 | |||||
 |  |  |  | ||
|
|
Harrison Koehli
Sott.net 2015-06-26 17:41:00
If you have yet to listen to last Sunday's Behind the Headlines interview with James and JoAnne Moriarty on Libya, I urge you to do so. While Sott.net carried numerous reports on the U.S.-sponsored destruction of Libya, the Moriartys' first-hand account not only reveals new details you've probably not heard anywhere else; it paints a picture that brings the stark reality home in a way that just reading reports and analyses cannot. The reality of what happened (and is still happening) in Libya is worse than we can possibly imagine. The Moriartys were in Libya at the time of the 'uprising' and 'revolt', and the Western coalition's 'subsequent' invasion (the two were really the same thing). They saw it all first-hand. They engaged in a fact-finding mission, documenting atrocities. They were captured by Al Qaeda (i.e. the U.S.'s 'rebel allies'), interrogated and threatened with being chopped up and burned. But they managed to get out of the country with their lives and tell the story of what they saw. It is nothing like we have heard from the mainstream media. The so-called uprising was not spontaneous. It was planned in advance. The 'rebels' were nothing of the sort. They were Western-trained, Western-financed, and Western-supported terrorists: Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Ansar al-Sharia, the same people that would soon move over to Syria and Mali, and later become 'ISIS'. Within days, these mercenaries had already created a Bank of International Settlements-approved private Central Bank and Libya's substantial wealth (the country was debt-free), in the form of cash deposits and precious metals, was looted. Thousands died in the first days of the indiscriminate slaughter carried out by coalition forces under the ruse of establishing a "no fly zone". The media's job was to blame atrocities on Gaddafi. In fact, the atrocities were committed by 'our guys': rape, torture, murder, decapitation, burning alive, skinning flesh, cannibalism - if you've heard about it in horror movies, it happened in Libya in the name of Western freedom and democracy. All the hallmarks of ISIS that so terrify the world today were endorsed and supported by our own governments in order to destroy Libya and prevent it from becoming a viable African alternative to Western death culture. American 'democracy' in action. | |
 |
| No new articles. |
| Puppet Masters |
|
Dave Johnson
Campaign for America's Future 2015-06-24 00:00:00
Fast track passes. Our Congress - the supposed representatives of We the People - voted to cut themselves and us out of the process of deciding what "the rules" for doing business "in the 21st Century" will be. How do the plutocrats and oligarchs and their giant multinational corporations get what they want when a pesky democracy is in their way? They push that pesky democracy out of their way. Because of fast track, when the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and any other secretly negotiated "trade" agreements are completed Congress must vote in a hurry with only limited debate, cannot make any amendments no matter what is in the agreement, and they can't be filibustered. Nothing else coming before our Congress gets that kind of skid-greasing, only corporate-written "trade" agreements - and it doesn't matter how far the contents go beyond actual "trade." | |
Comment: Maybe it was nostalgia giving hope that Congress still had some threshold of integrity. What's next? Pick your favorite economic collapse, false flag, natural disaster, etc.
Just the same, there are three things that come to mind:
See also: TTP and TTIP trade agreements | |
|
|
F. William Engdahl
New Eastern Outlook 2015-06-26 14:47:00
Given a series of recent speeches by leading US officials and actions, the question must be frankly posed: Has Washington gone collectively looney tunes? Even as the governments of the EU are moving to buck US pressures and ease the sanctions, the Obama Administration seems intent on marching in the direction of a nuclear confrontation with Russia. As the ancient Greek expression puts it, "Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad..." The following recent developments fit that pattern quite nicely, thank you. On June 5, Ashton Carter, the neo-conservative Obama Defense Secretary gave clear indications he is prepared to be far more provocative against Russia than his fired predecessor, Chuck Hagel. Carter convened a special meeting in Stuttgart, Germany of two dozen US military leaders and US Ambassadors in Europe at the headquarters of US European Command. He told them, "We have something that has taken a sad turn recently, which is Russia." That in itself was not so notable as were the reports that the neo-con US Defense Secretary, "Ash"—that is his nickname, appropriately enough—Carter discussed at the Stuttgart meeting returning US short-range nuclear missiles to European NATO countries to target Russia. On June 7, just two days after Carter's Stuttgart remarks, UK Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, told the press that the UK might again place American nuclear missiles on British soil because of what he termed "heightened tensions" with Russia. The Foreign Secretary said there were "worrying signs" about the increased activity of Russian forces and that the UK would "consider the pros and cons of taking US intermediate-rangeweapons." | |
Comment: Are there any voices of clear-headed reason in Washington D.C or, for that matter, in Europe to be found? If you're out there - and you have any clout whatsoever -best to speak up now!
| |
|
|
RT
2015-06-25 15:39:00
Switzerland is providing only limited information about rich tax evaders who have stashed about €80 billion from cash-strapped Greece, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said in an interview with Swiss state broadcaster SRF. "Sometimes we know that someone has taken money away from Greece. But we do not know in what city or which bank it is located in Switzerland. We know too little to be able to locate the black money,"Varoufakis told the Rundschau program on SRF on Wednesday. It is impossible to obtain the information from Swiss authorities, he added. Athens is working on a plan to give tax evaders the opportunity to voluntarily disclose themselves, and make them invest in Greek economy. The evaders would pay a 22 percent penalty in such a case. | |
|
|
Kremlin.ru
2015-06-26 13:30:00
Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with President of the United States of America Barack Obama. In particular, the two leaders discussed the Ukrainian crisis and the fulfilment of the Minsk Agreements. The Presidents agreed that US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin will be in contact to discuss implementation of these agreements. Comment: Of course Obama's view is: Significant attention was given to a set of issues pertaining to counter-terrorism efforts, particularly the spread of the Islamic State's influence in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama agreed to instruct Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry to hold a meeting to discuss this issue. In addition, the presidents of Russia and the United States had an extensive discussion of current issues in bilateral relations. They also engaged in a detailed exchange of opinions concerning the situation in Syria and touched on settling the issue of the Iranian nuclear program. | |
Comment: Both men previously held a phone conversation in Februrary about Ukraine. The situation in Ukraine has only declined since. Maybe some wheeling and dealing going on? Are Greece-Russia relations part of the deals?
| |
|
|
Andrew Korybko
Russia Insider 2015-06-26 12:44:00
The US has been tightening its containment noose around Eurasia's multipolar anchors over the past few years, having notably succeeded in wooing Myanmar away from China in 2011 and transforming Ukraine into a geopolitical enemy of Russia in 2014. In the face of these American asymmetrical advances, Russia and China have opted to make game-changing peninsular pivots as a means of escaping the strategic traps being set, with Moscow moving to the Balkans and Beijing being beckoned towards Indochina. Their effort to sidestep the containment wall being built around them places both theaters, the Balkans and Indochina, front and center in the US' upcoming destabilization campaigns. This article examines the historical-strategic lead-up to the present situation and explains the necessity of Russia and China's respective peninsular pivots. | |
Comment: The 'Great Game' has many dimensions. Check out: Chinese stock plunge leaves state media speechless
| |
|
|
Bloomberg
2015-06-25 13:03:00
Rising up from the center of Beijing, not far from the Temple of Heaven, is the loudest voice in the wild east of the Chinese stock market. It's neither a bank nor a brokerage -- it's the headquarters of Xinhua News Agency, long considered the "throat and tongue" of the Chinese government. With the heady exuberance over Chinese stocks starting to fade, sowing fears of worse to come, investors are scouring state media for clues to the Communist Party's thinking. | |
|
|
Joachim Hagopian
American Empire Exposed 2015-06-17 00:00:00
As the globalists' vision for a one world totalitarian government unfolds in rapid sequence of their long plotted New World Order, a parallel process is also quietly unfurling in the covert formation of a globalized international military fighting force. The US Joint Special Operations Command Forces have built a notorious reputation as death squads known for conducting middle of the night raids, murdering entire families in the process along with detaining targeted suspects in both Iraq and Afghanistan and now all over the world. Because Special Forces by their very nature are highly secretive and virtuallyunaccountable to everyone, including our own government, we never hear much about this global elite killer machine. The only exceptions are the contradictory renditions of how theNavy Seals took out Osama bin Laden, or glossy film renditions glorifying Special Forces exploits as recruitment propaganda commercials, now all closely monitored, controlled and censored by the US military. In fact, the FBI, the CIA and Pentagon all have liaison handlers assigned to Hollywood just to make sure the shady truth about them never gets to the big screen audience. Sadly the film industry has degenerated into joining the lowly ranks of mainstream media as mere gov.whore-corp propagandists. Truth is now the enemy. | |
Comment: If one ultimately draws the conclusion that the PTB's plans are actuallydesigned to wreak as much drawn out discord, suffering and death as humanly possible - in as many spheres as possible - they'd be correct in thinking so.
| |
|
|
Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Julie Lévesque
Global Research 2015-06-25 21:38:00
U.S District Court Judge George O'Toole has officially sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death. Tsarnaev is to be executed at the Federal Prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. At the end of the hearing, US District Judge George A. O'Toole Jr. sentenced Tsarnaev to death on six of the 30 charges he was convicted of, and gave him consecutive life sentences for some of his other crimes. O'Toole was bound by the jury's decision to sentence Tsarnaev to death — a sentence that is subject to an automatic appeal. The jury condemned Tsarnaev to death specifically for the bomb he placed that killed two people — not for a separate bomb his older brother placed. O'Toole, in his remarks before he issued the sentence, told Tsarnaev he will be remembered solely for his "evil." (Boston Globe, June 24, 2015) Comment: It's worth noting a small detail in this CNN article reporting from the courtroom where Tsarnaev was recently sentenced to death: SOTT has written about Tsarnaev's change in voice previously: | |
Comment: Yet another false flag.
| |
|
| Society's Child |
|
David Edwards
Raw Story 2015-06-25 20:26:00
A federal judge accused the U.S. government of a "lack of candor" and ordered it to return $167,000 that was seized from a man who was stopped for a minor traffic violation. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a Nevada state trooper stopped Straughn Gorman's motor home on Interstate 80 in January 2013 for allegedly driving too slow. Comment: It's worth noting that it took this man over 2 years to get his money back. Most people would not be able to afford to hire an attorney to fight for them for that long. The government counts on that, and that is why civil forfeiture is a scam by our government:
After Gorman declined to let the trooper search his vehicle, the trooper let him go without a citation. But the trooper radioed ahead for a Elko County sheriff's deputy to perform a second stop with a drug-sniffing dog. The dog alerted the deputy to something suspicious in the motor home, and $167,000 was found hidden throughout the vehicle. Gorman's money was turned over to federal authorities to initiate civil forfeiture proceedings, but he was never charged with a crime. | |
|
|
Ali Abunimah
Electronic Intifada 2015-06-26 17:30:00
Foreign investment in Israel plummeted almost 50 percent in 2014, a fact attributed to last summer's assault on Gaza and the growing impact of boycotts. This week the UN's trade and development agency UNCTAD released its annual World Investment Report on foreign direct investment (FDI) - a measure of money that investors from overseas put into a country to invest in businesses, build factories or start other economic projects. According to the report, FDI into Israel in 2014 plummeted to just $6.4 billion from almost $12 billion in 2013. The 2014 figure appears to be the lowest in more than a decade. Foreign direct investment into Israel averaged around $9 billion per year from 2005 to 2012. "We believe that what led to the drop in investment in Israel are Operation Protective Edge and the boycotts Israel is facing," Roni Manos, an Israeli economist who co-authored the report, told Israel's Ynet. | |
|
|
Bill Quigley
AlterNet 2015-06-24 17:10:00
Police kill a lot of unarmed people. So far in 2015, as many as 100 unarmed people have been killed by police. There have been around 400 fatal police shootings; one in six of those killings, 16 percent, were of unarmed people, 49 had no weapon at all and 13 had toy guns, according to theWashington Post. Of the police killings this year less than 1 percent have resulted in the officer being charged with a crime. The Guardian did a study which included killings by Tasers and found 102 people killed by police so far in 2015 were unarmed and that unarmed black people are twice as likely to be killed by police as whites. Here are 15 of the most outrageous reasons given by police to justify killing unarmed people in the last 12 months. | |
Comment: It's been starkly clear to police officers that they will not be punished for what is essentially murder. The system is set up to protect the authorities and the police exist to protect the rich and powerful. The rest of us can be murdered with impunity. Welcome to 21st century freedom in the good ole USA.
| |
|
|
Curtis Skinner
Raw Story 2015-06-26 15:56:00
A fire inside a church with a primarily African-American congregation in Macon, Georgia has been ruled as arson by fire officials, reported the Telegraph. Macon-Bibb County fire Sergeant Ben Gleaton told the newspaper that while the investigation into Tuesday's fire at the God's Power Church of Christ continues, enough evidence had been discovered to rule the blaze had been deliberately set. The arson ruling came a day after North Carolina authorities said a predominantly black church in Charlotte was purposefully burned, and roughly a week after a white gunman opened fire in an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine people. | |
|
|
RT
2015-06-25 15:43:00
Nearly twice as many Americans have been killed by right-wing extremists since 9/11 as have died at the hands of radical Muslims on US soil, a new report found. There have also been nearly three times as many deadly right-wing attacks as jihadist ones. In almost a decade-and-a-half, 48 Americans have died in the US in 19 attacks by white supremacists, so-called "sovereign citizens" and other non-Muslim extremists, while 26 have died in seven jihadist attacks on US soil during that same time period, research center New America found as it compiled a new database on deadly attacks in the US since 9/11.
"Since 9/11, our country has been fixated on the threat of jihadi terrorism," said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, according to theKansas City Star. "But the horrific tragedy at the Emanuel AME reminds us that the threat of homegrown domestic terrorism is very real." Last Wednesday, nine African-Americans were shot and killed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Dylann Storm Roof, who later confessed to the massacre, made racist statements as he killed his victims, survivors told police. A website believed to belong to Roof contained a white supremacist manifesto, as well as photos of him posing with a gun, carrying the Confederate flag and burning an American flag. The Charleston shooting has not been officially labeled as terrorism, however, and Roof has not been charged with any crimes more heinous than murder.
| |||
|
|
Natasha GIlbert
Nature 2015-06-25 00:00:00
Nature explores the impact of the first US court decision over how employers use genetic information. A US company is the first to face penalties under the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), a law that protects the privacy of genetic information. On 22 June, a federal court jury in Georgia awarded US$2.25 million to two men whose employer tested their DNA, seeking to identify who had repeatedly left faeces in one of its warehouses. The firm, Atlas Logistics Group Retail Services, a grocery distributor in Atlanta, Georgia, asked employees Jack Lowe and Dennis Reynolds to give cheek swabs in 2012. Atlas sent their DNA to a lab for genetic comparison with the offending faecal matter. The tests showed that Lowe and Reynolds' DNA was not a match. In 2013, the workers sued Atlas. The case, nicknamed the 'mystery of the devious defecator' by US district court judge Amy Totenberg, is the first brought under GINA to go to trial. Here, Nature explains why the ruling matters. | |
Comment: The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act bans US employers from using genetic information in hiring, firing, promotion and compensation decisions, and from collecting genetic information from employees. Similarly, the bill prevents health plans and insurers from denying coverage or boosting premium prices based on a person's genetic information, such as whether they have gene variants known to increase disease risk. It also forbids them from requesting or requiring people to take genetic tests. Other countries, including France and Austria, also ban the use of genetic information in such decisions.
| |
|
|
RT
2015-06-26 12:46:00
A beach outside two hotels in central Tunisia have been attacked, with at least 27 dead and panic being reported at the scene. Two gunmen armed with Kalashnikov rifles reportedly penetrated a private area and opened fire. One of the hotels is the five-star Imperial Marhaba. The Interior Ministry at least 27 people are dead, foreigners among them.
Gunfire reported at scene of tourist hotel, local radio at site reporting multiple victims in Sousse #Tunisia— Patrick Markey (@PatrickMarkey2) June 26, 2015
| |
Comment: Absolutely dreadful!
| |
|
|
First Post
2015-06-26 10:05:00
Colombo: An Emirates Airbus A380 plane carrying over 500 people from Sydney to Dubai made an emergency landing in the Sri Lankan capital on Friday after pilots detected smoke in the cockpit. The plane, which landed safely in Colombo, was 320 nautical miles east of Colombo's Bandaranaike International airport when pilots made a distress call, airport's chief air navigation services officer Crishanthi Tissera said. "The pilots said May Day, May Day and we activated all our emergency services and brought the aircraft to a safe landing," Tissera told reporters. She said the pilots reported smoke in the cockpit but later the "full emergency" was downgraded to an "urgency". There was no fire seen as the plane landed 39 minutes after the first distress call. All 471 passengers, including six children and the 30-member crew disembarked safely. "Emirates flight EK413 from Sydney to Dubai...was diverted to Colombo due to a technical fault," the airline said in a statement without giving details about the nature of the problem. | |
Comment: Yet another incident of 'smoke in the cockpit'! Other recent reports include: "burning electrical or smoke", "odor of fumes" in cabins and smoke filled cockpits - forcing emergency landings. What is going on 'up in the air'?
See also: Sott Exclusive: Mayhem and Maydays in May skies: Aircraft crashes,accidents, glitches, mishaps and near misses | |
|
|
RT
2015-06-24 15:41:00
Scientists have concluded that four bombs detonated underwater by the Royal Navy were responsible for the death of 19 pilot whales, when they became stranded off the north of Scotland in 2011. A report published on Wednesday by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) said the noise from the explosions was likely to have interfered with the whales hearing, which caused them to drift onto the beach and die. The report explains that four 1,000 pound bombs were exploded during the 24 hours before the mass beaching occurred, which saw 70 pilot whales swim into the shallow waters of Cape Wrath, Europe's largest live bombing range, and become stranded by the tide. Another 250-pound bomb was later detonated after the crisis had begun. Locals attempted to herd the whales back into open water, but 39 became beached. Some 20 were re-floated, but, despite efforts by experts and concerned residents, 19 of the stranded whales died, prompting a government inquiry into the disaster. The report says: "The magnitude, frequency and proximity of the multiple detonations in the day prior to the stranding, and the single high-order detonation shortly after the beginning of the mass stranding, were plausible sources of significant disturbance to any neighboring marine mammals." | |
|
|
TruthVoice
2015-06-26 01:04:00
A police officer is facing multiple charges following a domestic dispute in which he allegedly pepper sprayed an infant. Clarksville Police Officer Charles Edelen had a domestic dispute with his wife and the father of her child on Tuesday night in Jeffersonville, Indiana. A police report states that Edelen threatened the child's father with a gun. Edelen also pepper sprayed the child's father and the child. The medical condition of the father and the infant is not known at this time. Edelen is now facing charges of aggravated battery, domestic battery, and criminal recklessness. As aggravated battery is a Class B felony under Indiana law, he could facebetween six and twenty years in prison if convicted. According to the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, pepper spray has been known to cause immediate, life-threatening injuries when exposed to young children. Online court records show Edelen posted bond and is now free. A judge told Edelen that he is not permitted to possess any weapons or have contact with his victims, and ordered him to seek mental health treatment. | |
|
|
RT
2015-06-25 18:16:00
England's homelessness crisis has reached its worst levels since 2008, with 65,000 households forced into temporary accommodation, new figures reveal. The number of families housed in bed and breakfasts has soared by more than 300 percent over the past five years, according to government data. Campaigners blame high rents and welfare cuts for forcing 100,000 children to live in hostels and other temporary accommodation. In the first quarter of this year alone, 13,520 households were made homeless across England - an 8-percent increase on the same period in 2014. Official data published on Wednesday by the Department for Communities and Local Government revealed England's housing crisis is having a disastrous impact on households. Over the past five years, the number of families living in "other private sector accommodation" - which can include single-room annexes and even caravans - has risen 267 percent to 15,460. Minorities constitute more than half of those forced into temporary accommodation, with 55 percent coming from black, minority and ethnic (BME) communities. | |
Comment: This is criminal considering the fact that the fortunes of Britain's mega rich have more than doubled during the past 10 years. Those at the bottom of the economic rung suffer needlessly while the wealthy continue to line their pockets with no concern for the consequences. However, their reign is likely temporary, as extreme income inequality is one of the primary factors that has generally preceded the precipitous fall of civilizations.
| |
|
| Secret History |
|
Marcus Hondro
An amazing archaeological find has been made on British Columbia's Calvert Island. It consists of 12 human footprints from three persons, thought to be the oldest footprints in all of North America.Digital Journal 2015-06-25 01:52:00
Prints radiocarbon dated The cluster of footprints are from two adults, one large, the other small, and one child, likely a family, and they show the three were huddled around a fire on the island;radiocarbon dating indicated they were finding warmth together about 13,200 years ago. Charcoal from the fire survived in the footprints and made radiocarbon dating possible. The prints were discovered during an archaeological dig on the island by two B.C. institutions, the Hakai Institute and the University of Victoria. The 12 impressions survived in clay formations and also found in the area were other prints, much younger at just 2,000 years old. Archaeologists Dr. Daryl Fedje and Dr. Duncan McLaren found the prints during excavation work below the high-tide line on a shoreline of Calvert Island. | |
|
| Science & Technology |
|
South China Morning Post
2015-06-26 17:35:00
Fancy a meteor shower racing across the night sky to mark your birthday? One Japanese start-up is hoping to deliver shooting stars on demand and choreograph the cosmos. And, say scientists, it's not just about painting huge pictures on the night-sky that would be visible to millions of people; artificial meteors could help us to understand a lot more about Earth's atmosphere. Lena Okajima, who holds a doctorate in astronomy, says her company, ALE, is intending to launch a micro satellite that can eject shooting stars at exactly the right time and place to put on a celestial show. "I'm thinking of streams of meteors that are rare in nature," Okajima said in an interview. "It is artificial but I want to make really beautiful ones that can impress viewers." In collaboration with scientists and engineers at Japanese universities, the ALE team is developing a satellite that will orbit the Earth and eject dozens of balls, a few centimetres in diameter, at a time. | |
|
|
Sean Poulter
Daily Mail 2015-06-25 23:47:00
A trial to create a genetically-modified wheat that would drive away insects without the need for powerful insecticide sprays has failed. Millions of pounds of public money was spent on the trial of a crop that GM scientists and supporters hoped would win over consumers sceptical about the technology. The wheat was genetically modified to release a scent that would supposedly drive away aphids or pests, so allowing the crop to flourish. However, while the idea worked in the laboratory, it did not when it came to growing the wheat in field conditions at Rothamsted Research Institute in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. The trial was hailed by the former Environment Secretary Owen Paterson in a major speech promoting GM technology given at the Rothamsted site in June 2013. At the time, he condemned critics of GM, describing them as part of the 'Green Blob', and praised the trial of the aphid resistant wheat as 'cutting edge'. The minister declared: 'It is precisely the type of pioneering science that we are famous for.' Now the research team has published the results, which reveal the wheat did not repel the insects as expected. | |
Comment: Despite industry marketing propaganda, the truth is that GMO crops are being ravaged by the very pests they were designed to resist. Repeated studies have also shown that GMO crop yields are not consistently higher than non-GMO crops. Arrogant scientists who continue to believe they can outwit 'mother nature' are simply using the earth's population as guinea pigs where everyone will experience the devastating environmental, economic, and health consequences of their hubris.
| |
|
|
Susan Scutti
Medical Daily 2015-06-08 01:23:00
Water companies around the world take heed: A new University of Sheffield studyoverturns the previous understanding of how leaky pipes and water pressure function together within major distribution networks. Though it is commonly assumed pressure forces water out through leaks, thus preventing water from getting in, a new research study finds evidence confirming the opposite. Contaminants can enter pipes through leaks and travel throughout a water network. Importantly, then, our drinking water may become contaminated by way of leaky pipes. "Previous studies have shown that material around water pipes contains harmful contaminants, including viruses and bacteria from feces, so anything sucked into the network through a leak is going to include things we don't want to be drinking," Dr. Joby Boxall, lead researcher and a professor in the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, stated in a press release. | |
|
|
Alexandra Witze
Nature 2015-06-25 00:00:00
Some 4.7 billion kilometres from Earth, the New Horizons spacecraft is heading for a historic rendezvous with Pluto. To achieve this, it will need to hit a very small target: an imaginary rectangle in space measuring just 100 by 150 kilometers. Mission navigators need to put New Horizons precisely in that area to ensure that the spacecraft can make all planned science observations during its 14 July fly-by of Pluto — the first ever of that distant dwarf planet. For now, the spacecraft is on target. But getting to Pluto is one of the hardest tasks in interplanetary navigation, and crucial decisions will be made in the next week and a half. The last chance to change the spacecraft's flight path comes on 4 July. Because astronomers discovered the dwarf planet in 1930, they have seen only part of its 248-year path around the Sun, and they don't know exactly where Pluto is. And New Horizons is so far from Earth that it takes 9 hours to send and receive a signal, making the spacecraft hard to direct in real time. "Everything is pushed to the extreme," says Bobby Williams, an engineer at KinetX Aerospace in Simi Valley, California, who heads the mission's navigation team.
| ||
Comment: Pluto has five known moons: Charon, Nix, Styx, Hydra and Kerberos, three of which are locked together in a mutual orbit - a three-body resonance. Charon is the biggest and has 11% the mass of Pluto, thought to have formed during a cosmic collision early in the Solar System's history. The other moons are thought to be a coalescence of debris from that collision.
| ||
|
| Earth Changes |
|
The Guardian
2015-06-25 19:18:00
An eight-year-old boy suffered minor injuries after being bitten by a shark on Wednesday while swimming in knee-deep water in Surf City, North Carolina. Town manager Larry Bergman says the town does not plan to warn visitors about the shark bite or tell swimmers to get out of the water, but it has increased police beach patrols. The Surf City incident is the fourth shark bite in shallow water off a North Carolina beach in the past two weeks. "It really comes down to a joint decision on public safety officials, including myself," Bergman said. He said he would have decided to close the beaches "if there was a big hazard, if there was an imminent danger". The town does not have an official lifeguarding staff, instead employing police officers and water-rescue-trained firefighters to patrol the beaches on four-wheelers. Beachgoers swim "kind of at their own risk", Bergman said. He said some people have approached police officers after hearing about the bite on social media. "News travels really fast," he said. | |
|
North Korea says it has been hit by its worst drought in a century, resulting in extensive damage to agriculture during its main planting season. The official Korean Central News Agency said the drought has caused about 30 percent of its rice paddies to dry up. Young rice plants normally need to be partially submerged in water during the early summer. "Recently in our country, there has been a severe drought with sudden extremely high temperatures and nearly no rain," Ri Yong Nam, a senior North Korean weather official, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "Now the drought is causing a water shortage and great damage to agriculture, and we foresee this drought will continue for a while." He said temperatures in May were 5-7 degrees Celsius (9-12 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than normal. Both North and South Kore have had unusually dry weather this year. | |
|
|
Phys.org
2015-06-26 00:00:00
Isla Rasa, in the Gulf of California, is renowned for its massive aggregations of nesting seabirds. Over 95 percent of the world populations of Elegant Terns and Heerman's Gulls concentrate unfailingly every year on this tiny island to nest. Ever since the phenomenon was described by L. W. Walker in 1953 the island has been a magnet for tourists, naturalists, filmmakers, and seabird researchers. During some years in the last two decades, however, the seabirds have arrived to the island in April, as they usually do, but leave soon after without nesting. The first event was the 1998 "El Niño", when oceanic productivity collapsed all along the eastern Pacific coast from Chile to California. But then colony desertion happened again in 2003, and since then it has recurred with increasing frequency in 2009, 2010, 2014, and 2015.Researchers and conservationists were asking themselves where are the birds going when they leave their ancestral nesting ground, and what is causing the abandonment of their historic nesting site. | |
Comment: What the researchers don't mention is that the oceans may be warming due to undersea volcanoes:
| |
|
Pretty much everyone knows Kansas weather can turn on a dime. One example of how things can change quickly was sent to us by Laura Lemmons. While Laura had her camera out, she shot a photo of a dust devil that headed for water. Laura kept shooting even though the dirt devil kept moving. No one was hurt, and this amazing video shows once again that the only constant about Kansas weather is change.
| ||
|
[Message clipped] View entire message
