Published on Sep 30, 2012 by Gisela Valentin

2012-09-30_18-29-31_854

Published on Sep 25, 2012 by monkeyt033

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Published on Sep 24, 2012 by bravenewfoundation

Since 2004, up to 884 innocent civilians, including at least 176 children, have died from US drone strikes in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan. A new report from the Stanford and New York University law schools finds drone use has caused widespread post-traumatic stress disorder and an overall breakdown of functional society in North Waziristan.

In addition, the report finds the use of a "double tap" procedure, in which a drone strikes once and strikes again not long after, has led to deaths of rescuers and medical professionals. Many interviewees told the researchers they didn't know what America was before drones. Now what they know of America is drones, death and terror.

Follow the conversation @WarCosts #UnderDrones

http://www.warcosts.com

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has created a bass cannon that can put out fires with sound.

c|net
by Christopher MacManus
July 16, 2012 4:38 PM PDT


[font color=gray]A thing of the past? (Credit: DARPA)[/font]

Citing a lack of innovation in fire-extinguishing methods over the last 50 years, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) last week revealed an ear-buzzing new method for putting out fires: blast it with fine-tuned frequencies.

Officially referred to as "acoustic suppression of flame," this simple yet potentially revolutionary method simply relies on two speakers playing a specific low frequency toward the fire.

The resulting acoustics increase air velocity, making it easier to alter the origin of the fire's combustion, also known as the flame boundary layer.

A DARPA statement says the specific sound "leads to higher fuel vaporization, which widens the flame, but also drops the overall flame temperature. Combustion is disrupted as the same amount of heat is spread over a larger area."



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http://vimeo.com/36386074

The Waiting Room is a character-driven documentary film that uses extraordinary access to go behind the doors of an American public hospital struggling to care for a community of largely uninsured patients. The film – using a blend of cinema verité and characters’ voiceover – offers a raw, intimate, and even uplifting look at how patients, staff and caregivers each cope with disease, bureaucracy and hard choices.

The ER waiting room serves as the grounding point for the film, capturing in vivid detail what it means for millions of Americans to live without health insurance. Young victims of gun violence take their turn alongside artists and small business owners who lack insurance. Steel workers, taxi cab drivers and international asylum seekers crowd the halls. The film weaves the stories of several patients – as well as the hospital staff charged with caring for them – as they cope with the complexity of the nation’s public health care system, while weathering the storm of a national recession.

The Waiting Room lays bare the struggle and determination of both a community and an institution coping with limited resources and no road map for navigating a health care landscape marked by historic economic and political dysfunction. It is a film about one hospital, its multifaceted community, and how our common vulnerability to illness binds us together as humans.

http://www.whatruwaitingfor.com/

UK Border Agency working on plans for priority passport lanes for rich travellers at Heathrow and other British airports

The Guardian
Tuesday 18 September 2012 14.57 EDT
Alan Travis, home affairs editor

[font color=gray]
Queues at Heathrow border control in June. Photograph:
Steve Parsons/PA[/font]

The UK Border Agency has disclosed that it is working on plans for fast-track passport lanes for rich travellers at Heathrow and other British airports so it can avoid a repeat of the two-hour queues witnessed this year. Brian Moore, the departing head of the UK Border Force, told MPs that "high-value" people who were considered valuable passengers by the airlines or valuable to the British economy would be given priority treatment at immigration control under the plans.

It would be an extension of a priority queueing system tried out this year at Heathrow, under which passengers from Australia, Canada, the US, New Zealand and other mainly "old Commonwealth" countries who do not need a visa to enter Britain would be fast-tracked.

Moore told the Commons home affairs select committee: "It is an idea that officials are discussing with port operators. It will then go back to ministers for them to consider whether and how it is going to be progressed. It is an idea that is being pursued."

Keith Vaz, the committee chair, pressed Moore as to whether it meant the super-rich would have a fast-track into Britain. Moore said it would cover people who were "valuable to the economy and were valued by the airlines". He said the move was intended to demonstrate that Britain was "open for business".

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Bellona
Charles Digges
28/08-2012



Enormous quantities of decommissioned Russian nuclear reactors and radioactive waste were dumped into the Kara Sea in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia over a course of decades, according to documents given to Norwegian officials by Russian authorities and published in Norwegian media.

Bellona had received in 2011 a draft of a similar report prepared for Russia’s Gossoviet, the State Council, for presentation at a meeting presided over by then-president Dmitry Medvedev on Russian environmental security.

The Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom confirmed the figures in February of this year during a seminar it jointly held with Bellona in Moscow. Bellona is alarmed by the extent of the dumped Soviet waste, which is far greater than was previously known – not only to Bellona, but also to the Russian authorities themselves.

The catalogue of waste dumped at sea by the Soviets, according to documents seen by Bellona, and which were today released by the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, includes some 17,000 containers of radioactive waste, 19 ships containing radioactive waste, 14 nuclear reactors, including five that still contain spent nuclear fuel; 735 other pieces of radiactively contaminated heavy machinery, and the K-27 nuclear submarine with its two reactors loaded with nuclear fuel.

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See also:

ENENews (Japan -Fukushima)
ENENews (US-Canada)
ENENews (World)

WHP-TV | CBS21 News
Reported by: Ewa Roman
Published: 9/20 3:40 pm
Email: ewaroman@cbs21.com



Three Mile Island is still shutdown Thursday night. Around 220 Thursday afternoon, people who live near the nuclear power plant heard a loud noise, saw steam and then the plant automatically shut down. This is the second time that this has happened in the past month.

Along with that steam, authorities say undetectable amounts of radiation were released into the air. A TMI spokesperson says there was never a threat to public health so no evacuations were needed.

Guy Magaro was mowing the lawn when he heard it. "All of a sudden you hear a big boom,” Magaro explained. “Steam vented out and then it goes into shutdown." Around 220 p.m. Thursday, a spokesperson for Three Mile Island says the nuclear power plant automatically shut down and steam was released into the air, releasing an undetectable amount of radiation.

"When our turbine shuts down the steam that normally goes to the turbine is released to the atmosphere,” explained TMI spokesperson Ralph DeSantis. “Any radiation in that steam is so low that we can't detect it."

MORE w/ VIDEO

See also (w/ VIDEO):

TMI officials identify cause of plant shutdown

Another edge of Bayou Corne sinkhole caves in