The European Union Times |
- Astonishing images of Mercury captured by NASA spacecraft before smashing into planet
- Nigerian Army Rescues Hundreds of Women and Girls from Boko Haram Captivity
- 250 killed in Nepal mudslide avalanche
- Disgraced HSBC cites UK ‘regulatory reforms’ as a cause for Asia move
- NSA “Sonic-Wave” Weapon Use In Baltimore Horrifies Russia
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Posted: 28 Apr 2015 03:49 PM PDT
 As Judgment Day approaches for NASA’s Messenger probe, stunning new pictures have emerged of the planet it is set to crash into on Thursday: Mercury. The incredible close-up shots show our solar system’s smallest planet as never before. The psychedelic appearance is explained by NASA overlaying the pictures from the spacecraft’s Visual and Infrared Spectrometer (Virs) onto a black and white mosaic in order to accentuate features such as craters and volcanic vents. After more than a decade since its launch, and four years circling Mercury, Messenger will go where no other probe has gone before on April 30th. After running out of fuel for its thrusters, the 500kg spacecraft is set to plunge onto the planet’s surface at some 8,750 miles per hour, creating its own sizeable crater and destroying the probe itself.  But the touchdown looks set to be an anti-climactic one. Messenger will crash behind Mercury, out of view of Earth. In fact it will take hours for NASA to confirm the probe’s demise, only being able to do so hours later when the spacecraft fails to appear from behind the planet.  1. Water Finding frozen water so close to the Sun was a major surprise, though there had been hints in earlier radar observations. 2. What lies above Something was covering the ice, an unexplained dark layer. More investigation will be carried out but NASA is putting its money on it being carbon-rich compounds, similar to substances found in certain meteorites and in comets. 3. It used to be bigger To be exact, over the past four and a half billion years Mercury has shrunk by over 7 kilometres in radius. Reams of data have yet to be analyzed. But for now, it’s a bittersweet time for those whose careers have revolved around the probe. ‘I have worked on the mission for 19 years. It’s like losing a member of the family. Even pre-knowledge doesn’t prepare you completely for the loss,’ said Mercury mission head Sean Solomon. Source           |
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Posted: 28 Apr 2015 03:35 PM PDT
 The Nigerian army on Tuesday rescued 200 girls and 93 women who had been kidnapped and taken hostage by the terrorist group Boko Haram. The women were rescued during the Nigerian army’s offensive to take back the Sambisa Forest from Boko Haram, the army announced on Twitter. “Troops this afternoon rescued 200 girls and 93 women from Sambisa Forest. We cannot confirm if the Chibok girls are in this group,” it said, adding Nigerian troops had also destroyed three camps run by the militants there. According to Reuters, none of the hostages were among the more than 200 schoolgirls Boko Haram kidnapped from the northeastern village of Chibok just over a year ago. The fate of those girls is still unknown. The kidnapping led to a worldwide call for the hostages to be returned to their homes. It also sparked a global social media campaign led on Twitter by the message #BringBackOurGirls. Diplomats and intelligence officials say they believed at least some of the girls were being held in the forest about 100 km (60 miles) from Chibok, although US reconnaissance drones failed to find them, Reuters reported. Nigerian forces backed by warplanes invaded the vast former colonial game reserve late last week as part of a push to win back territory from the terrorist group. The group announced earlier this week that it had changed its name from Boko Haram to “Islamic State’s West Africa Province” (ISWAP). Active since 2009, the Islamic militant group is notorious for mass killings and kidnappings. It currently operates on the border of four Western African countries: Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon. Source      |
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Posted: 28 Apr 2015 03:24 PM PDT
 On Tuesday, officials said the mudslide and avalanche took place in the isolated Ghodatabela village in rural regions near Gorkha district, about 100 kilometers northwest of the capital, Kathmandu, the epicenter of the April 25 earthquake. “An avalanche occurred in the afternoon today in Ghodatabela, an area on the popular Langtang trekking route,” said the chief district officer, Uddav Prasad Bhattarai. Reports indicate that there had been heavy snowfall near the village and the ground may have been loosened after the quake. Many roads have been blocked as a result of landslides, making it difficult for rescue teams and aid deliveries. The death toll for the natural disaster has exceeded 5,000 so far. More than 10,000 others have been also injured. About 18 people were also killed in the new avalanche on Nepal’s Mount Everest, which was triggered by the quake. Although most of the casualties were in Nepal, neighboring India reported 61 deaths and Tibet 25. Nepal has announced three days of national mourning. According to the United Nations, some 8 million people across Nepal have been affected by the incident and that more than 1.4 million people are in need of food assistance. The World Food Program (WFP) said that in addition to its aid operations, it was providing logistics, telecommunications, and air transport, which would cost $34 million over the next three months. Source      |
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Posted: 28 Apr 2015 03:01 PM PDT
 As disgraced British bank HSBC considers moving its headquarters to Asia, many UK tax payers have welcomed the news. The banking giant, which previously assisted criminals in dodging tax, cited regulatory changes as a driving factor for its move. HSBC is pondering selling off its UK retail unit in a lucrative £20bn deal, as it reviews whether it should remove its headquarters from the City of London to less stringently regulated pastures. Last week, the bank cited Britain’s shifting regulatory climate along with increasing operational costs as leading push factors for the move. Destinations under consideration include the bank’s former home Hong Kong, a range of other Asian hot spots and New York. Of particular concern to HSBC is Britain’s rising bank levy, which is increasing year on year. And like other banks based in the UK, HSBC faces pressure to sever its retail arm from its investment banking arm by 2019. Such a move falls under the government’s strategy to tackle the “too big to fail” characteristic of banks that caused the 2008 financial crisis. A possible Brexit from the EU should the Conservative Party win May’s general election has also been cited as a motivating factor. The prospect of terminating Britain’s EU membership is viewed as unwelcome by many key City players. Unlike Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Lloyds, HSBC was not bailed out by UK tax payers during the global financial crisis. However, it has been denounced in recent months over its role in the most serious tax dodging scandal in modern banking history. In February, it emerged HSBC’s Swiss private banking arm had aided royalty, criminals, terrorists and drug dealers in dodging taxes. The allegations were made by ex-HSBC employee and whistleblower Herve Falciani. A colossal cache of files leaked by Falciani to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) shed light on these practices. The files specifically revealed the bank’s alleged complicity in tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance between 2005 and 2007. They also shed light on HSBC’s policies of doling out large amounts of cash to clients in mixed currencies, and offering banking services to drug traffickers and criminals. As news of HSBC’s involvement in industrial scale tax dodging surfaced, Labour MP Austin Mitchel said Britain’s tax avoidance industry had eclipsed its tax collection industry. HSBC subsequently apologized publicly for the bank’s transgressions, with the bank’s chief executive claiming the institution had been “completely overhauled.” Like many leading British banks, HSBC has been engulfed by scandal in recent years. The bank was fined by regulators for fraudulently mis-selling payment protection insurance (PPI) to unwitting customers and manipulating foreign exchange markets. It was also fined heavily by American regulators for breaching US anti-money laundering regulations. News of HSBC’s departure from British soil has prompted a 0.6 percent hike in the bank’s shares since April 24. HSBC employs a total of 48,000 people in Britain. In March, the bank said it plans to relocate its British head office to Birmingham within the next four years, a move which would see 1,000 jobs transferred from London to the English West Midlands. The bank was first founded in 1865 in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and later relocated its headquarters to London in 1993 after buying up Midland Bank in Britain. Midland was part of the global FTSE 100 index, and provided business support and banking to leading manufacturers and business people. Source      |
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Posted: 28 Apr 2015 04:24 AM PDT
 The Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) states in a new report today that they were “horrified” over the use by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) of a powerful mass-psychology weapon against unsuspecting American citizens yesterday in Baltimore, Maryland, which caused these people, who were mostly school children, to erupt in a crazed frenzy of rioting, burning and looting. According to this report, the SVR was first alerted Sunday morning by signal intelligence analysts operating from theFederations Embassy in Washington D.C. that the NSA was in the process of completing their “final preparations” for a “mass event” believed to be scheduled for Monday, 27 April, in or around Baltimore. Raising the concerns of the SVR even more of what the NSA was planning, this report continues, were the presence of US Special Forces “provocateurs” within the crowds of Baltimore protectors Saturday evening agitating them towards violence. The presence of these US Special Forces “provocateurs” were noticed and commented on too by the former highly decorated New York City Police Detective Bo Dietl, who when being interviewed by the Fox News Service about the unrest in Baltimore stated about them: “And I saw — it’s just funny to see — these white guys, six-foot tall white guys with bandanas over their faces. They’re trying to hide their faces, what are they doing there?” As to why, indeed, these US military “provocateurs” were in Baltimore, this report notes, became apparent yesterday when over 85 NSA controlled Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) weapon vehicles left their main base at Fort Meade, Maryland, and began encircling this city. The LRAD vehicles deployed by the NSA around Baltimore yesterday, this report further explains, is a sonic weapon developed to send messages, warnings, and harmful, pain-inducing tones over longer distances than normal loudspeakers. LRAD systems have been used to counter piracy, as non-lethal crowd control weapons, and as communication devices too. Making these particular LRAD weapon vehicles deployed by the NSA around Baltimore even more dangerous, SVR analyst in this report say, was their “electronic signature” showing that they were equipped with a new technologydeveloped by Raytheon in 2011 that produces a low-frequency sound which resonates with the respiratory tract, making it hard to breathe. According to Raytheon’s patent, the intensity of this sonic weapon could be increased from causing discomfort to the point where targets become “temporarily incapacitated”. Even more insidiously, this report says, were that these LRAD weapon vehicles were also supported by Raytheon acoustic police shields that operate in what is called a “cohort mode” in which many shields are wirelessly networked so their output covers a wide area, like Roman legionaries locking their shields together. One shield acts as a master which controls the others, so that the acoustic beams combine effectively. When the “target area” of Baltimore intended for this combined LRAD-sonic police shield “test” was surrounded by NSA-US military forces yesterday, this report grimly notes, all that remained was to insert the “test subjects” into this “electronic grid of madness”…who in this particular case happened to be school children. Eerily, SVR intelligence analysts note in this report, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, this past weekend, gave notice of her knowledge of what was going to occur during this NSA “test” when she told reporters that her police officers were instructed to allow protestors to express themselves and that “we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.” As to the exact mechanics of this horrific NSA “test” on Baltimore school children yesterday, this report continues, once the “target area” was encircled by LRAD-police shield sonic weapons, a mass NSA initiated text was sent to all of these school students via social media about a “purge” to take place at 3 p.m. when their school day ended, starting at Mondawmin Mall and ending downtown. Such memes have been known to circulate regularly among city school students, based on the film “The Purge,” about what would happen if all laws were suspended.  And in order to ensure that all of these “test subjects” were kept in the “target area”, this SVR report says, once these students received the NSA text “purge” message and left their schools, all of the public transportation systems they relied on to get home were shut down. To the psychological effect of these school children being surrounded by these NSA sonic weapons and not allowed to go home, this report notes, was sadly predictable as all past examples in history have shown that these situations breed mass psychosis leading to extreme violence. As to why the NSA would conduct such a horrific “test” upon school children this SVR report notes several possibilities…the most probable being, they say, that what happened in Baltimore yesterday is associated with the massive unconventional war exercise being planned for the United States by the Obama regime called Jade Helm that many Americans believe is a prelude to the instituting of martial law.  And to if the Obama regime is, in fact, planning to institute martial law in America, this report notes, SVR intelligence officials think it is more likely than not. The reason(s) for them believing this is so, interestingly, is not the NSA “test” in Baltimore, but rather a series of “embedded” subliminal messages beginning to show up on American television the past few weeks…including a new American Association for Retired Persons (AARP) commercial where in the background a public service announcement news report about “riots nationwide” and a declaration of martial law by government emergency services barely audibly says: “Riots nationwide have prompted local governments to declare martial law. The President is asking that citizens find safety and remain calm. Authorities are working to contain the outbreak.” Source     |
