Archive
Russian volcano activity causes global concern
Now the world has something else to grip about when it comes to Russia – the weather.
A string of volcanoes on Russia’s eastern seaboard of Kamchatka have been unusually active for the last six months. The dust they threw up diverted winds in the Arctic, pushing cold air over Europe and North America and causing the unusually cold winter this year, say scientists.
The volcanoes (160 in total, of which 29 are active) are still on the go and could create more problems this year, depressing harvests around the world just as global food prices soar and Read more…
Soros says Israel is “main stumbling block” in Mideast
The Arab liberation revolution will fundamentally change the Middle East. The acceleration of the West’s decline will change the world. One outcome will be a surge toward China, Russia and regional powers like Brazil, Turkey and Iran. Another will be a series of international flare-ups stemming from the West’s lost deterrence. But the overall outcome will be the collapse of North Atlantic political hegemony not in decades, but in years. When the United States and Europe bury Mubarak now, they are also burying the powers they once were. In Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the age of Western hegemony is fading away.
Egypt is more complex and, ultimately, more influential, which is why it is so important to get it right. The protesters are very diverse, including highly educated and Read more…
WikiLeaks: US agrees to tell Russia Britain’s nuclear secrets
The US secretly agreed to give the Russians sensitive information on Britain’s nuclear deterrent to persuade them to sign a key treaty, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
Information about every Trident missile the US supplies to Britain will be given to Russia as part of an arms control deal signed by President Barack Obama next week.
Defence analysts claim the agreement risks undermining Britain’s policy of refusing to confirm the exact size of its nuclear arsenal.
The fact that the Americans used British nuclear secrets as a bargaining chip also sheds new light on the so-called “special relationship”, which is shown often to be a one-sided affair by US diplomatic communications obtained by the WikiLeaks website.
Details of the behind-the-scenes talks are contained in more than 1,400 US embassy cables published to date by the Telegraph, including almost 800 sent from the London Embassy, which are published online today. The documents also show that: Read more…
Russia Working on Mysterious Space Plane of Its Own
It’s official: the space race is on again.
54 years after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik I satellite, sparking the original space race — and 20 years after the USSR’s collapse left America as the sole space superpower — the Russians are back on track. The Kremlin’s military space chief Oleg Ostapenko just announced that Russia is developing a small, maneuverable, reusable space plane to match the U.S. Air Force’s mysterious X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle.
Russian industry has already outlined the craft’s design, Ostapenko said. “As to whether we will use it, only time will tell,” he added coyly.
But it seems unlikely Russia would forgo the opportunity to Read more…
Map shows most of Northern Hemisphere is covered in snow and ice
At first glance it looks like a graphic from a Discovery Channel program about a distant ice age. But this astonishing picture shows the world as it is today – with half the Northern Hemisphere covered with snow and ice.
The image was released by the National Oceanic And Atmospheric Association (NOAA) on the day half of North America was in the grip of a severe winter storm.
The map was created using multiple satellites from government agencies and the US Air Force.
That Antarctica, the Arctic, Greenland and the frozen wastes of Siberia are covered in white comes as no surprise. But it is the extent to which the line dips down over the Northern Hemisphere that is so remarkable about the image.
The shroud of white stretches down from Alaska and sweeps through the Midwest and along to the Eastern seaboard. The bitter cold has reached as far as Texas and northern Mexico where in Ciudad Juarez temperatures today were expected to dip to minus 15C.
In the U.S. tens of millions of people chose to stay at home rather than venture out. In Chicago, 20in of snow fell leading to authorities closing schools for the first time in 12 years. The newspaper for Tulsa, Okalahoma, was unable to publish its print edition for the first time in Read more…
Russia Fields Ballistic Missiles in South Ossetia, Report Says
Russia has moved Tochka ballistic missiles to the breakaway Georgian territory of South Ossetia, Interfax reported last week (see GSN, Aug. 26, 2010).
“The Georgian special services have been informed about the presence of the rockets in South Ossetia, which are capable to effectively repel any aggression from Tbilisi,” Georgia, an insider from Russia’s Southern Military District told the news agency.
Also called the SS-21 Scarab, the short-range, single-warhead missile can hit targets within 75 miles, according to Interfax (Interfax, Jan. 24).
Georgia and Russia fought a brief war in summer 2008 after Tbilisi tried to re-exert control over South Ossetia. Since then, Moscow has recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and constructed military facilities in the two areas.
Georgia last week denounced the reported transfer of the Read more…
“War Without Borders”: Washington Intensifies Push Into Central Asia
By Rick Rozoff
A recent editorial on the website of Voice of America reflected on last year being one in which the United States solidified relations with the five former Soviet republics in Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
One or more of the five nations border Afghanistan, Russia, China and Iran and several more than one of the latter. Kazakhstan, for example, adjoins China and Russia.
The U.S. and Britain, with the support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, invaded Afghanistan and fanned out into Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in October of 2001, less than four months after Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan founded the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to foster expanding economic, security, transportation and energy cooperation and integration in and through Central Asia. In 2005 India, Iran and Pakistan joined the SCO as observers and Afghan President Hamid Karzai has attended its last five annual heads of state summits. [1]
Now the U.S. and the NATO have over 150,000 troops planted directly south of three Central Asian nations.
Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are also on the Caspian Sea, a reservoir of oil and natural gas whose dimensions have only been accurately determined in the past twenty years and where American companies are active in hydrocarbon projects.
After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Pentagon and its NATO allies deployed military forces to, in addition to Soviet-constructed air bases in Afghanistan, bases in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The first two countries Read more…
Something Large This Way Comes
And so it picks up steam. What started in Iceland, instigated by Wall St, has now engulfed Tunisia, Yeman, Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and others yet to be made manifest. Saudi Prince Turki bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud has warned the country’s royal family to step down and flee before a military coup or a popular uprising overthrows the kingdom.
Julianne the Apostate can take the credit of kicking this ball down the hill as it was his release of some of those documents which demonstrated selected venality amongst certain countries’ leadership. It would have happened anyway, but the Apostate, it seems, was the spark. How this could be to Israel’s benefit is beyond me.
The control system is blowing apart at the seams. Anyone thinking the unrest across North Africa to the Middle East is part of a planned paradigm has got to be crazy. Certainly, there are organizational forces at work trying to ride on top of the chaos, but all Read more…
Hundreds of Russians protest against Putin
MOSCOW (AP) — About 500 people demonstrated in a central Moscow square on Monday to demand the ouster of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his “rule of thieves.”
The rally took place peacefully, but police detained a separate group of 20 opposition activists nearby. About 60 protesters also were detained in St. Petersburg, one of a number of other cities where demonstrations were held.
Prominent opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was arrested and jailed for 15 days following a similar demonstration a month ago, kept up his assault on Russia’s longtime leader as he addressed the protesters on Moscow’s Triumph Square.
He compared Putin to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek, who is facing mass unrest after 30 years in power.
“Please, someone tell me how our Read more…
North pole shift could cause airport trouble
Airports like Tampa and West Palm Beach
have recently closed runways because of the shift that is taking place, and it is not the runway that is moving.
Peter Burns, Ph.d., a professor at Notre Dame, says, “The issue of course is the magnetic field does not align with the rotational poles of the earth, and depending on where you sit on the earth, the wandering of the magnetic poles is more or less significant.”
Burns also says that magnetic north is currently located in northern Canada, and it is wandering towards Russia.
This could cause some problems for pilots, as compass readings will also “wander”.
Dee Davis of the Mishawaka Pilots Club, says, “More and more navigation is GPS-based and that is a wonderful thing. But the magnetic north compass still works very well, it is inexpensive, and doesn’t require batteries.”
Compasses aid in navigation and they play an important role in runway numbering.
The main runway at South Bend Regional Airport is labeled 27, a look at the charts shows that the runway’s full heading is at 273 degrees.
If magnetic north continues to wander, some runway numbers will no longer match up with their true heading, a problem that could be very dangerous for pilots taking off.
“One of the most important things that a pilot does before take off, is he will Read more…
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