupted him, shouting "the second amendment". Mr Heslin held a large framed photograph of Jesse as he spoke, saying: "It's not a good feeling. Not a good feeling looking and your child laying in a casket or looking at your child with a bullet wound in his forehead." | |
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Katie McDonough
Salon 2013-01-29 14:28:00
North Dakota State University returned $1.2 million in sex ed. funds because of pressure from anti-choice activists Last year, a pair of researchers at North Dakota State University won a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families to start a sexual health program aimed at preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases in at-risk teens. But as Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones reports, the school had contracted Planned Parenthood to provide the services, and antiabortion activists in the state started complaining about NDSU doing business with the nationwide women's health - and in states other than North Dakota, abortion services - provider. "When I see something that says this is Planned Parenthood - they're not even a part of the state of North Dakota. They don't serve anyone in North Dakota, and they shouldn't be a part of North Dakota. They're not a part of how we do business in this state," said Rep. Bette Grande on a local radio show denouncing Planned Parenthood and NDSU. "It is an overt abortion industry that we don't want to be a part of," she added. | |
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Michael Winter
USA Today 2013-01-29 14:21:00
Judge agrees with jury that five heart-attack deaths during massive arson blaze were murder. Following a jury's recommendation, a California judge Monday sentenced a prison rapist to death for starting a massive 2003 wildfire that caused five fatal heart attacks, which jurors decided was murder. Rickie Lee Fowler, 31, was convicted in August of first-degree murder and arson for tossing a road flare into bone-dry brush above San Bernardino in October 2003 because his godfather had kicked him out of his house, the Riverside Press-Enterprise says. Dubbed the Old Fire, it burned for nine days across 142 square miles in the mountains east of Los Angeles, killing five men fighting or escaping flames that destroyed more than 1,000 homes, cabins and other structures. The blaze was one of several that swept across Southern California at the time. | |
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ahram online
2013-01-29 14:12:00
Rescue team successfully offloads 112 passengers from sinking vessel near Upper Egyptian city of Kom Ombo. A cruise ship carrying 112 Egyptian passengers sank in the Nile River on Tuesday evening after crashing into large rocks, Al-Ahram's Arabic-language news website has reported. | |
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David Edwards
Raw Story 2013-01-29 14:04:00
A 75-year-old man has been charged for the murder his doctor, 52-year-old urologist Dr. Ronald Gilbert, in Newport Beach, California. KTLA identified Stanwood Fred Elkus as the person suspected of shooting Gilbert at around 2:45 p.m. on Monday. Elkus had reportedly been receiving treatment for a prostate problem. According to The Jewish Press, Gilbert, who was an orthodox Jew, was shot six or seven times in the torso as he was preparing to perform surgery on Elkus at Hoag Hospital. "What's going on with the world today?" nephrology laboratory office supervisor Kristen Cotty remarked to the Orange Country Register. "I mean, schools, now I got to worry about going to work. This has got to stop." | |
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Fars News Agency
2013-01-29 05:12:00
Twenty people died in a plane crash near Almaty in Southwestern Kazakhstan. A civilian aircraft carrying 15 passengers and five crew members on board has crashed in the Central Asian state on Tuesday. Media reports said that the passenger jet went down near Almaty, the country's financial capital. "Twenty people were on board, five crew members and 15 passengers" and all of them died in the incident, Kazakhstan's SCAT airline said in a statement. "According to preliminary information there are no survivors," it added. The plane, whose make was not immediately made clear, was flying to Almaty from the northern city of Kokshetau. | |
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Greg Moran
U-T San Diego 2013-01-29 12:55:00
A San Diego Superior Court judge sentenced Patricia Corby, a Carmel Valley woman who drowned her 4-year-old autistic child in a bathtub in March, to 15 years to life in prison Monday. Corby had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on Dec. 27 for killing her son, Daniel, on March 31. Judge Charles Gill handed down the sentence at a hearing where distraught relatives of Daniel blasted the 37-year-old mother for killing her son. "You are a loathsome person, and you deserve everything you get," said Duane Corby, the boy's father. During the hearing, Patricia Corby sobbed loudly and hung her head, at one point moaning, "Stop, stop," at the harsh comments from family members. | |
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news.com.au
2013-01-29 12:51:00
At least eight bodies were found in a well in northern Mexico on Sunday near the site where 20 people went missing late last week, including members of a Colombian-style band, according to a state forensic official. Gov. Rodrigo Medina told a local television station that four of the bodies had been pulled from the well, and said it could hold as many as 10 cadavers. Mr Medina said experts were still working to identify the corpses, but noted "we have evidence that indicates that (the bodies) may very well be the members of this band." The Nuevo Leon State Investigative Agency was still working at the well in a vacant lot in the town of Mina near the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, and the body count could rise, the forensic official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case. | |
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Marc Lallanilla
LiveScience 2013-01-29 09:14:00
To provide complete care for its residents, Chaseley Trust - a venerable British nursing facility housed in an ornate seaside mansion - offers amenities such as a movie theater, a gymnasium and a pool table. It also, from time to time, invites prostitutes and strippers to provide their services to residents. "People have needs," said manager Helena Barrow, as quoted in The Sun. "We are there to help. We respect our residents as individuals so that's why we help this to happen. If we refused, we would not be delivering a holistic level of care." The revelation has ignited a nationwide debate over the rights of the disabled, and over the role of sex in assisted living facilities. The local East Sussex County Council has started an investigation into the home's use of strippers and prostitutes, according to The Inquisitr. "This has the potential to place vulnerable East Sussex residents at risk of exploitation and abuse," a council spokesman told The Inquisitr. Nonetheless, Barrow claims the practice has the support of Chaseley's staff, who said they might otherwise be sexually harassed by the residents - some of whom are as young as 18 years and have neurological conditions. | |
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Rob Bleaney
Mirror 2013-01-29 10:54:00
Brazilian wife accused of planting toxic substance on her genitals before luring her husband to bed A woman is being sued by her husband for allegedly trying to kill him by putting poison in her genitals and then asking him to perform oral sex. The Brazilian wife is accused of planting a toxic substance on her genitals before luring her husband to bed. | |
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RT.com
2013-01-29 10:22:00
A plane has crashed in Kazakhstan with five cabin crew members and at least 15 passengers on board, Interfax reported, quoting local Emergency Ministry workers. Reuters, however, quoted a list published by the prosecutor-general's office which said the number of people killed in the crash was 21, not 20. The plane, which according to reports is a Challenger-200, crashed near Almaty, the largest city in the country. At 1:15pm local time (7:15 GMT) it disappeared from radar. The passengers were mostly business professionals, with one child among those on board, local authorities said. The plane broke into several parts after falling to the ground, they added. | |
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Eric W. Dolan
Raw Story 2013-01-29 10:13:00
The California Highway Patrol hopes to locate a group of drivers who briefly shut down the I-880 near Oakland by doing donuts in the middle of the highway. A YouTube video entitled "Idiots start drifting in the middle of the highway" showed about half a dozen tuned cars driving in circles and peeling out as traffic piled up behind them. | |
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David Edwards
Raw Story 2013-01-29 09:54:00
A 69-year-old war veteran and former missionary was arrested over the weekend on the suspicion of killing a 22-year-old Cuban immigrant who mistakenly arrived in his driveway because of faulty GPS directions. Gwinnett County jail records obtained by The Atlanta Journal Constitution indicated that Phillip Walker Sailors was charged on Sunday with the murder of Rodrigo Abad Diaz. Friends who were in the car with Diaz told WSB-TV that they were trying to pick up a friend on the way to ice skating on Saturday but their GPS directed them to the wrong address. The friends said that they waited in the driveway for a few minutes before Sailors emerged from the house and fired a gun into the air. | |
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| Secret History |
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Tia Ghose
LiveScience 2013-01-28 14:00:00
Scientists have unearthed and dated some of the oldest stone hand axes on Earth. The ancient tools, unearthed in Ethiopia in the last two decades, date to 1.75 million years ago. The tools roughly coincided with the emergence of an ancient human ancestor called Homo erectus, and fossilized H. erectus remains were also found at the same site, said study author Yonas Beyene, an archaeologist at the Association for Research and Conservation of Culture in Ethiopia. Collectively, the finding suggests an ancient tool-making technique may have arisen with the evolution of the new species. "This discovery shows that the technology began with the appearance of Homo erectus," Beyene told LiveScience. "We think it might be related to the change of species." The findings were described today (Jan. 28) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. | |
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| Science & Technology |
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Adam Vaughan
Raw Story 2013-01-29 09:51:00
Once common sightings of hedgehogs are becoming rare in the UK's gardens, parks and hedgerows, say ecologists The once common sight of hedgehogs in gardens could become a thing of the past, with the spiny species having suffered a dramatic decline in recent years on a par with the loss of starlings, red squirrels and other quintessentially British wildlife. Ecologists this week published figures suggesting hedgehog numbers declined by over a third between 2003 and 2012. Such a precipitous drop means the hedgehog, celebrated in culture from Beatrix Potter's Mrs Tiggy-Winkle to Philip Larkin's poetry, is becoming an increasingly rare sight in the UK's gardens, parks and hedgerows. | |
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Yahoo News / ANI
European Space Agency's Venus Express has made unique observations of Venus during a period of reduced solar wind pressure, that the planet's ionosphere balloons out like a comet's tail on its nightside. For Earth, which has a strong magnetic field, the ionosphere is relatively stable under a range of solar wind conditions.2013-01-29 07:40:00 But by comparison, Venus does not have its own internal magnetic field and relies instead on interactions with the solar wind to shape its ionosphere. Venus Express' new results have revealed for the first time the effect of a very low solar wind pressure on the ionosphere of an unmagnetised planet. The observations were made in August 2010 when NASA's Stereo-B spacecraft calculated a drop in solar wind density to 0.1 particles per cc, around 50 times lower than normally observed this persisted for about 18 hours. |
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Agence France-Presse
2013-01-28 18:41:00
Recycling entrepreneur Tom Szaky is stubbing out the world's cigarette problem -- one butt at a time. The 30-year-old who dropped out of Princeton University to start his innovative company TerraCycle in Trenton, New Jersey, says there's no such thing as trash, even when you're talking about the contents of ashtrays. In a program started in May in Canada and now running from the United States to Spain, TerraCycle collects cigarette butts from volunteers and turns them into plastic, which can be used for anything, even ashtrays themselves. The discarded cigarettes, which litter countries around the world, are first broken up, with the paper and remaining tobacco composted. The filter, made of a plastic called cellulose acetate, is melted down and turned into an ingredient for making a wide range of industrial plastic products, such as pallets -- the trays used to ship heavy goods. It seems that for once smoking benefits everyone. The tobacco industry, happy to get some decent publicity, pays TerraCycle. Volunteer collectors win points per butt, which can then be redeemed as contributions to charities. Sidewalks start looking cleaner. And TerraCycle, which sells recycled products to retailers like Walmart and Whole Foods, gets more business. | |
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Dr.Tony Philips
Talk about a close shave. On Feb. 15th an asteroid about half the size of a football field will fly past Earth only 17,200 miles above our planet's surface. There's no danger of a collision, but the space rock, designated 2012 DA14, has NASA's attention.Science@NASA 2013-01-28 18:26:00 "This is a record-setting close approach," says Don Yeomans of NASA's Near Earth Object Program at JPL. "Since regular sky surveys began in the 1990s, we've never seen an object this big get so close to Earth."
Earth's neighborhood is littered with asteroids of all shapes and sizes, ranging from fragments smaller than beach balls to mountainous rocks many kilometers wide. Many of these objects hail from the asteroid belt, while others may be corpses of long-dead, burnt out comets. NASA's Near-Earth Object Program helps find and keep track of them, especially the ones that come close to our planet. 2012 DA14 is a fairly typical near-Earth asteroid. It measures some 50 meters wide, neither very large nor very small, and is probably made of stone, as opposed to metal or ice. Yeomans estimates that an asteroid like 2012 DA14 flies past Earth, on average, every 40 years, yet actually strikes our planet only every 1200 years or so. | |
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| Earth Changes |
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Andrea Thompson
OurAmazingPlanet 2013-01-29 12:11:00
After an Arctic blast left much of the United States out in the cold, a new system is bringing the threat of severe weather to the central portions of the country this evening and through the night. A satellite snapped an image of the system earlier this morning (Jan. 29). The National Weather Service's (NWS) Storm Prediction Center, located in Norman, Okla., has forecast severe thunderstorms, with damaging winds and hail - and possibly even tornadoes - for the lower Ohio Valley, the mid-South and the lower Mississippi Valley. The SPC says the threat will increase through the night, with squall lines (or long lines of thunderstorms) and individual storms rolling through along with a cold front. Nighttime storms and tornadoes can be particularly deadly, as people tend to be in bed and unaware of warnings and the storms are harder to see as they bear down. A 2008 study in the American Meteorological Society's journal Weather and Forecasting found that nighttime tornadoes were 2.5 times as likely to cause a death as those that occurred in the daytime. The threat of deadly nighttime tornadoes is exacerbated in the winter with the season's shorter daylight hours. | |
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Rob Gutro
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center 2013-01-29 16:47:00
NASA satellite imagery revealed that Cyclone Felleng is packing some powerful thunderstorms with overshooting cloud tops. An overshooting (cloud) top is a dome-like protrusion that shoots out of the top of the anvil of a thunderstorm and into the troposphere. It takes a lot of energy and uplift in a storm to create an overshooting top, because usually vertical cloud growth stops at the tropopause and clouds spread horizontally, forming an "anvil" shape on top of the thunderstorms. During the night-time hours (Madagascar local time) of Jan. 28, NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured a night-time image of Cyclone Felleng when it was located northwest of Madagascar. The image was created at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was false colored to reveal temperatures. The image showed some pretty cold overshooting cloud tops, topping at ~170K (-153.7F/ -103.1C). The image also showed some interesting gravity waves (waves in the atmosphere) propagating out from the storm in both the thermal (infrared) and visible imagery. The infrared imagery also showed that Felleng has strengthened significantly since the previous day as convective bands of thunderstorms are wrapping more tightly into the eye. | |
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James Grubel
Business Day 2013-01-29 16:39:00
Massive summer floods have killed four people and forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes across two Australian states on Tuesday, disrupting air and rail travel and coal production. A deluge fed by the ex-tropical cyclone Oswald dumped more than 200mm of rain in some areas of the Queensland and New South Wales states over the past three days, swelling rivers and swamping towns. The worst-hit areas were around Bundaberg, Rockhampton and Ipswich in Queensland, and around the northern New South Wales towns of Grafton and Lismore. | |
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George Roberts
ABC News 2013-01-29 16:32:00
More than two dozen people have been killed, injured or are missing as a result of a landslide caused by heavy rain on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. By last night, 14 people had died in the muddy landslip, a further nine were injured and six were still missing. The side of a hill in Agam, west Sumatra, slid away on Sunday, wiping out homes, rice paddies and an orchard. | |
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Greg McCune
Reuters 2013-01-29 16:20:00
A wide area of the central and southeast U.S. faces the unusual threat of tornadoes in January over the next 12 to 18 hours as an approaching cold front clashes with unusually warm air, a meteorologist said on Tuesday. The first tornado warning of the approaching storm was issued on Tuesday for western Missouri, said meteorologist Bill Bunting at the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. A warning is intended to signal residents to take cover because a tornado could be forming. A less urgent tornado watch is in effect for a region from extreme northeast Texas through virtually all of Arkansas, western Tennessee and extreme southern Illinois. "It's a little unusual," Bunting said of the tornado threat. "We don't see this every winter with this kind of warmth preceding a storm system." | |
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The Bristol Post
2013-01-29 16:15:00
Snow, hail, heavy rain and thunder - the North Somerset area has experienced it all over the past two weeks. And now the wild weather has caused a spectacle in the Bristol Channel, with local people capturing a picture of what appears to be a mini tornado in the estuary. This picture was taken by Sue Hewitt, of Downend, who spotted the event while out walking along the coastal path between Clevedon and Portishead at around 1pm on Sunday. | |
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Raw Story
2013-01-29 14:02:00
Coral reefs in the Caribbean are producing less than half of the key ingredient that makes their calcium skeleton compared to pre-industrial times, scientists said on Tuesday, describing the findings as "extremely alarming." The amount of new calcium carbonate being added by coral reefs is at least half, and in some places 70 percent lower, than it was thousands of years ago. Biologists have long sounded the alarm for reef-building corals, on which nearly half a billion people depend for their livelihood from fishing and tourism. Previous research has estimated that coral cover is declining by as much as two percent per year in parts of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. In the Caribbean, cover has shrunk by around 80 percent on average since the mid-1970s. | |
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John Vidal
Guardian 2013-01-29 10:51:00
Report shows vast forest, shared by India and Bangladesh, is being rapidly destroyed by environmental change A vast mangrove forest shared by India and Bangladesh that is home to possibly 500 Bengal tigers is being rapidly destroyed by erosion, rising sea levels and storm surges,according to a major study by researchers at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and others. The Sundarbans forest took the brunt of super cyclone Sidr in 2007, but new satellite studies show that 71% of the forested coastline is retreating by as much as 200 metres a year. If erosion continues at this pace, already threatened tiger populations living in the forests will be put further at risk. | |
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Adam Taylor
Business Insider 2013-01-29 10:45:00
Several buildings have fallen into an enormous sinkhole in Guangzhou, China, destroying at least five shops and taking out power for 3,000 residential units nearby, Shanghaiist reports. The sink hole was 300 square meters wide (3229.2 square feet), and appears to be growing. Thankfully there does not appear to be any injuries at present. This video shows the moment the sinkhole expanded, taking out much of the building and creating a chaotic scene.
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Comment: We find it interesting that the number of sinkholes are increasing... is the planet literally 'opening up'?
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John Vidal
Guardian 2013-01-29 10:38:00
Rapid erosion and rising sea levels are increasingly threatening the existence of islands off the coast of Bangladesh and India School teacher Nurul Hashem lives in a grass hut set among coconut palms and pine trees, just yards from a pristine beach on the sparkling Bay of Bengal. It sounds idyllic, but he longs to return to the island of Kutubdia, 50 miles away, where his family home has been swallowed by ever-rising tides and is now out at sea under several feet of water. To make matters worse, the local government, which welcomed him when he arrived three years ago, wants him and thousands of other families who have fled to the coast from the island, to make way for an airport and hotel developments. Kutubdia is one of many islands off Bangladesh and India affected by increasingly rapid erosion and some of the fastest recorded sea-level rises in the world. These "vanishing islands" are shrinking dramatically. Kutubdia has halved in size in 20 years, to around 100 sq km. Since 1991, six villages on the island of fishermen and saltworkers have been swamped and about 40,000 people have fled. Like Hashem, most have relocated to the coast near Cox's Bazar. | |
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Stephen C. Webster
Raw Story 2013-01-29 10:07:00
Land that roughly 50 percent of Americans call home is under threat from the coastal effects of climate change, a study published Tuesday (PDF) by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warns. "An increase in the intensity of extreme weather events such as storms like Sandy and Katrina, coupled with sea-level rise and the effects of increased human development along the coasts, could affect the sustainability of many existing coastal communities and natural resources," report co-author Virginia Burkett, of the U.S. Geological Survey, said in an advisory. The study warns that approximately 50 percent of Americans live in coastal watershed communities - a number that is projected to grow - that face increasing flood risks due to storm surges, extreme weather and rising sea levels as the climate grows more unpredictable. These risks are compounded by changes to coastal ecosystems brought about by human activity, causing "toxic algal blooms" and depleted fish stocks, loss of wetlands and dying coral reefs. | |
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CBC News
2013-01-29 09:25:00
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is investigating after dozens of dead seals were found on a beach and in the waters off Prince Edward Island. A group of students from the Charlottetown-based Atlantic Veterinary College found as many as 50 dead seals over the weekend. The students came upon the bloody carcasses of grey seals either dead or dying. Many of seals were pups.
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Anatolia News Agency
2013-01-27 19:32:00
Meric-Ipsala road in the Thrace region of Turkey has been shut down to motor vehicle traffic on Sunday due to heavy snowfall which began in Edirne province. Aside from the Meric-Ipsala road, 37 village roads have also been shut down to traffic due to heavy snowfall in the region. Road crews are working to open the Meric-Ipsala road to traffic again on Sunday. Snow thickness at Uludag, one of the favorite skiing centers of Europe, reached 215 centimeters on Sunday. The Weather Department of the north-western province of Bursa said that they expected snowfall at Uludag on both Sunday and Monday. | |
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Brian Mastre, Chase Moffitt
WOWT 2013-01-28 18:10:00
An underground electrical equipment fire caused a power outage in parts of downtown Omaha Sunday night. As of 10:30 a.m. Monday, OPPD reported less than 100 customers in the area were still without power. The outage stretches from 11th Street to just west of 20th, from Leavenworth to Farnam. OPPD said it plans to have power restored by sometime Monday evening. Due to the outage, the Douglas County Courthouse will be closed Monday. Those who are scheduled to appear in court are being sent next door to the Douglas County City building. The MUD building at 17th and Harney is closed until further notice.
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| Fire in the Sky |
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Ofelia Garcia Hunter
A suspicious loud noise or explosion was heard about 10:30 p.m. Saturday by residents in Alice, but law enforcement officials weren't able to pinpoint the source.Alice Echo-News Journal 2013-01-26 16:01:00 Some reports said it came from the southside area and others said it was near the Alice airport. But sources so far have not located anything. Acting Police Chief Albert Martinez said the department received about 15 calls that night about the boom, but were unable to locate anything. He added that a sonic boom was a strong possibility. |
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John L. Ross
Corbin, Kentucky - "It sounded like an explosion."The Times-Tribune 2013-01-28 19:51:00 "I thought I heard thunder." "It may have been a sonic boom." "We felt the house shake." "I heard something twice." "My wife and I felt an earthquake." Dozens of reports similar to this flooded all areas of law enforcement Wednesday, from Whitley County, to Laurel, Knox and McCreary counties. The general consensus is the first "boom" was approximately at 1 p.m., the second around 2 p.m. However, as of press time, no official answers were available. "There's no determination yet that this was a quake," said Whitley County Sheriff Colan Harrell. "This was just a real freak thing." |
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Tim Ciesco
Roanoke, Virginia -- An object that looked like a giant fireball made a brief appearance in the sky at around 9:30pm Sunday -- and while no one can say with 100 percent certainty what it was, experts tell us they have a pretty good idea.WSLS 2013-01-28 19:45:00 Aerospace Corporation -- a federally funded research and development center based in California that works with the Air Force and NASA -- says the timing and witness descriptions are consistent with a satellite that fell back into Earth's atmosphere. That satellite, called Cosmos 1484, was launched by the Soviet Union back in 1983. Sightings were reported from Canada all the way down to Georgia. Aerospace says that's a much greater distance than you typically see with these events, which is why they're continuing to investigate. The American Meteor Society received several dozen reports, including a handful from our region. "I've never seen anything like this in all the meteor showers I've observed," posted Raymond, who lives in Amherst County. "It had a glowing train that was sparking like it was on fire," wrote Sarah, who lives in Bassett. We were unable to find anyone who had a picture or video of the fireball. Aerospace says it can be difficult to capture because these events usually last for less than a minute. There were no reports of any space debris hitting the ground. Aerospace says any falling pieces of the satellite likely landed in the ocean. |
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| Health & Wellness |
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Evan Bleier
Opposing Views 2013-01-29 16:19:00
Jack Andraka of Crownsville, Md., has developed a simple test which allows for detection of mesothelin, a biological indicator for early stage pancreatic cancer. The dip stick test, which can be used with either blood or urine, may revolutionize the treatment and detection of the deadly disease which currently kills 19 out of 20 sufferers due largely to the fact that it is so hard to diagnose before it's too late. By using his test, pancreatic cancer patients now have a chance to find out about the disease with enough time to take advantage of medical treatment. Andraka is optimistic that with enough early warning, patients will now have a survival rate that is close to 100 percent. Similar to the way diabetic testing strips work, Andraka's test require only a drop of blood to determine whether patients carry the mesothelin biomarker. | |
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Eric W. Dolan
Raw Story 2013-01-29 10:10:00
Warmer than average winters could result in more severe flu epidemics, according toresearch published Monday in PLOS Currents: Influenza. The study mathematically analyzed climate patterns and cases of influenza in the U.S. from 1997 to the present. Though mild winters tended to reduce the spread of influenza, the following year often brought an early and severe outbreak because of lessened immunity. "It appears that fewer people contract influenza during warm winters, and this causes a major portion of the population to remain vulnerable into the next season, causing an early and strong emergence," said Sherry Towers of Arizona State University, the lead author of the study. | |
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Raw Story
2013-01-29 09:45:00
Pollution levels in Beijing soared above index limits, the US embassy said, as a dense cloud of haze shrouded large swathes of northern China. People in the capital, some wearing masks, Tuesday battled through a second consecutive day of pollution at hazardous levels. Beijing municipal authorities warned those with respiratory difficulties to stay indoors. It is at least the fourth time a dense cloud of haze has descended on northern China this winter, reducing visibility and causing flight delays, with even state media repeatedly expressing anger over the issue. "The current environmental problems are worrisome," Wang Anshun, who took over as mayor of the Chinese capital this week, was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua news agency. | |
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David Evans
This study was published in the Lancet 2000 Oct 14;356(9238):1300-6Healthy Diets and Science 2013-01-28 00:00:00 Study title and authors: Calcium and fibre supplementation in prevention of colorectal adenoma recurrence: a randomised intervention trial. European Cancer Prevention Organisation Study Group. Bonithon-Kopp C, Kronborg O, Giacosa A, Räth U, Faivre J. Registre Bourguignon des Tumeurs Digestives, Faculté de Médecine de Dijon, France. This study can be accessed at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ Ispaghula husk is a soluble fibre that comes from a shrub-like herb, Plantago psyllium. Ispaghula husk is also known as psyllium, psyllium seed, psyllium husk, ispaghula or ispaghula seed. |
Comment: Learn more about the dangers of supplemental fiber:
Dietary fiber: the bull's sh*t in the china shop |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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Maureen Ellis
heraldscotland 2013-01-28 08:44:00
Scots doctors are to embark on a pioneering trial of technology similar to that used to manage depression and epilepsy in an attempt to 'rewire' the brains of stroke victims. Clinical researchers at Glasgow University are aiming to help patients overcome some of the physical disabilities caused by a stroke. The team from the university's Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences will undertake the world's first in-human trial of vagus nerve stimulation in stroke patients. Strokes, which affect 280 per 100,000 people in Scotland annually, can result in the loss of brain tissue and negatively affect various bodily functions from speech to movement, depending on the location of the stroke. The study, which will be carried out at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow, will recruit 20 patients who suffered a stroke around six months ago and who have been left with poor arm function despite receiving the best available treatment. Each participant will receive three one-hour sessions of intensive physiotherapy each week for six weeks to help improve their arm function. Half of the group will also receive an implanted Vivistim device, a vagus nerve stimulator, which connects to the vagus nerve in the neck. When they are receiving physiotherapy to help improve their arm, the device will stimulate the nerve. | |
Comment: Practitioners of the Éiriú Eolas program have been stimulating the vagus nerve in a natural way and reporting its benefits for years. You can also benefit from it ateebreathe.com
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| High Strangeness |
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The Local
2013-01-28 11:12:00
A building in the leafy suburbs of Berlin has been dubbed the house of doom after it emerged that nine people died unnatural deaths there in the last 15 years. Tabloid newspaper Bild dug up the details. Built just 25 years ago in the Gatow district of Spandau, the large house has been home to a brothel owner who ended up decapitated, the suicide pact of a British journalist and his lover, and the murder-suicide of an entire family. The most recent was scientist Lorin W., who earlier this month bumped his car into the vehicle in front at the traffic lights. When the driver rang the police, the Siemens employee tore off onto the motorway, where he lost control at a speed of 200kph and died in the crash. But Lorin W. was not the first to meet his maker in a nasty accident. A brothel owner who was renting the top floor apartment was decapitated while flying down the nearby Autobahn on his motorbike in 2003. | |
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Greg Newkirk
A curious bit of video that hit the internet on Friday shows strange "orbs" floating through the New Zealand sky.WhoForted? 2013-01-28 12:31:00 According to The Canadian, the first object was captured during day light hours from the North on 25 January 2013. And the the second object was captured toward the South at 9.45pm. Other than the models of camera used to make the capture, there doesn't seem to be much more information on the intriguing footage. They don't exactly look or move like any traditional aircraft, and they're far too slow to be a meteor. Give the footage a peek down below, and let us know what you think the orbs are.
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NewsdzeZimbabwe
2013-01-27 19:05:00
The survivor, Ms Clara Banda, who escaped with visible minor burns and eye injury, says the blast occurred soon after her counterpart, 24-year-old Speakmore Mandere, popularly known as Sekuru Shumba, beheaded the goblin. She claims to have miraculously escaped after failing to land the major role of conducting the ceremony. In a state of shock, she ran to her nearby home soon after the blast. According to Ms Banda, transport operator Mr Clever Kamuyedza approached Mandere seeking help to dispose of the troubling goblin. He was to pay $15 000 for the ritual. "The tragedy fell upon us while we were conducting the ceremony to dispose of the goblin that this businessman brought to Sekuru Shumba," said Ms Banda. According to the traditional healer, Mr Kamuyedza acquired a money-spinning goblin from a nearby country to boost the fortunes of his transport business. He, however, decided to dispose of it after it started "to make extreme demands.'' Mandere is said to have assembled a team of traditional healers including Ms Banda, to assist in conducting the ceremony. "After assembling the team, Sekuru Shumba invited Mr Kamuyedza, his wife and two of their associates to his home for consultations," said Ms Banda. "The consultations lasted three days during which we discussed whether or not we could handle this kind of ritual." | |
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Mike Lockley
Crop circles are not the work of hoaxers and aerial photos of the Black Country can prove it, says Australian boffin.Birmingham Mail, UK 2013-01-27 06:59:00
An Aussie historian believes he has buried forever the 'cereal' lie that crop circles are the work of hoaxers - by unearthing Black Country images of them dating back to 1945 and beyond. It's 'barley' believable, but Greg Jefferys has also uncovered evidence of the phenomenon in scientific documents dating back to 1880. The boffin, from Hobart, Tasmania, says his findings prove there's more to the mysterious circles than hoaxers playing silly tricks. "This discovery proves that claims by various artists to be the sole creators of crop circles are themselves a hoax," he says. "It just goes to show that the circles remain unexplained. "I hope this discovery will stimulate renewed interest in crop circles by serious scientific researchers who have been fooled by the hoax claims." Greg, aged 59, who cut his teeth locating shipwrecks, used Google Earth's new 1945 overlay - images of places taken 68 years ago - to make the breakthrough. | |
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| Don't Panic! Lighten Up! |
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Lindsay Jolivet
Yahoo! Canada News - Daily Buzz 2013-01-29 00:00:00
Manuela lived hidden in a store room for 30 years. She lived among broken electronic junk and she may have survived by eating termites. No, this isn't the story of a social recluse because Manuela is a turtle discovered by her family more than 30 years after she went missing, according to the Daily Mail. In 1982, builders conducting repairs on a house in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that belonged to the Almeida family, left the front door open. The Almeidas could not find the family turtle that day and never saw it again, until this month. After the father, Leonel, died, his wife and children began sorting through his possessions. |
