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Pepe Escobar
Asia Times 2013-04-22 16:18:00
The Boston bombing was major blowback. That much is certain. The question is, what level of blowback? It could have been a covert op gone real bad. It could have been blowback from former ''freedom fighters'' - in this case ethnic Chechens - reconverted into terra-rists. It could have been straight blowback for United States foreign policy targeting Muslims, whether dispatching them to Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib or Bagram, extraordinarily renditioning them, or target assassinating them. The FBI, predictably, is not admitting any of these three options. It sticks to a convoluted screenplay worthy of those cocaine-fueled Hollywood nights in the 1980s; a couple of bad guys who ''hate our freedoms'' because... they do. As I've written elsewhere in a sort of preamble for this article, there are inter-galactic holes in the story of the Tsarnaev brothers. Now we also know - via their mother - that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was monitoring elder brother Tamerlan for at least five years. In a subsequent interview to CNN's Piers Morgan, the mother actually talked, significantly, about ''counseling''. |
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Sott.net
Thankfully, some Americans are taking note of the gaping holes
in the official narrative about the Boston Bombings. Listen as concerned
citizens call in to C-SPAN's Washington Journal to point out just some of the evidence pointing to last Monday's 'terror attack' being yet another false flag event.2013-04-23 16:22:00
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Adam Goldman, Eric Tucker & Matt Apuzzo
Associated Press 2013-04-24 03:22:00
In the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev fell under the influence of a new friend, a Muslim convert who steered the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam, family members said. Under the tutelage of a friend known to the Tsarnaev family only as Misha, Tamerlan gave up boxing and stopped studying music, his family said. He began opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He turned to websites and literature claiming that the CIA was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Jews controlled the world. "Somehow, he just took his brain," said Tamerlan's uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, who recalled conversations with Tamerlan's worried father about Misha's influence. Efforts over several days by The Associated Press to identify and interview Misha have been unsuccessful. Tamerlan's relationship with Misha could be a clue in understanding the motives behind his religious transformation and, ultimately, the attack itself. Two U.S. officials say he had no tie to terrorist groups. Throughout his religious makeover, Tamerlan maintained a strong influence over his siblings, including Dzhokhar, who investigators say carried out the deadly attack by his older brother's side, killing three and injuring 264 people. | |
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Comment: Very interesting indeed. So the 'extremist
websites' Tamerlan was visiting were not 'al_qaeda_forever.aol.com' and
such nonsense set up by the CIA and the FBI to entrap young Muslims...
he was merely broadening his mind by visiting websites in the alt.net
community.
Also, by acknowledging that he had no ties to terrorist groups, the US govt recognises that his 'conversion to Islam' was irrelevant - the point is that Tamerlan 'converted' to Truth. We wonder to what extent Tamerlan was aware of the ways of 'The Beast'? Surely he was not naive to the FB-Lie's entrapment of young Muslims into fake terror plots? In light of this, it seems highly unlikely that he willingly participated in this terror 'drill'-turned-real deal. An oft-used tactic in Israeli 'suicide bombings' is to coerce the young Palestinian into being in a certain place at a certain time by threatening that failure to do so would result in harm being visited on their families. Tamerlan leaves behind a wife and three-year-old daughter... |
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| Puppet Masters |
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Thomas R. Eddlem
The New American 2013-04-20 17:47:00
Only after the curfew in Watertown, Massachusetts, was lifted and alert resident David Hanberry went outside his home to get a smoke, according to news reports, did the case of the Boston Marathon bombing manhunt for suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev crack open. That was when Hanberry saw blood on the tarp of his dry-docked boat and called the police. Up until that time, a wide assortment of local, state, and federal officials were engaged in a dragnet that essentially shut down the city of Boston, and included house-to-house searches in the neighborhoods of Watertown, Mass. and New Bedford, Mass., the latter being near where 19-year-old Russian immigrant Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had enrolled in college. Tsarnaev, a Muslim from the Dagestan area of Russia that abuts Chechnya, became a U.S. citizen on September 11 of last year. In essence, the lessons from the Boston Marathon mean that the following procedures employed in the week-long manhunt proved to be completely ineffective in apprehending Tsarnaev: |
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Pepe Escobar
Welcome to the sweet abyss of an Orwellian vortex. 2013 increasingly looks like 1984.Asia Times Online 2013-04-24 17:17:00 In two previous articles, for RT and for Asia Times Online I have looked into the superimposed levels of blowback implied by the Boston bombing. With still so many unanswered questions regarding what took place on the ground in Boston after the bombing, it's time to look at an extra, possible Top Ten list of lingering absurdities. And this without sidestepping other unanswered crucial questions, such as why a bomb drill - organized by Craft - was going on during the marathon at which the bombing took place; and why it was vehemently denied that a bomb drill was going on. For this current set of questions, I'm grateful for the help of Asia Times Online's Bostonian readers. |
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Stephen C. Webster
The Raw Story 2013-04-23 17:13:00
Appearing on Fox News Republican talk show "Hannity" Monday night, right-wing columnist Ann Coulter said she's sad that not only does she think the Boston bombing should shut down the nation's immigration reform debate, she would like to see the alleged bomber's widow in jail too, not for committing a crime but for "wearing a hijab." "I don't care if she knew about this," Coulter said. "She ought to be in prison for wearing a hijab. This immigration policy of us, you know, assimilating immigrants into our culture isn't really working. They're assimilating us into their culture. Did she get a clitorectomy too?" Hannity seemed momentarily puzzled at the sudden citation of female genital mutilation, stammering his reply. "I, uh, I don't know the answer to that," he said before confidently adding: "But your point is well taken." |
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planestrainsautomobiles
Live Leak 2013-04-22 16:43:00
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Comment: Say hello to the new normal - For the authoritarians and their followers it's a dream come true.
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Terri Sanginiti
A programming error led to 194 residents being notified by telephone
that a ship was leaking radioactive material near Port Penn this
morning. It took nearly an hour until they were told there was no such
disaster.DelawareOnline 2013-04-24 16:18:00 The message, part of a training exercise and not intended for public distribution, was sent out about 11:30 a.m. by First Call, the company that operates the state's reverse-911 system, said Kevin Wilson, of the Delaware Emergency Management Agency. It instructed the recipients who live within a half mile of 5 South Congress St. in Port Penn to shelter in place and tune radios to the Emergency Alert System for details. The message led the recipients to believe that an actual event had taken place, Wilson said. Then at 12:25 p.m., First Call issued another message to the homes affected saying the first one was sent in error. Matthew Teague, president of First Call, apologized to residents for any inconvenience. |
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Source
2013-04-24 14:56:00
Jia Jiuxiang dies after being taken in for questioning by Communist party's anti-corruption investigators. A senior official at a city court in central China has died under mysterious circumstances, his body bruised after 11 days in the custody of anti-corruption investigators of the ruling Communist party, according to his family. The case of Jia Jiuxiang, who was vice-president of the Sanmenxia City intermediate people's court in Henan province, is the second in two weeks to surface of an official dying while being held in the party's secret detention system, which is not regulated by law. Jia's relatives say they suspect he was tortured in detention. His brother-in-law, Zhou Qiang, said Jia was detained on 12 April by the local party's discipline inspection committee, turned up in a local hospital on Monday night and died on Tuesday morning after attempts to save him failed. Jia's wife, who was allowed to see the body, said his face had turned blue and his body was covered in bruises, Zhou said. "We think that in handling the case, the discipline inspection committee used cruel tactics against him," Zhou said. He said that Jia, 49, had previously been in good health. Another relative, Ma Weihua, who identified himself as Jia's nephew, confirmed details of Zhou's account and said local officials told the relatives they would conduct an investigation into Jia's death. |
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Ofra Edelman
Haaretz 2013-04-24 14:13:00
Shin Bet Security Service personnel can proceed to access emails of tourists landing at Ben-Gurion Airport, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein said Wednesday, choosing not to interfere with the procedure. He noted that such searches "are performed only in exceptional instances, after other relevant incriminating indications are found." Responding to a complaint filed by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Weinstein, in a response issued by his assistant, Nadeem Abboud, said, "given the limitations of intelligence coverage and the difficulty of obtaining relevant information about foreign citizens, the questioning conducted at the border crossings by the representative of the Shin Bet carries weight in bolstering or refuting the suspicions against a foreign national wanting to enter." |
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Lenny Bernstein and Kimberly Kindy
The Washington Post 2013-04-23 14:12:00
Authorities dropped charges Tuesday against the man they had accused of sending ricin-laced letters to the White House, a U.S. senator and a county judge as the FBI appeared to turn its attention toward his longtime antagonist in a small-town Mississippi feud. A federal magistrate judge directed that charges against Paul Kevin Curtis, 45, be dismissed because "the ongoing investigation has revealed new information," according to his written order. The charges were dropped without prejudice, meaning that they could be reinstated. But Tuesday afternoon, the FBI was searching the Tupelo, Miss., home of James Everette Dutschke in connection with the ricin case. Dutschke said he is innocent and does not know anything about the ingredients for ricin. |
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Daniel Hopsicker
MadCow Morning News 2013-04-24 13:58:00
The uncle of the two men who set off bombs at the Boston Marathon, who struck the only grace note in an otherwise horrific week, worked as a "consultant" for the Agency for International Development (USAID) a U.S. Government Agency often used for cover by agents of the CIA, in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan during the "Wild West" days of the early 1990's, when anything that wasn't nailed down in that country was up for grabs. "Uncle Ruslan" Tsarni of Montgomery Village Md., whose name was the top trending topic worldwide on Twitter last Friday for his plain-spoken condemnation of his two nephews, has had a checkered business career, that began well before he graduated (as Ruslan Z Tsarnaev) from Duke Law School in 1998. Tsarni, a well-connected oil executive, is currently involved in an international criminal investigation into a Kazakh billionaire banker-turned-fugitive alleged to have absconded with $6 billion from Kazakhstan's BTA Bank. The story begins with The London Sunday Times on May 8, 2011, which reported the sale of the personal home of England's Prince Andrew to billionaire Kazakh Oligarch Timur Kulibayev, who "controls that country's oil industry and happens to be married to the daughter of its autocratic President Nursultan Nazarbayev." What does that have to do with "Uncle Ruslan?" Let's take a look. |
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Peter Roff
U.S. News & World Report 2013-04-23 08:25:00
Late Tuesday, the U.S. House of Representatives released an interim progress report on its investigation into the assault on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya that led to the murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stephens and three other men. To put it mildly, the findings of the investigation thus far are damning. The product of combined investigations by the House Committees on the Armed Services, Judiciary, Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight and Government Reform, the report says that "There remain unanswered questions about the events surrounding the attacks, and the Administration owes answers to the American people." According to the executive summary, the ongoing investigation by the five House committees has already determined that: |
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Geoffrey Ingersoll
On Thursday night while police were hunting in Watertown, Mass. for
bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, at one point they
arrested a naked man who looks a lot like Tamerlan.Business Insider 2013-04-22 19:23:00 Police say the naked man is not Tamerlan, despite various conspiracy theories going around the Internet. According to the official account, Tamerlan died after a shootout with cops, riddled with bullets and shrapnel before being run over by his brother who was fleeing the scene in an SUV. |
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Kristan T. Harris
CudahyNow 2013-04-21 20:39:00
So let's start with who caused more terror in Boston? The police with warrantless searches of countless houses at gun point or the bomber? I know that there are a ton of conspiracies out there on the Boston bombing. But one thing we can all agree on is that the government did not waste the opportunity to test the police state model. I wonder how many firearms were illegally confiscated from homes during the door to door search yesterday. The media promoted this event as a heroic adventure. 9,000 law enforcement officers to find 1 suspect who was actually found by someone taking a smoke break. Obama says we owe the government gratitude for a week of terror. I say that AMERICA is in distress and this is the first domino in the new world order and a police state in America. In the media they are now promoting that martial law means Free Pizza. Evil is selling it to you. The local police did a duty bringing milk to a family with a 16 month year old because they could not leave their house to get milk? Martial law is a direct violation of our constitution and is 1 step closer to the One World Government Ps. if there is Marshall Law who is delivering the Pizza? Give me liberty, Give me freedom, Kristan T. Harris |
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Stephen Lendman
Stephen Lendman Blog 2013-04-23 18:19:00
State-sponsored terrorism defines US policy. Doublespeak duplicity conceals it. Doublethink manipulates public opinion to ignore inconvenient truths. Howard Zinn once asked: "How can you make war on terrorism if war is terrorism?" Waging war on terrorism "gives government a perpetual war and a perpetual atmosphere of repression." "And it generates perpetual profits for corporations. But it's going to make the world a far more unstable and dangerous place." "Terrorism replaced communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country, for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home." Since WW II, "there has not been a more warlike nation in the world than the United States." Zinn added that "(g)overnments are terrorists on an enormously large scale." None in world history match America. Waging war on humanity is official policy. US law calls "international terrorism" activities involving: The US Army Operational Concept for Terrorism (TRADOC Pamphlet No. 525-37, 1984) called it "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature....through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear." |
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| Society's Child |
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Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog 2013-04-24 15:30:00
The world is heading into a horrific economic nightmare, and an inordinate amount of the suffering is going to fall on innocent children. If you want to get an idea of what America is going to look like in the not too distant future, just check out what is happening in Greece. At this point, Greece is experiencing a full-blown economic depression. As I have written about previously, the unemployment rate in Greece has now risen to 27 percent, which is much higher than the peak unemployment rate that the U.S. economy experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s. And as you will read about below, child hunger is absolutely exploding in Greece right now. Some families are literally trying to survive on pasta and ketchup. But don't think for a moment that it can't happen here. Sadly, the truth is that child hunger is already rising very rapidly in our poverty-stricken cities. Never before have we had so many Americans unable to take care of themselves. Food stamp enrollment and child homelessness have soared to brand new all-time records, and there are actually thousands of Americans that are so poor that they live in tunnels underneath our cities. But for millions of other Americans, the suffering is not quite so dramatic. Instead, they just watch their hopes and their dreams slowly slip away as they struggle to find a way to make it from month to month. There are millions of parents that lead lives that are filled with constant stress and anxiety as they try to figure out how to provide the basics for their children. How do you tell a child that you can't give them any dinner even though you have been trying as hard as you can? What many families go through on a regular basis is absolutely heartbreaking. Unfortunately, more poor families slip through the cracks with each passing day, and these are supposedly times in which we are experiencing an "economic recovery". So what are things going to look like when the next major economic downturn strikes? |
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Josh Gerstein
Politico 2013-04-21 12:37:00
The Obama Administration and a federal judge in San Francisco appear to be headed for a showdown over the controversial state secrets privilege in a case about the U.S. government's 'no-fly' list for air travel. U.S. District Judge William Alsup is also bucking the federal government's longstanding assertion that only the executive branch can authorize access to classified information. The disputes arose in a lawsuit Malaysian citizen and former Stanford student Rahinah Ibrahim filed seven years ago after she was denied travel and briefly detained at the San Francisco airport in 2005, apparently due to being on the no-fly list. In an order issued earlier this month and made public Friday, Alsup instructed lawyers for the government to "show cause" why at least nine documents it labeled as classified should not be turned over to Ibrahim's lawyers. Alsup said he'd examined the documents and concluded that portions of some of them and the entirety of others could be shown to Ibrahim's attorneys without implicating national security. "After a careful review of the classified materials by the Court, this order concludes that a few documents could potentially be produced with little or no modifications to them," Alsup wrote in an April 2 order (posted here). "This order independently determines that in addition to correspondence between the parties, the two internal training documents are eligible for production to plaintiff's counsel without implicating national security." If the judge persists in his ruling, it would be highly unusual since most judges are loath to override the executive branch's conclusions that certain information needs to be classified on national security grounds. It has happened on a few occasions (see here, here, and here), but such decisions are very rare. |
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Amy Choczick
The New York Times 2013-04-20 00:00:00
Three years ago, Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists and supporters of libertarian causes, held a seminar of like-minded, wealthy political donors at the St. Regis Resort in Aspen, Colo. They laid out a three-pronged, 10-year strategy to shift the country toward a smaller government with less regulation and taxes. The first two pieces of the strategy - educating grass-roots activists and influencing politics - were not surprising, given the money they have given to policy institutes and political action groups. But the third one was: media. Other than financing a few fringe libertarian publications, the Kochs have mostly avoided media investments. Now, Koch Industries, the sprawling private company of which Charles G. Koch serves as chairman and chief executive, is exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company's eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant. By early May, the Tribune Company is expected to send financial data to serious suitors in what will be among the largest sales of newspapers by circulation in the country. Koch Industries is among those interested, said several people with direct knowledge of the sale who spoke on the condition they not be named. Tribune emerged from bankruptcy on Dec. 31 and has hired JPMorgan Chase and Evercore Partners to sell its print properties. The papers, valued at roughly $623 million, would be a financially diminutive deal for Koch Industries, the energy and manufacturing conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., with annual revenue of about $115 billion. Politically, however, the papers could serve as a broader platform for the Kochs' laissez-faire ideas. The Los Angeles Times is the fourth-largest paper in the country, and The Tribune is No. 9, and others are in several battleground states, including two of the largest newspapers in Florida, The Orlando Sentinel and The Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. A deal could include Hoy, the second-largest Spanish-language daily newspaper, which speaks to the pivotal Hispanic demographic. | |
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Comment: There is hardly any "free-press" left, but the
Koch brothers would like to exercise even more control over the media
and in the process counter any news critical of their industries.
However, people are waking up to the fact that the MSM is totally
controlled.
Koch Industries buying ads to refute news stories Mainstream media in decline as they lose Americans trust 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America Why the Mainstream Media Remains Ignorant to the Working Class |
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Erin Anderssen
Globe and Mail 2013-04-22 23:59:00
The United States is exploring how to save money on security by charging a toll to Canadians crossing the border by ground - a possible new traveller's tax that immediately raised fierce opposition from political and business leaders in both countries. The idea of a "crossing fee" was revealed in a recent budget request by the Department of Homeland Security, which was seeking funds to study the cost of collecting a new toll for people walking and driving into the United States from the north and south. |
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Ryan Bonner
HalfHollowHills Patch 2013-04-23 12:06:00
Exercise Saturday will test the Postal Service and the region's response plans to a biohazard event. The U.S. Postal Service plans to conduct an emergency preparedness exercise in Melville this week. The exercise planned for Saturday will test the Postal Service and the region's response plans to a biohazard event.The Postal Service says the "full-scale" exercise will include employee evacuations from the Mid Island Mail Processing & Distribution Center. The exercise is scheduled to begin Saturday, April 27 at 11 a.m. and last about three hours. Some disruption to traffic may be expected at this location. Also participating in this activity will be the Melville Fire Department and other community mutual aid responders, Suffolk County Public Health Department, County Homeland Security and Anti-Terrorism, County Fire Rescue Emergency Services and other federal agencies. |
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Holly Henry
WTKR 2013-04-23 13:28:00
Raleigh, NC - NCDOT Ferry Division is taking part in security exercise drills on Wednesday, involving its ferry terminals at Cherry Branch, Minnesott Beach, Pamlico River and Cedar Island. All vessels assigned to those routes will also be involved. NCDOT would like to point out that the exercise is not taking place in response to any threat to the ferry vessels, terminals or any other transportation venue or facility, but rather as a learning exercise to assist in making North Carolina ferries safe for the traveling public. Similar drills have been taking place within the Ferry Division over the last few years. The Ferry Division and its staff will be partnering with the Transportation Security Administration's Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) team, Craven and Carteret County Sheriff departments and emergency services, and the United States Coast Guard Sector North Carolina. This is an exercise in which local and federal agencies work together to supplement existing security resources, officials say. |
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Janet Lueken
Newsnet5.com 2013-04-23 10:06:00
Cleveland - Today the Indians are partnering with the City of Cleveland for a full-scale emergency exercise. The practice drill has been in the planning stages for the past six months and is set to begin around 10:30 a.m. Downtown patrons will see members of the Cleveland Police Department, Fire and EMS, plus Cuyahoga County's office of emergency management, the Medical Examiner's and Sheriff's Department around Progressive Field. The FBI, Northeast Ohio Regional Fusion Center, Urban Search and Rescue, SWAT and other agencies are expected to participate as well, however, there will be no disruption of public safety services. The exercise has been in the planning stages for the past six months. Local officials say recent events in Boston and West, Texas, have highlighted the importance of these types of training sessions. Follow live tweets from NewsChannel 5 Managing Editor James Pollack inside the emergency exercise. |
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Gregory Pratt
ChicagoTribune 2013-04-23 15:49:00
The Department of Defense is holding an urban warfare training exercise at the former Tinley Park Mental Health Center site tonight and tomorrow, village officials have announced. The government training exercises "will include building breaching and helicopter operations," according to Mayor Ed Zabrocki. "Building breaching" involves the use of small explosives that are used to take out doors, explained Pat Carr, the Emergency Management Agency's director in Tinley Park. "The Mental Health Center grounds provide a very realistic training environment for these different types of exercises," Carr said. Village officials are notifying the public about the training exercises to avoid frightening local citizens after the Boston Marathon bombing last week. "The concern we have is that, when this occurs...on the hands of what happened in Boston, it's gonna make people's nerve-endings a little more sensitive," Zabrocki said. The Tinley Park Mental Health Center will be closed to the public during the event. Carr said there shouldn't be too much noise from the helicopters or the explosives. In the past two years, the Mental Health Center has been used during training exercises by the Illinois State Police, the Cook County Sheriff's Office, Chicago Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in addition to Tinley Park's public safety agencies. "What's unique about this one is that it goes on multiple days and it's probably the largest of what we've had so far," Zabrocki said. |
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| Secret History |
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phys.org
Ancient DNA recovered from a series of skeletons in central Germany up
to 7500 years old has been used to reconstruct the first detailed
genetic history of modern Europe.2013-04-23 15:57:00 The study, published today in Nature Communications, reveals a dramatic series of events including major migrations from both Western Europe and Eurasia, and signs of an unexplained genetic turnover about 4000-5000 years ago. Comment: Forced migration and genetic mutation as the fruits of cometary bombardment? For more information on just what a regular occurrence this is, how knowledge of it has been systematically erased from the historical record (and why), read Laura Knight-Jadczyk's Comets and the Horns of Moses. |
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The Daily Mail UK
Researchers found genetic lineage of Europe mysteriously transformed about 4000 years ago2013-04-24 06:18:00 Bell Beaker culture, which is believed to have been instrumental in building the monoliths at Stonehedge, could hold the key The genetic makeup of Europe mysteriously transformed about 4,000-5,000 years ago, researchers have discovered. An Australian team found the unexplained change while analysing several skeletons unearthed in central Europe that were up to 7,500 years old. They say the rapid expansion of the Bell Beaker culture, which is believed to have been instrumental in building the monoliths at Stonehedge, could hold the key.
What is intriguing is that the genetic markers of this first pan-European culture, which was clearly very successful, were then suddenly replaced around 4,500 years ago, and we don't know why,' study co-author Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide Australian Center for Ancient DNA said. 'Something major happened, and the hunt is now on to find out what that was.' |
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Becky Oskin
OurAmazingPlanet 2013-04-23 13:56:00
The grand Mycenaens, the first Greeks, inspired the legends of the Trojan Wars, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Their culture abruptly declined around 1200 B.C., marking the start of a Dark Ages in Greece. The disappearance of the Mycenaens is a Mediterranean mystery. Leading explanations include warfare with invaders or uprising by lower classes. Some scientists also think one of the country's frequent earthquakes could have contributed to the culture's collapse. At the ruins of Tiryns, a fortified palace, geologists hope to find evidence to confirm whether an earthquake was a likely culprit. Tiryns was one of the great Mycenaean cities. Atop a limestone hill, the city-state's king built a palace with walls so thick they were called Cyclopean, because only the one-eyed monster could have carried the massive limestone blocks. The walls were about 30 feet (10 meters) high and 26 feet (8 m) wide, with blocks weighing 13 tons, said Klaus-G. Hinzen, a seismologist at the University of Cologne in Germany and project leader. He presented his team's preliminary results April 19 at the Seismological Society of America's annual meeting in Salt Lake City. |
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| Science & Technology |
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Irene Klotz
Discovery 2013-04-23 16:23:00
A small but incredibly bright comet heading toward the sun could do more than dazzle Earth's skies when it arrives later this year. Scientists say Comet ISON, already shedding dust at the prodigious rate of about 112,000 pounds per minute, could spark an unusual meteor shower. Computer simulations predicting the location and movement of the comet's dust trail show Earth will be passing through the fine-grained stream around Jan. 12, 2014. Some of the particles, which are smaller in diameter than a red blood cell, should be pushed back by the pressure of sunlight, allowing them to be captured by Earth's gravity when the planet plows through the largely invisible stream. |
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Erin Wayman
Science News 2013-04-24 15:46:00
Earthlings may owe a debt of gratitude to the enormous miniplanets that smashed into the planet it its youth. Such collisions might have knocked away much of the supply of chlorine concentrated on the planet's surface, geochemists propose. Had that loss not occurred, the world's oceans would have been too salty for complex life to thrive, they suggest. The scenario may explain why Mars, which suffered fewer large impacts, may have more than twice as much chlorine as Earth does, the researchers report April 16 in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. "The story seems to hang together pretty well," says James Brenan, a geologist at the University of Toronto who wasn't involved in the study. "Life, probably over a fairly long time, might have been able to adapt to this environment, though certainly things would be different than today." One snag is that the idea is "a very difficult thing to test," says geochemist Ray Burgess of the University of Manchester in England. The composition of ancient meteorites, which are remnants of the raw material that built the planets, indicates that Earth should have 10 times as much chlorine as it does. The missing chlorine has perplexed scientists for decades. In 1995, geochemist William McDonough suggested that chlorine was dragged to Earth's center by iron, nickel and other metals that formed the planet's core. |
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NASAexplorer
In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the
spring of 2010, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has had
virtually unbroken coverage of the sun's rise toward solar maximum, the
peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle. This video shows
those three years of the sun at a pace of two images per day.NASA/YouTube 2013-04-24 14:18:00 SDO's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) captures a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. The images shown here are based on a wavelength of 171 Angstroms, which is in the extreme ultraviolet range and shows solar material at around 600,000 Kelvin. In this wavelength it is easy to see the sun's 25-day rotation as well as how solar activity has increased over three years. During the course of the video, the sun subtly increases and decreases in apparent size. This is because the distance between the SDO spacecraft and the sun varies over time. The image is, however, remarkably consistent and stable despite the fact that SDO orbits the Earth at 6,876 miles per hour and the Earth orbits the sun at 67,062 miles per hour.
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April Flowers
RedOrbit 2013-04-24 14:16:00
Asteroids and other objects in our solar system collide often, but researchers are not always able to detect or track such impacts from Earth. This means that we are sometimes caught unaware by the "rogue debris" created by the impacts. New research from the University of California, Los Angeles, has devised a method to monitor these types of collisions in interplanetary space. The team used a new method to determine the mass of magnetic clouds that result from the impacts. Nearly 30 years of observations of such collisions went into the findings published online in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science. The study could help researchers have a better understanding of how to locate incoming meteoroid debris that could endanger the Earth. "The passage by the Earth earlier this year of the small asteroid 2012 DA14 and the explosion the same week of an even smaller asteroid in the atmosphere above central Russia remind us that while space is mostly empty, the objects that are orbiting the sun do occasionally collide with other orbiting bodies, and the energy released in such collisions can be catastrophic to the bodies involved," said Christopher T. Russell, a professor in UCLA's Department of Earth and Space Sciences. "We have found a way by which we can monitor such collisions in space by identifying the magnetic signature produced in these collisions," he said. "While the colliding objects may be only tens to hundreds of feet across, the resulting magnetic signature can be hundreds of thousands of miles in width and be carried outward from the sun by the solar wind for millions of miles." |
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The Daily Galaxy
2013-04-24 05:39:00
ESA's Herschel space observatory has solved a long-standing mystery as to the origin of water in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, finding conclusive evidence that it was delivered by the dramatic impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in July 1994. During the spectacular week-long collision, a string of 21 comet fragments pounded into the southern hemisphere of Jupiter, leaving dark scars in the planet's atmosphere that persisted for several weeks. The remarkable event was the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision in the Solar System. It was followed worldwide by amateur and professional astronomers with many ground-based telescopes and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. ESA's Infrared Space Observatory was launched in 1995 and was the first to detect and study water in Jupiter's upper atmosphere. It was widely speculated that comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 may have been the origin of this water, but direct proof was missing. |
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Mark Prigg
Comet could shine brighter than Venus or even the full moon in NovemberThe Daily Mail UK 2013-04-23 04:03:00 Photographed on April 10, when it was 394 million miles from Earth The Hubble Space Telescope has given astronomers their clearest view yet of Comet ISON, which experts believe could light up the sky in a breathtaking display later this year. The image of Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) was photographed on April 10, when the comet was slightly closer than Jupiter's orbit at a distance of 386 million miles from the Sun, and 394 million miles from Earth. Experts believe it will get dramatically brighter as it swings around the sun in late November, with some claiming the comet could shine brighter than Venus or even the full moon.
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Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience 2013-04-23 16:01:00
Australia's colonization may have been an organized affair rather than an accident, a new analysis suggests. Some 50,000 years ago, aboriginal human settlers arrived on the continent, but how many people it took to found Australia's population is unknown. The new study, published Tuesday (April 23) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that about 1,000 to 3,000 individuals originally landed on Australia's shores. "This is largely speculative, but I think this suggests something more than accidental colonization by a small group on a raft of vegetation or other unplanned voyage," study researcher Alan Williams, a doctoral candidate at The Australian National University, wrote in an email. "For me, this suggests a deliberate attempt at exploration (if not migration) more akin to those we see in the recent past from Hawaii and other Pacific islands." |
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Science Daily
2013-04-23 18:03:00
Ancient DNA recovered from a series of skeletons in central Germany up to 7,500 years old has been used to reconstruct the first detailed genetic history of modern Europe. The study, published today in Nature Communications, reveals a dramatic series of events including major migrations from both Western Europe and Eurasia, and signs of an unexplained genetic turnover about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. The research was performed at the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD). Researchers used DNA extracted from bone and teeth samples from prehistoric human skeletons to sequence a group of maternal genetic lineages that are now carried by up to 45% of Europeans. The international team also included the University of Mainz in Germany and the National Geographic Society's Genographic Project. "This is the first high-resolution genetic record of these lineages through time, and it is fascinating that we can directly observe both human DNA evolving in 'real-time', and the dramatic population changes that have taken place in Europe," says joint lead author Dr Wolfgang Haak of ACAD. "We can follow over 4,000 years of prehistory, from the earliest farmers through the early Bronze Age to modern times." |
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| Earth Changes |
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Chris D'Angelo
USGS specialist: 'The reefs are dying'thegardenisland.com 2013-04-19 12:48:00 Lihu'e - The outbreak of deadly coral disease along Kaua'i's North Shore may be targeting more than one species of Montipora coral The spread of the disease was described as an "epidemic" in a November 2012 report by the U.S. Geological Survey Until recently, the cyanobacterial disease was thought to be exclusive to the common rice coral. But after returning to Kaua'i this week, Dr. Thierry Work, head of infectious disease for USGS, said the blue rice coral species is also in trouble. "The blue rice coral definitely has lesions on it," he said. "Of course, we'll have to do the analysis to see if it's the same (disease)." He said the lesions look similar to what he saw at 'Anini and Tunnels beaches. Work spent Monday and Tuesday diving at several locations along Kauai's North Shore, including reefs near Ha'ena, Wainiha and Waipa. He collected 30 coral tissue samples, which he took back to the lab in Honolulu for DNA testing.
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Leon Watson
Seven-minute clip apparently captured after a river burst its banksThe Daily Mail UK 2013-04-24 04:27:00 It captures huge blocks of ice and mud heading towards whirlpool A monstrous whirlpool has appeared in the Baltic state of Latvia swallowing everything dragged towards it. The bizarre phenomenon looks as if a plug has been pulled from the ground beneath as it sucks water down. A seven-minute clip of what looks like a vortex in action was apparently captured after a river burst its banks in the south-east of the country.
It captures huge blocks of ice and mud heading towards the whirlpool before disappearing underneath the water's surface. More than 220,000 people have already watched the video in less than 48 hours on YouTube. |
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Harriet Arkell and Francesca Infante
Scotland battered again by second round of sandstorms devastating cropsThe Daily Mail UK 2013-04-24 03:10:00 Farmer Cameron MacIver in Moray says the sand is so high 'the only thing showing is top of fences' Scotland was hit by a second bout of freak sandstorms today, causing an estimated £50,000 damage to crops. Farmers in Elgin, Moray, had just spent a week clearing up after freak winds created 4ft high sand drifts on Tuesday when more gales swept in, whipping up further sandstorms and devastating crops. Barley farmer Cameron MacIver said: 'There's parts around my farm where the only thing showing above the sand is the top bit of the fence.'
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Courtney Spamer
On Saturday afternoon, the wet snow piled in the mountains of the Loveland Pass gave way, creating a fatal avalanche.Accuweather.com 2013-04-22 02:57:00 Adding to the already 19 deaths by avalanches during the 2012-13 winter season, five people were trapped and killed on Saturday. A sixth snowboarder managed to escape the snow and go to get help. Despite now being in the latter half of April, the slopes definitely don't look like it out in Colorado.
Colorado Avalanche Information Center executive director Ethan Greene said "We are very much in a winter snowpack right now. The calendar may say it's April, but the snowpack looks more like February..." That is due to the heavy snow that Colorado has seen for the start of spring, making it still feel like winter. Gusting winds following the heavy, wet snow of these storms has risen the avalanche danger in the central Rockies, which is typically uncommon for this time of the year. The last avalanche to cause this many deaths was back in 1962, when seven people were killed at Twin Lakes in January. |
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US Geological Survey
2013-04-23 19:14:00
Event Time 2013-04-23 23:14:42 UTC 2013-04-24 09:14:42 UTC+10:00 at epicenter Location 3.920°S 152.127°E depth=17.8km (11.0mi) Nearby Cities 31km (19mi) N of Rabaul, Papua New Guinea 50km (31mi) NNW of Kokopo, Papua New Guinea 209km (130mi) SE of Kavieng, Papua New Guinea 284km (176mi) NE of Kimbe, Papua New Guinea 819km (509mi) NE of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea Technical Details |
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| Fire in the Sky |
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LeAnne Gendreau,
Ryan Hanrahan and
Amanda Raus
NBC Connecticut 2013-04-23 16:30:00
A Yale expert confirmed Tuesday that an object that crashed through a house in Wolcott Friday night was a meteorite. Larry Beck, of Williams Court in Wolcott, called police at 10:20 a.m. on Saturday and said a rock crashed through the roof of his house on Friday night and damaged the roof and copper piping, and cracked the ceiling in his kitchen. "All the sheet rock had broken apart and it was on the floor," Beck said. That was around the time that people from several towns along the shoreline called police and reported a loud boom that rattled windows. Beck told police that he'd heard a loud crash and thought that a joist or rafter had broken. |
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| Health & Wellness |
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WorldTruth.tv
2012-06-07 17:37:00
Doctors used to think that if they drained a sick person's blood it would purge the "evil" infection or disease right out of the body, but all that did was make the ill person much weaker, unable to fight off whatever was invading their body, and the patient was then highly likely to lose the battle for life, and in less time. Research using polls and questionnaires continue to show that 3 of every 4 doctors and scientists would refuse chemotherapy for themselves due to its devastating effects on the entire body and the immune system, and because of its extremely low success rate. On top of that, only 2 to 4% of all cancers even respond to chemotherapy or prove to be "life extending," yet it is prescribed across the board for just about every kind of cancer. Polls were taken by accomplished scientists at the McGill Cancer Center from 118 doctors who are all experts on cancer. They asked the doctors to imagine they had cancer and to choose from six different "experimental" therapies. These doctors not only denied chemo choices, but they said they wouldn't allow their family members to go through the process either! What does that say about their true opinion of this archaic method? |
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FDA approved new drug despite ongoing investigation of lab misconduct and falsification of test data
Charles Seife and Rob Garver
ProPublica 2013-04-24 16:32:00
Last week, ProPublica reported that the Food and Drug Administration allowed dozens of medications to stay on the market, even though the research designed to prove their safety and effectiveness was undermined by "egregious" violations at a major pharmaceutical research laboratory in Houston. New information shows that even after the FDA had cited the lab for falsifying data and other misconduct, the agency issued a brand new approval to a drug tested there. The FDA has refused to reveal the names of any of the approximately 100 drugs affected by the fraud at the Houston lab of the firm Cetero Research, saying that to do so would reveal confidential commercial information. ProPublica was able to identify five of those drugs, and now we've found a sixth. This one was approved after the agency had already cited the Houston lab for misconduct. The drug is a generic version of Tussionex, which combines a long-acting narcotic cough suppressant with an anti-allergy medication. Manufactured by TrisPharma, the drug has a tongue-twisting chemical name: hydrocodone polistirex/chlorpheniraminepolistirex. |
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Dr. Mercola
Articles.Mercola.com 2013-04-23 13:07:00
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Insure
2010-07-02 05:38:00
It's not often that a scientific study suggests there are advantages to being overweight. With obesity at epidemic proportions in the United States -- the Centers for Disease Control estimates 34 percent of adults are too fat for their own good -- most studies sing the praises of exercise, dieting and losing weight. But a recent study by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute found that chubby men actually stand a better chance of surviving an automobile crash -- provided they are wearing a seatbelt. Despite this encouraging news, heavy-sey fellows should not expect lower car insurance rates. |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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Brandon Keim
Wired.com 2013-04-24 12:23:00
Sam Parnia practices resuscitation medicine. In other words, he helps bring people back from the dead - and some return with stories. Their tales could help save lives, and even challenge traditional scientific ideas about the nature of consciousness. "The evidence we have so far is that human consciousness does not become annihilated," said Parnia, a doctor at Stony Brook University Hospital and director of the school's resuscitation research program. "It continues for a few hours after death, albeit in a hibernated state we cannot see from the outside." Resuscitation medicine grew out of the mid-twentieth century discovery of CPR, the medical procedure by which hearts that have stopped beating are revived. Originally effective for a few minutes after cardiac arrest, advances in CPR have pushed that time to a half-hour or more. New techniques promise to even further extend the boundary between life and death. At the same time, experiences reported by resuscitated people sometimes defy what's thought to be possible. They claim to have seen and heard things, though activity in their brains appears to have stopped. It sounds supernatural, and if their memories are accurate and their brains really have stopped, it's neurologically inexplicable, at least with what's now known. Parnia, leader of the Human Consciousness Project's AWARE study, which documents after-death experiences in 25 hospitals across North America and Europe, is studying the phenomenon scientifically. Parnia discusses his work in the new book Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death. Wired talked to Parnia about resuscitation and the nature of consciousness. |
