Israel Makes Waves by Simulating an Earthquake
Jan 31, 2010 News & Events
(IsraelNN.com) The Seismologic Division of the Ministry of National Infrastructure’s Geophysical Institute will attempt to simulate an earthquake in the southern Negev on Thursday. The experiment, financed by the U.S. Defense Department, is a joint project with the University of Hawaii and is part of a scientific project intended to improve seismological and acoustic readings in Israel and its environs, up to a 1,000 km/621 mile radius.
The experiment intends to improve the understanding of sound waves in the atmosphere. Scientists will then be able to fine-tune Israel’s seismological equipment to give advance warning of earthquakes. Measurements will also be taken in other countries, including Cyprus, Greece, France, and Germany.
Israel will create a controlled explosion of 80 tons of explosive material, which will simulate the intensity of a tremor after an earthquake of Magnitude 3. Natural earthquakes of a similar intensity occur in the Middle East region about once a week, without the public feeling them.
Courtesy, U.S. Geological Survey
The results from the experiment will be available to the entire scientific community and is expected to make an additional contribution to scientific research of sound waves in the atmosphere and earthquakes.
In the last few years, the Geophysical Institute has created several earthquake simulations in order to calibrate its equipment. In June 2004, the institute detonated 32 tons of explosives in the southern Negev. In June 2005, the institute detonated 20 tons in the Beit Alfa quarries in the Jezreel Valley south of the Galilee. The success of the experiments has significantly contributed to improving the accuracy of identifying earthquakes in Israel.
The Ministry of National Infrastructure and Finance Ministry have recently financed a three-year plan to upgrade Israel’s seismological equipment, as part of Israel’s earthquake advance warning system.
Tags: Simulating an Earthquake
Osama bin Laden, Climate Expert
Jan 31, 2010 News & Events
Alan Caruba
Canada Free Press
January 30, 2010
To the world’s experts on climate change, let us now add the name of Osama bin Laden to those of Al Gore; UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon; the Chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri; numerous heads of state over the years; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; members of Congress still trying to pass Cap-and-Trade legislation; and the odious IPCC scientists who apparently colluded to foist false data on the public in order to further the fraud of global warming.
This is, of course, a short list given the vast number of people who attended the recent UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen. It reportedly cost the taxpayers over a million dollars for the U.S. delegation and that does not include the cost of the President’s attendance. In his State of the Union speech, Obama received a chorus of laughter when he spoke of the “overwhelming evidence” of climate change.
Bin Laden is getting increasingly desperate in his appeals to the world’s Muslims and, in a recent audiotape, “he blamed the Western industrialized nations for hunger, desertification, and floods across the globe,” according to a report by the Associated Press.
Bin Laden’s real complaint, however, has always been that he cannot replace the Saudi royal family and control that nation’s oil and the revenues that flow from it. One of the many sons of a prominent Saudi family, bin Laden went off to aid the Afghans in their fight against the Soviet Union and, ironically, it was covert American weapons aid that made their victory possible.
He could have settled for being a hero of that conflict, but like so many egomaniacs, he decided to fight the crusades over again and all subsequent Western influence in the Middle East in the name of Islam.
A succession of terrorist attacks flowed from that decision. U.S. embassies in Africa were bombed, an American warship was attacked in Yemen, and the most spectacular attack was, of course, the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A fourth plane was brought down by its passengers.
Americans seem to have forgotten that George W. Bush responded forcefully to 9/11 and to the threat of Saddam Hussein to the entire Middle East. This is in contrast to President Obama’s futile efforts to get the Iranian ayatollahs to cooperate. Dictators are not famous for being nice.
As the AP report noted, bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warming in past messages, but his latest on January 29 was the first to focus on it as a major theme along with the need to destroy the American economy. With regard to the latter, he seems to be getting a lot of help from President Obama who has tripled U.S. debt during the past year.
The significance of his latest audiotape seems to be a belated effort to piggyback the global warming issue at the same time it is crashing and burning worldwide due to revelations that the data on which it was based was deliberately falsified.
Claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting were false and this was made known to the IPCC Chairman Pachauri two months before the Copenhagen conference, but he managed to wait until after the conference to publicly correct the IPCC report.
Bin Laden’s bad timing suggests that his campaign is losing support. It is almost comical that he would try to enlist the support of global warming diehards in his quest to overthrow the Great Satan, America, and the Little Satan, Israel, but there is nothing comical about his continued threat to the nation and the world.
The silence of Al Gore as the planet has cooled since 1998 suggests that even he knows that his self-enrichment plan is coming to an end. Only President Obama seems or pretends to be oblivious to the idiocy of cutting “greenhouse gas emissions” in the name of a planet that is not warming.
In this quest, Obama has now been joined by Osama.
Tags: America, Bin Laden, Climate change, global warming, war on terror
Girls Eyes Produce Crystals
Jan 29, 2010 News & Events
A Lebanese girl has eyes which are producing an average of eight small crystals a day.
Audit deems Pakistan aid program a failure
Jan 29, 2010 Pakistan, pakistan politics
Colum Lynch
A $45 million USAID program aimed at improving the ability of Pakistani tribal leaders to govern a politically sensitive stretch of territory along the Afghan border has failed to achieve its primary mission of improving the delivery of basic services, according to an audit by the agency’s inspector general.
The two year-old development program for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) was designed to help improve living standards in one of Pakistan’s poorest and most politically unstable territories. So far, only $15.5 million has been spent on the initiative.
More specifically, the program — which is run by Development Alternatives, Inc. — was set up in January 2008 to aid local government officials and charities in developing the capacity to absorb the large amounts of Western assistance that have flowed into the area to challenge the political standing of the region’s extremists.
It funds the activities of the FATA development authority, which employs 100 people, and FATA secretariat, which oversees nearly 30,000 local employees, including teachers and health- care workers. But the “program has made little headway in achieving its two main goals,” according to the audit.
“It has not achieved the goal of improving the capacity of FATA governmental institutions to govern,” according to the audit, which was produced by the inspector general’s office in Manila, the Philippines. And it “did not increase the capacities of [local] NGOs to promote good governance, although some progress was made.”
The report cites some advances, including training in financial management and program and development planning for 1,224 local officials. The program also provided some training and office equipment for 42 nongovernmental organizations.
The program has been plagued by a deteriorating security situation that has prompted USAID to order Development Alternatives and other American contractors to relocate to Islamabad from Peshawar, where a USAID official was killed in November 2008.
The report says that the program was further delayed after the contractor’s chief representative resigned in September 2008, leaving the position vacant until January 2009. It took 9 months to identify local charities to support, and 400 computers purchased for government offices remain in unopened boxes. Another 72 laptops were unaccounted for at the time of the audit.
In a response, USAID’s Pakistan mission director, Robert J. Wilson, said the agency would seek to ensure the delivery of the computers by the end of March. He said that 55 of 72 missing laptops have been found and that USAID will bill the contractor and the Pakistani authorities for the rest if they don’t turn up.
The report also faults a change of political strategy by the Obama administration, which is now calling for U.S. assistance to be channeled through local charities, for placing the program in limbo.
In June, USAID refused to provide full funding for a $15.3 million request from Development Alternatives as it began to rethink its practice of directing most of its funds to U.S.-based contractors. In October, USAID asked the company to prepare a plan to shut down its operations, but never made a decision to close it.
In response to the audit, Wilson said that USAID had agreed in December to extend Development Alternatives’ contract through the end of 2010.
Tags: FATA, fatta, Pakistan, taliban, war on terror
Five Sisters
Jan 28, 2010 Videos
A terrific song and compilation. In memory of Palestinian children murdered
Tags: Five Sisters, Gazza, Palestinian, war
Gates confirms Blackwater presence in Pakistan
Jan 27, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan, war on terror
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirms that American security firms Xe Services LLC, formerly known as Blackwater, and DynCorp have been operating in Pakistan.
The two firms are operating in private capacities, Gates said on Thursday, adding that the companies were abiding by Pakistani laws.
However, he said that if the Pakistani parliament votes for a ban on the presence of the firms, the US government would comply with it.
Blackwater won notoriety for having gone on a shooting rampage in a heavily trafficked Baghdad intersection in September 2007 killing more than a dozen Iraqi civilians.
Blackwater Worldwide changed its name to Xe Services LLC in February 2009, after it came under international criticism for its disregard for civilian lives.
Two former Blackwater mercenaries have also been charged with the 2009 murder of two Afghan civilians in Kabul.
Asad Durani, former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), had earlier told Press TV that the notorious firm, Blackwater, was involved in the deadly drone attacks on Pakistani territories, which usually result in civilian casualties.
“I learned somewhere that these people are employed certainly for…the logistic support at the drone bases. That is understandable,” Durani said earlier in January.
Gates, meanwhile, said that Washington is considering sharing its Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology with Pakistan.
“These UAVs are useful and we have a budget for them,” Gates said in an interview with a privately-run Pakistani television on Thursday.
He claimed that the drones had proved productive in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“We are working together with Pakistan army in this connection,” Gates said, adding that discussions were underway with Pakistan military leadership on technical matters in this regard, a Press TV correspondent reported late Thursday.
Defense officials in his delegation later said that the US will provide 12 Shadow drones to Pakistan.
The Shadow drone is about 3.3 meters (11 feet) long and has a wing-span of 4.2 meters (14 feet), with sensors and cameras feeding video images back to operators on the ground.
Tags: Blackwater, cia, DynCorp, XE
Dance Party For Pakistani Journalists/TV anchors at US Embassy Islamabad
Jan 26, 2010 News & Events, Pakistan
Pakistani anchors must be protesting against drone attacks while partying like they do on TV
Shaukat Paracha, Asma Shirazi, Meher Bukhari, Saima Mohsin are some of the names that were in attendance, in a Drink & Dance party hosted by the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W Patterson.
Tags: ARY, Asma Shirazi, dawn news, islamabad, Mehar Bukhari, Pakistani Journalists, Party in Islamabad, Saima Mohsin, Samma Tv, TV anchors, US Embassy
