Anthropogenic climate change is anticipated to increase severe thunderstorm potential in North America, but the resulting changes in associated convective hazards are not well known. Here, using a novel modelling approach, we investigate the spatiotemporal changes in hail frequency and size between the present (1971–2000) and future (2041–2070). Although fewer hail days are expected over most areas in the future, an increase in the mean hail size is projected, with fewer small hail events and a shift toward a more frequent occurrence of larger hail. This leads to an anticipated increase in hail damage potential over most southern regions in spring, retreating to the higher latitudes (that is, north of 50° N) and the Rocky Mountains in the summer. In contrast, a dramatic decrease in hail frequency and damage potential is predicted over eastern and southeastern regions in spring and summer due to a significant increase in melting that mitigates gains in hail size from increased buoyancy.Reminds me a bit of the complexity of rainfall changes under climate change - with rainfall intensification, but increased drying on hotter days, you might end up with roughly the same amount of rainfall over (say) a year, but more damage caused by the intensity when it does fall.
Arkansas's pesticide regulators have stepped into the middle of an epic battle between weeds and chemicals, which has now morphed into a battle between farmers. Hundreds of farmers say their crops have been damaged by a weedkiller that was sprayed on neighboring fields. Today, the Arkansas Plant Board voted to impose an unprecedented ban on that chemical.
"It's fracturing the agricultural community. You either have to choose to be on the side of using the product, or on the side of being damaged by the product," says David Hundley, who manages grain production for Ozark Mountain Poultry in Bay, Arkansas.
The tension — which even led to a farmer's murder — is over a weedkiller called dicamba. The chemical only became a practical option for farmers a few years ago, when Monsanto created soybean and cotton plants that were genetically modified to survive it. Farmers who planted these new seeds could use dicamba to kill weeds without harming their crops.
Farmers, especially in the South, have been desperate for new weapons against a devastating weed called pigweed, or Palmer amaranth. And some farmers even jumped the gun and started spraying dicamba on their crops before they were legally allowed to do so. (Dicamba has long been used in other ways, such as for clearing vegetation from fields before planting.)
The problem is, dicamba is a menace to other crops nearby. It drifts easily in the wind, and traditional soybeans are incredibly sensitive to it. "Nobody was quite prepared, despite extensive training, for just how sensitive beans were to dicamba," says Bob Scott, a specialist on weeds with the University of Arkansas's agricultural extension service.
Reference was made throughout the proceedings to a mysterious German ‘Black Book’, which was said to contain the names of 47,000 prominent British homosexuals, lesbians and secret agents working for the enemy. The names included, it was said, Asquith, Margot Asquith, Lord Haldane and many others of the great and good. When a Mrs Villiers-Stuart (later imprisoned for bigamy) shouted, from the witness box, that the judge’s name was in the book, the proceedings reached a level of insanity beyond anything achieved by Mr Justice Cocklecarrot....
....Decadence, however that pejorative word is defined, is by no means synonymous with homosexuality.
Noel Pemberton Billing MP, of course, was sure that it was. He had been an actor, a barrister, the inventor of a ‘self-calculating pencil’ and a ‘flying boat’ which failed to take off. He had founded the Vigilante Society with an Admiral’s son called Henry Hamilton Beamish who believed that Britain was ruined by ‘Jewalisation’ and that the Jews were responsible for a quarter of the casualties in the war. The Vigilantes published a paper called the Imperialist, which announced ‘the existence in the “Cabinet Noir” of a certain German prince, a book which contains reports from the agents ‘who have infested this country for over twenty years’, agents spreading such debauchery and such lasciviousness as only German minds can conceive and only German bodies execute’.
Billing was anxious to spread his beliefs, not only to Parliament and the Press, but in the Courts of Law. His opportunity came when a private production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, a play banned from the public by the Lord Chamberlain, was proposed. The Vigilante carried a paragraph mysteriously worded ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’ and went on: ‘To be a member of Maud Allan’s performances of Salome one has to apply to a Miss Valetta of 9, Duke Street, Adelphi, WC. If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of members, I have no doubt they would secure the names of several of the first 47,000 [in the Black Book].’ Maud Allan charged Billing with criminal libel and he decided to defend himself at the Old Bailey.
Mr Justice Darling, a small, dandified figure, much given to flippant little jokes at which the Court was expected to laugh heartily, was caricatured by Max Beerbohm wearing a black cap with bells on it. He allowed the loud-voiced Billing, who stood with his monocle fixed in his eye and his arms crossed, to dominate the proceedings. Hours were spent discussing the contents of the Black Book which probably only existed in the fertile imaginations of Billing, his mistress Mrs Villiers-Stuart, and some other dubious witnesses....
The tone of the trial was further lowered by the evidence of the loathsome Lord Alfred Douglas, who attacked Wilde in general and Salome in particular. He also said that prime ministers, judges and ‘greasy advocates’ all conspired to ‘support perverts’. The judge and lawyers seemed too innocent for any such task. They had great difficulty in understanding the word ‘clitoris’ and the QC for the dancer-actress Maud Allan, apparently hearing the word ‘orgasm’ for the first time, asked if it meant some sort of unnatural vice.
"For 100 years, we got stuck into that Freudian perspective on dreams, which turned out to be not scientifically very accurate," says Robert Stickgold, a sleep researcher and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "So it's only been in the last 15 to 20 years that we've really started making progress."Yet further down, it has a peculiar claim:
A number of Freud's observations about dreams are still relevant, even if his interpretations of them are less than scientific.
For example, he observed that certain dream elements are common, if not universal. Teeth, for example.
"A particularly remarkable dream symbol is that of having one's teeth fall out, or having them pulled," Freud wrote in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. He goes on to say that's usually a symbol for castration "as a punishment for onanism." The castration explanation may be off base, Baird says. But problems with teeth are, indeed, something many people report in their dreams. "It's weird," he says. "What has that got to do with anything?" Baird suspects we share many dreams like this because we share the same nervous system design, and many of the same anxieties.I say peculiar, because I don't recall ever having an odd tooth related dream.
Dreams may be so hard to pin down scientifically because they are so closely related to consciousness, a concept that has bedeviled scientists and philosophers for centuries.
We all somehow know we are conscious. But it's been difficult to define precisely what consciousness is, let alone determine how it is generated by the brain.
The British Automatic Fire Sprinkler Association (BAFSA), the trade body for the fire sprinkler industry, said retrofitting Grenfell Tower with sprinklers might have cost £200,000. This is the figure for installing a sprinkler system but does not include potential maintenance fees or costs associated with the wider redevelopment of a building.And another Council has already decided to retrofit 25 high rise blocks at a cost of ten million pounds.
While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!is dangerously ambiguous. As New York Magazine writes:
They are right - and you would have to be completely foolish (as Trump supporters are) not to see the impropriety and danger in this idiot President tweeting to the world.But if Trump’s tweet is just mindless bluster, that hardly makes it less unnerving. In their joint military exercises, the United States and South Korea have rehearsed preemptive strikes against North Korea, ones designed to kill Kim Jong-un before he has a chance to press the proverbial button. Arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis has warned that the implication of these exercises aren’t lost on Pyongyang: Kim knows “he has to go first, if he is to go at all.”Just because savvy news consumers in the United States are comfortable assuming that Trump is merely talking trash doesn’t mean that North Korea is. In April, the president suggested that the day Beijing’s efforts to rein in Pyongyang failed would be the day that America took action against Kim Jong-un’s regime.“Well if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you,” Trump told the Financial Times.The fact that the American president is an emotionally volatile reality star — who publishes his foreign-policy musings directly to the internet — has always been dangerous. In the context of a military standoff with a nuclear-weapons state, it may prove fatally so.
Whether eaten with mayonnaise or taken au naturel, the Belgian chip is up there with chocolate, beer and the national football team in the nation’s psyche. No public square is complete without a frietkot, or chip stand, where sellers swear by double frying bintje potatoes in beef or horse fat to achieve the ideal combination of a succulent centre and crispy exterior.I don't much like horses: I'd just as soon they stayed out of any chips I might be eating, as well. If ever I get to Belgium, that is.
Psychological science consistently finds when a lie gets repeated, it’s slightly more likely to be misremembered as truth. It’s called the “illusory truth effect.” It’s a tendency the whole news media — as well as consumers of news — should be wary of. And it’s a reason not to give notorious bullshitters such a substantial spotlight. Especially bullshitters whose lies hurt others and whose lies have a track record for virality....
The illusory truth effect has been studied for decades — the first citations date back to the 1970s. Typically, experimenters in these studies ask participants to rate a series of trivia statements as true or false. Hours, weeks, or even months later, the experimenters bring the participants back again for a quiz.On that second visit, some of the statements are new, some are repeats. And it’s here that the effect shows itself: Participants are reliably more likely to rate statements they’ve seen before as being true — regardless as to whether they are or not.When you’re hearing something for the second or third time, your brain becomes faster to respond to it. “And your brain misattributes that fluency as a signal for it being true,” says Lisa Fazio, a psychologist who studies learning and memory at Vanderbilt University. The more you hear something, the more “you’ll have this gut-level feeling that maybe it’s true.”Most of the time this mental heuristic — a thinking shortcut — helps us. We don’t need to wrack our brains every time we hear “the Earth is round” to decide it’s true or not. Most of the things we hear repeated over and over again are, indeed, true.But falsehoods can hijack this mental tic as well.
But buildings *are* very heavily regulated. They are not “deregulated”. This can just as easily be seen as a failure of the “regulate everything and all will be well” approachAnd he cites Tim Worstall:
So, layer upon layer of intrusive regulation and government made this happen.As someone says in response to Worstall:
The solution is more layers of intrusive government and regulation. That’ll work, won’t it?
I don’t know, but what do you suggest as an alternative? Fewer fire regulations? No fire regulations?And someone back at Stoats writes:
Timmy’s argument is ludicrous: the Graun describes how the designers and builders failed to comply with the building regulation requirement that “the external envelope of a building should not provide a medium for fire spread”, and other factors contributed to the death toll. Timmy jumps to:The other ludicrous line that some on the Right are running is that the building was only clad in flammable cladding because of Green/climate change regulations for insulation. (Some have been trying to bring EU regulation into it too - which hardly makes any sense if it is true that Germany does not allow the use of this material on its buildings.)
“So, layer upon layer of intrusive regulation and government made this happen.”
False as the regulations are not “layer upon layer”, they have repeatedly been revised, tested, and reexamined in relation to experience, as well as getting watered down by dogma against regulation.
Ludicrous as, by Timmy’s argument, regulations against murder make murders happen.
After less than a year in Tokyo, Hughes, sensing the imminence of war with Japan and keen to alert Australia and America to the danger, packed his own notebooks full of sensitive information and headed back to Australia at the beginning of 1941.Hughes went on to become a double agent, fooling the KGB, and (much later) took Fleming on a boozey research tour of Japan for the novel.
When the war ended, Hughes returned to live in Japan, now under American Occupation, and became manager of No. 1 Shimbun Alley, a rowdy foreign correspondents’ club situated next to the residential wing of the Soviet Embassy. The club was the meeting ground of reporters, former soldiers and spies, many of whom conducted illicit liaisons in its bedrooms.
The Cold War deepened in 1948 over the Berlin Airlift. Hughes was dismissed as manager of the club and swore never to return to it. At the same time, he started working as a foreign correspondent for London’s Sunday Times, under its foreign manager Ian Fleming, who had played a distinguished role in British naval intelligence during World War II and presided over many crucial covert operations.
Hughes now created his own intelligence network by founding the Baritsu Chapter, supposedly the Asian section of the Baker Street Irregulars, a Sherlock Holmes appreciation society first founded in the U.S. in 1934. “Baritsu” is the name given to a fictional form of martial art that Holmes is described as using to defeat his arch-nemesis, Moriarty, while wrestling with him at the Reichenbach Falls.
China is betting on new, small-scale nuclear reactor designs that could be used in isolated regions, on ships and even aircraft as part of an ambitious plan to wrest control of the global nuclear market.Sure they make great mobile phones, but not entirely sure (to put it mildly) that they have the runs on the board re environmental responsibility to trust a nuclear reactor shipped out from there.
Within weeks, state-owned China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) is set to launch a small modular reactor (SMR) dubbed the “Nimble Dragon” with a pilot plant on the island province of Hainan, according to company officials.
Unlike new large scale reactors that cost upward of $10 billion per unit and need large safety zones, SMRs create less toxic waste and can be built in a single factory.
A little bigger than a bus and able to be transported by truck, SMRs could eventually cost less than one-tenth the price of conventional reactors, developers predict.
Over the past decade in particular, the internet and social media have changed the game. They speed people to like-minded warriors and give them the impression of broader company or sturdier validation than really exist. The fervor of those in the anti-vaccine movement exemplifies this. So did the stamina of Americans who insisted that Barack Obama was born abroad — and who were egged on by Donald Trump.
Admirers of a responsible politician or righteous cause coalesce quickly, but the same goes for followers of a hatemonger or crackpot. One good articulation of this came from David Simas, who was Obama’s political director, in a New Yorker article by David Remnick that deconstructed the 2016 election.What people find on the web “creates a whole new permission structure, a sense of social affirmation for what was once unthinkable,” Simas told Remnick. Obama, in his own comments to Remnick, picked up that thread, saying, “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll.”“The capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal — that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate,” Obama added. Suspicion blossoms into certainty. Pique flowers into fury.
His life online reflected the goosing, goading, amplifying power of social media and the eminence of outrage in public debate. As Michael Gerson noted in The Washington Post after the shooting, today’s partisans “have made anger into an industry — using it to run up the number of listeners, viewers and hits.” Mocking and savaging political opponents have been “not only normalized but monetized,” Gerson added, and he stated the obvious, which needed stating nonetheless: “If words can inspire, then they can also incite or debase.”
The idea that some on the far left are openly condoning violence is a red flag for extremist group monitors.
"This is a dangerous game; people are going to die. No one's died yet, but it's just a matter of time," says J.J. McNabb, an expert on political extremism at George Washington University.
McNabb says white supremacists and neo-Nazis are widely condemned — and deservedly — for their violent tendencies. But she says the Antifa shouldn't get a pass on their violence just because they oppose white supremacists....
Still, their numbers are tiny in relation to the mainstream political left. And, say experts, it's misleading for right-wing groups to suggest that the Antifa are more violent than right-wing extremists.
"The far left is very active in the United States, but it hasn't been particularly violent for some time," says Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.
He says the numbers between the groups don't compare.
"In the past 10 years when you look at murders committed by domestic extremists in the United States of all types, right-wing extremists are responsible for about 74 percent of those murders," Pitcavage says.
You have to go back to the 1970s to find the last big cycle of far-left extremism in the U.S. Both Pitcavage and McNabb say we have been in a predominantly far-right extremist cycle since the 1990s — the abortion clinic bombings and Oklahoma City, for example. And, more recently, racially motivated attacks such as the one at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, the mass shooting at a black church in Charleston, S.C., and last month's stabbings on a commuter train in Portland.
When it comes to many regulations, it is best to leave such calculations of benefit and cost to the market, rather than the government. People can make their own assessments of the risks, and the price they’re willing to pay to allay them, rather than substituting the judgment of some politician or bureaucrat who will not receive the benefit or pay the cost.Opportunistically, she also concentrates on just one safety matter relevant to the Grenfell fire - the decision not to try to retrofit a sprinkler system.
Grenfell Tower, of course, was public housing, which changes the calculation somewhat.Yes! Because it wasn't a case of market choice at all for those residents.
And yet, even there, trade-offs have to be made. The government spends money on a great number of things, many of which save lives. Every dollar it spends on installing sprinkler systems cannot be spent on the health service, or national defense, or pollution control. Would more lives be saved by those measures or by sprinkler systems in public housing? It’s hard to say.Look, there is time to make a statement of the bleeding obvious - not all government funded enterprises can be made perfectly safe if the cost of doing so is going to be astronomically high - and there is a time to instead make another bleedingly obvious one: it is a bad idea for governments to leave it up to builders to decide whether to make high rise apartment buildings flammable, especially when the additional cost to use non flammable material is small.
A new report by Unicef contains a shocking statistic - New Zealand has by far the highest youth suicide rate in the developed world.
A shock but no surprise - it's not the first time the country tops that table.
The Unicef report found New Zealand's youth suicide rate - teenagers between 15 and 19 - to be the highest of a long list of 41 OECD and EU countries.
The rate of 15.6 suicides per 100,000 people is twice as high as the US rate and almost five times that of Britain.I suppose it is not a great surprise to read that the rates are particularly high amongst young Maori and Pacific Islander males - it ties in with what happens in the Australian aboriginal population.
Suicide rates in Australia peaked in 1963 (17.5 per 100,000), declining to 11.3 per 100,000 in 1984, and climbing back to 14.6 in 1997. Rates have been lower than this since that year. The age-standardised suicide rate for persons in 2015 was 12.7 per 100,000.Why was 1963 a peak year for suicide? Certainly puts nostalgia for the Golden Age of Menzies into a bit of perspective...
The Pentagon will send almost 4,000 additional American forces to Afghanistan, a Trump administration official said Thursday, hoping to break a stalemate in a war that has now passed to a third U.S. commander in chief. The deployment will be the largest of American manpower under Donald Trump's young presidency.
How many times should we say it? Don’t build residential towers. Don’t make or let people live in them, least of all families. They are antisocial, high-maintenance, disempowering, unnecessary, mostly ugly, and they can never be truly safe. No tower is fireproof. No fire engine can reach up 20 storeys, period....but he has a point, at least when it comes to government funded housing for the relatively poor.
Towers are again raising their heads across the urban landscape, creatures of egotistical architects, greedy developers and priapic mayors. We gasp at their magnificence, their extravagance, their sheer height. Yet like Grenfell they are alien creatures in a British city. They do not converse with their context, they thumb their noses at it.
Hence the most “crowded” parts of London are not around towers but in eight-storey Victorian terraces. The boulevards of central Paris have treble London’s residential density without towers. Westminster council’s aborted Paddington Pole, at some 60 storeys, had fewer housing units than the high-density street housing suggested by its opponents. The tall blocks wanted by Boris Johnson for Clerkenwell’s Mount Pleasant estate are at a lower density than the low-rise town houses proposed by the consultants Create Streets.And, I am also reminded of Kevin McCloud's 2010 documentary on lessons to be learnt about high density living from the Mumbai slums. And also, how Japan manages to cram in extremely high density but with most residential blocks of relatively limited height.
DUBAI: A senior bank manager was arrested last week after a Muslim colleague filed a complaint accusing him of insulting Islam.
E.D. from Goa, India, was taken into custody within hours of the incident at the Bur Dubai branch of a local bank on June 7. He was held at Al Raffa Police station before being released on bail.
The complainant T.A., 30, from Bangalore, India, said his boss E.D. made religious slurs against him and ridiculed Islam when he asked him for leave to go to Makkah for the Umrah piligrimage.
“This happened during our morning huddle. In front of several staff members, E.D. mocked me saying that if I was so keen to perform Umrah then instead of the Kaaba, I may as well take rounds (tawaaf) of his villa in Victory Heights,” T.A. said in an interview with XPRESS.
“I was shocked but I kept my cool and told my boss that he had no right to make such blasphemous comments against my religion but he remained unrepentant and went on to blame Muslims for terror attacks including the recent one in London. He also made jibes at my appearance, particularly my bloodshot eyes. He said they make me look as if I was drunk. I told him they were caused by lack of sleep during Ramadan but he refused to listen and said Ramadan was a month of giving but all that I gave him during Ramadan was pain. The same day I filed a police complaint.”
Between 1990 and 2014, the ECDB has identified 38 homicide events motivated by Islamist extremism that killed 62 people. When you include 9/11, those numbers jump dramatically to 39 homicide events and 3,058 killed.
The database also identified 177 homicide events motivated by far-right extremism, with 245 killed. And when you include the Oklahoma City bombing, it rises to 178 homicide events and 413 killed.
Although our data for 2015 through 2017 are still being verified, we counted five homicide events perpetrated by Islamist extremists that resulted in the murders of 74 people. This includes the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, which killed 49 people. In the same time period, there were eight homicide events committed by far-right extremists that killed 27 people.
These data reveal that far-right extremists tend to be more active in committing homicides, yet Islamist extremists tend to be more deadly.
Our research has also identified violent Islamist extremist plots against 272 targets that were either foiled or failed between 2001 and 2014. We are in the process of compiling similar data on far-right plots. Although data collection is only about 50 percent complete, we have already identified 213 far-right targets from the same time period...
Far-right extremists, who typically harbor anti-government sentiments, have a higher likelihood of escalating routine law enforcement contacts into fatal encounters. These homicides pose unique challenges to local law enforcement officers who are disproportionately targeted by the far right.A good article.
In November 2016, a residents organisation, Grenfell Action Group, published online an article attacking KCTMO as an "evil, unprincipled, mini-mafia" and accusing the Borough Council of ignoring health and safety laws. The Group suggested that "only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of [KCTMO]". The group had also published articles criticising fire safety and maintenance practices at Grenfell Tower.[12][13]This is going to be in the news for quite a long time, by the sounds.
Now, researchers at the University of Miami and the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research have shown that the eels use Earth's magnetic field to determine which direction to swim. In a Norwegian fjord, they placed locally caught glass eels in a mesh container that was suspended from a surface float. A camera recorded the behaviour of the eels and the team found that they tended to swim in a southerly direction at ebb tides. The same glass eels were then placed in a specially designed tank in which they are shielded from external stimuli such as daylight. Magnetic fields were applied to the tank, which effectively rotated the magnetic north–south axis by 90°. During periods of ebb tides, the team found that the eels oriented themselves in a southerly direction as defined by the applied magnetic field. This led them to conclude that the glass eels navigate using Earth's magnetic field in a manner that is linked to the local cycle of tides. This, they believe, could help the eels to use the tides to reach freshwater in rivers. "It is incredible that these small transparent glass eels can detect the Earth's magnetic field," says Miami's Alessandro Cresci. "The use of a magnetic compass could be a key component underlying the amazing migration of these animals," he adds. "It is also the first observation of glass eels keeping a compass as they swim in shelf waters, and that alone is an exciting discovery."
The systematic persecution of gay men under the Nazi regime has been well documented by historians. The regime's laws explicitly criminalized homosexual acts between men. About 50,000 men were convicted for being homosexuals and between 5,000 and 15,000 were imprisoned in concentration camps, where up to 60 percent of them died, according to scholars.
But how lesbians fared is less clear. Females were excluded from the law that made homosexual acts illegal. Aside from a few cases that have been uncovered by a handful of scholars in the United States and Germany, little documentation exists describing how the Nazis treated lesbians.
Liu née Holzmann, whose lesbian relationship was also documented in a recent German monograph, struck Huneke as particularly strange. Holzmann was a Jewish lesbian who lived in Nazi Berlin. In 1941, she married a Chinese waiter and received Chinese citizenship, which the police insisted shielded her from deportation to a concentration camp. Once Holzmann's husband became aware of her lesbian relationship, he filed for divorce and contacted the police.
Yet, as in the other three cases, the police opted not to intervene. "It is frankly bizarre that the criminal police would insist, in multiple documents, on the protections conferred a German Jewish lesbian by virtue of her de jure Chinese citizenship," Huneke wrote.
The Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA is one of a handful of hospitals and clinics nationwide that offer a treatment that works in a fundamentally different way than drugs. The technique, transcranial magnetic stimulation, beams targeted magnetic pulses deep inside patients' brains—an approach that has been likened to rewiring a computer.
TMS has been approved by the FDA for treating depression that doesn't respond to medications, and UCLA researchers say it has been underused. But new equipment being rolled out this summer promises to make the treatment available to more people.
"We are actually changing how the brain circuits are arranged, how they talk to each other," said Dr. Ian Cook, director of the UCLA Depression Research and Clinic Program. "The brain is an amazingly changeable organ. In fact, every time people learn something new, there are physical changes in the brain structure that can be detected."
The joint American-Norwegian radar project, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and consume substantial amounts of electricity, has infuriated Moscow, which sees it as part of a Pentagon drive to encircle and contain Mr. Putin’s resurgent Russia. The Russian ambassador in Oslo, Norway’s capital, recently warned Norway that it should “not be naïve” about Russia’s readiness to respond.
“Norway has to understand that after becoming an outpost of NATO, it will have to face head-on Russia and Russian military might,” the ambassador, Teimuraz Ramishvili, told Norway’s state broadcaster, NRK. “Therefore, there will be no peaceful Arctic anymore.”
The new radar system at Vardo will merely upgrade an earlier American-built radar system and continue its mission, Morten Haga Lunde, the chief of Norway’s military intelligence agency, said in a cryptic statement last year. That mission, he added, is to track space debris like defunct satellites and to “monitor our national area of interest in the North.”
But Russia’s generals and many Norwegians have dismissed the space-trash story. They say they believe that the new Globus 3 radar is part of the Pentagon’s efforts to develop a global missile-defense system, making it a prime target for attack in the event of a conflict.
How do you start a dairy industry overnight in a wealthy desert nation with its transport links blockaded? You buy 4,000 cows from Australia and the U.S. and put them on airplanes.Here's the link.
That is what Qatari businessman Moutaz Al Khayyat told Bloomberg he is doing. The airlift will require as many as 60 flights on Qatar Airways, but Al Khayyat said, "This is the time to work for Qatar."
Taking into account all of the above, it seems remarkable that some foreign commentators still find it difficult to see that Putin has been engaged in an all-out attempt to bring his Western enemies down, by whatever means. If 'enemy' seems excessive, let us recall that the standard KGB expression for the US during the Cold War was 'chief adversary', and that until quite recently the Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, Patrushev, was claiming publicly that US hostility to Russia was 'systemic' and 'immanent' – that is, no matter who was president, the US would continue to seek to 'dismember' Russia.So one bit of notorious Russian fake news has started from their secret mind reading projects? Huh. How more "fake news" can you get?
As Robert Horvath noted in an unpublished address to the Pacific Institute in February (cited here with permission), the most lurid specimen of this propaganda is the allegation that Madeleine Albright once said it would be impossible to construct a just world while Siberia's vast natural resources were controlled by Russia alone. That allegation was first aired in an interview in the Russian government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta with a former KGB general about an occult secret project to read the minds of Western leaders. This project was the source of the Albright-Siberia claim.
