Respected Middle East expert and former BBC presenter Alan Hart has broken his silence on 9/11, by revealing that the world’s most prominent civil engineering company told him directly that the collapse of the twin towers was a controlled demolition.
Speaking on the Kevin Barrett show yesterday, Hart said he thought the 9/11 attack probably started as a Muslim operation headed up by Osama Bin Laden but that the plot was subsequently hijacked and carried out by Mossad agents in collusion with elements of the CIA, adding that since its formation, Israel has penetrated every Arab government and terrorist organization.
“My guess is that at an early point they said to the bad guys in the CIA – hey this operation’s running what do we do, and the zionists and the neo-cons said let’s use it,” said Hart, making reference to how top neo-cons like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their fellow Project For a New American Century authors had called for a “catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor,” the year before 9/11.
“The twin towers were brought down by a controlled ground explosion, not the planes,” said Hart, adding that this view was based on his close friendship with consultants who work with the world’s leading civil engineering and construction firm.
Hart asked the company to study the collapse of the twin towers, after which they told him directly, “There’s absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the towers were brought down by a controlled ground explosion.”
Hart then explained how the five dancing Israelis seen celebrating the attack on the World Trade Center in New Jersey as it unfolded, who turned out to be Mossad agents, proves at at a minimum Israel knew the attack was going to happen. Hart went further in speculating that the planes had been fitted with transponders and that the Israelis were guiding them in to the towers.
Host Barrett pointed out that to carry out the successful controlled demolition of three of the biggest buildings in history, the conspirators would have to ensure that they were hit, making the use of remote controlled airliners a distinct possibility. In addition, Barrett mentioned the fact that he had interviewed numerous pilots who dismissed the chances of accurately guiding a huge commercial airliner into a building while flying at sea level at around 600 miles per hour, especially considering the alleged 9/11 hijackers struggled to even fly basic Cessna light aircraft.
“Sounding a chilling note, Hart added that the U.S. is in grave danger of an Israeli-instigated false-flag nuclear attack, perhaps using an American nuclear weapon stolen from Minot Air Force Base during the “loose nukes” rogue operation of August, 2007. The motive would be to trigger a U.S. war with Iran, and perhaps to finish the ethnic cleansing of Palestine under cover of war–which Hart is convinced the Zionists are planning to do as soon as the opportunity presents itself,” writes host Barratt.
Given his biography and standing, Hart’s comments are not to be taken lightly. Hart is a former Middle East Chief Correspondent for ITN News and has also presented for BBC Panorama specializing in the Middle East. He was also a war reporter in Vietnam and the first journalist to reach Suez Canal with the Israeli army in 1967. Over the decades, Hart has developed close relationships with numerous high profile political figures, including the Shah of Iran, Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres.
Hart has been a successful author for years and has no reason to fabricate the fact that a top construction firm told him point blank that the towers were brought down in a controlled demolition.
In forwarding this information, Hart joins legions of other credible experts who to some extent or other have all publicly challenged the official 9/11 story, with many outright stating that the attacks were an inside job, people like 20-year decorated CIA veteran Robert Baer, who told a radio host that “the evidence points at” 9/11 having had aspects of being an inside job.
“It’s near-impossible to find anyone in Afghanistan who doesn’t believe the US are funding the Taliban: and it’s the highly educated Afghan professionals, those employed by ISAF, USAID, international media organizations – and even advising US diplomats – who seem the most convinced,” reports the Guardian today. “The US has an interest in prolonging the conflict so as to stay in Afghanistan for the long term,” said one Afghan.
It does not take a lot of research to prove the Taliban — and al-Qaeda — were fabricated by the CIA in league with Pakistani and Saudi Arabian intelligence.
In the Middle East and Europe the media has reported this fact for some time now. But in the United States the corporate media retells the official fantasy ad nauseam and millions of people by it hook, line, and sinker.
In 1998, top Rockefeller minion Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted the Taliban was created by the United States. “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” said a testy Brzezinski when pushed by Le Nouvel Observateur.
Brzezinski’s Afghan Mujahideen organized to fight the Soviets and displace their puppet Mohammad Najibullah — subsequently murdered by the Taliban — eventually splintered into the Taliban. “In 1994, a new group, the Taliban (Pashtun for ’students’), emerged on the scene. Its members came from madrassas set up by the Pakistani government along the border and funded by the U.S., Britain, and the Saudis, where they had received theological indoctrination and military training,” writes Phil Gasper, a professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame de Namur University.
The creation of the Taliban was “actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA,” according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. “The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban.”
The CIA also used “humanitarian” front organizations such as the Committee for a Free Afghanistan to fund and train the Mujahideen and eventually the Taliban. The CIA also spent millions of dollars developing and printing textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings for Afghan schoolchildren.
“We should recognize that American tax dollars helped to create the very Taliban government that now wants to destroy us,” writes Rep. Ron Paul. “In the late 1970s and early 80s, the CIA was very involved in the training and funding of various fundamentalist Islamic groups in Afghanistan, some of which later became today’s brutal Taliban government. In fact, the U.S. government admits to giving the groups at least 6 billion dollars in military aid and weaponry, a staggering sum that would be even larger in today’s dollars.”
After the Taliban killed thousands and captured Kabul in 1996, the U.S. said it didn’t have a problem with their over-the-top religious fanaticism. State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw “nothing objectionable” in the Taliban’s plans to impose strict Islamic law (see Joel Mowbray, Dangerous diplomacy: how the State Department threatens America’s security, p. 62). Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: “The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan.”
“The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil corporations], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that,” said another U.S. diplomat in 1997 (see Timothy Mitchell, McJihad: Islam in the U.S. Global Order).
“The reference to oil and pipelines explains everything,” explains Gasper. “Since the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991, U.S. oil companies and their friends in the State Department have been salivating at the prospect of gaining access to the huge oil and natural gas reserves in the former Soviet republics bordering the Caspian Sea and in Central Asia. These have been estimated as worth $4 trillion.”
The master criminal organization Enron gave the Taliban bribes as part of a “no-holds-barred bid to strike a deal for an energy pipeline in Afghanistan” in order to supply one of its power plants in India. Enron executives privately meet with Taliban officials in Texas in 1997 and the fanatics were “given the red-carpet treatment.” It is said Enron secretly employed CIA agents to carry out its dealings overseas.
“Our government publicly supported the Taliban right up until September 11,” Ron Paul continues. “Already in 2001 the U.S. has provided $125 million in so-called humanitarian aid to the country, making us the world’s single largest donor to Afghanistan.”
This marriage of convenience came to an abrupt end shortly after September 11, 2001, when the United States invaded Afghanistan supposedly in response to the Taliban sheltering another CIA asset, Osama bin Laden. As it turns out, however, the U.S. planned to invade Afghanistan prior to September 11, 2001, when cave-dwelling Arabs changed the laws of physics.
Soon thereafter, in late December, 2002, an oil pipeline deal was penned in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, with installed Afghan puppet and former Unocal employee Hamid Karzai in attendance (Karzai joined the struggle against the Soviets in 1982 and became director of operations of the Afghan National Liberation Front, a CIA front).
Ahmed Wali Karzai, Hamid’s brother and a key player in the country’s opium trade, also works for the CIA. “The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House,” the New York Times reported on October 27, 2009.
As the Guardian reported, most Afghans know “America’s war strategy” is a joke and only the American people are fooled and also fleeced.
For years the corporate media has told us the Taliban fund their insurgency with profits from a huge opium industry. But even Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Bilderberger Richard Holbrooke, admits this is not the case. “In the past there was a kind of feeling that the money all came from drugs in Afghanistan,” said Holbrooke last year. “That is simply not true.”
In fact, before “everything changed,” the Taliban banned opium cultivation in Afghanistan, an effort the corporate media characterized as an effort to run up prices.
However, after the defeat of the Taliban, the drug trade, under the supervision of the CIA, would once again blossom.
“After five years of the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan’s drug production had swelled to unprecedented proportions,” writes Alfred W. McCoy, a professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In August 2007, the U.N. reported that the country’s record opium crop covered almost 500,000 acres, an area larger than all the coca fields in Latin America. From a modest 185 tons at the start of American intervention in 2001, Afghanistan now produced 8,200 tons of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country’s GDP and 93% of global heroin supply.”
In April, Fox News ran a brazen propaganda piece on Afghanistan’s opium trade claiming the U.S. military allows peasants to grow opium out of respect for their cultural traditions.
In fact, the CIA has long used profits from opium to finance its covert operations. In March 2002, a U.S. foreign intelligence official speaking on the condition of anonymity told NewsMax of the CIA’s record of involvement with the international drug trade. The official said: “The CIA did almost the identical thing during the Vietnam War, which had catastrophic consequences — the increase in the heroin trade in the USA beginning in the 1970’s is directly attributable to the CIA. The CIA has been complicit in the global drug trade for years, so I guess they just want to carry on their favorite business.”
In 2008, Russia’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, accused the Pentagon of acting as a mule for the CIA’s drug business. A Russian television report from Afghanistan said that drugs from Afghanistan were hauled by American transport aircraft to the U.S. airbases Ganci in Kyrgyzstan and Incirlik in Turkey. One of the best-informed Russian journalists on Central Asia, Arkady Dubnov, quoted anonymous Afghan sources as saying that “85 per cent of all drugs produced in southern and southeastern provinces are shipped abroad by U.S. aviation,” according to Vladimir Radyuhin.
In order to continue the CIA’s favorite business enterprise and extend the occupation indefinitely, the U.S. supports its official enemy in Afghanistan. “It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting,” Aram Roston wrote for the Nation on November 11, 2009. “US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts — hundreds of millions of dollars — consists of payments to insurgents.”
Roston “uncovered a tangled web of former military and CIA officials, relatives of the Afghanistan president and Defense Minister and various other shady characters who act as a pipeline from the U.S. Treasury to the Taliban,” write Jon Soltz and Richard Allen Smith for Vet Voice.
The occupation of Afghanistan is not about freedom and democracy for the Afghan people. It is about producing heroin and maintaining a military foothold in Asia.
On May 20, a Senate committee approved another $33.5 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “The action by the Senate Appropriations Committee is the first step toward congressional approval of the extra war spending that President Barack Obama requested in February to support his surge of 30,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan,” Reuters reported. The money comes on top of about $130 billion that Congress already approved for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars through September 30 of this year.
Not only will the money help support an effort to flood American streets with deadly heroin — and thus turn heavy profits for the money launderers on Wall Street — it will also add to the preposterous debt owed to bankers. In the end, we not only pay for the misery of drug addiction (and the war on drugs, including the prison industrial complex) but the effort to reduce America to a nation of slaves indebted for generations to come to a cabal of international bankers.
Good on ordinary Torontonians. Despite all the H1N1/swine flu hype this past winter, just 28.2% of that city’s residents bothered to get vaccinated against the “pandemic;” that’s less than the 35% who usually get shots each year against the seasonal flu.
Even Toronto health care workers couldn’t be stampeded into getting the shots. Only 60% of them bothered.
Barbara Yaffe, head of communicable disease control for the Toronto Board of Health, proclaimed herself reasonably satisfied with the public’s response. But how can she be? Given the $1-billion+ spent by Ottawa on the swine flu hysteria (which probably climbs to $2 billion or more when provincial and municipal campaigns are added in), a 28% vaccination rate is awful if your aim is to have as many people immunized as possible. The 35% rate most winters is achieved at a fraction of the expense and public calamity.
So hear, hear to those who resisted the madness that was the Great 2009-10 Swine Flu Pandemic.
Even from the start, the World Health Organization and other experts where told this strain of flu was weak and easily defeated. Infection rates never came remotely close to forecasts and death tolls were thankfully much, much lower than for typical seasonal infections.
The trouble, I think, was that so many public health officials have predicted so many pandemics for so long — SARS, bird flu, swine flu — that they simply got caught up in their own warnings and projections. They wouldn’t listen to contrary evidence.
Science writer Michael Fumento has an excellent summary in Forbes this week of just what a fizzle the swine flu was: 18,000 deaths worldwide versus the 250,000 to 500,000 the WHO reports happen in an average year. It would obviously be better if there were no deaths at all, but that low figure is cause for rejoicing.
It is also yet another example of experts crying “wolf!” If they don’t stop soon, the public will stop listening to experts altogether.
A campaign to shame Saddam Hussein was devised by American spies during the planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it was revealed last night.
The CIA secretly plotted to flood Iraq with a fake video making it look like Saddam was having sex with a teenage boy.
According to the Washington Post, the U.S. intelligence agency also targetted Osama bin Laden for the bogus propaganda, making a film purporting to show the al Qaeda leader sitting around a campfire with his cronies, swigging alcohol and discussing their conquests of young boys.
Squabbling over the projects, as well as budget cuts, meant the videos never saw the light of day.
But the revelations will come as a major embarrassment to the CIA at a time when President Obama has demanded a clean-up after banning harsh interrogation methods used during the war on terror under George Bush.
Former intelligence officials claimed the video showing Hussein having sex with a boy would have been staged using actors.
‘It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,’ said one ex-CIA agent. ‘Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.'
Other dirty tricks ideas discussed included a plan to interrupt Iraqi television with a made-up news bulletin showing a Saddam look-alike announcing his resignation.
The fake dictator would say he was handing the reigns of the country over to his hated son Uday.
‘I’m sure you will throw your support behind His Excellency Uday,’ the imposter was supposed to tell the Iraqi people.
The CIA also wanted to hack into Iraq’s TV networks and insert misleading messages into the broadcasts.
Eventually ‘things ground to a halt’, the former agent told the Post’s Spy Talk blog.
James Pavitt, then head of the agency’s Operations Division, and his deputy, Hugh Turner, were said to be opposed to the covert plans.
Saddam was eventually captured in late 2003 and hanged in December 2006. His sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed in a shoot-out with allied troops in July 2003.
Former intelligence officials dismissed the dirty tricks ideas as ‘ridiculous’.
‘They came from people whose careers were spent in Latin America or East Asia and didn’t understand the cultural nuances of the region,’ said an ex-agent.
Another CIA official, who has extensive experience in the region, said: 'Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East - nobody cares.
‘Trying to mount such a campaign would show a total misunderstanding of the target. We always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos.’
A U.S. official said last night: ‘We can’t confirm those accounts, but if these ideas were put forward at any time they clearly didn’t go very far.’
The most effective ‘information warfare’ project during the invasion was said to be emails and faxes sent to Iraqi unit commanders as the fighting began urging them to give up and go home because they were were doomed to defeat.
Two former CIA officials have admitted to creating a fake video in which intelligence officers dressed up as Osama Bin Laden and his cronies in an effort to defame the terrorist leader throughout the middle east.
The details are outlined in a Washington Post article by investigative reporter and former Army Intelligence case officer Jeff Stein.
Stein’s sources told him that during planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group considered creating a fake video of Saddam Hussein engaged in sexual acts with a teenage boy, then flooding Iraq with copies of the tape.
That idea, along with faking Iraqi news bulletins, never came to fruition according to the former CIA officials, because agreement on the projects could not be reached between the Iraq Group and CIA’s Office of Technical Services.
However, the two sources reveal that the agency did previously concoct at least one fake Bin Laden video:
The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.
The former officials told Stein that the project was taken over by the military after it ground to a halt:
The reality, the former officials said, was that the agency really didn’t have enough money and expertise to carry out the projects.
“The military took them over,” said one. “They had assets in psy-war down at Ft. Bragg,” at the army’s special warfare center.
This latest revelation bolsters evidence that the intelligence agencies, and perhaps more significantly, the military have been engaged in creating fake Bin Laden videos in the past.
As we have exhaustively documented, Intelcenter, the U.S. monitoring group that routinely releases Bin Laden video and audio, much of which have been proven to be either rehashed old footage or outright fakes, is an offshoot of IDEFENSE, a web security company that monitors intelligence from the middle east.
IDEFENSE is heavily populated by long serving ex military intelligence officials, such as senior military psy-op intelligence officer Jim Melnick, who served 16 years in the US army and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in psychological operations. Melnick has also worked directly for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Intelcenter notoriously released the “laughing hijackers” tape and claimed it was an Al-Qaeda video, despite the fact that the footage was obtained by a “security agency” at a 2000 Bin Laden speech.
IntelCenter was also caught adding its logo to a tape at the same time as Al-Qaeda’s so-called media arm As-Sahab added its logo, proving the two organizations were one and the same.
Could the CIA group of “dark skinned actors” have been behind the infamous December 2001 “Fat nosed” Bin Laden video, that was magically found in a house in Jalalabad after anti-Taliban forces moved in?
The tape featured a fat Osama laughing and joking about how he’d carried out 9/11. The video was also mistranslated in order to manipulate viewer opinion and featured “Bin Laden” praising two of the hijackers, only he got their names wrong. This Osama also used the wrong hand to write with and wore gold rings, a practice totally in opposition to the Muslim faith.
Despite the fact that the man in the video looks nothing like Bin Laden, the CIA stood by it and declared it to be the official “9/11 confession video”.
The latest revelations also shed light on another past Bin Laden release – a tape in which he ludicrously declared himself in league with Saddam Hussein in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq.
The notion that the CIA project was taken over and drastically improved by the Pentagon at some point after 2003 jives with the improvement in quality of Bin Laden videos in later years. Most notably the video that was released immediately ahead of the 2004 election, and it’s digitally manipulated duplicate from 2007, in which Bin Laden appeared to have a dyed beard.
For a run down of some of the most notoriously dubious Bin Laden videos see the following article.
Kim Jong-Il has put North Korean troops on combat alert and threatened military action if the South trespasses in its waters as global stock markets freak out at the prospect of a war which, if it occurs, can be blamed on the U.S. government’s history of arming the Stalinist dictator with nuclear weapons.
Korean markets plunged 3.3 per cent overnight as investors were spooked at escalating tensions between the two countries following South Korea’s allegation that the North was responsible for the March 26 torpedoing of one of its warships
On Monday, President Obama also told the U.S. military to prepare for conflict as it plans to carry out anti-submarine and other naval exercises with South Korea.
As we have documented, North Korea’s nuclear belligerency was almost exclusively a creation of the U.S. government in that they armed the Stalinist state both directly and indirectly through global arms dealers under their control, namely Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. While labeling North Korea as part of the “axis of evil,” the U.S. government was enthusiastically funding its nuclear weapons program at every stage.
Both the Clinton and Bush administrations played a key role in helping Kim Jong-Il develop North Korea’s nuclear prowess from the mid 1990’s onwards.
Just as with Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons program, it was Donald Rumsfeld who played a key role in arming Kim-Jong-Il.
Rumsfeld was man who presided over a $200 million dollar contract to deliver equipment and services to build two light water reactor stations in North Korea in January 2000 when he was an executive director of ABB (Asea Brown Boveri). Wolfram Eberhardt, a spokesman for ABB confirmed that Rumsfeld was at nearly all the board meetings during his involvement with the company.
Rumsfeld was merely picking up the baton from the Clinton administration, who in 1994 agreed to replace North Korea’s domestically built nuclear reactors with light water nuclear reactors. So-called government-funded ‘experts’ claimed that light water reactors couldn’t be used to make bombs. Not so according to Henry Sokolski, head of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, who stated, “LWRs could be used to produce dozens of bombs’ worth of weapons-grade plutonium in both North Korea and Iran. This is true of all LWRs — a depressing fact U.S. policymakers have managed to block out.”
“These reactors are like all reactors, they have the potential to make weapons. So you might end up supplying the worst nuclear violator with the means to acquire the very weapons we’re trying to prevent it acquiring,” said Sokolski.
The U.S. State Department claimed that the light water reactors could not be used to produce bomb grade material and yet in 2002 urged Russia to end its nuclear co-operation with Iran for the reason that it didn’t want Iran armed with weapons of mass destruction. At the time, Russia was building light water reactors in Iran. According to the State Department, light water reactors in Iran can produce nuclear material but somehow the same rule doesn’t apply in North Korea.
In April 2002, the Bush administration announced that it would release $95 million of American taxpayer’s dollars to begin construction of the ‘harmless’ light water reactors in North Korea. Bush argued that arming the megalomaniac dictator Kim Jong-Il with the potential to produce a hundred nukes a year was, “vital to the national security interests of the United States.” Bush released even more money in January 2003, as was reported by Bloomberg News.
Bush released the funds despite the startling revelation, reported by South Korean newspapers, that a North Korean missile warhead had been found in Alaska.
Construction of the reactors was eventually suspended, but North Korea had an alternative source through which they could obtain the nuclear secrets vital to building an atom bomb arsenal – CIA asset and international arms smuggler AQ Khan.
In 2004, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb program, admitted sharing nuclear technology via a worldwide smuggling network that included facilities in Malaysia that manufactured key parts for centrifuges.
Khan’s collaborator B.S.A. Tahir ran a front company out of Dubai that shipped centrifuge components to North Korea.
Despite Dutch authorities being deeply suspicious of Khan’s activities as far back as 1975, the CIA prevented them from arresting him on two occasions.
“The man was followed for almost ten years and obviously he was a serious problem. But again I was told that the secret services could handle it more effectively,” former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers said. “The Hague did not have the final say in the matter. Washington did.”
Lubbers stated that Khan was allowed to slip in and out of the Netherlands with the blessing of the CIA, eventually allowing him to become the “primary salesman of an extensive international network for the proliferation of nuclear technology and know-how,” according to George W. Bush himself, and sell nuclear secrets that allowed North Korea to build nuclear bombs.
“Lubbers suspects that Washington allowed Khan’s activities because Pakistan was a key ally in the fight against the Soviets,” reports CFP. “At the time, the US government funded and armed mujahideen such as Osama bin Laden. They were trained by Pakistani intelligence to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Anwar Iqbal, Washington correspondent for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, told ISN Security Watch that Lubbers’ assertions may be correct. “This was part of a long-term foolish strategy. The US knew Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons but couldn’t care less because it was not going to be used against them. It was a deterrent against India and possibly the Soviets.”
In September 2005 it emerged that the Amsterdam court which sentenced Khan to four years imprisonment in 1983 had lost the legal files pertaining to the case. The court’s vice-president, Judge Anita Leeser, accused the CIA of stealing the files. “Something is not right, we just don’t lose things like that,” she told Dutch news show NOVA. “I find it bewildering that people lose files with a political goal, especially if it is on request of the CIA. It is unheard of.”
Through their policies in aiding North Korea to build light water reactors, and via the CIA asset AQ Khan who was protected at every step of the way while he helped provide North Korea with the means to build a nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government itself is directly complicit in providing North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il with the nuclear weapons he now threatens to use against U.S. ally South Korea.
North Korea is controlled by a hereditary Stalinist dictatorship that has starved two million of its citizens to death in favor of building a million-man army. Some people put the figure at four million, one-quarter of the population. In the far north of the country there is a network of forced labor gulags where people who have ‘expressed a bland political opinion’ are, along with their entire families, tortured, raped and executed. Horrific bio-chemical experiments are performed on mass numbers of people. Babies are delivered and then stamped to death by the camp guards. If the mother screams while the guards are stamping on the baby’s neck, she is immediately assassinated by a firing squad. These guards are rewarded with bonuses and promotions for ripping out prisoners’ eyeballs.
The North Korean people are enslaved by a government that is using food as a weapon. Perhaps this is why the EU and the United States, via the UN World Food Program, resumed the shipment of hundreds of thousands of tons in food aid at the end of February 2003. This goes directly to the sitting dictatorship, which then decides who gets it by their level of allegiance to the state. Food aid only increases the power of Kim Jong-Il and yet it is veiled by the UN in bleeding heart humanitarian rhetoric. The money goes straight to enabling the North Korean leadership to live in the lap of westernized luxury with casinos and lavish new cars.
President Bush publicly claimed to loathe Kim Jong-Il and yet his administration, like Bill Clinton before him, set the policy to help North Korea obtain nuclear expertise. The U.S. intelligence network also protected AQ Khan and allowed him to provide the means with which North Korea acquired their nuclear capability.
If the tensions between the Koreas were to escalate into all out war, don’t expect the castrated American corporate media to mention how Kim Jong-Il grew to be such a threat in the first place – with the aid of nuclear weapons enthusiastically supplied by the U.S. government and its surrogates.
Authorities in Colorado's San Luis Valley are trying to solve a series of bizarre, gruesome slaying: cows, mutilated, carved up, left to die in the fields.
Police are stumped. But rancher Mike Duran, who lost two of his cows to mutilation last December, has a theory that is literally out of this world. He says it was aliens.
"It's almost like the animal was taken away, killed, surgically manipulated and brought back," Duran told us.
Some of the wounds on one cow were "like laser cuts," he said. "There was no blood. No tracks. No witnesses at all."
"Some people say it was a cult. But even if it was a cult, we would find tracks or something like that."
In Duran's mind, that leaves only one other option.
"I believe there are aliens. People may laugh at me for thinking that," Duran said. "(The aliens) do what they have to, and then they bring (the cows) back and they drop them back in the field. And that's why there are no tracks."
Duran is not alone.
"The (female cow's) sexual organs were removed, the eyes were removed, a tongue was removed," said Chuck Zukowski, a self-described UFO investigator and reserve El Paso County Sheriff's deputy, who is trying to solve Duran's case.
"The pattern is that of surgical cuts. There are no bite marks. There are no scratch marks. There's no carnage on the ground...It's as if it was under surgery."
Duran says he found a powerful electromagnetic field coming from one of the cow's carved-out head, only adding to his suspicions that aliens are to blame.
"In my opinion, this is probably one of the best cold cases we have," Duran says.
The Colorado Department of Agriculture, however, doesn't buy the extraterrestrial theory.
"Postmortem changes on an animal happen very fast," said Nick Striegel, a veterinarian with the department. "Predators are coming in...they can lick up that blood. Insects and other parts of the decomposing process can digest body fluids."
If not predators, Striegel says it is also possible that people could be involved.
An extraordinary crop circle based on the 'world's most beautiful maths theorem' has appeared in a field next to a windmill in Wiltshire.
The complex disc, which measures 300ft across, appeared to the east of Wilton Windmill near Marlborough in a blazing yellow rape seed field.
It appeared on Saturday just 25miles from another circle that popped up a fortnight ago by the Iron Age hill fort of Old Sarum.
Lucy Pringle, a renowned crop circle researcher was puzzled by what appears to be a hidden code based on complex numbers within the shape.
She said: 'I believe it contains binary, a numeral system, or base-2 number system that represents numeric values using two symbols, 0 and 1.
'Working from the centre outwards, people are suggesting it has a connection to Leonhard Euler's theorem e^(i)pi+1=0 which is thought to be one of the most beautiful theorems in mathematics.'
She added that it could even contain a hidden tune.
'Historically over the years, crop circles have been associated with diatonic scales (white notes on the piano),' she said.
'These diatonic scale frequencies are encoded in each segment of the crop circle and can be played on the piano.
'This is a unique formation incorporating both music and mathematics and is similar in importance to the famous 2008 Barbury Castle Pi event.'
Another crop circle expert said everyone can draw their own conclusions from the circles, adding: 'The thing about maths and the circles is that you are dealing with something which isn't an exact science so one person may decode the circles as having diatonic ratios, the other may find meaning in binary numbers or astrological cycles.
'The only possible explanation which covers all areas would be humans, however this can only be a problematic relationship shared by creaters and researchers since the [UFO] researchers hate the idea that a sense of wonder and optimism is quoshed by the admittance of human involvement.'
Carved out in a barley field, the Barbury Castle crop circle was a pictorial representation of the first ten digits of Pi, one of the most fundamental symbols in mathematics. The image was an example of what is known as a fractal, or geometric pattern.
It was solved by astrophysicist Mike Reed who saw a picture of the crop circle and made the mathematical link.
Crop circle designs have developed from simple circles in the 1970s to pictorial designs in the late 1980s and binary number designers from 2001.
Scientists have created artificial life in a laboratory, leading to accusations they are 'playing God' and tampering 'with the essence of life'.
In a world first, Craig Venter, a maverick biologist and billionaire entrepreneur, has made a synthetic cell from scratch.
The creation of a new life form, which has been nicknamed 'Synthia', paves the way for customised bugs that could revolutionise healthcare and fuel production.
In future, bacterial 'factories' could be set up to manufacture artificial organisms designed for specific tasks such as medicines or producing clean biofuels.
The technology could also be harnessed to create environmentally friendly bugs capable of mopping up carbon dioxide or toxic waste.
Dr Venter, a 63-year-old Vietnam War veteran known for his showman tendencies, said last night: 'We are entering a new era where we're limited mostly by our imaginations.'
But the breakthrough, which took 15 years and £27.7million to achieve, opens an ethical Pandora's box. Ethicists said he is 'creaking open the most profound door in humanity's history' - with unparalleled risks.
There are fears that the research, detailed in the journal Science, could be abused to create the ultimate biological weapon.
And there are also warnings that one mistake in a lab could lead to millions being wiped out by a plague, in scenes reminiscent of the Will Smith film I Am Legend.
Dr Venter, who was instrumental in sequencing the human genome, had previously succeeded in transplanting one bug's genome - its entire cache of DNA - into another bacterium, effectively changing its species.
He has taken this one step further, transplanting not a natural genome but a man-made one. To do this, he read the DNA of Mycoplasma mycoides, a bug that infects goats, and recreated it piece by piece.
The fragments were then 'stitched together' and inserted into a bacterium from a different species.
There, it sprang to life, allowing the bug to grow and multiply, producing generations that were entirely artificial.
The transferred DNA contained around 850 genes - a fraction of the 20,000 or so contained in a human's genetic blueprint.
Dr Venter, whose team of 20 scientists includes a Nobel laureate, likens the process to booting-up a computer.
Like a program without a hard drive, the DNA doesn't do anything by itself. But, when the software is loaded into the computer - in this case the second bacterium - amazing things are possible, he said.
Now that the scientist, whose J Craig Venter Institute has labs in California and Maryland, has proved the concept, the path is open for him to alter the 'recipe' to create any sort of organism he chooses.
At the top of his wishlist are bugs capable of producing clean biofuels and of sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Other possibilities include designer microbes that can mop up oil slicks or generate huge quantities of drugs, including the flu vaccine.
Any such organisms would be deliberately 'crippled' so that they cannot survive outside the lab, he claimed.
Brushing aside the ethical concerns of his work, Dr Venter wrote in his autobiography that it would allow 'a new creature to enter the world'.
'We have often been asked if this will be a step too far,' he said. 'I always reply that - so far at least - we are only reconstructing a diminished version of what is out there in nature.'
Last night, he claimed the breakthrough had changed his views on the definition of life. 'We have ended up with the first synthetic cell powered and controlled by a synthetic chromosome and made from four bottles of chemicals,' he said.
'It is pretty stunning when you just replace the DNA software in a cell and the cell instantly starts reading that new software and starts making a whole new set of proteins, and within a short while all the characteristics of the first species disappear and a new species emerges.
'That's a pretty important change in how we approach and think about life.'
The process was carried out on one of the simplest types of bacteria, under strict ethical guidelines. The research team insist that they cannot think of a day when the technology could be used to create animals or people from scratch.
Last night, scientists appeared divided over the news. While some hailed the research as 'a defining moment in the history of biology', others attacked it as 'a shot in the dark'.
Kenneth Oye, a social scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., said: 'Right now, we are shooting in the dark as to what the long-term benefits and long-term risks will be.'
Pat Mooney, of the ETC group, a technology watchdog with a special interest in synthetic biology, said: 'This is a Pandora's box moment - like the splitting of the
atom or the cloning of Dolly the sheep, we will all have to deal with the fall- out from this alarming experiment.'
Dr David King, of the Human Genetics Alert watchdog, said: 'What is really dangerous is these scientists' ambitions for total and unrestrained control over nature, which many people describe as "playing God".
'Scientists' understanding of biology falls far short of their technical capabilities. We have learned to our cost the risks that gap brings, for the environment, animal welfare and human health.'
Professor Julian Savulescu, an Oxford University ethicist, said: 'Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity's history, potentially peeking into its destiny.
'He is not merely copying life artificially or modifying it by genetic engineering. He is going towards the role of God: Creating artificial life that could never have existed.'
He said the creation of the first designer bug was a step towards 'the creation of living beings with capacities and a nature that could never have naturally evolved'. The risks were 'unparalleled',' he added.
And he warned: 'This could be used in the future to make the most powerful bioweapons imaginable. The challenge is to eat the fruit without the worm.'
Has he created a monster?
BY Michael Hanlon, Science Editor
The creation of a living being in a laboratory is one of the staples of science fiction.
Now it is a scientific fact. Yesterday's announcement of the birth of a 'synthetic cell' - made by injecting a bacterium shell with genetic material created from scratch by scientists - raises many questions.
These range from the mundanely practical - how will this be useful? - to the profoundly philosophical - will we have to redefine what life is?
Depending on your viewpoint, it is either a powerful testament to human ingenuity or a terrible example of hubris - and the first step on a very dangerous road.
To understand what this development means, we need to discover who the team behind this innovation is.
It is led by Craig Venter, the world's greatest scientific provocateur, a 63-year-old Utah-born genius, a Vietnam veteran, billionaire, yachtsman, and an explorer. Above all he is a showman.
A master of self-publicity, he does not do things by halves; he led the private team which competed with scores of publicly funded scientists in the U.S. and UK to 'crack' the human genome by sequencing our DNA.
His rapid, innovative approach led to the possibility he would beat the scientific establishment.
So, to save face all round, the human genome was presented as a joint achievement. At around the same time, he began talking about making an artificial lifeform in the lab.
Not a Frankenstein's monster, or even a mouse, but a bacterium, one of the simplest living organisms. His blueprint was to be an unassuming and harmless little germ with only 485 genes (humans have around 25,000).
Venter talks grandly of a supercharged biotech revolution, with synthetic bacteria designed to produce biofuels, to mine precious metals from rocks and industrial waste, to digest oil slicks and render toxic spills harmless. Scientists could even create bacteria which can produce novel drugs and vaccines, or organisms engineered to live on Mars and other planets.
The potential is huge - but so are the dangers. An artificial species, created in the lab, might not 'obey the rules' of the natural world - after all, every living being on Earth has evolved over three billion years, when a myriad of competing species have had to share the same increasingly crowded environment.
It is possible to imagine a synthetic microbe going on the rampage, perhaps wiping out all the world's crop plants or even humanity itself.
Synthetic biology also challenges our most cherished notions of what life itself actually is. Non-scientists might not realise that we have, as yet, no proper definition of life.
A diamond is not alive; a baboon clearly is. But what about a virus? Viruses, which are even simpler than bacteria, have a genetic code written in DNA (or its cousin RNA).
The stuff viruses are made from is the stuff of life - protein coats and so on - yet they cannot reproduce independently.
Like diamonds, they can be grown into crystals - and you certainly cannot crystallise baboons. Most biologists say viruses are not alive, and that true biology begins with bacteria.
So is Synthia, Venter's tentative name for his new critter, alive? It is certainly not the result of Darwinian evolution, one of the (many) definitions of life. It is more 'alive' than any virus but it is the product of Man, not of evolution. Its genetic code is simple enough to be stored on a computer (but then again, so is ours).
Whatever the answer to this fundamental question, Venter's breakthrough is certainly the final rebuttal to the old notion of a vital spark - a mysterious essence that divides the quick from the dead. If you can carry around a genome on a computer memory stick and make a cell using a few simple chemicals, then the old idea of 'vitalism' is truly dead.
Of course, this is early days. It is not yet clear if Venter can negotiate the final step - creating a whole cell from scratch, using no bits of existing living organisms at all.
His bacterium is likely to be weak and feeble; we are a long way from synthetic super-plagues, and even further from an artificial animal or plant. But it is hard to escape the feeling that a boundary has been crossed. The problem is, it is far from clear where we go from here.
An official investigation has concluded that a North Korean torpedo was responsible for the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean warship, prompting condemnation of the Pyongyang regime by America, Britain and the United Nations.
The rospect of dangerous instability on the Korean peninsula grew after South Korea vowed "resolute countermeasures" against its neighbour for the unprovoked attack.
The Cheonan, a 300 ft-long corvette, sank off the southern coast of Baengnyeong Island on March 26, within South Korean waters. Of the 104 men on board, 58 were rescued.
An official report found that a North Korean vessel had fired upon the Cheonan in the night before retreating back into North Korean waters.
The report was greeted with outrage by the US, Britain, Japan and the UN.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said: "The United States strongly condemns the act of aggression that led to their deaths.
"This act of aggression is one more instance of North Korea's unacceptable behavior and defiance of international law.... Such unacceptable behavior only deepens North Korea's isolation."
William Hague, the British foreign secretary, condemned what he called North Korea's "total indifference to human life".
Britain "and international partners are committed to working closely with the Republic of Korea (South Korea) as they consider an appropriate multilateral response to this callous act," he added.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon, who is South Korean himself, described the investigation results as "deeply troubling", while the Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama strongly condemned the attack on the Cheonan, describing it as "unforgivable".
The report itself read: "The evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the torpedo was fired by a North Korean submarine..
"There is no other plausible explanation."
The attack on the Cheonan is the worst apparent provocation by the North since the bombing of a Korean Air flight in 1987 with the loss of 115 lives.
The investigators unveiled large parts of the torpedo that had been salvaged from the scene, including its propellers, propulsion motor and steering section. They said these parts, some of which were inscribed with Korean lettering, "perfectly match the schematics of the CHT-02D torpedo included in introductory brochures provided to foreign countries by North Korea for export purposes".
The South Korean Defence ministry also noted that a "few small submarines and a mother ship supporting them left a North Korean naval base in the West Sea two to three days prior to the attack and returned to port two to three days after the attack."
North Korea has reacted angrily to the accusation, saying that the report was a "fabrication" and that it would wage "all-out war" if there was even a minor retaliation. North Korea has a history of sabre-rattling, but is also a nuclear-armed state, having tested an atomic bomb last year.
China, which is North Korea's strongest ally, and which could use its veto at the United Nations Security Council to block any further sanctions against Pyongyang, reacted cautiously to the news.
The sinking of the South Korean ship was "unfortunate", said Cui Tiankai, the deputy Foreign minister, without acknowledging that North Korea may be responsible for the incident.
Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, visited Beijing earlier this month, perhaps in an attempt to gauge whether the Chinese would continue to support him in the wake of the aggression.
"China is not directly involved, so it should not take a stance on either side or express views on the incident," said Zhang Liangui, a North Korean expert at the Central Party School, where Communist Party leaders are trained.
"South Korea's submission of its report to the UN will clearly force China into making a stance and this will be a challenge. This will be handled by the Foreign ministry, but my view is that China, in accordance with its rising status as a major country, should not go against the rest of the world, but should consider its interests in line with the majority," he added.
In Seoul, the long weeks of mourning since the attack and the personal stories of the young men who lost their lives have deepened the sense of outrage, piling pressure on the government not to allow the lost lives to pass unavenged.
However, military retaliation against North Korea seems to have already been ruled out. "Nobody wants a war on the Korean peninsula and the truth is that it is not easy to take revenge after the event," said Choi Jong-min, whose brother-in-law, Petty Officer First Class Jo Jin-young, was among the dead.
"Military reprisals should have been taken there and then [at the time of the sinking], or not at all," he added.
South Korea has called an emergency meeting of its National Security Council on Friday to discuss its options. However, experts said that most of the punitive actions on offer stand to hurt Seoul at least as much as Pyongyang.
"There really are few good options out there for South Korea," said Daniel Pinkston, a North Korea expert at the International Crisis Group. "They can go to the UN, but in reality China is very unlikely to back serious economic measures against the North which is already in economic crisis.
"Anything too drastic, such as military retaliation or real moves to destabilize the North's economy risks regional instability that could trigger market crashes, capital flight and an overnight loss of regional confidence. It is really hard to see how the South ends up better off after this."
Henry W. McElroy, Jr, retiring State Representative to New Hampshire, declared this week that former U.S. President Eisenhower was briefed about the presence of extraterrestrial intelligent beings on Earth. McElroy also said that the document he viewed while at the State Legislature made referrence to the opportunity for Eisenhower to meet the alien visitors.
This new revelation could result in timely support for the August 2010 election on the Denver ballot initiative to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission. The proposed commission would collect credible evidence and whistle-blower testimony regarding UFOs and visitors to Earth of extraterrestrial origin. It would then share such evidence with the public through the Denver city government web site at no cost to the city budget. The aim of the commission is to brief the public with information previously viewed only by a privileged few.
Following is the transcript of his speech made on May 8, 2010, at Fort Monroe, Virginia. The Gateway to Freedom video of McElroy's speech can also be viewed on YouTube.
Transcript:
"Hello, I'm speaking with you from Fort Monroe, Virginia. We're also known as The Gateway to Freedom.
We sit right next to a little town called Phoebus, Virginia. Interestingly, they call themselves The Gateway to the New World.
Phoebus sits inside of Hampton, Virginia whose motto is First from the Sea, First to the Stars.
My name is Henry McElroy, Jr. a retiring, former State Representative from New Hampshire. Thank you for your attention to this brief message concerning the world's interaction with both earth-based, and off-world astronauts.
The reason I am making this announcement is in the hopes of encouraging better perspective to all who explore the universe. Therefore, as a result, making a more valuable contribution to humanity, for the benefit of all faiths, all races and all nations.
Another reason I am here today is because I believe in the foundational wisdom of our nation, which was laid down by our founding fathers and because we know that highly advanced knowledge and information can assist human beings in solving various problems both in current times, and in our future.
When I was in the New Hampshire State Legislature, I served on the State Federal Relations and Veterans Affairs committee. It was, apparently, important that as a Representative of the Sovereign People who had elected me to this Honorable Office, that I be updated on a large number of topics related to the affairs of our People, and our Nation. As I understood it, some of those ongoing topics had been examined and categorized as Federal, State, Local development, and security matters. These documents related to various topics some of which spanned decades of our nation's history. One of those recurring topics is the reason I am addressing you this evening.
I would like to submit to our nation my personal testimony of one document related to one of these ongoing topics which I saw while in office, serving on the State Federal Relations and Veterans Affairs Committee.
The document I saw was an official brief to President Eisenhower. To the best of my memory this brief was pervaded with a sense of hope, and it informed President Eisenhower of the continued presence of extraterrestrial beings here in the United States of America.
The brief seemed to indicate that a meeting between the President and some of these visitors could be arranged as appropriate if desired.
The tone of the brief indicated to me that there was no need for concern, since these visitors were in no way, causing any harm, or had any intentions, whatsoever, of causing any disruption then, or in the future.
While I can't verify the times or places or that any meeting or meetings occurred directly between Eisenhower and these visitors----because of his optimism in his farewell address in 1961, I personally believe that Eisenhower did, indeed, meet with these extraterrestrial, off world astronauts.
I hope my personal testimony will aid the nation in its quest for continued enlightenment. I am honored to follow in the footsteps of those who have come forward with their personal testimonies - those who deserve the admiration of the American people for sharing their accounts publicly, in an effort to elevate our knowledge to a higher understanding of our existence.
People such as:
Former Astronauts John Glenn, Edgar Mitchell, Gordon Cooper, and Buzz Aldrin
Former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter
Captain Bill Uhouse of the United States Marine Corps
Lt. Col John Williams of the United States Air Force
Co Phillip Corso Sr. of the United States Army
Commander Graham Bethune of the United States Navy
Along with:
David Hamilton of the Department of Energy, Donna Hare of NASA, and James Kopf of the National Security Agency
I would also like to thank the countries of France, Brazil, Britain, Russia, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, our neighbor to the North - Canada, Uruguay, and Australia, for also opening their files to the citizens of their countries, and allowing them access to information that is so very important to the evolution of humanity.
I thank you for allowing me this opportunity to have a small part in doing the same, by sharing the information I have given you today.
Thank you very much and I'd like to thank our communications crew for helping us make this happen today.
And, I'd also like to authorize distribution of this video for anyone who wants to use it for educational purposes.
A GERMAN UFO expert has claimed that a NASA spacecraft may have been hijacked by aliens - who are now attempting to contact Earth.
Hartwig Hausdorf claims that Voyager 2 - an unmanned interplanetary probe blasted into space 33 years ago - has started transmitting strange, unintelligible signals, Bild newspaper revealed today
NASA installed a 12-inch disk containing music and greetings in 55 languages in case intelligent extraterrestrial life ever found it.
But last month the probe began sending back distorted messages from its location near the edge of the solar system that baffled NASA scientists were unable to decode, Mr Hausdorf says.
"It seems almost as if someone had reprogrammed or hijacked the probe, thus perhaps we do not yet know the whole truth," the author of UFOs - They Are Still Flying told Bild.
The signal from Voyager 2 - which takes 13 hours to reach the Earth - broke off fully on April 22.
NASA said engineers were working to solve a data transmission fault.
The space agency has not commented specifically on Mr Hausdorf's comments, although it says the fault is likely to be a glitch in the probe's computer memory
Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, were launched in 1977 to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Three decades on, they are the most distant human-made objects in outer space.
Voyager 1 is currently more than 8.5 billion miles from Earth. It will soon travel beyond the heliosphere - a bubble the sun creates around the solar system - into interstellar space, scientists say.
Indian military scientists are studying an 82-year-old who claims he has not had any food or drink for 70 years.
Prahlad Jani is being held in isolation in a hospital in Ahmedabad, Gurjarat, where he is being closely monitored by India's defence research organization, who believe he may have a genuine quality which could help save lives.
He has now spent six days without food or water under strict observation and doctors say his body has not yet shown any adverse effects from hunger or dehydration.
Mr Jani, who claims to have left home aged seven and lived as a wandering sadhu or holy man in Rajasthan, is regarded as a 'breatharian' who can live on a 'spiritual life-force' alone. He believes he is sustained by a goddess who pours an 'elixir' through a hole in his palate. His claims have been supported by an Indian doctor who specializes in studies of people who claim supernatural abilities, but he has also been dismissed by others as a "village fraud."
India's Defence Research Development Organisation, whose scientists develop drone aircraft, intercontinental ballistic missiles and new types of bombs. They believe Mr Prahlad could teach them to help soldiers survive longer without food, or disaster victims to hang on until help arrives.
"If his claims are verified, it will be a breakthrough in medical science," said Dr G Ilavazhagan, director of the Defence Institute of Physiology & Allied Sciences.
"We will be able to help save human lives during natural disasters, high altitude, sea journeys and other natural and human extremities. We can educate people about the survival techniques in adverse conditions with little food and water or nothing at all."
So far, Mr Prahlad appears to be standing up to scrutiny. He has not eaten or drunk any fluids in six days, and similarly has not passed urine or a stool in that time. He remains fit and healthy and shows no sign of lethargy. Doctors will continue observing him for 15 days in which time they would expect to see some muscle wastage, serious dehydration, weight loss,and fatigue followed by organ failure.
It is common in India for Jains and Hindus to fast, sometimes for up to eight days, without any adverse affects, as part of their religious worship. Most humans cannot survive without food for 50 days. The longest hunger strike recorded is 74 days.
According to Dr Sudhir Shah, who examined him in 2003, he went without food or water for ten days in which urine appeared to be reabsorbed by his body after forming in his bladder. Doubts were expressed about his claim after his weight fell slightly at the end of the trial.
A European probe is tonight (March 03 2010) skimming past a moon that was once thought to be an alien spacecraft. Mars Express will swoop less than 42 miles over Phobos, one of two natural satellites orbiting the red planet.
The flypast - the closest ever - will allow scientists to measure deep inside the 17 mile wide, potato-shaped moon to see just what it is made of.
Phobos, thought to be an asteroid captured by Mars's gravity, has an unusual low orbit that is taking it spiralling slowly towards an impact.
According to the European Space agency's Phobos blog, that led to US President Dwight Eisenhower being briefed in 1960 that it could be a space station launched by an advanced Martian civilisation. (NB: The ESA blog entry has now been removed).
Scientists at the time thought that drag from the atmosphere was causing Phobos to sink in its orbit by around two inches a year - and for that to happen, some said it had to be hollow like an Easter egg.
A Russian suggestion was apparently that the moon could not therefore be a natural object and might be an ancient abandoned spacecraft. Fred Singer, a special advisor on space to the White House, was said by ESA to have passed this information on to the President. However, noted atmospheric physicist Professor Singer, who is now 85, tells us he did no such thing and in fact, he was instrumental, with Ernst Opik (see below), in coming up with the correct explanation for Phobos's descent - a deceleration caused by Mars's tidal pull.
There will be no photos from the close encounter because Mars Express will be on Phobos's night side. The image here was taken on a previous flyby.
Mars scientists will probe Phobos's real interior by listening to its gravitational effect on a radio signal from their spacecraft during the flyby. Mars also has a smaller nine mile wide moon called Deimos.
LibDem MP Lembit Opik's grandfather Ernst Opik first noted (with Singer) the correct reason for Phobos's strange orbit in 1964. The moon must have an irregular shape and the pull of Mars's gravity created a tidal force that robbed it of energy.
As Star Wars fans might say: "That's no space station ... it's a moon!"
NaturalNews) Reports about the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill have been largely underestimated, according to commentators, including Paul Noel, a Software Engineer for the U.S. Army at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. He believes that the pocket of oil that's been hit is so powerful and under so much pressure that it may be virtually impossible to contain it. And Noel is not the only person questioning the scope of this disaster.
A recent story from the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) reports that many independent scientists believe the leak is spewing far more than the 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, per day being reported by most media sources. They believe the leak could be discharging up to 25,000 barrels (more than one million gallons) of crude oil a day right now.
The riser pipe that was bent and crimped after the oil rig sank is restricting some of the flow from the tapped oil pocket, but as the leaking oil rushes into the well's riser, it is forcing sand with it at very high speeds and "sand blasting" the pipe (which is quickly eroding its structural integrity).
When this disaster first occurred, the media downplayed it. BP spokespersons were quick to claim that the leakage was minimal and that crews would eventually be able to contain it. But as time went on, it became clear that things were not under control and that the spill was far more serious than we were originally told. (Gee, sound familiar? Remember Katrina?)
Yet some of the media reports still seem more like press releases than actual reporting because they continue to repeat what the public relations cleanup crews (pun intended) would like the public to believe rather than what's actually happening. Reality, it seems, has a nasty habit of interfering with corporate spin.
Cap and trade becomes "cap and pray"
The New York Times yesterday reported that BP is working on a large containment dome that is intended to cap the leak and catch the escaping oil so that it can be safely pumped to the surface. Meanwhile, crews are said to be working on fixing the broken blow-out preventer valve that should have stopped the leak from happening in the first place, but they have been unsuccessful thus far.
Almost every report says that BP is doing everything it can to contain the spill and stop the leak, even though the company claims it is not technically at fault. According to an article from the U.K. Daily Mail, BP's CEO Tony Hayward recently responded to the cleanup efforts by explaining, "This is not our accident but it is our responsibility to deal with it."
Swiss-based Transocean is the company that actually owned and operated the sunken rig. It manned the rig with its own crew and BP just leased it from Transocean (which makes you wonder why BP is so willing to take full responsibility for everything).
BP says that it's working on a relief well, but that it could take up to three months to complete. Until then, the company is trying several different approaches to at least slow the leak and hopefully stop it altogether.
Mind you, almost all of the information about the spill from day one has come directly from BP which obviously has every incentive to downplay the true environmental destruction that could be caused by this oil spill.
Even the word "spill" is incorrect. This isn't some ship of oil that spilled into the ocean -- it's a "volcano" of oil spewing from the belly of Mother Earth herself. It's under extremely high pressure, it's spewing a huge volume of oil directly into the ocean, and there so far seems to be no human-engineered way of stopping it (short of setting off an underground nuclear bomb near the well site).
Addressing the unanswered questions
According to the CSM article, environmental risk models are normally performed for pollutants like crude oil, yet not one model has yet been released for this incident by BP or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Many are wondering why this crucial information has not been made public. Could it be because the results of the model might seem too catastrophic?
Neither has there been an adequate explanation given for exactly why the oil rig exploded... twice! Some reports indicate that the crews responsible for properly cementing the well casing didn't do it right. Others suggest that the oil deposit was just too large and under too much pressure for the equipment to handle it. (Be careful where you poke around the planet if you can't handle what comes out, right?)
It's also important to note that, according to a recent New York Times article, Halliburton was actually the company responsible for all the cementing work on the rig, which brings a third party into the picture.
BP's federal permits allowed the company to drill up to 20,000 feet deep, but according to one of the workers who was onboard the rig during the explosion, drilling in excess of 22,000 feet had been taking place. This same worker is said to handle company records for BP, but BP has denied these allegations.
BP has declined to comment, however, on other allegations that the spill happened because it chose not to install necessary deep-water valves which would have acted as a last resort seal of protection in the event of an emergency.
Several other allegations include suspicions that the crews allowed gas to build up in the well bore and that the rig operator tried to detach too quickly from the well, causing a disruption.
BP, Halliburton and Transocean have all indicated that they are continuing to investigate the situation. When companies investigate themselves, however, the truth rarely comes out.
The possibility of an extinction event?
It's hard to say exactly what's going on in the Gulf right now, especially because there are so many conflicting reports and unanswered questions. But one thing's for sure: if the situation is actually much worse than we're being led to believe, there could be worldwide catastrophic consequences.
If it's true that millions upon millions of gallons of crude oil are flooding the Gulf with no end in sight, the massive oil slicks being created could make their way into the Gulf Stream currents, which would carry them not only up the East Coast but around the world where they could absolutely destroy the global fishing industries.
Already these slicks are making their way into Gulf wetlands and beaches where they are destroying birds, fish, and even oyster beds. This is disastrous for both the seafood industry and the people whose livelihoods depend on it. It's also devastating to the local wildlife which could begin to die off from petroleum toxicity. Various ecosystems around the world could be heavily impacted by this spill in ways that we don't even yet realize.
There's no telling where this continuous stream of oil will end up and what damage it might cause. Theoretically, we could be looking at modern man's final act of destruction on planet Earth, because this one oil rig blowout could set in motion a global extinction wave that begins with the oceans and then whiplashes back onto human beings themselves.
We cannot live without life in the oceans. Man is arrogant to drill so deeply into the belly of Mother Earth, and through this arrogance, we may have just set in motion events that will ultimately destroy us. In the future, we may in fact talk about life on Earth as "pre-spill" versus "post-spill." Because a post-spill world may be drowned in oil, devoid of much ocean life, and suffering a global extinction event that will crash the human population by 90 percent or more.
We may have just done to ourselves, in other words, what a giant meteorite did to the dinosaurs.
