Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Sunday 5 July 2015


Puppet Masters
RT
2015-07-05 20:20:00

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Iran has announced the deployment of its second long-range Ghadir radar, which is part of an integrated air defense system the country is creating. An even longer-range system is currently partially operational.

The new over-the-horizon radar system, which is said to be able to track ballistic missiles at 1,100km and fighter aircraft at 600km, was finalized in Ahwaz city in southwestern Khuzestan province near the Iraq border, the state-run FARS news agency reported Saturday.

It's the second system of its kind in Iran. The first Ghadir was unveiled in June last year at the Garmsar site in Semnan province in the north of the country. The Iranian military said that the system had been tested since 2011 and that it would be mass-produced.
Comment: This radar system should pose some difficulty for any country trying to bomb Iran.
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Tyler Durden
Zerohedge
2015-07-04 20:09:00
One week ago, when we scoured through the latest OCC quarterly derivative report (in which we find that the top FDIC insured 4 US banks continue to account for over 90%, or $185.5 trillion of all outstanding derivatives which as of March 31 amounted to $203 trillion; nothing new here), we found something fascinating: based on the OCC's derivative update, JPM had literally cornered the commodity derivatives complex, when from "just" $226 billion in total Commodity exposure, JPM's notional soared by 1,690% in one quarter to $4 trillion, or about 96% of total.

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Comment: Certainly interesting moves by these big banks. Hope this blows up in their face.
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Sputnik
2015-07-05 18:11:00

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While NATO is beefing up its military presence in the Baltics and Eastern Europe in order to counter Russia's mythical "aggression," the alliance's officials cannot provide any credible justification for their initiative.

Christopher S. Chivvis, Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, admits that "the chances of a Russian attack on the Baltics are low, and the costs of war with NATO would be enormous for Moscow."

However, the political scientist jumps on the bandwagon of proponents of further NATO expansion in Eastern Europe.

Providing no credible evidence to confirm Russia's militaristic intentions, the expert claimed that "Moscow's future trajectory" is "highly uncertain."

He referred to Russia's "saber-rattling along NATO's eastern flank" — including "military exercises" and "air and naval maneuvers" — turning a blind eye to the fact that it was NATO that has drawn closer to Russia's borders over the last 25 years.

Remarkably, Russia's military drills conducted in its own territory as well as its air and naval exercises carried out in complete accordance with international rules and regulations have nevertheless "prompted" NATO "to take the risk of conflict seriously."
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Stephen Lendman
Global Research
2015-07-05 00:00:00

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On Friday, presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton addressed a hand-picked audience at a Dartmouth College campaign event. She lied calling Iran an "existential threat to Israel... I hope we are able to get a deal next week that puts a lid on (its) nuclear weapons program."


Even if we do get such a deal, we will still have major problems from Iran. They are the world's chief sponsor of terrorism.

They use proxies like Hezbollah to sow discord and create insurgencies to destabilize governments. They are taking more and more control of a number of nations in the region and they pose an existential threat to Israel.

We...have turn our attention to working with our partners to try to reign in and prevent this continuing Iranian aggressiveness.


Fact: US and Israeli intelligence both say Iran's nuclear program has no military component. No evidence whatever suggests Tehran wants one. Plenty indicates otherwise.
Comment: Just what the world needs, more war with the resulting total destruction of yet another country who in reality poses no threat, except in the minds of the emperors of chaos. Hillary is no friend of humanity.
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Kirill Benediktov
The Vineyard of the Saker
2015-07-04 15:20:00

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Writer and political analyst Kirill Benediktov on Yevgeni Maximovich's role in Russian politics

It seemed that Yevgeni Maximovich Primakov would live forever.

He was a wise old man, holding no official post, but always ready to help the country. To give advice to the people invested with real power; to meet informally with foreign partners—not the ones you see on TV, but those who make the decisions; to influence his friends and followers, who held key posts in various powerful agencies.

Primakov was the incarnation of the concept of "soft power," and virtually its only practitioner who was fighting for Russia's glory.

Of course, the media is as full of "soft power" soldiers as a tin of sardines. They go on and on about "the Chinese danger," and how Russia, having quarrelled with the West, is doomed to become a raw materials appendage of China, or how it is for naught that the Kremlin is trying to establish mutually beneficial contacts with Turkey. They carry on about Iran using us as a pawn in its game with Washington, and how Beijing and Delhi will never trade in their friendship with America for the dubious benefits of an alliance with Moscow... Now that Primakov is gone, those thin, whiny voices will be louder and shriller on the air.

Right now, that is insignificant. Because Primakov's idea of creating a Great Triangle, Moscow-Delhi-Beijing, is becoming a real political construct before our very eyes, no matter how loud the liberal jackals may yap.

Yevgeni Maximovich first proclaimed the idea of the Great Triangle during his visit to Delhi in 1998. Many of us recall the condition Russia was in at that time: politically and economically crushed, having barely survived the August default, and just barely beginning to find our way out of the deep crisis into which Russia had been plunged by the "young reformers" in alliance with the corrupt members of the Yeltsin Family.
Comment: Russia has lost a great, if untitled statesman. It is heartening to see his legacy going forward, as Russia takes its rightful place in the world.
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C.M.
Investment Watch Blog
2015-07-04 01:28:00

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No details offered, and a bit cagey in how it's delivered by Yanis, but this is big news if it's true:

Yanis Says Europe Has Offered A Deal "We Would Sign On The Dotted Line"
Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis says the European governments with whom he is negotiating have offered him a deal he is willing to sign, according to an interview on Channel 4.

There is a condition, however. Greece must first vote "no" in the referendum on accepting Europe's bailout conditions, on Sunday. It is not clear what the terms of the deal are, and Channel 4's video ends before Varoufakis describes them.

A transcript of that interview reads like this:

Varoufakis: Let me tell you something which is probably unknown. Ever since we declared a referendum and incensed our European partners we had the most, er, interesting proposals coming from Brussels. Perhaps this referendum and the impasse that it represents concentrated several minds in Brussels and we've had some really good proposals. Proposals that we would sign on the dotted line for.

Channel 4's Paul Mason: You have a proposal you would sign on the dotted line for?

Varoufakis: Yes we do.

Paul Mason: Where is it?

Varoufakis: I'm not going to tell you. It's somewhere in this building. But the of course crucial part of the story is that before this proposal becomes a genuine negotiating document which we can sign off on Monday, the Greek people have to empower us with a "no."

The background here is that after Greece defaulted on a 1.5 billion euro repayment to the IMF, the IMF then admitted that Greece's debts are so large they need to be restructured. This gave a huge boost to Varoufakis's left-leaning Syriza government in Greece, which wants voters to vote "no" to Europe's bailout conditions. The EU and the IMF want Greeks to vote "yes" and accept the bailout conditions. Those conditions require Greece to repay its debts in full by reforming its economy, cutting public spending, and increasing the level of tax collection.
Comment: This certainly smells fishy.
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Society's Child
John Vibes
trueactivist.com
2015-07-03 20:56:00

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47-year-old Portuguese actor and practicing Buddhist, Heitor was detained by police this week, and held for 6 hours under suspicion of terrorism after he was meditating on a flight that was awaiting takeoff from Paris.

Lourenco had allegedly frightened flight attendants and other passengers when he meditated and read a sacred Tibetan text to himself just before the plane took off. The departure was delayed, and police boarded the plane and took Lourenco away for questioning.

"Police told me that I had been denounced as a terrorism suspect aboard the plane because I was reciting the Koran aloud, that I was reading a text involving words 'death' and 'bomb'," Lourenco told reporters on Thursday.

Lourenco said that he was using his tablet to read the sacred text, and the app that he was using included a timer to let him know how long he was meditating. The fact that his application had a timer was allegedly what made people think it was a bomb, but it a major stretch to assume such a thing, and an extreme overreaction.

When police arrived on the scene it should have only taken him a few seconds to explain the situation, but instead he was taken off of his flight, treated like a criminal, and detained for 6 hours. Eventually, police were able to Google his name to discover that he was a well-known actor and a practicing Buddhist, and they finally let him go.
Comment: The fear mongering is certainly working.
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Lecia Bushak
Medical Daily
2015-07-02 14:22:00

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Whether you're reaching for your phone in the morning to shut off the alarm or to check all those important Instagram or Facebook updates you missed over the past 8 hours, you're probably one of those millennials glued to your phone first thing in the morning. Heck, who am I to judge? We're all guilty of it.

We've become dependent on devices and social media, addicted even, and it has become second nature to constantly check our phones to see if we have a new e-mail or a notification that someone has liked a photo. And it turns out we're thinking about our phones more than we think about our significant others or even coffee first thing in the morning.

According to a new study out of the Braun Research Center and Bank of America, more people think about their phones than their significant others when they first wake up. The study "explores mobile behaviors and trends among adult consumers across the country," its website states. "This year's results demonstrate the notable impact that mobile devices increasingly have on our daily lives. For many, it's the first and last interaction of the day."

The study found that 35 percent of people thought about their smartphone first thing in the morning, followed by 17 percent who thought about coffee, and 13 percent who thought about their toothbrushes. Only 10 percent thought about their significant other (this is a tricky one, because what if your SO is lying there next to you? Or perhaps thinking about them is synonymous to thinking about your smartphone, because you reach over to text them "Good morning!" first thing).
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Terrence Newton
Activist Post
2015-07-04 00:00:00

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It has been over four years since the 9.0 magnitude Tōhoku earthquake and ensuing catastrophic tsunami leveled the Pacific coast of Japan, setting off a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Radiation has been pouring into the ocean, into the earth below, and into the air for over 1500 days now and there is still zero sense of urgency on the part of the government and world leaders to seriously address this blooming catastrophe. All efforts to stop the meltdown and clean up the radiation have been left in the hands of TEPCO, Japan's energy company that has been proven time and again to be inept and unprepared to confront a disaster of this sort.

The mainstream media, for its part, appears to be complicit in a cover-up of the effects that Fukushima radiation is already having on our environment and on human and animal health, and instead insists on omitting most news on the matter, or seriously dumbing down reports of the fallout.
Comment: To those reading only the mainstream press, Fukushima is 'old news'. The unprecedented rates of cancer, and the ongoing devastating effects on insectsbirds andmarine life have been effectively hidden from view. It's obvious those in control of the nuclear industry have done their jobs, much to our detriment.
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Allgov.com
2015-07-05 15:05:00

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Police in the United States have fatally shot 124 mentally ill people so far this year, according to The Washington Post.

The Post found that the vast majority of the 124 were armed, but in most cases, the officers weren't responding to reports of a crime, but to calls from relatives, neighbors or others who said a mentally fragile person was behaving erratically, including 50 victims who said they wanted to kill themselves. And many of those who were armed didn't have firearms, but toy guns, knives or other implements that are less lethal than a gun.

The newspaper also found that more than 50% of the 124 were killed by officers whose agencies did not provide the most current training available for dealing with the mentally ill. "And in many cases, officers responded with tactics that quickly made a volatile situation even more dangerous," the Post's Wesley Lowery, Kimberly Kindy and Keith L. Alexander wrote.


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For instance, police are trained to take control, often through stern, shouted commands, when dealing with an armed suspect, the Post reported. But shouting and drawing weapons is "like pouring gasoline on a fire when you do that with the mentally ill," said Ron Honberg, policy director with the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, an independent research organization devoted to improving policing, said the death toll of mentally ill at the hands of police represents "a national crisis."

"We have to get American police to rethink how they handle encounters with the mentally ill. Training has to change," Wexler told the Post.

The newspaper reported that its research showed there were 462 police shootings in the first six months of 2015. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is supposed to keep track of such things but often has incomplete data, has never recorded 460 shootings in an entire year.

Comment: The stories behind these deaths are absolutely horrific. The Washington Postis such the propaganda rag. If you can stomach it, do read the original 'blaming the victim' article and some of the readers comments. It's disgusting to see the propaganda so effective. Such blatant disregard for victims or the real problem of escalating violence against innocent people in the U.S.

See also:
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Kathleen Brown
CNS News
2015-07-01 12:54:00

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Middle and high school students can't get a Coca-Cola or a candy bar at 13 Seattle public schools, but they can get a taxpayer-funded intrauterine device (IUD) implanted without their parents' consent.

School-based health clinics in at least 13 Seattle-area public high schools and middle schools offer long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), including IUDs and hormonal implants, to students in sixth-grade and above at no cost, according to Washington State officials.

LARCs are associated with serious side effects, such as uterine perforation and infection. IUDs, specifically, can also act as abortifacients by preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg.
Comment: Since when do tween and teenaged girls have the ability to give informed consent regarding medical procedures?
Consent is a voluntary agreement with an action proposed by another. Consent is an act of reason; the person giving consent must be of sufficient mental capacity and be in possession of all essential information in order to give valid consent. A person who is an infant, is mentally incompetent, or is under the influence of drugs is incapable of giving consent. Consent must also be free of coercion or fraud. Informed consent of a patient or other recipient of services is based on the principles of autonomy and privacy; this has become the requirement at the center of morally valid decision making in health care and research. Seven criteria define informed consent: (1) competence to understand and to decide, (2) voluntary decision making, (3) disclosure of material information, (4) recommendation of a plan, (5) comprehension of terms (3) and (4), (6) decision in favor of a plan, and (7) authorization of the plan. A person gives informed consent only if all of these criteria are met. If all of the criteria are met except that the person rejects the plan, that person makes an informed refusal.
It seems the powers that be would like nothing better than to remove all parental influence regarding the care of their children. How accommodating will these clinics be when side effects and complications arise?
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Raúl Ilargi Meijer
The Automatic Earth
2015-07-05 14:43:00

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I hardly ever go out in the morning, the first 7-8 hours of every single day are taken up by reading and writing. But today I did, to feel the mood in the city. Not sure I got it, though. Everything's quiet. It may not help that I'm staying smack in the middle of the Acropolis tourist area (still haven't figured out why 90% of them are American).

Not sure if many Greeks even really understand what is going on, and who can blame them, they have every reason to be scared more than anything else.

And I'm still trying to wrap my head around the trouble just about everyone seems to have with the simplest and most basic exercise in direct democracy that's taking place right now. The referendum here today has been called manipulative, opaque, some say there's not enough time, others claim Tsipras is merely trying to save face in the face of defeat, courts have been called in to rule on its legality.
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Daisy Luther
Natural Blaze
2015-07-04 00:00:00

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It's Independence Day! The 4th of July! Burgers! Picnics! Fireworks!

That's what it's all about, right? Go, America!

Actually, no, there probably weren't any hotdogs cooking on the grill on Independence Day in 1776. When the founding fathers of our nation signed the Declaration of Independence, they probably weren't wondering if the beer was cold yet, if Ben was going to burn the burgers again, or whether Thomas remembered the lighter for the fireworks.

They were thinking about freedom.

The whole purpose of the gesture was that these men were tired of bowing down to someone who did not have their best interests at heart. They were determined to no longer be the subjects of a King who looked at them as a way to make himself wealthy.

And, sadly, here we are a couple hundred years later, dependent yet again.

Our culture is just so incredibly dependent. Freedom is terrifying to most people because it means that they and they alone, are responsible for the actions that they take. An independent person succeeds or fails on his or her own merit. Independence by its very nature means that the possibility of failure exists. It requires a sense of adventure, confidence, and the ability to fail and get right back up again, and it seems like these things are being bred out of the American people.
Comment: The first step towards independence is recognizing that we have been brainwashed since infancy into believing a maelstrom of lies promulgated primarily to enslave us completely. While lifting the veil of these lies can be a long painful process, the rewards are priceless. If we consider the fact that the earth has entered a time ofplanetary chaos, and that many of the things we take for granted may soon vanish, the sooner we begin the process of trying to see reality as it is and take steps to think and act independently, the better equipped we will be to not only survive the chaos but to thrive and perhaps one day to actually be free.
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Janet Phelan
New Eastern Outlook
2015-07-04 23:09:00

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The fourth of July. This is the day for Americans to go down to the beach with a picnic basket loaded up with ham sandwiches and to drink more beer than can possibly be recommended during the work week. This is the day to gather with friends and family and to ooh and aah at pyrotechnics dazzling the sky. It is a day, if we stop to think, to be grateful that we are not living in a country which produces lock-step conformity and fear in its citizenry. It is a day, traditionally, to be thankful for our freedoms.

This July 4th, it would be useful to take a look at what we have lost, in terms of freedoms, and what we still stand to lose. Like some other institutions in America, the July 4th celebration of freedom has become something of an obligatory exercise of patriotic fervor. And given the developments of the last few years, it may now be relatively empty of meaning.

For the first time in US history, we have a President who has created—and invoked — the executive privilege of ordering the murders of US citizens without due process. While this has only been exercised a few times (to our knowledge), most notably with the 2011 assassination by drone strike of US born Muslim cleric Anwar al -Awlaki and subsequently of his son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the precedent now exists. This is not a privilege generally granted to a President in a free society. In fact, it is an action that is more redolent of a dictator, a Hitler or a Pol Pot whose purges of not only "enemies of the state," but also of whomever pissed off the dictator, became part of our collective awareness that we, as Americans, were very fortunate not to live under these sorts of rulers.
Comment: Perhaps Independence Day should be reclassified as a day of mourning, rather than a celebration. A day to mourn the freedoms Americans always thought they had and the freedoms to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that this country has snatched from people all over the world.
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Bernie Suarez
Activist Post
2015-07-04 20:01:00
Today I want to openly declare to the current control system what Independence Day means to me and why it is the most important holiday of the year.

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Dear controlling (federal) government, 

Do you know what today is? That's right. It's the one day of the year where we the little people celebrate Independence from you the larger control system. That is after all at the heart of Independence Day. This is the day when individuals with a conscience, not groups like government and corporations but individual human beings get to reminisce on the idea of freedom. And how can we blame humans for doing that? Freedom, after all is the most prized right to yearn for. It's a right, it's a moral code, it's an expectation and desire that all humans quietly yearn for, hope for and dream of. Freedom from you, the government. Freedom from external control and manipulation. Freedom from coercion, intimidation and forced slavery based on fear of harm, fear of being robbed and fear of being locked up. All three of these threats are the essence of what government does, but you already know that.
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Secret History
Paul DeRienzo
Who.What.Why
2015-06-30 00:00:00

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In August 2005, the New York Police Department, with the Department of Energy, conducted an anti-terrorism radiation flyover survey. The survey was intended to provide a baseline of radiological activity, in order to catch a suspicious construction of a dirty bomb.

They didn't find a dirty bomb—but there was plenty of radiological activity. Surveyors found 80 radioactive locations in the city—one of them being Great Kills Park in Staten Island, one of the city's five boroughs. The Park is a popular place near a suburban enclave inhabited by cops, firefighters and other unsuspecting residents. The Park, more than 500 acres of woods surrounding softball and soccer fields and a marina, was constructed from garbage dumped in the bay between 1944 and 1946. Unregulated and illegal dumping has a long history in New York City.

Children Are Especially Vulnerable

The radium is the legacy of nuclear weapons production coupled with a cavalier attitude towards the odorless, tasteless and invisible threat posed by radioactivity.

"This is potentially a very dangerous situation," said former Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) in 2013, whose congressional district includes the park. "The last thing I want is to have anyone or their children get sick or hurt because of this contamination."
Comment: See also: Undark and the Radium Girls
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Science & Technology
Phys.org
2015-07-03 00:00:00

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The DNA molecule is chemically unstable giving rise to DNA lesions of different nature. That is why DNA damage detection, signaling and repair, collectively known as the DNA damage response, are needed.

A group of researchers, lead by Vasily M. Studitsky, professor at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, discovered a new mechanism of DNA repair, which opens up new perspectives for the treatment and prevention of neurodegenerative diseases. The article describing their discovery is published in AAAS' first open access online-only journalScience Advances.

"In higher organisms DNA is bound with proteins in complexes called the nucleosome. Every ~200 base pairs are organized in nucleosomes, consisting of eight histone proteins, which, like the thread on the bobbin, wound double helix of DNA, which is coiled into two supercoiled loops. Part of the surface of the DNA helix is hidden, because it interacts with histones. Our entire genome is packed this way, except for the areas, from which the information is being currently read",—says Vasily M. Studitsky , who is the leading researcher and the head of the Laboratory of Regulation of Transcription and Replication at the Biological Faculty of the Lomonosov Moscow State University.
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Elizabeth Howell
Space
2015-07-04 20:16:00

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After taking a 26-year nap, a waking black hole released a burst of X-rays that lit up astronomical observatories on June 15 — and it's still making a ruckus today.

Astronomers identified the revived black hole as an "X-ray nova" — a sudden increase in star luminosity — coming from a binary system in the constellation Cygnus. The outburst may have been caused by material falling into a black hole.
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RT
2015-07-05 09:32:00

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After two consequent failures to get essential supplies to the International Space Station, crew members finally received much-needed cargo delivered by a Russian Progress space freighter.


Comment: What's up with these frequent resupply failures, rocket crashes and malfunctions in space?
There is a hypothesis that our atmosphere has changed:
Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection: The Secret History of the World - Book 3 


The Progress M 28M docked with the ISS on Sunday, carrying 2.4 tons of fuel, water, oxygen and scientific experiments needed to operate the station. The robotic freighter was launched Friday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The delivery gives relief to the three-strong crew of the ISS a week after Space X rocketFalcon 9 failed to launch a Dragon cargo ship to the station as its oxygen tank burst. In April, a Russian Progress spaceship failed, too, due to a glitch in its third stage that sent the spaceship tumbling.

The delivery paves the way for the scheduled arrival on three more crewmembers, NASA's Kjell Lindgren, Russia's Oleg Kononenko and Japan's Kimiya Yui, who are to join NASA's Scott Kelly and Russia's Mikhail Korniyenko and Gennady Padalka in orbit later this month.

With the Progress ship's arrival, the ISS has a stockpile large enough to operate through November. The next supply mission by the Japanese HTV cargo transport is scheduled for August.
Comment: How much do these missions cost? Especially in light of the frequent failures, exploding rockets, cargoes burning up and falling into the ocean?
Wired: April 30, 2015
The unmanned Progress M-27M capsule was launched atop a Soyuz-2-1a rocket on Tuesday, carrying around 3,000 pounds of fuel, food, supplies and experiments to the International Space Station. Unfortunately Roscosmos and Nasa have now admitted that Progress 59 is now effectively space junk, Sen.com reported - albeit a piece of junk which cost around $50 million to put into space just days ago.
Antares rocket failure: October 29, 2014
Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment, ranging from "classified cryptographic" gear to school science experiments, was destroyed in a giant fireball on Tuesday evening after technicians detonated a self-destruct mechanism six seconds after launch because of a "catastrophic" equipment failure.
Washington Business Journal: March 3, 2009
Last month's satellite launch failure will cost Orbital Sciences Corp.more than $5 million.
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Phys.org
2015-07-01 07:53:00

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The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft first began orbiting comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August 2014. Almost immediately, scientists began to wonder about several surprisingly deep, almost perfectly circular pits on the comet's surface. Now, a new study based on close-up imagery taken by Rosetta suggests that these pits are sinkholes, formed when ices beneath the comet's surface sublimate, or turn directly to gas.

The study, which appears in the July 2, 2015 issue of the journal Nature, reveals that the surface of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is variable and dynamic, undergoing rapid structural changes as it approaches the sun. Far from simple balls of ice and dust, comets have their own life cycles. The latest findings are among the first to show, in detail, how comets change over time.

"These strange, circular pits are just as deep as they are wide. Rosetta can peer right into them," said Dennis Bodewits, an assistant research scientist in astronomy at the University of Maryland who is a co-author on the study. The pits are large, ranging from tens of meters in diameter up to several hundred meters across.

"We propose that they are sinkholes, formed by a surface collapse process very similar to the way sinkholes form here on Earth," Bodewits added. Sinkholes occur on Earth when subsurface erosion removes a large amount of material beneath the surface, creating a cavern. Eventually the ceiling of the cavern will collapse under its own weight, leaving a sinkhole behind. "So we already have a library of information to help us understand how this process works, which allows us to use these pits to study what lies under the comet's surface," Bodewits said.
Comment: The Rosetta mission scientists have already admitted, based on new information, that what they "have discovered is already starting to transform our understanding of Rosetta's target comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (C-G for short), and cometary science."

Wheres the ice 3 surprising comet facts we've already learned from Rosetta

Perhaps if they considered the electrical nature of comets, as Wallace Thornhill states in this video, these sinkholes and other phenomena, such as the "increasingly stormy" conditions on Uranusincreased volcanic activity on Jupiters moon Ioscientists have been puzzled by the wobble of Saturn's moon Mimas and a major increase in asteroid activity has seen MIT astronomers upgrade the solar system from stable to dynamicwould seem to indicate solar system-wide 'climate change'.

For more information read: Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection
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Phys.org
2015-07-03 00:00:00

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Exciting new technologies, which allow users to change the shape of displays with their hands, promise to revolutionise the way we interact with smartphones, laptops and computers. Imagine pulling objects and data out of the screen and playing with these in mid-air.

Today we live in a world of flat-screen displays we use all day - whether it's the computer in the office, a smartphone on the train home, the TV or iPad on the couch in the evening. The world we live in is not flat, though; it's made of hills and valleys, people and objects. Imagine if we could use our fingertips to manipulate the display and drag features out of it into our 3D world.

Such a vision led to the launch in January 2013 of GHOST (Generic, Highly-Organic Shape-Changing Interfaces), an EU-supported research project designed to tap humans' ability to reason about and manipulate physical objects through the interfaces of computers and mobile devices.
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Earth Changes
khou.com
2015-07-03 16:37:00

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A sick Pygmy whale washed ashore on Surfside Beach Friday morning, much to the surprise of nearby beachgoers.

People rushed to save the whale, but responders determined the whale was too sick to be transported and had to be put down.

Officials with the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network said that if you encounter a beached whale or dolphin, call 1-800-9-Mammal and follow the instructions of the staff until a rescue team can arrive on scene.
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Andrei Medina
gmanetwork.com
2015-07-04 15:43:00

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Two waterspouts were caught by a resident in Aringay, La Union during inclement weather there, a report from GMA's "24 Oras" said Saturday.

According to the residents who took the video footage, they first saw one of the waterspouts at sea and was approaching their houses.

They then saw another, larger waterspout building up and seemingly sucking water from the sea nearby.

The waterspouts fortunately did not pass through their houses and no one was reported hurt during the incident.

According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, waterspouts are tornados that form over water "They are associated with severe thunderstorms, and are often accompanied by high winds and seas, large hail, and frequent dangerous lightning," NOAA also said on its website


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Steve Parren
vtdigger.org
2015-06-26 13:26:00

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Monarch butterflies are in decline nationwide, and may be approaching dangerously low levels.

Monarchs have declined nearly 80% in the 21 years researchers have been monitoring their wintering populations, from a high of up to one billion butterflies in the 1990s to roughly 56 million today, according to a recent report from the Xerces Society.

But according to Mark Ferguson, a biologist for the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department, Vermont may play an important role in the continued efforts at monarch conservation.

"Vermont's meadows and old fields provide habitat for milkweed, which is a critical food source for monarchs," said Ferguson. "In contrast, increasing levels of herbicide use in large-scale agriculture in the Midwest appear to have greatly reduced the abundance of milkweed in that part of the country, which historically produced half of the monarchs in eastern North America."

Monarchs lay eggs on milkweed and feed on milkweed as caterpillars. Most eastern monarchs overwinter at a single site in the mountains of central Mexico. According to Ferguson, monarchs need to reproduce several times during their north-bound migration, and require milkweed at each of these sites.
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Katherine Schaeffer
triblive.com
2015-07-03 12:55:00

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The Washington County Animal Response Team rescued a horse Friday morning from a 6-foot sinkhole at a Scenery Hill farm.

Responders lifted the 1,000-pound horse, named Chautauqua Worms, from the hole with an A-frame hoist borrowed from the county, said Ed Childers, a firefighter at the North Strabane fire department, which runs the rescue team known as CART.

The response team arrived at the Amos Road property about 6 a.m., pulling the horse from the pit at 9:30 a.m., Childers said.

"All in all, everything went pretty well," Childers said. "No injuries, no damaged equipment."

Neighbors identified the horse as belonging to horse farm owner Lisa Beinhauer. She could not be reached for comment.
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Bath Chronicle
2015-07-05 12:44:00

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A 15ft deep hole opened up on a popular Devon beach on Thursday.

A large part of the beach in Exmouth has been closed to the public over fears of further sinkholes appearing in the sane.

One beach-goer reported the discovery to the coastguard near Orcombe Point.

Specialist teams secured the area and on arrival found a hole approximately 15ft wide and the same distance down had appeared and was filled with water.

The surrounding sand was also soft, with fresh holes starting to appear nearby.

East Devon District Council said a 100m squared cordon has now been put in place after concern was raised that the hole may be indicative of a much larger chamber underneath.
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Fire in the Sky
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Health & Wellness
Dr.Vandana Shiva
Common Dreams
2015-06-29 19:49:00

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How industrial-scale farming is actually becoming anti-science.


"Science" is derived from the scire - "to know".

Each of us should know what we are eating, how it was produced, what impact it has on our health.

The knowledge we need for growing food is knowledge of biodiversity and living seed, of living soil and the soil food web, of interaction between different species in the agroecosystem and of different seasons. Farmers have been the experts in these fields, as have ecological scientists who study the evolution of microorganisms, plants and animals, the ecological web and the soil food web.
Comment: Dr. Vandana Shiva has written and lectured extensively regarding the failed science surrounding the biotechnology industry, the genetic modification of plant and animal genes, and the growing concern of bio-piracy. Read the following articles written by Dr. Shiva to learn more about the control and corruption of the world's food/seed markets based on flawed GMO science.
When corporates take patents, Dr
...

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