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Ian Cobain
The Guardian 2013-07-15 09:17:00
When Bilal Berjawi spoke to his wife for the last time, he had no way of being certain that he was about to die. But he should have had his suspicions. A short, dumpy Londoner who was not, in the words of some who knew him, one of the world's greatest thinkers, Berjawi had been fighting for months in Somalia with al-Shabaab, the Islamist militant group. His wife was 4,400 miles away, at home in west London. In June 2011, Berjawi had almost been killed in a US drone strike on an al-Shabaab camp on the coast. After that he became wary of telephones. But in January last year, when his wife went into labour and was admitted to St Mary's hospital in Paddington, he decided to risk a quick phone conversation. A few hours after the call ended Berjawi was targeted in a fresh drone strike. Perhaps the telephone contact triggered alerts all the way from Camp Lemmonier, the US military's enormous home-from-home at Djibouti, to the National Security Agency's headquarters in Maryland. Perhaps a few screens also lit up at GCHQ in Cheltenham? This time the drone attack was successful, from the US perspective, and al-Shabaab issued a terse statement: "The martyr received what he wished for and what he went out for." The following month, Berjawi's former next-door neighbour, who was also in Somalia, was similarly "martyred". Like Berjawi, Mohamed Sakr had just turned 27 when he was killed in an air strike. | |
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Comment: As explained above, "al-Qaida's resilience and
ability to spread" is entirely down to US and UK intelligence agencies
who understand that the only real threat out there is the threat they
face from the masses ever seeing what's really going on and removing
them from power.
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Robin D.G. Kelley
Counterpunch 2013-07-15 22:02:00
In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, Senator Rand Paul, Florida State Representative Dennis Baxley (also sponsor of his state's Stand Your Ground law), along with a host of other Republicans, argued that had the teachers and administrators been armed, those twenty little kids whose lives Adam Lanza stole would be alive today. Of course, they were parroting the National Rifle Association's talking points. The NRA and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative lobbying group responsible for drafting and pushing "Stand Your Ground" laws across the country, insist that an armed citizenry is the only effective defense against imminent threats, assailants, and predators. But when George Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, teenage pedestrian returning home one rainy February evening from a neighborhood convenience store, the NRA went mute. Neither NRA officials nor the pro-gun wing of the Republican Party argued that had Trayvon Martin been armed, he would be alive today. The basic facts are indisputable: Martin was on his way home when Zimmerman began to follow him - first in his SUV, and then on foot. Zimmerman told the police he had been following this "suspicious-looking" young man. Martin knew he was being followed and told his friend, Rachel Jeantel, that the man might be some kind of sexual predator. At some point, Martin and Zimmerman confronted each other, a fight ensued, and in the struggle Zimmerman shot and killed Martin. |
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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
PaulCraigRoberts.org 2013-07-13 00:00:00
The American people have suffered a coup d'etat, but they are hesitant to acknowledge it. The regime ruling in Washington today lacks constitutional and legal legitimacy. Americans are ruled by usurpers who claim that the executive branch is above the law and that the US Constitution is a mere "scrap of paper." An unconstitutional government is an illegitimate government. The oath of allegiance requires defense of the Constitution "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." As the Founding Fathers made clear, the main enemy of the Constitution is the government itself. Power does not like to be bound and tied down and constantly works to free itself from constraints. The basis of the regime in Washington is nothing but usurped power. The Obama Regime, like the Bush/Cheney Regime, has no legitimacy. Americans are oppressed by an illegitimate government ruling, not by law and the Constitution, but by lies and naked force. Those in government see the US Constitution as a "chain that binds our hands." The South African apartheid regime was more legitimate than the regime in Washington. The apartheid Israeli regime in Palestine is more legitimate. The Taliban are more legitimate. Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein were more legitimate. The only constitutional protection that the Bush/Obama regime has left standing is the Second Amendment, a meaningless amendment considering the disparity in arms between Washington and what is permitted to the citizenry. No citizen standing with a rifle can protect himself and his family from one of the Department of Homeland Security's 2,700 tanks, or from a drone, or from a heavily armed SWAT force in body armor. |
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| Puppet Masters |
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Anthony Effinger and Matthew Bristow
Bloomberg 2013-07-16 11:54:00
Gustavo Soler knew he was in trouble. It was 2001, and Soler was union president at a coal mine in Colombia owned by Drummond Co., which is controlled by the wealthiest family in Alabama. Soler's predecessor, Valmore Locarno, and Locarno's deputy, Victor Orcasita, had been killed seven months earlier, and now Soler was getting threats, says his widow, Nubia, in an interview in Bogota. He told his family to pack up. They would leave the area as soon as he got home from the union office in Valledupar, a city in the country's coal belt. He never made it. Armed men stopped his bus, asked for him by name and abducted him. He was found under a pile of banana leaves with two bullet holes in his head, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its August issue. |
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Eisa Ali
Press TV 2013-07-15 21:36:00
Parliament has had its hands full in recent months, with investigations ongoing into the tax arrangements of various multinational corporation. Following the tax scandal of several big corporations like Google, Amazon and Starbucks, now the tax affairs of Prince Charles has made the headlines across the country. An influential committee of MPs is going to see whether Prince Charles is paying enough taxes. The last time Prince Charles's representatives were in front of parliament he was accused of being the recipient of the biggest housing benefit scheme in the country. And Margaret Hodge, chairwoman of the committee stated she was uncomfortable with the prince's tax arrangements. So what are the numbers? As of 2011, the Duchy was estimated to be worth £762 million with about 131,000 acres of land. The prince was last year paid a record £19million, from which he wrote off almost £11 million as expenses for staff and to the different charities he is a patron of. However he paid only £4.4 million in income tax. As a crown body, the duchy is exempt from paying corporation tax. The £4.4 million he did pay as income tax is completely voluntary on his part and is paid at the highest rate. While laudable, would any other citizens be allowed to choose whether they'd like to pay tax or not? |
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Lu Hui
Xinhuanet 2013-07-15 09:22:00
Beijing -- Senior executives at Britain's largest drugmaker, GlaxoSmithKline, allegedly accepted cash rake-offs and paid bribes to officials and doctors to boost sales and prices of its drugs in China, police said on Monday. The company allegedly used at least four travel agencies to funnel more than 3 billion yuan ($489 million) in bribes since 2007, said Gao Feng, an economic crimes investigator with the Ministry of Public Security. Some travel agencies had offered sexual services to senior executives in GSK for four years to maintain business contacts, police said. This case, a focal event of the industry, is believed by insiders to act as an wake-up call for China's pharmaceuticals sector. The company said in a statement on Monday it was "deeply concerned and disappointed by these serious allegations of fraudulent behavior and ethical misconduct by certain individuals at the company and third-party agencies. "GSK has zero tolerance for any behavior of this nature. GSK shares the desire of the Chinese authorities to root out corruption. These allegations are shameful and we regret this has occurred." It pledged to "cooperate fully" with Chinese investigating authorities and said it had stopped using the travel agencies that have been identified so far. |
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Dr. Kevin Barrett
Press TV 2013-07-15 19:03:00
Is this the world's worst case of insurance fraud...ever? That's what many are saying, as the world's biggest real-estate swindler and the world's most corrupt judge meet in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. At issue: billions of dollars in loot from the demolition of the World Trade Center complex on September 11th, 2001. World Trade Center owner Larry Silverstein - who confessed on national television to "pulling" World Trade Center Building 7 - will appear in the courtroom of Judge Alvin Hellerstein at 500 Pearl St. in New York City. The non-jury trial, which is expected to last three days, will decide whether Silverstein is entitled to recover $3.5 billion from airlines and airport-related companies, in addition to the $4.9 billion he has already received for his "losses" on September 11th. The question on everyone's mind is: Why is Silverstein claiming that airliners destroyed his buildings, when he has already confessed to demolishing at least one of them himself? In the 2002 PBS documentary America Rebuilds, Silverstein admitted to complicity in the controlled demolition of WTC-7, a 47-story skyscraper that dropped into its own footprint in 6.5 seconds. The mysterious destruction of Building 7 has become the Rosetta Stone of 9/11. Virtually all independent experts who have studied the case, including thousands of architects and engineers, agree that the government's explanation - that a few small office fires somehow destroyed WTC-7 - is a non-starter. Building 7, these experts say, was obviously taken down in a controlled demolition, as Silverstein himself admitted. (A nationwide ad campaign called "Re-Think 9/11" will remind millions of Americans about Building 7 this September.) |
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| Society's Child |
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Daily Telegraph
2013-07-09 16:08:00
An investigation into how the teenager died began as it emerged that the plane's pilot Lee Kang-kuk, 46, was training and in the process of getting a licence for the Boeing 777, which he was landing at that airport for the first time. One of two Chinese schoolgirls who died in a plane crash in San Francisco may have survived the disaster only to be run over by a fire engine or ambulance. An investigation into how the teenager died began as it emerged that the plane's pilot Lee Kang-kuk, 46, was training and in the process of getting a licence for the Boeing 777, which he was landing at that airport for the first time. He had logged only 43 hours at the controls on nine flights in that aircraft. More than 180 people were injured, 49 of them seriously, when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 hit a sea wall at the start of the runway, ripping off its tail, on Saturday. |
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RT
2013-07-16 15:47:00
Tens of thousands of Greeks have abandoned their workplaces on Tuesday and rallied in front of parliament in the capital Athens against government plans to satisfy foreign lenders by firing public sector employees. It is the third and the largest general strike the crisis-hit country has experienced since the start of the year. The 24-hour walkout came a day before the Greek MPs vote on a series of unpopular reforms, which the European Union and International Monetary Fund say are obligatory if Greece want more financial aid. "The public sector still composes a major part of the Greek economy. These jobs are protected by the constitution since the end of the 19th century," RT's correspondent, Egor Piskunov, reports from Athens. |
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Shantasa Saling
Sott.net 2013-07-16 06:28:00
An 11 year old boy named Terry Smith Jr. disappeared from Menifee California on Saturday July 6th 2013. My family and I were involved in the search effort and my daughter is a classmate and acquaintance of the boy's older brother. I will share my observations of the events of this past week to the best of my ability in case you are unfamiliar with this story. Terry, known as JuJu, lived with his mother Shawna Smith and her lesbian partner Denise, his 14 year old half-sister Mary Atilano and his 16 year old half-brother Skylar Atilano, in a small rural community about half-way between, and a bit east of, Los Angeles and San Diego. Once a small farming town from California's early days, Menifee has grown to approximately 80,000 residents in the last few decades and only recently incorporated as a city. Terry's home was located in area that has seen very little change during the development boom and is referred to as "Old Menifee". That area is known for having pockets of poverty, with drug use rampant among a certain percentage of the population that is made up of mostly "old time" families that have lived in the valley since well before the boom. Terry's home is located in one of those pockets just south of the center of "Old Menifee", the Menifee Market. The community first became aware of Terry's disappearance on Sunday July 7th. The initial story circulating was that Terry's mother left for the evening at 7:30pm on Saturday to play on her pool league at a local bar and left 11 year Terry in bed, with his older brother Skylar looking after him. She returned late and did not check in on Terry until the next morning at 10:30 am when she realized he was missing. She notified police and news spread quickly in town that a small autistic boy had possibly wandered off and was lost in the rocky and desolate hills of Menifee in 100F temperatures wearing only basketball shorts and no shirt or shoes. Bloodhounds had traced his scent to the end of the dirt road near the family's home. Here is the Riverside County Sheriff's press release with a list of agencies that assisted in the effort. | |
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Comment: Sadly, stories of children murdering children -
assuming that this is what happened in this case - are all too common
in today's world. Although numerous charlatans are found among 'psychic
detective' types, a number of murder cases have been solved thanks to
tip-offs from people who can see/sense/intuit/read into the crimes.
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The Associated Press
2013-07-15 21:46:00
Palm Springs - Four months after he was found unconscious in a Palm Springs, Calif., motel, doctors are looking into the mystery of a Florida man who awoke with no memory of his past and speaking only Swedish. Michael Boatwright, 61, woke up with amnesia, calling himself Johan Ek, The Desert Sun reports. Boatwright was found unconscious in a Motel 6 room in February. After police arrived, he was transported to the Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs where he woke up. Hospital officials said Boatwright may have been in town for a tennis tournament in the Coachella Valley. He was found with a duffel bag of exercise clothes, a backpack and tennis rackets. He also carried four forms of identification - a passport, a California identification card, a veteran's medical card and a Social Security card - all of which identified him as Michael Thomas Boatwright. Palm Springs police have documented his information in case anyone lists Boatwright as missing or wanted, authorities said. In March, doctors diagnosed Boatwright with Transient Global Amnesia, a condition triggered by physical or emotional trauma that can last for several months. The rare mental disorder is characterized by memory loss, "sudden and unplanned travel," and possible adoption of a new identity, according to the Sun. |
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Paul Solotaroff
Rolling Stone 2013-04-25 21:21:00
This was some battle going on in that car, a cage match of warring colognes. Tevin Thompson, tall and soft-cheeked, had basted himself in Curve, swiped from the back of his parents' dresser, where the old man kept his more expensive smell-goods. Leland Brunson, small and snarky, the runt of the four-kid crew, was bumping Chanel and a couple of clashing lotions and smelled like mixed inserts from three men's mags. Jordan Davis, the prince - he of the red-hot girlfriend and every fly snapback sold online - was drenched in Armani and looking right. And Tommie Stornes, at the wheel of his Durango - well, who ever knew what Tommie was wearing? He kept the whole scent counter at Macy's in his car. True, he'd taken hours to get coifed and dressed to go girl-hunting at the mall, but as these boys liked to say, you can't rush greatness. They hit the Town Center mall around 5 p.m. and found it hip-to-hip with Christmas shoppers. On this, the first evening after Thanksgiving, all of Jacksonville was out and about, walking of the torpor of candied yams at the fanciest galleria in northern Florida. The boys did their best impression of premium shoppers, four well-raised black teens from middle-class homes trying hard to stand out by blending in. They talked to - but whiffed with - a few of the upscale "honeys," browsed the stores for high-priced sneakers that they mostly owned already (Tevin bought a new pair every payday; Jordan, who'd just landed his first after-school job, was breaking his father's wallet with his shoe game) and began to make their way toward the exits. Then Jordan spotted Aliyah, his beautiful, on-off girlfriend, who was finishing up her shift at Urban Outfitters. They'd been on the rocks for weeks over the silliest teenage nonsense - he'd bought roses on her birthday but wouldn't bring them to school, convinced his friends would clown him till graduation. Now, though, she smiled at him, and Jordan's heart went clattering around his rib cage. "They needed to get back together so he'd stop talking about her," says Tevin. "Every . . . …single . . . …day, it was Aliyah this, Aliyah that. We're all like, 'Damn it, dude: Just call her already. |
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Chris Hedges
Truthdig.org 2013-07-14 00:00:00
The security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising. The legal system has been grotesquely deformed in most cities to, in essence, shut public space to protesters, eradicating our right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The goal of the corporate state is to criminalize democratic, popular dissent before there is another popular eruption. The vast state surveillance system, detailed in Edward Snowden's revelations to the British newspaper The Guardian, at the same time ensures that no action or protest can occur without the advanced knowledge of our internal security apparatus. This foreknowledge has allowed the internal security systems to proactively block activists from public spaces as well as carry out pre-emptive harassment, interrogation, intimidation, detention and arrests before protests can begin. There is a word for this type of political system - tyranny. If the state is ultimately successful in preventing us from mobilizing in public spaces, then dissent will mutate from nonviolent mass protests to clandestine and perhaps violent acts of resistance. Some demonstrators have already been branded "domestic terrorists" under the law. The rear-guard effort by a handful of activists to protect our rights to be heard and peaceably assemble is perhaps the most crucial, though unseen, struggle we currently are engaged in with the corporate state. It is a struggle to salvage what is left of our civil society and our right to nonviolent resistance against corporate tyranny. This is why the New York City trial last week of members of Veterans for Peace, along with other activists, took on an importance that belied the simple trespassing charges against them. The activists were arrested Oct. 7, 2012, while they were placing flowers in 11 vases and reading the names of the dead inscribed on the wall in New York's Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza after the official closing time, 10 p.m. The defiance of the plaza's official closing time - which appears to be enforced against political activists only - was spawned by a May 1, 2012, protest by Occupy Wall Street activists. The Occupy activists had attempted to hold a meeting in the plaza and been driven out by police. A number of Veterans for Peace activists, most of them veterans of the Vietnam War, formed a line in front of the advancing police that May night and refused to move. They were arrested. |
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Judd Legum
Think Progress 2012-03-26 05:59:00
Over the last 48 hours, there has been a sustained effort to smear Trayvon Martin, the 17-year old African-American who was shot dead by George Zimmerman a month ago. Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, said, "They killed my son, now they're trying to kill his reputation." Thus far these attacks have fallen into two categories: false and irrelevant. Much of this leaked information seems intended to play into stereotypes about young African-American males. Here's what everyone should know: 1. Prominent conservative websites published fake photos of Martin. Twitchy, a new website run by prominent conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, promoted a photo - purportedly from Martin's Facebook page - that shows Martin in saggy pants and flipping the bird. The photo, which spread quickly on conservative websites and Twitter, is intended to paint Martin as a thug. As Twitchy later acknowledged, it is not a photo of Trayvon Martin. [Examiner] | |
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Matt Roper
Mail Online 2013-07-15 13:56:00
Authorities in Brazil have denounced church leaders as criminals for chopping down more than 300 centuries-old trees in a national park - so pilgrims can celebrate mass during the Pope's visit to Rio de Janeiro. Pope Francis will make his first international trip to the world's largest Roman Catholic country later this month. Organisers of an event in the diocese of Sao Sebastiao de Itaipu, in the city of Niteroi, claimed they needed to clear an area of Atlantic rainforest to accommodate the expected crowd of up to 800 pilgrims. |
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Mark Easton
BBC News 2013-07-15 13:35:00
A third of Britain is effectively off-limits to lower-income working families because private rents are unaffordable, a new report claims. The report comes from the Resolution Foundation, which campaigns on behalf of low to middle-income families. It says most of southern England is now beyond the reach of less affluent households. The housing minister said the report was "factually flawed" and failed to take housing benefit into account. With social housing usually unavailable and home ownership unaffordable for many first-time buyers, renting privately is often the only option for households on lower incomes. A BBC housing calculator also identifies how renting a modest two-bedroom home for less than £700 a month is almost impossible in London and much of the South East. Modest is defined as having a rent below 75% of similar properties in the area. |
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Mark Manson
Markmanson Net 2013-07-10 19:26:00
Imagine you have a brother and he's an alcoholic. He has his moments, but you keep your distance from him. You don't mind him for the occasional family gathering or holiday. You still love him. But you don't want to be around him. This is how I lovingly describe my current relationship with the United States. The United States is my alcoholic brother. And although I will always love him, I don't want to be near him at the moment. I know that's harsh, but I really feel my home country is not in a good place these days. That's not a socio-economic statement (although that's on the decline as well), but rather a cultural one. I realize it's going to be impossible to write sentences like the ones above without coming across as a raging prick, so let me try to soften the blow to my American readers with an analogy: You know when you move out of your parents' house and live on your own, how you start hanging out with your friends' families and you realize that actually, your family was a little screwed up? Stuff you always assumed was normal your entire childhood, it turns out was pretty weird and may have actually fucked you up a little bit. You know, dad thinking it was funny to wear a Santa Claus hat in his underwear every Christmas or the fact that you and your sister slept in the same bed until you were 22, or that your mother routinely cried over a bottle of wine while listening to Elton John. The point is we don't really get perspective on what's close to us until we spend time away from it. Just like you didn't realize the weird quirks and nuances of your family until you left and spent time with others, the same is true for country and culture. You often don't see what's messed up about your country and culture until you step outside of it. And so even though this article is going to come across as fairly scathing, I want my American readers to know: some of the stuff we do, some of the stuff that we always assumed was normal, it's kind of screwed up. And that's OK. Because that's true with every culture. It's just easier to spot it in others (i.e., the French) so we don't always notice it in ourselves. So as you read this article, know that I'm saying everything with tough love, the same tough love with which I'd sit down and lecture an alcoholic family member. It doesn't mean I don't love you. It doesn't mean there aren't some awesome things about you (BRO, THAT'S AWESOME!!!). And it doesn't mean I'm some saint either, because god knows I'm pretty screwed up (I'm American, after all). There are just a few things you need to hear. And as a friend, I'm going to tell them to you. And to my foreign readers, get your necks ready, because this is going to be a nod-a-thon. A Little "What The Hell Does This Guy Know?" Background: I've lived in different parts of the US, both the deep south and the northeast. I have visited most of the US's 50 states. I've spent the past three years living almost entirely outside of the United States. I've lived in multiple countries in Europe, Asia and South America. I've visited over 40 countries in all and have spent far more time with non-Americans than with Americans during this period. I speak multiple languages. I'm not a tourist. I don't stay in resorts and rarely stay in hostels. I rent apartments and try to integrate myself into each country I visit as much as possible. So there. (Note: I realize these are generalizations and I realize there are always exceptions. I get it. You don't have to post 55 comments telling me that you and your best friend are exceptions. If you really get that offended from some guy's blog post, you may want to double-check your life priorities.) OK, we're ready now. 10 things Americans don't know about America. |
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| Secret History |
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No new articles. |
| Science & Technology |
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Royal Astronomical Society
Astronomy 2013-07-04 16:18:00
Star Tau Boo's baffling magnetic flipsThe star Tau Boo rapidly flips its magnetic field, potentially because of its interaction with a planet six times Jupiter's mass. For the first time, astronomers have watched the complete magnetic cycle of a star other than the Sun. Tau Boötis, known as Tau Boo, is a yellowish star that is a little brighter than our Sun. It is located 51 light-years away and hosts a giant exoplanet about six times the mass of Jupiter that orbits Tau Boo every 3.3 days. In 2007, scientists saw that the magnetic field of Tau Boo flipped. Since then, the team has observed four reversals in polarity, confirming that the star has a rapid magnetic cycle of no more than two years - compared to 22 years for the Sun. "The Sun's magnetic field is a bit like a giant bar magnet, with a north pole and south pole," said team member Rim Fares of the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom. "Every 11 years, during solar maximum [the peak of sunspot activity], the Sun's poles swap over. It takes two flips to restore the magnetic field to its original orientation, so the Sun's magnetic cycle lasts 22 years. Tau Boo has the same magnetic behavior as the Sun, but its cycle is very fast compared to the solar one." This abrupt shift changes the environment surrounding the large exoplanet, and the reasons for Tau Boo's fast cycle are still unclear. |
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Suzanne Wu
Study has important potential for developmental learning disabilities including features of autism.University of Southern California 2013-07-15 08:49:00 A little bit of learned fear is a good thing, keeping us from making risky, stupid decisions or falling over and over again into the same trap. But new research from neuroscientists and molecular biologists at USC shows that a missing brain protein may be the culprit in cases of severe over-worry, where the fear perseveres even when there's nothing of which to be afraid. In a study appearing the week of July 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers examined mice without the enzymes monoamine oxidase A and B (MAO A/B), which sit next to each other in our genetic code as well as on that of mice. Prior research has found an association between deficiencies of these enzymes in humans and developmental disabilities along the autism spectrum such as clinical perseverance - the inability to change or modulate actions along with social context. "These mice may serve as an interesting model to develop interventions to these neuropsychiatric disorders," said senior author Jean C. Shih, USC University Professor and Boyd & Elsie Welin Professor of Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the USC School of Pharmacy and the Keck School of Medicine of USC. "The severity of the changes in the MAO A/B knockout mice compared to MAO A knockout mice supports the idea that the severity of autistic-like features may be correlated to the amounts of monoamine levels, particularly at early developmental stages." |
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Ronald P. Millett
Meridian Magazine 2013-07-15 22:13:00
Remnants from the collision of over twenty fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994 still comprise 95% of the detectible water in Jupiter's atmosphere today. This discovery was possible thanks to one of the last observation missions of the infrared Herschel Space Telescope. A few days after the observation, the Herschel spacecraft ran out of its liquid helium coolant and will now have to be shut down.[1] An article now online from the May 4, 2013 issue of ScienceNews reports on research showing the detection of upper atmosphere water deposits that originated with the comet's collision with the massive planet.[2] "In July 1994, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plowed into Jupiter, and the comet fragments triggered dark scars of debris in the giant planet's atmosphere that were visible for weeks. The comet also left behind a more permanent deposit: millions of gallons of water. Water from the impact still makes up at least 95 percent of the water in the planet's upper atmosphere, researchers report April 23 in Astronomy & Astrophysics." |
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Tia Ghose
LiveScience 2013-07-15 21:56:00
Hold on to your wand, Harry Potter: Science has outdone even your best "Leviosa!" levitation spell. Researchers report that they have levitated objects with sound waves, and moved those objects around in midair, according to a new study. Scientists have used sound waves to suspend objects in midair for decades, but the new method, described today (July 15) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, goes a step further by allowing people to manipulate suspended objects without touching them. This levitation technique could help create ultrapure chemical mixtures, without contamination, which could be useful for making stem cells or other biological materials. |
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NBC Bay Area
2013-07-15 17:45:00
He's trying to revolutionize the automobile, and now he wants to do the same thing to mass transit. In an intriguing tweet posted Monday, Musk (@elonmusk) promises that on Aug. 12 he will unveil a new mass transit method which will revolutionize travel. He calls his invention the Hyperloop. Experts speculate it could be a series of pneumatic tubes that move passengers along a river of air. Musk has long been critical of California's proposed bullet train and predicts his Hyperloop will get passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes. The bullet train would make the trip in three hours.
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| Earth Changes |
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The Town Talk
2013-07-16 17:14:00
An Assumption Parish official says the deepest part of the 22-acre sinkhole near Bayou Corne is at least 500 feet deep, and not between 110 to 220 feet deep that has been estimated by Texas Brine. John Boudreaux, director of the Assumption Parish Office of Homeland Security, said previous depth reports released by Texas Brine Co. may have been inaccurate because the company's sonar did not penetrate debris fields inside the sinkhole. The swampland hole emerged last August after a Texas Brine salt dome cavern failed deep underground. That failure forced the evacuation of 350 residents for almost a year. |
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Lauren Strapagiel
Canada.com 2013-07-16 16:47:00
It was a wild day of weather yesterday in parts of Saskatchewan as a large storm cell made its way through the province. Much of the southern part of the province were put on alert with tornado and severe thunderstorm watches through the afternoon and evening. Although it wasn't quite as "Oklahoma-style" as Weather Network chief meteorologist Chris Scott predicted on Twitter, it sure packed a wallop. |
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Sara Wilson
Residents of Irricana, are cleaning up after a monster thunderstorm
rolled through town July 6, leaving more than a foot of hail in its
wake.Rocky View Weekly 2013-07-16 16:30:00
Life-long residents are stunned as photos and stories emerge of the devastation of the storm. "Never in all my years," David Butters, resident of Irricana since 1974 said, while showing off the flooding and destruction along First Street. "I've never seen anything like this." He's not the only one. |
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Helen Briggs
The government is stepping up monitoring of a disease thought to pose a serious threat to UK oak trees.bbc.co.uk 2013-07-15 14:19:00
Acute Oak Decline, which causes weeping patches on the stems of mature trees, is on the rise in England, particularly in the Midlands and the South East. A national survey has been commissioned as part of a new £1.1m research drive. Thousands of trees are thought to be affected, the Forestry Commission's lead scientist on the condition told Radio 4's Farming Today. "This is a serious problem in the UK," said Dr Sandra Denman. "So far we've only seen it in England, but because we haven't done any formal surveys we're unsure as to the full extent of the problem. "But we do estimate that there are many thousands of trees that are affected." Scientists believe a beetle may be responsible for the disease. They are also trying to isolate and identify a bacteria found on the dying trees that might be linked to the infection. Little is known about the rate of spread of the disease and whether all oak trees are at risk. |
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'Very anomalous weather pattern' - Heat wave building into the Ohio Valley and eastern United States
NASA
A very anomalous weather pattern is in place over the U.S. for mid-July.
Trapped between an upper level ridge centered over the Ohio Valley and
the closed upper level low over the Texas/Oklahoma border, atypical hot,
muggy air is stifling a broad swath of the eastern U.S. The closed low
is expected to drift west toward New Mexico bringing heavy, localized
rain to some areas and temperatures running 10-20 degrees below mid-July
averages. Across the east, temperatures will warm well into the 90's
and stay there through the week. This image was taken by the GOES East
satellite at 12:45 p.m. EDT on July 15, 2013.2013-07-16 10:21:00
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newsdaily.com
A teenage girl tourist was killed in a shark attack on Monday while
swimming off the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, the second such attack
this year in the French overseas territory.2013-07-15 07:38:00 Local officials said the 15-year-old was attacked in the mid-afternoon while swimming just a few metres (yards) from shore in Saint-Paul bay on the western side of the island. The girl, on holiday from mainland France, was swimming with another girl who had just climbed on shore when the attack took place. "Part of her body was carried away by the shark. Firefighters, lifeguards and a police helicopter are carrying out a search," said Gina Hoarau, the head of public safety in Saint-Paul. "The conditions of this attack are very surprising. We didn't think a shark could come so close to the shore," Hoarau said. A 36-year-old French honeymooner was killed by a shark in May while surfing not far from the island's popular beach of Brisants de Saint-Gilles. Last year, 78 shark attacks were reported around the world, of which eight were fatal. Source: Agence France-Presse |
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Larry O'Hanlon
Discovery News 2013-07-15 14:48:00
It has taken some time for the news to come out of India, but there has been a major landslide disaster that has claimed an estimated 6,000 lives. In the remote, mountainous north of the country, steep slopes have given way and launched flows of rock and water that have destroyed or seriously damaged some 240 villages and small towns. A very good place to get the details of the events, as well as analysis of the causes over the last few weeks, is via The Landslide Blog, by landslide expert Dave Petley of Durham University in the United Kingdom (full disclosure: I am the AGU blogosphere manager, where Petley's blog appears). Among the dead are pilgrims, tourists and residents of a number of villages, including the temple town of Kedarnath. The cause of the disaster is the exceptionally heavy monsoon rains that have hit the region. Videos of the actual flooding can be seen here.
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| Fire in the Sky |
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No new articles. |
| Health & Wellness |
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Robert Rosenberg
huffingtonpost.com 2013-07-13 07:28:00
In this month's British Medical Journal, there's a report on a study demonstrating the relationship of sleep to brain development in kids. It is called the Millennium cohort Study, and it followed 11,000 children. Those children who demonstrated irregular bedtimes up to the age of three were the most negatively affected when it came to reading, math skills and spatial awareness. When followed over time, they continued to lag developmentally even by the age of seven -- and girls more than boys. The authors concluded that the first three years of life seem to be a particularly sensitive time for sleep and its relationship to brain development. The findings are similar to a smaller Canadian study published in the journal Sleep in 2008. This study found that children sleeping less than ten hours a night before age three were more likely to exhibit language and reading problems as well as ADHD. In both studies, these problems persisted despite improvement in total sleep time after the age of three. What we are seeing here is the relationship of sleep to neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity relates to structural and functional changes in the brain brought on by training and experience. It is the ability of the brain to change by increasing brain tissue called gray matter and to alter the brain circuits called synapses. We know that adults are capable of these changes but on a much smaller scale. It would appear that the most crucial period for these kinds of brain changes is probably during the first three years of life. In fact, that is one of the reasons that children can recover from head trauma much more completely than adults can. It also explains the fact that if the entire left hemisphere is removed in a three or four year old, that child can still develop normal language skills. This is not possible in an adult. |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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Anna Mikulak
A new study shows that a predictive brain signal could explain why we
'hear' inner speech in our heads even in the absence of actual soundAssociation for Psychological Science 2013-07-16 16:14:00 Whether you're reading the paper or thinking through your schedule for the day, chances are that you're hearing yourself speak even if you're not saying words out loud. This internal speech - the monologue you "hear" inside your head - is a ubiquitous but largely unexamined phenomenon. A new study looks at a possible brain mechanism that could explain how we hear this inner voice in the absence of actual sound. In two experiments, researcher Mark Scott of the University of British Columbia found evidence that a brain signal called corollary discharge - a signal that helps us distinguish the sensory experiences we produce ourselves from those produced by external stimuli - plays an important role in our experiences of internal speech. The findings from the two experiments are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Corollary discharge is a kind of predictive signal generated by the brain that helps to explain, for example, why other people can tickle us but we can't tickle ourselves. The signal predicts our own movements and effectively cancels out the tickle sensation. And the same mechanism plays a role in how our auditory system processes speech. When we speak, an internal copy of the sound of our voice is generated in parallel with the external sound we hear. |
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Eric W. Dolan
Raw Story 2013-07-15 10:43:00
When our understanding of cause-and-effect is contradicted by what we actually see, sometimes our understanding overrules our perception. Research published online in Psychological Science on June 26 found people's causal expectations influenced their perception of the ordering of events in time. "It appears that when people hold strong convictions about the relationships between objects or events, then inference takes precedence over perception," Christos Bechlivanidis of the University College London, the lead author of the study, told PsyPost. The study of 229 participants, co-authored by David A. Lagnado, found the temporal content of perception is strongly biased by our understanding of causality. Bechlivanidis and Lagnado discovered people perceptually reorganized events in time so that the presumed cause preceded the effect - even after witnessing the effect precede the cause. "We usually assume that we see the objective temporal order in which events take place especially when we directly witness those events," Bechlivanidis explained. "However, apart from the information that is delivered through our senses, there is another way to constrain the possible orderings of events, by relying on the way events are related with each other. Since causes happen before their effects, certain orderings must be impossible or at least highly improbable. Surely, the glass must have collided with the floor before shattering to pieces. You must have flicked the switch before the room was illuminated." |
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| High Strangeness |
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No new articles. |
| Don't Panic! Lighten Up! |
| No new articles. |
