Wednesday, 23 October 2013

The European Union Times

Japan to shoot asteroid for samples in 2014 mission

Posted: 22 Oct 2013 03:25 PM PDT

A unique space cannon developed for Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft has successfully test-fired on Earth in preparation for a 2014 mission. During its upcoming journey into space, the cannon will blast an asteroid and mine samples of its soil.
The test took place in the Japanese prefecture of Gifu, paving the way for the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft to extract soil samples from the asteroid, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on Monday.
During the mission of Hayabusa 2, scheduled to begin in December 2014, the space probe will extract soil from inside the asteroid. In order to do this, it will be equipped with a collision device designed to shoot at the surface of the asteroid from a distance of 100 meters with metal shell ammunition moving at a speed of two kilometers per second.
JAXA hopes to create a small (a few meters in diameter), artificial crater from which Japanese scientists can extract valuable samples capable of revealing the history of the formation of cosmic bodies of this type.
“A new function, [a] ‘collision device,’ is considered to be [on board] to create a crater artificially,” JAXA explained on its website, adding that collecting samples from the surface that is exposed by a collision will ensure acquiring “fresh samples that are less weathered by the space environment or heat.”
In order to calibrate the precision of the cannon, JAXA engineers had to overcome a number of challenges. However, the agency assures that all problems have already been solved.

“We were able to solve several problems associated with the development of the device. During the tests, the projectile hit right on target, and with the expected speed,” JAXA engineer Takanao Saiki said.
Japanese scientists actively began exploring asteroids with the Hayabusa mission, which returned to earth in June 2010 after exploring a 500-meter-long rock-rich S-type Itokawa asteroid.
Hayabusa 2 is a successor of the first spacecraft and is scheduled to be launched in 2014 to conduct research of a C-type asteroid temporally called ‘1999 JU3.’ It is believed to contain a higher concentration of organic matters and water.
“Minerals and seawater which form the Earth as well as materials for life are believed to be strongly connected in the primitive solar nebula in the early solar system, thus we expect to clarify the origin of life by analyzing samples acquired from a primordial celestial body such as a C-type asteroid to study organic matter and water in the solar system and how they coexist while affecting each other,” JAXA posted on its website.
So far, research into ‘1999 JU3’ revealed that it is a sphere approximately 920 meters in diameter with an albedo on the surface of about 0.06. The rotation period of the celestial object is approximately 7.6 hours.
Hayabusa 2 is expected to reach its target in the middle of 2018 before departing back to Earth in 2019.
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Could Sydney be hit by devastating ‘fire cloud’?

Posted: 22 Oct 2013 03:14 PM PDT

Catastrophic weather systems known as ‘fire clouds’, sparked by heat from the raging bush blazes outside Sydney, could see south west Australia hit by devastating lightning storms.
The dramatic cloud formations have already been seen over some burning parts of the New South Wales bush last week.
But a merging of the biggest wild fires into one ‘mega blaze’ could see temperatures intensify and the atmosphere above the region made unpredictable and potentially dangerous.
The clouds rarely carry enough moisture to cause the heavy rain which firefighters need to help them douse the spreading flames.
But they can be unpredictable enough to cause lightning strikes which could well set light to the already dry earth in South West Australia.
Fire clouds are also known to scientists as ‘pyrocumulus’. They occur over the sites of large scale blazes, like the ones which have ravaged the landscape around Sydney.
They are caused when fires burn and the hot air which is released rises as a column into the atmosphere.
When the air moves upwards, it is quickly replaced by cooler air at high altitudes, a process which leads to a convection column.
In large bushfires, these hot-air columns can grow to enormous proportions, rising high into the atmosphere carrying a large amount of water vapour, which is one of the main products of fire.
Eventually, the column rises high enough into the atmosphere for the temperature was to be cool enough for the water vapour to condense into a pyrocumulus cloud.
Rural Fire Service spokeswoman Natalie Sanders confirmed a pyrocumulus was apparent over the State Mine fire, which stretched across more than 42,000 hectares, last week.

Asked if she believed there weather systems could reappear of the disaster zone, she told the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘If these fires are still going strong, there’s a potential for that to happen again.’
The likely cause of such a dramatic cloud would be the coming together of two of the biggest fires in New South Wales.
Officers are doing all they can to try to prevent the two infernos, one near between Lithgow, west of Sydney, and another close to Springwood coming together.
They have even deliberately merged smaller fires in the area surrounding the Blue Mountains, in a bid to make the blazes easier to manipulate.
Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons believes crews would be faced with the worst bushfire ever to hit New South Wales if the two were to meet.
Commissioner Fitzsimmons said: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever used the word mega-fire.
‘But the reality is that the modelling indicates that there’s every likelihood that in the forecast weather conditions, these fires, particularly in the back end of the mountains, will merge at some point.’
While fire fighters tackled the flames, members of the public were helping by rescuing wildlife from burning woods.
Locals near Lake Macquarie at Chain Valley Bay, took to the water to fish out swamp wallabies which had fled their forest homes.
One resident, Ryan Baxter, said: ‘The fire just raced down the shoreline at Chain Valley Bay and the animals got trapped. They would have been burned alive if they didn’t swim.’
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World Cup 2018 to be Russia’s greatest economic disaster?

Posted: 22 Oct 2013 03:01 PM PDT

Russia will spend over 600 billion rubles on the World Cup. The funds will be allocated by the federal budget, regions and private investors. In June, the government adopted a program to prepare for the World Cup FIFA 2018, and is now discussing the allocation of resources and responsibilities between federal entities.
The Director of the Department for Relations with the Regions of the organizing committee “Russia 2018″ Denis Polyakov said that half of these 600,000 will be allocated from the federal budget. Russian regions will provide 15 percent, and the remainder will be given by investors investing their money in commercial infrastructure. This part so far is the murkiest in the preparation for the World Cup.
Preliminary projections made a year after FIFA’s decision on the venue of the championship showed that of the money that the government will allocate, 200 million rubles will come from the federal budget and 100 billion rubles will be allocated by the regions. Now these amounts are revised in different ratio.
To date, the program for the preparation of the infrastructure required to host the FIFA World Cup FIFA 2018 includes 292 objects and events. Among them are 12 stadiums, 113 training grounds, 62 hotels, 11 airports, municipal facilities and transport infrastructure necessary for the operation of the World Cup facilities, energy supply infrastructure, IT and communications.
FIFA has tough infrastructure requirements. As Vadim Trukhachev, former employee of the Russian Olympic Committee, a sports journalist, explainedto Pravda.Ru, the minimum capacity of the stadium must be in the order of 30,000 spectators, and an airport should be located no farther than 100 kilometers from the venue. Much will depend on how the regions receiving the 2018 World Cup will invest in this infrastructure.
The program was developed by the Ministry of Sports of Russia. “A tremendous job has been done to prepare the infrastructure. We have collected and analyzed data on the current state of the infrastructure in all regions hosting the World Cup,” the Minister of Sports and Chairman of the Organizing Committee of “Russia 2018″ Vitaly Mutko explained the process. “There is no other such program. Over 1,000 objects have been analyzed. As a result of this work, we chose the optimal scenario of preparing training infrastructure under which we have selected only the objects instrumental for hosting such a large-scale event. These objects may yield maximum returns on investments in the long term and leave a legacy of the 2018 World Cup, contributing to regional development and economic growth of the country.”
Director of the Institute of Strategic Analysis FBK Igor Nikolaev explained that the amount to be spent on the World Cup exceeds the annual federal spending on health care by 15-17 percent. He said that “as for private investors, they are not that solid. If they invest, they would do it in the hope of some preferences from the federal budget. But there will be more problems than in Sochi. Investments in the main capital in August showed the result nearly four percent lower than in August of last year. That is, there will be money, but the price will be very high. ”
The regions definitely know where the money should be spent. According to the FIFA requirements, World Cup hosts have to provide 12 modern stadiums. Some regions have a much easier situation, for example, in Kazan a stadium was built for the Universiade-2013. Construction of stadiums is currently ongoing in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Sochi and Saransk. Arenas are being designed in Nizhny Novgorod, Volgograd and Samara.
Funds will also be directed at improving the capacity and partial restoration of certain airports that will receive the World Cup participants and fans.
The 2018 World Cup will be held in 11 Russian cities: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Sochi, Rostov, Kaliningrad, Saransk, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don and Nizhny Novgorod. As previously reported, of the total cost of the World Cup, 320 million rubles will be allocated for the construction of stadiums for soccer schools.
The decree covers 34 regions of Russia, and most of them have been allocated 8,421,000 rubles. There are regions – record holders that sent sums that are much larger – 16,842,000 rubles. With this money, football fields will be built in Dagestan, North Ossetia, Krasnodar Territory and Tula region. It is not ruled out that the World Cup 2018 championship will bring practical benefits to the country even before it starts. At the very least, it can reanimate children’s sports, which is a guarantee of Russia’s future sports victories.
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Mexico slams NSA spying on Felipe Calderon

Posted: 22 Oct 2013 02:17 PM PDT

Mexico has condemned the recently-revealed acts of espionage conducted by US National Security Agency (NSA) on former Mexican President Felipe Calderon.
“This practice (acts of spying carried out by NSA) is unacceptable, illegal and against Mexican and international law,” Mexican Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
The condemnation came after German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel reported that an NSA division known as “Tailored Access Operations” said in May 2010 that it had gained access to then-President Calderon’s email account, and obtained a “lucrative” source of information.
Calderon served as president of Mexico from December 1, 2006 to November 30, 2012.
The news magazine said that the information regarding the alleged NSA hacking of Calderon’s account was in a document leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
In September, Brazil’s Globo TV reported that the NSA spied on private communications of the Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. The report was based on documents released by Snowden.
The Mexican president called on US President Barack Obama to order a probe into allegations that the NSA has spied on his private communications.
On September 2, Mexico’s Foreign Ministry also said that it had called on Washington to conduct an “exhaustive investigation” into the issue, and condemned “any kind of spying against Mexican citizens in breach of international law.”
Snowden, a former CIA employee, leaked two top secret US government spying programs under which the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are eavesdropping on millions of American and European phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
The NSA scandal took even broader dimensions when Snowden revealed information about its espionage activities targeting friendly countries.
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China, gold prices & US default threats

Posted: 22 Oct 2013 01:48 PM PDT

In the very days when a deep split in the US Congress threatened a US government debt default, the gold price should normally jump through the roof, yet the opposite was the case. It is worth a closer look why.
Since August 1971, when US President Richard Nixon unilaterally tore up the Bretton Woods Treaty of 1944 and told the world that the Federal Reserve ‘gold window’ was permanently closed, Wall Street banks and US and City of London financial powers have done everything imaginable to prevent gold from again becoming the basis of trust in a currency.
On Friday, October 11, when there was no sign of any deal between US Congress members and the Obama White House that would end the government shutdown, the Chicago CME Group, which operates Comex – the Chicago Commodity Exchange, where contracts in gold derivatives are traded – announced that at 8:42am Eastern time the trading was halted for 10 seconds after a safety mechanism was triggered because a 2-million-ounce (56.7 million grams) gold futures sell order was executed.
Something rotten in gold market
The result of that huge paper gold sale was that at just the time when a possible US government debt default would send investors in a panic rush to the safety of buying gold, instead, the price plunged $30 an ounce to a three-month low of $1,259.60 an ounce. Market insiders believe the reason was direct market manipulation.
David Govett, head of precious metals at bullion broker Marex Spectron, calls the sudden huge futures sale suspicious.
“These moves are becoming more and more prevalent and to my mind have to either be the work of someone attempting to manipulate the market or someone who really shouldn’t be trusted with the sums of money they are throwing around. There are ways of entering and exiting a market so that minimum damage is caused and whoever is entering these orders has no intention of doing that,” Govett said.
UBS gold trader Art Cashin echoed the suspicion.
“…if that happens once it could be an accident of technology, or it could be a simple error. But when it happens five times over a period of months, it does raise questions. Is it being done purposefully? Is somebody trying to influence the market?”
That ‘someone’ market sources believe is the Obama White House, in league with the Federal Reserve and key Wall Street banks that would be ruined were gold to really rise.
In March 1988, five months after the worst one-day stock market plunge in history, President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12631. Order 12631 created the Working Group on Financial Markets, known on Wall Street as the ‘Plunge Protection Team’ because its job was to prevent any future unexpected financial market panic selloff or ‘plunge’.
The group is headed by the US Treasury Secretary and includes the chairman of the Federal Reserve, the head of the Securities & Exchange Commission, and the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) which is responsible for monitoring derivatives trading on exchanges.
Numerous times since 1988, reports have surfaced of secret interventions by the Plunge Protection Team to prevent a market panic selloff that could threaten the role of the US dollar. Former Clinton White House staff chief George Stephanopoulos admitted in 2006 that it was used to support the markets in the 1998 Russia/LTCM crisis under Bill Clinton, and again after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
He said, “They have an informal agreement among major banks to come in and start to buy stock if there appears to be a problem.”
Clearly stocks are not the only thing the government manipulates. Gold these days is a prime focus. The price of gold in recent years—since the eruption of the US dot.com IT stock bubble in 2000—has exploded from around $300 an ounce to a recent record high above $1,900 in August, 2011. Gold rose an impressive 70 percent from December 2008 to June 2011, after the Lehman Brothers collapse and the start of the Greek crisis in the eurozone.
Since then, with no clear reason, gold has reversed and lost more than 31 percent, despite the fact that talk of a unilateral Israeli military strike on Iran and the US financial debacle combined with a euro crisis, and now, threat of US government default, created overall huge demand for investment in gold.
This past April 10, the heads of the five largest US banks, the Wall Street ‘Gods of Money’ — JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citigroup — requested a closed door meeting with Obama at the White House. Fifteen days later, on April 25, the largest one-day fall in history in gold took place. Later investigation of trading records at Comex revealed that one bank, JP Morgan Securities, was behind the huge selloff of gold derivatives. Derivatives are pieces of paper or bets on future gold or other commodity prices. To buy gold futures is very inexpensive compared with gold but influence the real physical gold price, largely because the US Congress, under lobby influence from Wall Street, since 2000 and the Commodity Trading Modernization Act, has left gold derivatives unregulated. The President’s Plunge Protection Team was at work now as well, clearly.
China smiles & buys
In effect a war, a financial war, is underway between the Wall Street giant banks and their close allies, including the major City of London banks and banks like Deutsche Bank on the one side, using paper gold derivatives trading in the unregulated COMEX, with covert support of the US Treasury and Fed. On the other side are real investors and Central Banks who believe that the world financial system, especially the dollar system, is teetering on the brink of disaster and that physical gold is the historical best safe haven in such a crisis.
Here, the recent buying of gold reserves by several central banks including Russia, Turkey and especially China, are notable. The short-term derivative gold price manipulations by JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are creating smiles at the Peoples’ Bank of China and the Russian Central Bank among other buyers of physical gold. Since 2006 Russia’s central bank has increased its gold reserves by 300 percent.
Now, the Chinese central bank has just revealed data showing that China imported 131 gross tons of gold in the month of August, a 146 percent increase compared to a year prior. August was the second highest gold importing month in its history. More impressively, China has imported more than 2,000 tons of gold in the past two years. According to a 2011 cable made public by WikiLeaks, the Peoples’ Bank of China is quietly seeking to make the renminbi (the yuan) the new gold-backed reserve currency.
Hmmmm.
According to unofficial calculations, the Peoples’ Bank of China today holds about 3,500 tons of monetary gold, surpassing Germany, to make it number two in the world after the Federal Reserve.
And there are grave doubts whether the Federal Reserve actually holds the 8,044 tons of gold it claims it does. The former International Monetary Fund director, France’s Dominique Straus-Kahn, demanded an independent audit of the Federal Reserve gold after the US refused to deliver to the IMF 191 tons of gold agreed to under the IMF Articles of Agreement signed by the Executive Board in April 1978 to back Special Drawing Rights issuance. Immediately before he could rush back to Paris, he was hit by a bizarre hotel sex scandal and abruptly forced to resign. Straus-Kahn had been shown a secret Russian intelligence report prepared for President Vladimir Putin in which ‘rogue’ CIA agents revealed that the US Federal Reserve had no gold reserves and only lied that it did.
The stakes for Washington and Wall Street in depressing the gold price are staggering. Were gold to soar to $10,000 or more, where many believe current demand-supply pressures would find it, there would be a panic selloff of the dollar and of US Treasury bonds. China now holds a record $3.7 trillion of foreign currency reserves and the US Treasury bonds and bills are about half that.
That selloff would send US interest rates sky-high, forcing a chain-reaction of corporate and personal bankruptcies that have been avoided since the financial crisis broke in 2007 only owing to record near-zero Federal Reserve interest rates. That selloff, in turn, would be the end of the US as the world’s sole superpower. Little wonder the Obama Administration is manipulating gold. It cannot last very long at this pace, however.
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