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BBC News
2013-08-29 16:42:00
British MPs have voted against possible military action against Syria to deter the use of chemical weapons. David Cameron said it was clear the British Parliament does not want action and "I will act accordingly". The government motion was defeated 285 to 272, a majority of 13 votes |
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William Booth and Ruth Eglash
The Washington Post 2013-08-29 15:37:00
A shortage of gas masks caused a mini-melee among panicky moms pushing strollers here Wednesday, as Israelis prepared for possible U.S. airstrikes against Syria that could trigger retaliatory attacks in Israel. At a post office distribution center in the Hadar Mall in West Jerusalem, Israelis broke through yellow security tape and clawed into boxes containing the government-issued kits. Postal authority spokeswoman Maya Avishai described the scene as "a brutal onslaught" against law and order, and police were called to calm the crowd. Jamie Schwed, mother of a newborn, was frustrated to find that all the gas masks had been distributed. "They warned us of a possible attack, and they run out of masks? It's ridiculous," she said. Officials reported a surge in inquiries, deliveries and people lining up for the free kits, as the United States and its Western allies gathered support for a strike on Syria in retaliation for last week's alleged poison gas attack outside Damascus. The Syrian government denies responsibility for the attack, which killed hundreds, including many women and children. |
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Will Englund
The Washington Post 2013-08-29 15:43:00
Russian officials Wednesday accused Western nations of short-circuiting the work of United Nations weapons inspectors in Syria in their eagerness to launch an attack on Damascus. A British resolution in the U.N. Security Council condemning the Syrian government for using chemical weapons is premature given that the inspectors in Syria have not yet reported back on their findings, Russia's first deputy foreign minister, Vladimir Titov, said in remarks quoted by the Interfax news agency. The inspectors' report is not expected until the weekend at the earliest. With both Russia and China holding veto power in the Security Council, there is also no prospect that the British resolution will pass. Instead, the head of the foreign affairs committee in the lower house of Russia's parliament said, the move is an attempt to provide a justification for the attack on Syria that Moscow appears to believe is inevitable. |
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Anthony Faiola
The Washington Post 2013-08-29 15:31:00
As Western powers build their case for possible military strikes in Syria, a still-forming coalition on Wednesday confronted a chorus of resistance at home, throwing up possible delays for what initially seemed like a rapid timetable for action. In Britain, Washington's staunchest military ally, the ghost of faulty intelligence used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq hung over Prime Minister David Cameron's push to punish the government of President Bashar al-Assad after last week's alleged chemical attack near Damascus. Cameron's government presented a draft resolution at the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday seeking to authorize "all necessary measures" to protect Syrian civilians, after Foreign Secretary William Hague said the world had to act even if the United Nations didn't. But hours later, tepid domestic support in Parliament for fast action forced Cameron's government to back down from a planned vote Thursday that would have effectively paved the way for the immediate use of military force. Instead, the prime minister compromised with critics who thought that London was acting too hastily, promising to offer a watered-down measure Thursday that called for a second vote before strikes would be undertaken. That vote is likely to come next week, after U.N. inspectors now in Syria have submitted their report. |
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William Wan
The Washington Post 2013-08-29 15:26:00
As the United States moves toward intervention in Syria, China on Thursday urged restraint, warning that military action would only exacerbate the turmoil in Syria. "China calls on all parties to exercise restraint and calm," said China's foreign minister, Wang Yi. He said a political solution was "the only realistic way out on the Syrian issue." Wang's statement, posted on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Web site, was accompanied by a chorus of harsher editorials in China's state-controlled media, accusing Western powers of rushing to judgment and using chemical weapons as an excuse to cover up less righteous motives. China has followed Russia's lead in opposing growing international calls for action against Syria, especially after emerging evidence in recent days that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government deployed chemical weapons. |
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Anthony Faiola
The Washington Post 2013-08-29 15:21:00
U.S. efforts to forge an international coalition to support a military strike on Syria faced fresh uncertainty Thursday, as British Prime Minister David Cameron confronted a political fight in Parliament over military action and France called for a delay until U.N. inspectors finish their work on the ground. Speaking in the House of Commons, Cameron pledged that Britain would take no action until the United Nations had reviewed a report from weapons inspectors, who are in Syria examining the sites of an alleged chemical attack last week that left hundreds dead. Two years after the first anti-government protests, conflict in Syria rages on. See the major events in the country's tumultuous uprising. "It would be unthinkable to proceed if there was overwhelming opposition in the [U.N.] Security Council," Cameron told Parliament. |
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YouTube
Congressman Paul spoke out against Western military intervention in
Syria in June 2012. Here's what he had to say about U.S. war plans:2012-06-19 00:00:00
Transcript: |
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Lizzie Phelan
The first casualty of war is truth: Addounia Exposelizzie-phelan.blogspot.com 2012-03-02 07:54:00 With thanks to Rafiq Lutif for leaking these videos Here western media darling "activist" Danny Dayem can be seen ordering those around him to fire while he waits to go live on CNN, in order to back up his false claims that the Syrian government was committing a massacre against civilians in Homs. For more about dubious Danny (to put it mildly), please read here.
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Comment: Remember this from the first Gulf War?
Brought to you by CNN, creating fake realities since 1980. |
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RT.com
2013-08-29 14:04:00
Only days after the White House suggested it was all but certain Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons to gas hundreds of civilians, United States intelligence officials briefed on the situation say the evidence isn't all there. Despite recent remarks from US President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and other top administration officials, sources within the intelligence community are disputing the certainty that Assad ordered the use of chemical gas last week on innocent civilians outside of Damascus, Syria. Four US officials - including one senior member of the intelligence community - told the Associated Press this week that there's confusion over where the reported chemical warheads are currently being held and who exactly possesses them. Citing a lapse in both signals and human intelligence reports, the officials all told the AP on condition of anonymity that US and allied spies "have lost track of who controls some of the country's chemical weapons supplies," according to reporters Kimberly Dozier and Matt Apuzzo. |
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Peter Chamberlin
Opinion Maker 2013-08-28 14:09:00
Which is the greater moral obscenity? The fact that more than three-hundred civilians have been killed by chemical weapons, or the undeniable fact that over 100,000 Syrians have been killed by various means (most of them civilians), in a premeditated plan to create civil war in another sovereign nation? (SEE: The Obscenity of Humanitarian Warfare). The American Sec. of State is invoking moral outrage to justify further escalation of our interference in Syrian national affairs, to the point of committing Western troops in an actual physical aggression against Syria and the Syrian people. |
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Frederik Pleitgen and Holly Yan
CNN 2013-08-29 13:59:00
British Prime Minister David Cameron opened an emergency session of the House of Commons Thursday by saying the debate on Syria is about "how to respond to one of most abhorrent uses of chemical weapons in a century" -- not about regime change or invasion. "Put simply, is it in Britain's national interest in maintaining an international taboo against the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield?" Cameron asked lawmakers. "I would say yes it is." Cameron told members of the House of Commons -- whom he recalled from summer vacation to debate a British response to the deaths of hundreds in a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus last week -- that the government would not act without first hearing from U.N. weapons inspectors, giving the United Nations a chance to weigh in and Parliament to have another vote. But Cameron said a failure to act by the international community would give Syrian President Bashar al-Assad the unmistakable signal that he could use such weapons "with impunity." |
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Press TV
2013-08-29 13:51:00
A former UN official says the West has no mandate to militarily intervene in Syria and any such offensive would be the action of "self-appointed policemen" and "very unwise." In an article published on The Guardian on Wednesday, former Swedish Foreign Minister Hans Blix said US President Barack Obama, despite his pretensions to the contrary, is like former US President George W. Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in that he too seems willing to ignore the UN Security Council and "order armed strikes on Syria with political support from only the UK, France, and some others." He said the UN charter only allows the use of armed force in self-defence or with an authorization from the Security Council, but a potential US-led strike on Syria "could not be 'in self-defence' or 'retaliation', as the US, the UK and France have not been attacked." |
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Marina Portnaya
rt.com 2013-08-29 12:57:00
The US charge against Syria is being driven by Damascus' alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians. While Washington is quick to intervene on moral grounds, its own checkered past regarding WMDs may put the world's policeman under the spotlight. "Nobody disputes - or hardly anybody disputes - that chemical weapons were used on a large scale in Syria against civilian populations," US President Barack Obama told a briefing Wednesday. "We have looked at all the evidence, and we do not believe the opposition possessed ... chemical weapons of that sort." It is this charge, so far unsubstantiated by UN inspectors, that underpins Western attempts to intervene militarily in Syria. "If we are saying in a clear and decisive but very limited way, we send a shot across the bow saying, 'Stop doing this,' this can have a positive impact on our national security over the long term," Obama said. | |
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Comment: Redundant question - psychopaths literally have no shame and no conscience !!!
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From the Trenches
2013-08-28 00:00:00
I don't believe a lot of what I read on Before It's News, et. al., until I see the facts for myself. I always do my own research. There are a lot of folks out there making things up just to get their names out on the net. The rumor that has been going around about no one in the Army getting to take leave during the month of September and October is one of the things I had to see for myself. If that were true, that is a very big deal. It doesn't happen very often. My daughter and her husband have just been stationed at Ft. Riley, KS. He is in a unit that has just returned recently from deployment and is on "recovery phase" They are not slated to deploy anywhere anytime in the near future. My daughter called last night and said that they have all been told that they will get no leave in September through October. They were even told that they are on QRF, (Quick Reaction Force) I was in the Army for a long time. When you go on QRF, you are told months in advance and train and prep for it. You have to go through a week of paperwork, vaccinations for the area of possible deployment, etc. It is a big deal. It also only involves one unit as opposed to an entire base. It never happens on the fly like this. This tells me that they are planning for the possibility of a rapid deployment of at least one division. I do not know if this is happening at other bases. |
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Rupert Neate
Javier Martin-Artajo is accused of trying to cover up Bruno Iksil's spiralling multibillion pound lossesThe Guardian 2013-08-27 00:00:00
A former JP Morgan banker has been arrested in Spain 10 days after US authorities filed charges against him over the "London Whale" affair that cost the bank $6bn (£3.9bn). Javier Martin-Artajo, who was the direct supervisor of Bruno Iksil, the trader dubbed the "London Whale", handed himself in on Tuesday in Madrid following a conversation with the specialist fugitive unit of the Spanish police. Martin-Artajo, a 49-year-old Spanish national, is wanted by US authorities on four charges of conspiracy, keeping false books and records, wire fraud, and making false filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission watchdog. His passport has been confiscated pending extradition proceedings, a spokeswoman for the Spanish national court said. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of the most serious charges, although extraditions from Spain to the US are rare. He is accused of trying to inflate the value of trading positions held on JP Morgan's books. The mismarking allegedly took place as the traders tried to hide mounting losses in an illiquid derivatives market, where they had made outsized bets. Martin-Artajo, who was paid $11m a year for his work as head of Europe for JP Morgan's chief investment office (CIO), was charged by the New York attorney general, Preet Bharara, earlier this month. Bharara alleges that as the London losses mounted Martin-Artajo and former junior JP Morgan trader Julien Grout began to "creatively cook the books". |
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| Society's Child |
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David Templeton
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 2013-08-29 14:27:00
When the religious beliefs of parents conflict with the medical needs of the child, medical care trumps religion. In Pennsylvania, and most other states, the law allows health and government officials to get court approval to provide medical care to save a child's life over the parents' religious objections. But in Akron, Ohio, where Amish parents removed their 10-year-old daughter from the hospital to avoid further chemotherapy, the issue enters a legal gray area. "I think this is a more heartrending question," said Wes Oliver, associate professor of law and director of the Criminal Justice Program at the Duquesne Law School. "Do you require parents to take extraordinary measures to give a child a percentage chance of survival, or do you leave that decision for the parents?" In the Amish case, the parents took their daughter to the hospital in May for chemotherapy before removing her from treatment in June. |
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Bob Smietana
The Tennessean 2013-08-29 14:23:00
The federal government wants to give Annie Laurie Gaylor a clergy tax break for leading an atheist group. Gaylor, head of the Madison, Wis.-based Freedom from Religion Foundation, wants to stop it - and she's asking a federal judge for help. The standoff is the latest twist in a court battle over the parsonage exemption for clergy, a tax break that allows "ministers of the gospel" to claim part of their salary as a tax-free housing allowance. Gaylor's organization says the exemption gives religious groups an unfair advantage. That makes it unconstitutional, the foundation's lawsuit contends. But government lawyers say atheist leaders can still be ministers, because atheism can function as a religion. So leaders of an atheist organization may qualify for the exemption after all. No thanks, says Gaylor. |
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Erin Donaghue
CBS News 2013-08-28 14:15:00
A Montana judge who sentenced former teacher Stacey Rambold to 30 days in the rape case of a 14-year-old student is defending his decision as outrage grows over his comments that the girl was "older than her chronological age." In 2010, the girl killed herself at age 16 as the case was pending, and her mother told District Judge G. Todd Baugh Monday her relationship with Rambold was a "major factor" in her suicide. Baugh handed down the sentence Monday after former Billings Senior High School teacher Rambold, 54, was terminated from a sexual offender treatment program that was part of a deal to have his prosecution deferred. The judge said he wasn't convinced that the reasons for Rambold's termination from the program were serious enough to warrant a 10-year prison term recommended by prosecutors. In handing down the sentence, Baugh also said the 14-year-old victim was "older than her chronological age" and "as much in control of the situation" as the teacher. The girl's mother, Auleia Hanlon, stormed out of the courtroom yelling, "You people suck!," the Billings-Gazette reported. |
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Stephen Tschida
A Fairfax Station boy is undergoing emergency life-saving treatment at
Inova Children's Hospital after he stepped out his door and into the
fangs of a copperhead snake.wjla.com 2013-08-22 12:37:00 Michael Alford, 12, ran out of his house around 10:30 p.m. Wednesday wearing sandals. He says he stepped on something and when he lifted his foot, a snake tore into it.
"[I] opened the door and I stepped on a snake, a copperhead. I don't know whether I stepped on his tail or his head, but I took my foot off and he bit me." Alford's mother asked him to run to the car to get a token. What he came back with left her frightened and frantic. "He just ran up the steps and looked at me and was like 'A snake just bit me!' so I was a little freaked out," Kara Allan says. The family came to Inova Children's, which is equipped to administer the series of anti-venom shots. Dr. Minal Amin says copperhead bites can be serious. They have seen several in the past few weeks at Inova Fairfax Hospital. "We would recommend for someone to get away from the snake and elevate the extremity and come to the nearest hospital," Amin says. Meanwhile, Alford watches the swelling, which is slowly receding. "I'm doing better. The anti-venom is pushing it back to where it started," he says. |
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Amy Lange
myfoxdetroit.com 2013-08-23 12:20:00
A young woman taking a shower inside her Westland apartment this week was shocked to find a large snake in an overhead exhaust fan. "She screamed and I was like, 'what's the problem?'" said Reggie Johnson, the woman's boyfriend. But when he entered the bathroom, he immediately knew. Staring down at them was a 4-foot snake believed to be either a python or a boa constrictor. Johnson was frightened for his girlfriend and her kitten Clyde, who happened to be in the bathroom at the same time. "It was probably wanting to get him," said Johnson. "I just took him out and put him in his cage." Johnson says he called friends and they pulled the snake out and security at the Hunters West Apartments, near Wayne and Warren, released it into the nearby woods. It turns out, the snaked belonged to a neighbor and it had escaped. But no one bothered to tell Reggie, his girlfriend or Clyde the kitten. "It was a big surprise to us," said Johnson. "We're just happy it's gone." |
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Kevin Koeninger
Police forced an innocent, double-leg amputee to get out of his car at
gunpoint, with hands up, then beat and ridiculed him as "a cripple
crawling around," the African-American man claims in court.Courthouse News 2013-08-28 10:30:00 Leroy Duffie claims Lincoln city police handcuffed and beat him and left him lying on the street for half an hour before they finally "removed the handcuffs and allowed the plaintiff to crawl under the van to retrieve his prosthetic legs." Duffie sued the City of Lincoln in Lancaster County Court. Duffie describes himself in the lawsuit as "an African American ... with a diagnosis of depression and post traumatic stress disorder and ... a double amputee with prosthetics." He says Lincoln police pulled him over for no discernible reason on Sept. 3, 2011. The complaint states: "When plaintiff was stopped, he was confronted by LPD officers with their service revolvers drawn and pointed at him and he was immediately ordered to raise his hands and get out of the van. Plaintiff politely responded that he couldn't raise his hands and get out of the van at the same time due to his being a double amputee and needed his hands to help lift his improperly fitted prosthetic legs that were only duct taped to the upper remaining portions of his legs. |
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Comment: No amount of money can compensate Mr. Duffie
for what these pathological police officers put him through, and
whatever monetary award, if any, he receives will be paid by working
class taxpayers, not the cops who assaulted him. The psycho police who
committed this heinous act have not been disciplined and continue to
swagger around wearing badges that entitle them to commit crimes any
ordinary citizen would be imprisoned for.
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The Guardian, UK
2013-08-28 22:00:00
A man accused of stealing his father's body from a Detroit cemetery with the hope of bringing him back to life has pleaded guilty in exchange for avoiding prison. Vincent Bright, 49, stole the body of 93-year-old Clarence Bright from Gethsemane cemetery on 14 January and stored it in a home freezer. Police, acting on a tip from other family members, found the corpse in Bright's home on Detroit's east side. Police said Bright took the body in the hope his father would be resurrected. Bright pleaded guilty on Monday to a charge of disinterring a body and faces sentencing on 24 September. "He seems to be doing well," his defence lawyer Gerald Karafa told the Associated Press on Tuesday. A conviction on the charge of disinterring a body could have brought up to 10 years in prison. Prosecutors sought a mental health examination for Bright, which found he was competent to stand trial. Source: Associated Press |
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Neetzan Zimmerman
The Gawker 2013-08-28 14:44:00
A special spirit day at Oral Roberts University took a tragicomical turn last week when a bald eagle released into the school's Christ Chapel by a professional handler crashed into a window just as students began chanting "USA! USA!" The eagle was unharmed, but many of the students could be heard screaming at the sight of America's national animal wiping out in metaphorical fashion. The bird had apparently become disoriented from the crowd's patriotic hollering. "It was a bit shocking to see, but we're thankful the eagle is OK," an ORU spokeswoman told Tulsa World. After the eagle's trainer recovered the bird, university president Dr. William M. Wilson continued with the service, at one point urging students to become "eagles for Christ." In other words, get led astray by the mindless repetition of an arrogant conviction until you eventually crash into an invisible construct. |
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Kim Petersen
Information Clearinghouse 2013-08-24 00:00:00
Common decency demands that when someone slanders you in a public forum that you should have the right to respond in that same forum. TRNN is an independent news network that provides thought-provoking news, analysis, and commentary. TRNN is much more than news headlines. For the greatest part, news events are reported in context and with relevant background information. This distinguishes TRNN very much from state and corporate media news. In addition, TRNN senior editor Paul Jay is very adept at playing devil's advocate, laying out the corporate media/government line whereby guest analysts can probe and expose propaganda and disinformation. Since criticizing the corporate media is very much like flogging a dead horse and because getting the real news out there is so important, I tend to focus my media criticism on TRNN. For instance, I criticized TRNN for parroting a corporate-state media message about North Korea (without providing relevant background information).1 Its US electoral coverage in 2008 and 2012 was fundamentally anti-democratic because of its inordinate focus on the evilist parties rather than alloting equal coverage to all parties (albeit third party coverage did increase from 2008 to 2012). Recently TRNN has been presenting a series called "Reality Asserts Itself." Some fine insight has been provided by Chris Hedges, Vijay Prashad, and Max Blumenthal. However, in a recent installment of the show, Blumenthal engaged in, what can best be described as, character assassination. Blumenthal's target was the jazz musician/author Gilad Atzmon. 2 |
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Julia La Roche
Business Insider 2013-08-27 00:00:00
Darryl Layne Woods, the former CEO of a Missouri bank, admitted in court yesterday to using financial crisis bailout funds to purchase a luxury waterfront condo in Florida, Dealbook's Peter Lattman reports. In November 2008, Woods, 48, who was the head of Mainstreet Bank and the bank's holding company Calvert Financial Corporation, applied for TARP money on behalf of his bank, a press release states. In January 2009, his bank received $1,037,000. A month later, he used $381,487 of it to buy a place in Fort Myers, Florida. He pleaded guilty to misleading federal investigators about how he used the TARP money. Woods is no longer allowed to work in the banking industry, according to the release. He also faces a sentence of up to one year in federal prison without parole and a fine of up to $100,000 plus restitution. |
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| Secret History |
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Sarah Griffiths
Swiss researchers from the University of Bern said mounds of
seashells were left by settlers in the early Holocene period, around
10,400 years agoThe Daily Mail, UK 2013-08-29 06:51:00 Experts once thought the previously unexplored area had been rarely occupied by communities due to poor environmental conditions
Ten thousand-year-old remains of human settlements have been found in Bolivia and is now the oldest archaeological site in the Amazon region. The find came as a surprise to experts as it was thought the previously unexplored area had been rarely occupied by communities due to poor environmental conditions. Swiss archaeologists made the discovery after analysing forest islands - small forested mounds of earth - which are found throughout Amazonia. |
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| Science & Technology |
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Laura Bailey
Imagine that garbage haulers don't exist. Slowly, the trash accumulates
in our offices, our homes, it clogs the streets and damages our cars,
causes illness and renders normal life impossible.University of Michigan 2013-08-29 16:36:00 Garbage in the brain, in the form of dead cells, must also be removed before it accumulates, because it can cause both rare and common neurological diseases, such as Parkinson's. Now, University of Michigan researchers are a leap closer to decoding the critical process of how the brain clears dead cells, said Haoxing Xu, associate professor in the U-M Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. A new U-M study identified two critical components of this cell clearing process: an essential calcium channel protein, TRPML1, that helps the so-called garbage collecting cells, called microphages or microglia, to clear out the dead cells; and alipid molecule, which helps activate TRPML1 and the process that allows the microphages to remove these dead cells. Moreover, the Xu lab identified a synthetic chemical compound that can activate TRPML1. Because this chemical compound ultimately helps activate this cell-clearing process, it provides a drug target that could help combat these neurological diseases. |
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Becky Oskin
LiveScience 2013-08-29 13:00:00
The age of discovery isn't over yet. A colossal canyon, the longest on Earth, has just been found under Greenland's ice sheet, scientists announced today (Aug. 29) in the journal Science. "You think that everything that could be known about the land surface is known, but it's not," said Jonathan Bamber, lead study author and a geographer at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. "There's still so much to learn about the planet." The great gorge meanders northward from Summit, the highest point in central Greenland, toward Petermann Glacier on the northwest coast, covering more than 460 miles (750 kilometers). Researchers think the ravine could be even longer, but they don't yet have the data to prove where the canyon peters out deep under the interior ice sheet. "It may actually go farther south," Bamber told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. [See Photos of Mega-Canyon Under Greenland Ice Sheet] The broad chasm is up to 2,600 feet (800 meters) deep and 6 miles (10 km) wide, similar to America's Grand Canyon in scale, the researchers said. The distinctive V-shaped walls and flat bottom suggests water carved the buried valley, not ice, Bamber said. Though it is not the world's deepest canyon, it's the longest, handily besting the 308-mile-long (496 km) Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon in China. |
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Tammy Plotner
UniverseToday 2013-08-29 14:10:00
What's new in the outer reaches of our solar system? Try the discovery of a Trojan asteroid orbiting Uranus. While a plethora of puns exist for this simple fact, the reality check is that this means there are far more of these objects out there than astronomers expected. The new Trojan even has a name - 2011 QF99! A Trojan asteroid is a transient space rock which is temporarily captured by the gravity of a giant planet. It shares the planet's orbital path, locked into a specific position known as a Lagrange point. What makes 2011 QF99 unusual is its presence in the outer solar system. Researchers found the scenario a bit unlikely. Why? The answer is simply because of planet size. According to theory, the strong gravitational pull of the larger neighboring planets should have destabilized any captured asteroid's orbit and shot Uranian Trojans out of the neighborhood long ago. |
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Christine Hsu
Counsel&Heal 2013-08-28 17:31:00
We may all be Martians, according to scientists who recently discovered more evidence that life on Earth may have started on Mars. "In addition, recent studies show that these conditions, suitable for the origin of life, may still exist on Mars," Professor Steven Benner, from The Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in the USA, said in at the annual Goldschmidt conference. Benner explained that an oxidized mineral form of molybdenum, an element that may have been crucial to the origin of life, could only have been available on the surface of Mars and not on Earth. "It's only when molybdenum becomes highly oxidized that it is able to influence how early life formed," Benner said. "This form of molybdenum couldn't have been available on Earth at the time life first began, because three billion years ago the surface of the Earth had very little oxygen, but Mars did. It's yet another piece of evidence which makes it more likely life came to Earth on a Martian meteorite, rather than starting on this planet," he explained. At the conference, researchers presented two paradoxes that have made it difficult for scientists to understand how life could have started on Earth. |
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RedOrbit
2013-08-28 22:06:00
Spending too much time "liking" what your friends have to say on Facebook? Addicted to retweeting? Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a "shocking" solution to these kinds of problems. Robert R. Morris and Dan McDuff, a pair of PhD candidates at MIT, have developed a device that administers a non-lethal shock when you overindulge in online distractions, according to John Biggs of TechCrunch. They have dubbed the unit the "Pavlov Poke", and as Morris explained in a recent blog post, it features special code that monitors the websites that individuals visit using their browsers. Should a specific site (for example, a popular social network) become visited too frequently, the device sends a shock through a peripheral device hooked up to the user's keyboard. The Pavlov Poke is made of an Arduino board (a type of board that can be used to develop various applications), according to Victoria Woollaston of the Daily Mail. It is connected to the computer by a USB cable, and rests underneath the wrist of a user. Once installed, the application's logging software tracks usage of various programs and websites, and issues a warning message if too much time is spent viewing or using the software or webpage. If use is not discontinued, the board will administer an electric shock. |
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| Earth Changes |
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NASA
2013-08-28 17:07:00
Portugal has been experiencing the worst drought in years. Drought and the dry conditions that follow lead to wildfires set by just a spark or a lightning strike. Portugal's north has been plagued with wildfires due to these such conditions. Spain and France have joined their firefight lending water-dumping aircraft in an effort to quell the raging fires. The dry conditions, heat, high winds, and difficult terrain in the area where the fires have been most active have produced what the firefighters over there have dubbed "the perfect storm." |
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Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
2013-08-29 13:20:00
Fairbanks - A severe winter storm hit Alaska's Brooks Range on Wednesday, stranding numerous trucks on the Dalton Highway amid heavy drifting snow, high winds and zero visibility. The Alaska Department of Transportation said that conditions are forcing maintenance crews to withdraw from a 110-mile stretch of the Dalton Highway in the Atigun Pass area. Travel is not advised because of the poor conditions, which include winds of 50-60 mph. "They just can't keep it open," said DOT spokeswoman Meadow Bailey. "They plow through it, and it just blows over again." An undetermined number of trucks also are stuck between 275 Mile and 305 Mile, according to DOT. Bailey said drivers are being retrieved from trucks stuck in the roadway, but most appear to be staying put while parked along the side of the road. Bailey said it's the fourth weather-related closure of the Dalton Highway this year. Before that, she said the Dalton hadn't been closed for at least a few years. The recent storms have caused trucks to stack up on both ends of the closed area. Ben Krzykowski, who owns Ben's Auto and Truck Repair, has spent the past week pulling out stuck vehicles when weather allows it. He said there were at least 50 trucks piled into the Coldfoot Camp parking lot last Saturday. "There was basically no room to park in there," he said. An additional 10 trucks are parked at the other end of the closure at the Sagavanirktok River DOT station until conditions improve, Bailey said. |
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Robert Felix
Ice Age Now 2013-08-29 13:07:00
President declares state of emergency. Peru's government has declared a state of emergency in parts of the southern Andean region of Puno hit with the coldest temperatures in a decade, daily El Comercio reported. President Ollanta Humala announced the emergency for seven provinces in Puno - Carabaya, Sandia, Lampa, San Antonio de Putina, Melgar, Puno and El Collao. Hundreds of families have been affected and more than 250,000 alpacas have died due to freezing temperatures and snow storms. Passengers on buses running between Puno and Arequipa were forced to wait some eight to 10 hours on the icy highways at temperatures of minus 15 degrees Celsius. |
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Robert Felix
Ice Age Now 2013-08-29 12:54:00
Maybe 15 years. Maybe 22 years. Snowfall of such intensity and duration in São José dos Absent is the highest in 13 years. Perhaps even longer. The Municipal Secretary of Tourism, Alziro Paim Rock, a resident of St. Joseph of the Missing for 20 years, thinks Wednesday's snow - which caused the suspension of classes in the municipal and state levels - surpassed that of 13 years ago. The dimension of the phenomenon on Wednesday was much larger than expected, said Rocha. I talked to the staff that makes the prediction in the city and this was the biggest snow in 15 years. Mary Rosineris, 22 years old, has never seen so much snow in the town. The streets, fields and houses were covered with about five inches of snow, said Ronaldo Coutinho Prado, of the agency ClimaTerra. |
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The Guardian
2013-08-29 10:55:00
A female African elephant charges into a vehicle in the Kruger national park in South Africa. Johann Lombard, who has 23 years of experience as a professional safari guide, filmed the incident and says neither the elephant or anyone in the vehicle was harmed. Lombard says it is unusual for elephants to charge vehicles in this manner |
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Mark Willacy
Australian Broadcasting Company 2013-08-29 10:10:00
It's been erupting constantly for nearly 60 years, spewing out smoke and ash and sending shivers through the more than half a million people who live nearby. Japan's Sakurajima volcano recently blasted 100,000 tonnes of ash more than five kilometres into the sky, reminding surrounding communities of its power and volatility. Vulcanologists warn that the magma chamber beneath the mountain is about 90 per cent full, meaning that a large lava eruption cannot be ruled out. The ABC's North Asia correspondent Mark Willacy travelled to Sakurajima in south-west Japan to see how people live with this rumbling giant. In legend, this belching giant was named for a beautiful goddess, the divine being venerated as the symbol of delicate earthly life. But Sakurajima is anything but delicate. It is the mother of all Japanese volcanos. Just across the water from the city of Kagoshima, it is both a tourist drawcard and a troublesome neighbour. And for our visit on this perfect summer's day, the mountain is putting on yet another show. Sakurajima is one of the world's most active volcanos. Some years it belches into life or erupts over 1,000 times and this bad-tempered beast is just eight kilometres from the 600,000 residents of Kagoshima. |
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Jethro Mullen
CNN 2013-08-29 10:06:00
The people of Colcord, Oklahoma, might need something a little stronger than Brita filters to remove the impurities from their drinking water. Blood worms -- small, red insect larvae -- have been appearing in water glasses and filters in the rural town. Authorities have warned Colcord's 800 residents not to drink, cook with or brush their teeth with the worm-infested tap water. Schools in the area have been closed since Tuesday as officials try to figure out where the bright-red creatures came from and how long it will take to get rid of them. |
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CBC News
2013-08-28 20:44:00
Residents of Eagle, Alaska, are getting worried about possibly toxic gases wafting into town from a mysterious underground fire on a nearby mountain that's been burning for almost a year. Nobody seems to know exactly what's burning. Experts suspect it's either a volcano forming or natural gas or oil burning in underground shale deposits. Whatever it is, the fire has been burning on a remote mountaintop, about 40 kilometres north of the community since last October at least. When the wind is right, residents can smell noxious smoke all over town. | |
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Comment: The planet is opening up!
This is further evidence that SOTT is on the right track about 'climate change': *localized* warming, within an overall trend of global cooling, is the result of increased volcanic and subterranean activity. |
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| Fire in the Sky |
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strangesounds.org
2013-08-28 14:50:00
The following videos were all recorded on the same day and point out a huge meteor rocketing in the sky in the region of San Luis Potosi in Mexico.
This huge fireball travelled in Earth's atmosphere on the 21st of August 2013, leaving behind a trail of smoke.
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| Health & Wellness |
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No new articles. |
| Science of the Spirit |
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Anna Mikulak
With so many other competing voices, having a conversation on a bustling
subway or at a crowded cocktail party takes a great deal of
concentration. New research suggests that the familiar voice of a spouse
stands out against other voices, helping to sharpen auditory perception
and making it easier to focus on one voice at a time.Association for Psychological Science 2013-08-29 17:03:00 "Familiar voices appear to influence the way an auditory 'scene' is perceptually organized," explains lead researcher Ingrid Johnsrude of Queen's University, Canada. Johnsrude and her colleagues asked married couples, ages 44-79, to record themselves reading scripted instructions out loud. Later, each participant put on a pair of headphones and listened to the recording of his or her spouse as it played simultaneously with a recording of an unfamiliar voice. On some trials, participants were told to report what their spouse said; on other trials, they were supposed to report what the unfamiliar voice said. The researchers wanted to see whether familiarity would make a difference in how well the participants understood what the target voice was saying. |
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Audrey Hamilton
Deep down, men may not bask in the glory of their successful wives or
girlfriends. While this is not true of women, men's subconscious
self-esteem may be bruised when their spouse or girlfriend excels, says a
study published by the American Psychological Association.American Psychological Association 2013-08-29 16:50:00 It didn't matter if their significant other was an excellent hostess or intelligent, men were more likely to feel subconsciously worse about themselves when their female partner succeeded than when she failed, according to the study published online in the APA Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. However, women's self-esteem was not affected by their male partners' successes or failures, according to the research, which looked at heterosexual Americans and Dutch. "It makes sense that a man might feel threatened if his girlfriend outperforms him in something they're doing together, such as trying to lose weight," said the study's lead author, Kate Ratliff, PhD, of the University of Florida. "But this research found evidence that men automatically interpret a partner's success as their own failure, even when they're not in direct competition" Men subconsciously felt worse about themselves when they thought about a time when their female partner thrived in a situation in which they had failed, according to the findings. The researchers studied 896 people in five experiments. |
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| High Strangeness |
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The Daily Mail, UK
Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr., who claimed he handled debris from the 1947 crash
of an alien spacecraft near Roswell, New Mexico, has died at the age of
76 doing what he loved best - reading a book about UFOs.2013-08-29 07:06:00 Denice Marcel said her father was found dead at his home in Helena Saturday, less than two months after making his last trip to Roswell. Over the past 35 years, Marcel Jr. appeared on TV shows, documentaries and radio shows; was interviewed for magazine articles and books, and traveled the world lecturing about his experiences in Roswell.
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| Don't Panic! Lighten Up! |
| No new articles. |
