Sunday 18 January 2015

USAHitman | Conspiracy News

Mass extinction for Earth’s oceans probable, comprehensive study says

Posted: 16 Jan 2015 04:59 PM PST

The first comprehensive study of its kind has determined that ocean life is facing mass extinction from human activity. But the record damage is still reversible – unlike our impact on land. American scientists say the effects can be mitigated.
We’ve known for a while that achieving sustainability would be impossible with our lifestyles. Although the majority of Earth is covered in water we are vastly reliant on, many of our practices are causing unprecedented damage to marine biology: coral reef damage, resource mining, fish farming, construction work, chemical pollution, the depletion of bio resources, unintended species migration, global warming, military drills – to name just a few.
The picture has just been made clearer by a study that for the first time ever brought all these strands together. Drs. Malin L. Pinsky, Stephen R. Palumbi, Douglas J. McCauley and colleagues from the University of California have dug into hundreds of sources past and present, including the fossil record and statistics on shipping and seabed mining to form the chilling conclusions of their study, published Thursday in the journal Science.
“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” McCauley says on the analysis, which has already received wide acclaim from marine biologists and experts in related fields.
“If by the end of the century we’re not off the business-as-usual curve we are now, I honestly feel there’s not much hope for normal ecosystems in the ocean,” Palumbi said.

One of the key conclusions is that the oceans had until now largely evaded the damage we had caused to terrestrial life, seeing as we’re after all a terrestrial species. But after 1800, when industrialization hit, land extinction sped up and the stage was set for irreversible water damage, which is now mirroring the situation.
“Current trends in ocean use suggest that habitat destruction is likely to become an increasingly dominant threat to ocean wildlife over the next 150 years,” the team said in their study. And because oceans are a fluid mechanism, and much more difficult to monitor accurately than land, there is practically no way of reaching a conclusion on the average state of Earth’s water. Some places could be far wars off than others, hence the importance of the new cumulative analysis.
We’re squeezing the species on all sides: mangrove farming destroys habitats, while our fish nets have affected 20 million square miles of ocean already, altering the continental shelf.
Seabed mining contracts are an especially huge change: the area went from zero square miles in the year 2000 to a staggering 460,000 in 2014. This serious threat is especially dangerous to sensitive and unique ecosystems.
And while we no longer hunt whales to the same extent, their lives are now affected by a rapidly growing number of shipping lanes.
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UK-France Channel Tunnel closed after smoke detected

Posted: 16 Jan 2015 04:44 PM PST

Channel Tunnel connecting the UK and France has been shut down after smoke was detected, the tunnel operator announced. Eurotunnel expects to resume vehicle and freight services later in the evening. Eurostar trains were also returned to original stations while drivers were advised to postpone planned trips.
Preliminary reports say the source of the smoke is a lorry at the French end of the tunnel, according to Kent police.
“A lorry fire has led to the closure of both bores of the Channel Tunnel,” police said in an emailed statement. “The fire was at the French end of the tunnel and is being dealt with by the French authorities.”
No injuries has been immediately reported in the incident, but rail passengers were advised to expect significant delay while the vehicle is being recovered and smoke clears.
“We are sorry but we are unable to run any further trains today because Eurotunnel has been closed due to smoke detected in the north tunnel,” Eurostar said on Twitter.
“If you were planning to travel today, we advise you to postpone your journey and not to come to the station.”
The Channel Tunnel has been operating since May 1994. It transports over 20 million passengers and 19 million tons of cargo annually, according to estimates.
Source
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DEA admits to collecting phone records of Americans

Posted: 16 Jan 2015 04:43 PM PST

Yet another federal agency of the United States government maintained a database of phone records pertaining to Americans who were not necessarily suspected of any wrongdoing, the Justice Department has admitted.
In addition to the database of telephony metadata maintained by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and revealed to the world through classified documents via former government contractor Edward Snowden, a Justice Department official acknowledged in a court filing this week that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) operated a similar system for roughly a decade.
The admission was made on Thursday by way of an official declaration entered in federal court by Robert Patterson, an assistant special agent in charge at the DEA, concerning a previous Department of Homeland Security investigation that helped authorities narrow in on a suspect charged with violating the trade embargo between the US and Iran.
In December, a federal judge said the government had to explain the “contours of the mysterious law enforcement database used by Homeland Security Investigation, including any limitations on how and when the database may be used,” according to Courthouse News Service.
On Thursday, the DEA agent did just that.
In a declaration filed in US District Court for the District of Columbia, Patterson wrote that a database existed at the DEA’s disposal that “consisted of telecommunications metadata obtained from United States telecommunications service providers pursuant to administrative subpoenas served upon the service providers under the provision of 21 USC 876, a provision of the Control Substance Act that provides law enforcement with the ability to investigate suspected drug crimes.” The DEA reportedly stopped using the database in late 2013.
“This metadata related to international telephone calls originating in the United States and calling [redacted]designated foreign countries, one of which was Iran, that were determined to have a demonstrated nexus to international drug trafficking and related criminal activities.”
The 2013 Snowden disclosures exposed how the US intelligence community has long been able to query a database of similar call records forwarded to the Justice Department for national security reasons. Only now, however, has it been revealed that the DEA administered a separate database, this one logging any case in or out of the US in which one of the parties is presumed to be in any such vaguely defined countries with a “demonstrated nexus” to drug dealing.
The DEA database, Patterson added, “could be used to query a telephone number where federal law enforcement officials had a reasonable articulable suspicion that the telephone number at issue was related to an ongoing federal criminal investigation.” An Iranian-based phone number was sucked up in the database, according to the official, and then led authorities to suspected sanction violator Shantia Hassanshahi.
“I have long believed that the government put Iran on its list of approved target countries under the Section 215 dragnet not to use for counterterrorism purposes (the terror Iran seems to have sponsored of late is largely US generated), but instead to support sanctions,” national security blogger Marcy Wheeler wrote on Friday, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provision that lets the NSA collect telephony metadata in bulk. Indeed, Wheeler wrote that Patterson’s statement confirms that the US government had an entire other database, this time for the DEA, to support sanctions on Iran.
Saied Kashani, a lawyer for Mr. Hassanshahi, told The Wall Street Journal that he has attempted to have the phone evidence suppressed because the system, as described, “functions entirely like the NSA database…which is likely unconstitutional.”
“I think when Congress passed this statute they had no intention that an agency would use it to generate these vast quantities of information in a database on innocent Americans,’’ Kashani added.
American authorities detained Hassanshahi upon entering the US in January 2012 and, after examining his laptop, allegedly found evidence linking the man to having exported $6 million worth of goods that illegally ended up in Iran. Hassanshahi was charged with one count of conspiracy to violate the International Economic Emergency Powers Act and the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations.
Source
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Brooklyn DA to probe allegations NYPD officers planted guns

Posted: 16 Jan 2015 04:10 PM PST

The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office announced it is looking into whether or not six NYPD officers planted guns on innocent people in order to arrest them for illegal possession of firearms.
Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson announced the investigation after prosecutors were forced to drop a weapons case involving a man accused of having a gun outside his Brooklyn apartment. The probe will center on allegations that police officers have been planting guns on innocent people.
The man in question in this particular case, 53-year-old Jeffery Herring, was arrested last year by officers from the 67th Precinct in East Flatbush. Police said they had a tip from a confidential informant stating that someone had a gun. Herring matched the description of the man, and a gun was found at the location reported by the informant.
However, the gun found was in a plastic bag with no traces of the suspect’s fingerprints. The charges were dropped when police were unable to bring the informant to court despite a judge’s order that he or she appear. Herring has maintained his innocence for more than a year and a half.
“I dreamed of this day,” said Herring, who was facing up to 15 years in jail, to The New York Daily News. “I knew I didn’t do anything.” The DA’s investigation will not focus solely on Herring’s case. Five other cases share similar details, a situation that has led to the suspicion of questionable police conduct.
“We will investigate the arrest of Mr. Herring and other arrests by these officers because of the serious questions raised by this case,” said Thompson.
The public defender representing Herring, Debora Silberman, suggested in court papers that the group of officers invents criminal informants and may have been motivated to make false arrests to satisfy department goals or quotas. They might also be collecting the $1,000 rewards offered to informants for Operation Gun Stop, which is meant to notify police of illegal gun possession.
A spokeswoman for the NYPD told The New York Times that investigators from the Internal Affairs Bureau were looking at officers’ conduct in these cases. “Any allegations that are made in regards to the credibility of the officers are taken very seriously,” she added.
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World War III scares posted by hacked NY Post, UPI Twitter feeds

Posted: 15 Jan 2015 04:06 PM PST

Social media watchers on Friday were treated to shocking and dramatic global developments courtesy of the New York Post and United Press International: World War III declared by the Pope! China and the United States engaged in a serious military battle!
Thankfully for the international community, it was just (another) case of hacked Twitter accounts going haywire.
Both UPI and the New York Post had their Twitter feeds hijacked at around 1 p.m. on Friday, as President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron addressed the media on cyber security and the need to beef up online defenses.
While the two leaders answered questions, the news organizations’ Twitter feeds were filled with reports of China condemning President Obama’s “pivot to Asia” before firing on and damaging of the USS George Washington, an American aircraft carrier based in the Pacific. The feeds also stated that the US was involved in “active combat” against China in the South China Sea.
“US Joint Chief of staff: USS George Washington damaged, US navy now engaged in active combat against Chinese vessels in South China sea,” read one tweet.
Another read: “JUST IN: Xi Jinping: Obama ‘condemned’ for Asia pivot, ‘has forced China to protect its interests through military means.’”
Meanwhile, UPI tweeted that Pope Francis declared “World War II has begun.”
Less dramatic — but still very wrong — was a NY Post business section tweet which said the Federal Reserve wants “negative interest rates to avoid market recession due to low oil prices.”
Both the Post and UPI quickly deleted the tweets after they were posted, and acknowledged they had been hacked.
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4 killed in anti-Charlie Hebdo march in Niger

Posted: 15 Jan 2015 04:00 PM PST

At least three civilians and one police officer have reportedly been killed during a protest against cartoons published in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. It comes as Muslims across the world united in marches on Friday.
“There was one police officer killed and three civilians,” a police source told Reuters. “Some of the protesters were armed with bows and arrows as well as clubs. The clashes were very violent in some places,” he said.
Another 45 people – 23 protesters and 22 police officers – have been wounded. A rally in Niger’s second city, Zinder, also descended into violence as protesters set fire to churches and raided shops run by Christians.
A French cultural center was set ablaze by about 50 protesters who broke through the building’s front entrance. Shouting “Charlie is the devil,” they set fire to the cafeteria, library, and offices.
“We’ve never seen that in living memory in Zinder,” an administration official told AFP. “It’s a black Friday.” Outraged by the new magazine issue, Muslim communities staged mass marches across the world on Friday.
An anti-Charlie Hebdo rally, organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, gathered over 2,000 protesters in Amman, Jordan. Brotherhood spokesman Murad Adaileh said the group strongly condemns both the killings and the “offensive” against the prophet, AP reported.
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