Twelfth Bough

i run my own damn think tank

Archive for February 10th, 2010

the sun, the clouds, the climate

Feb 10

Posted by A. Peasant in Censorship, Experts, Global Warming, Mind-fucking | No Comments

Shorter theory:

The magnetic field of the sun regulates how many cosmic rays reach the earth.
The magnetic field of the sun varies over time.
Therefore, the number of cosmic rays reaching the earth varies over time.

Cosmic rays produce ions in the atmosphere — tiny aerosolized particles.
These ions — tiny aerosolized particles — allow water to condense and form clouds.

More cosmic rays make more ions make more clouds.

More clouds reflect more sunlight and cool the earth.

So the clouds are caused by the cosmic rays, which reach the earth based on the sun’s magnetic field.

Therefore the magnetic field of the sun regulates the earth’s climate.

According to this theory, which makes sense, cosmic rays and the sun drive climate, not you. Do a little happy dance.

Note the sourpuss faces at the IPCC when they saw the presentation (part 3). The scientists could not get the results published for sixteen months. The IPCC people say this is NONsense.

In 6 parts, h/t incoming.

Right now we appear to be in a cold period, based on our position vis-a-vis spiral arms of the Milky Way. These spiral arms can generate a five to ten degree variation in earth’s temperature. Five to ten degrees! That’s a lot.

So what are the particles they’re spraying into the atmosphere, which we know as chemtrails, that spread out and form clouds, which cool the planet, while they browbeat us senseless with this human-caused global warming crap?

Why do they do this? To make everything worse? To JUSTIFY their global warming carbon trading schemes?

serial killer: the firewall defense

Feb 10

Posted by A. Peasant in Bush/Cheney, Canada, Experts, FBI, Identities, Limited Hangouts, Mexico, Military, Occult, Psychopaths | No Comments

George Bush, as governor of Texas, pardoned Henry Lee Lucas, a sadistic and prolific serial killer, in 1998.

Henry’s crimes were of a particularly brutal nature, involving rape, torture, mutilation, dismemberment, necrophilia, cannibalism, and pedophilia, with the number of victims running as high as 300-600 by some accounts - including Henry’s own, at times - though this figure is likely inflated. By all accounts though, Lucas, frequently working with partner Ottis Toole - a self described arsonist and cannibal - savagely murdered literally scores of victims of all ages, races, and genders.

…Henry, as it turns out, has some interesting stories to tell. In 1985, just a couple years into his incarceration, he attempted to tell his story in a book, written for him by a sympathetic author. The book, titled The Hand of Death: The Henry Lee Lucas Story, tells of Henry’s indoctrination into a nationwide Satanic cult. Lucas claimed that he was trained by the cult in a mobile paramilitary camp in the Florida Everglades in the fine art of killing, up close and personal. Other training involved abduction and arson techniques.

He further claimed that leaders of the camp were so impressed with Henry’s handling of a knife that he was allowed to serve as an instructor. Following his training, Henry claimed to have served the cult in various ways, including as a contract killer and as an abductor of children, who were then taken just over the border to a ranch in Mexico near Juarez. Henry has said that this cult operated out of Texas and from a ranch in northern Mexico, trafficking in children and drugs, among other nefarious pursuits. In essence, Henry claimed that what appeared to be the random work of a serial killer was in fact a planned series of crimes often committed for specific purposes.
Some of the murders were political hits, according to Henry, including the occasional assassination of foreign dignitaries. This was not true for all of Henry’s crimes. Some he did just because that’s what he liked to do. And it was the one thing that he was really good at.

…What are we to make of such stories? Could Henry have been telling the truth about being a contract killer? And if so, did the contracts he was receiving have some kind of government connection? Though Henry never broaches the subject in his book, the training camp as he describes it clearly had military connections. And Henry has explicitly stated that the cult included among its members various prominent persons, including high level politicians. Could this be the reason for the actions taken by Governor Bush in June of 1998?

Now that Colonel Williams has been arrested, will he be linked to other crimes? His arrest opens cold cases in three other provinces.

According to Larry Jones, the man who was initially suspected in Williams’ alleged home invasions and sexual assaults, police were looking for very specific items in the early days of their investigation. Jones, who lives next door to Williams on Cosy Cove Lane in Tweed, said that back when police were investigating him, they searched his home and produced a search warrant for La Senza bras, Jessica brand panties, computers, laptops and digital photography. Other reports say police were also looking for baby blankets and zip ties.

…Williams had been posted to the Shearwater base near Halifax, N.S., from 1992 to 1994, according to his biography posted on the Department of National Defence website until Tuesday afternoon. During that time frame, Andrea King, 18, Shelley Connors, 17, and Kimber Leanne Lucas, 24, were murdered. …Investigators will also look into the unsolved 2001 murder of 19-year-old Kathleen MacVicar in Trenton.

An FBI profiler suggests that whoever committed these murders has been active for a long time.

Torstar News Service asked Mark Safarik, one of the FBI’s serial-killer hunters with the famed Behavioral Analysis Unit, about the likelihood that crimes like that were the work of a first-time offender. After 22 years in the bureau, Safarik now operates a Virginia-based consultancy with Robert K. Ressler, the FBI investigator credited with popularizing the term “serial killer.”

After considering some of the published details, Safarik observes, “People don’t just wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to abduct someone and murder them.’ I’m sure there’s a history.

“For me, the surprise is the number of assaults in a relatively short period of time,” Safarik says. “He’s obviously intelligent. He’s careful. So what’s happening with him? Is there some sort of mental decompensation? Did something trigger this?”

According to the profile of this sort of violent sex offender, “Usually there’s a progression,” Safarik says. “First, prowling, peeping, non-violent paraphilic (sexually deviant) stuff, voyeuristic activities. At some point, offenders decide that’s not enough. They’ll cross that line into fantasy fulfillment. He may have acted out with willing partners initially, prostitutes or others. And then that isn’t enough of a thrill, and he crosses over into non-compliant victims.”

The offender in the latest crimes sounds like someone at the mature end of that progression, Safarik believes. “He’s comfortable in the environment. He’s breaking in. He’s staying for long periods of time. He’s engaged in other activities – binding, photographing. That isn’t typically behaviour that just starts.”

Safarik suggested that, aside from other violent sex crimes, police will be looking for reports of unsolved “precursor” crimes in places where Williams has lived.

“I would be looking for cases where we tend to see sexual components that aren’t necessarily seen as sex crimes,” he says. “For instance, night-time burglaries where someone’s house is broken into but nothing is stolen. Or fetish-type burglaries, where they’re taking clothing.”

The search will be complicated by several factors, Safarik says. First, there’s Williams’ job.

“He’s in the military. That’s a problem. Not only has he moved around, the people around him have moved around.”

There’s also a massive time gap to fill in.

“I’d be checking back into his late teens. I’d probably start at age 18,” Safarik says. That would leave police poring over cold case files, many of them seemingly minor crimes, going back to the early ’70s.

“I’d be running the whole gamut, going deep into this guy’s history,” says Safarik. “I know that’s what they are doing.”

Indeed. OR, maybe people in our government already know all about William’s history. Maybe the idea that he is a “serial killer” is a limited hangout. If this “bright shining star” of a man, having been groomed for the highest levels of the military, and if he has been caught doing crimes that might link back to many other people in the power structure, that is going to require damage control. So if he’s a “serial killer,” that means he acted alone.

Firewall.

^^^^^^^

Safarik’s partner, Robert K. Ressler, knows just about everything there is to know regarding “serial killers.” You could say he wrote the book.

Actually, he did write the book, I Have Lived in the Monster: Inside the Minds of the World’s Most Notorious Serial Killers.

An account of Ressler’s Career in the FBI’s behavioral science unit, and his work pursuing the nation’s worst serial killers. Ressler was a cohort of John Douglas. Reading this book, and some of Douglas’ work, I am struck by how egotistical these guys are. I guess they have to be, to deal with the kinds of crimes they deal with.

Sometimes experts get that way.

^^^^^^^

According to Dave McGowan, the US military seeded embassies throughout the world with assassins, some of whom were culled from military prisons.

“A U.S. Navy psychologist, who claims that the Office of Naval Intelligence had taken convicted murderers from military prisons, used behavior modification techniques on them, and then relocated them in American embassies throughout the world … The Navy psychologist was Lt. Commander Thomas Narut of the U.S. Regional Medical Center in Naples, Italy. The information was divulged at an Oslo NATO conference of 120 psychologists from the eleven nation alliance … The Navy provided all the funding necessary, according To Narut.
“Dr. Narut, in a question and answer session with reporters from many nations, revealed how the Navy was secretly programming large numbers of assassins. He said that the men he had worked with for the Navy were being prepared for commando-type operations, as well as covert operations in U.S. embassies worldwide. He described the men who went through his program as ‘hit men and assassins’ who could kill on command. “Careful screening of the subjects was accomplished by Navy psychologists through the military records … and many were convicted murderers serving military prison sentences.”

…The intelligence community, it seemed, was recruiting from prisons to make use of the natural talents of convicted killers to produce the fabled ‘Manchurian Candidates’ - mind controlled assassins. This operation involved killers drawn from military prisons, though there is no reason not to suspect that parallel programs were being conducted in civilian prisons as well.

And that’s how, theoretically, someone like Henry Lee Lucas might get away with 600 murders. He’s just doing his job. Of course, there’s a lot more to it, because people in positions of authority need to look away at the appropriate times.
Lucas’ story then, as bizarre as it may appear to be, is certainly not without precedent. Other events that have transpired since Henry first began telling his tales of The Hand of Death lend further credence to various aspects of his story. For example, there is the issue of the cult-run ranch just south of the border. While this may have sounded rather far-fetched back in the early 1980’s, it certainly doesn’t today. In 1990, just such a ranch was excavated in Matamoros, Mexico, yielding the remains of over a dozen ritual sacrifice victims. While Ottis Toole - still alive at the time - noted that this was not the specific ranch with which he and Henry were associated, he also mentioned that there were numerous such operations in the area.
So closely did the Matamoros case parallel the stories told years before by Lucas that some law enforcement personnel in Texas chose to take a closer look at Henry’s professed cult connections. In fact, Jim Boutwell, sheriff of Williamson County, Texas later told a reporter that investigators had verified that Lucas was indeed involved in cult activities. And a decade later, yet another excavation was begun, this time at a ranch near Juarez, Mexico, which is precisely where Henry claimed it to be. This story made a brief appearance in the American press in December of 1999, until U.S. officials moved in to take over the investigation, after which coverage promptly ceased.

Juarez, Mexico, you may recall, is the very same city across the Texas border where “drug traffickers” stormed a party about a week ago and gunned down a couple dozen teenagers. Very little has been accomplished in this case, aside from a few arrests of people around the edges, lookouts and such.

You can read more about this phenomenon of sloppy police work and “untouchable” criminals in the UK, for instance, here and here.

^^^^^^^

If Williams is a “serial killer,” what would make him any different than Henry Lee Lucas? Intelligence.

Most good people are only aware of the least intelligent part of the evil distribution; those are the people who are obviously evil: criminals. (like Henry - ed.)

…What does an evil person of normal intelligence look like? Most people are very familiar with them. An evil person of normal intelligence is a person who makes life difficult, painful, and unpleasant for the good people around them. The supervisor who creates a crises at work by trying to pour a cup and a half of coffee into a cup and then requires everyone to work holiday’s and weekends to clean up the mess - is an example of an evil person of normal intelligence. What distinguishes such people from criminals is that they are quicker learners; they figure out what will happen to them if they pursue the sort of obvious evil things that the least intelligent of the evil spectrum do. Evil people of normal intelligence are careful to do their best to blend into good society.

…Next up the ladder is the evil person of above average intelligence. These people have a similar goal to evil people of average intelligence; the production of human misery. However these people see the opportunity to do something that evil people of normal intelligence don’t see how to do; murder someone and get away with it. They understand that the way to murder someone and get away with it is to not care who they kill, how they kill them, or when they kill them. Such people set up conditions where someone will be ‘accidentally’ killed and wait for the circumstances to occur.

…That leaves us those who are evil and of high intelligence. Most good people are also familiar with these kind of people; we call them leaders - both of industry and of government. It is the goal of such people to get away with mass murder.

^^^^^^^

Why would the idea of “serial killers” be useful to intelligence agencies?

  • to cover-up organized rings of Satanic crimes
  • to disguise the true motive of some contract killings
  • to create a climate of fear and terror
  • to eliminate undesirable members of society
  • to identify and use ‘violence-prone’ individuals as assets
^^^^^^^
These remarks:

Retired colonel Alain Pellerin is the executive director of the Conference of Defence Associations Institute and served in the army for 36 years. He said he had never heard of such a “strange” case. He compared notes with fellow long-serving military friends Monday….”I think it’s a local affair that will affect the population in Trenton because they knew him personally and people served under him. He was the base commander, after all. “But the rest of the people in the forces, it’s not related to the work, really, so it’s not something that will taint the armed forces negatively. There is a love affair between the population and the armed forces and I don’t think that will change. It’s really just one individual who’s accused of a serious crime.”

…combined with the “serial killer” idea, coming straight from Ressler’s firm, speak volumes.

UPDATE: An article here notes the curious dead-end of Williams’ history before 1987. It might be tough to complete a “serial killer” profile without the background information.
Jones said as he looks back, he really knew very little about his neighbour.He’s not the only one. In Williams’ biography, the military does not have any information prior to his joining the service in 1987. Other than the fact he attended the University of Toronto, there is little else. In fact, I have not been able to determine where he was born, where he grew up, if he has parents still living or siblings.

It will be very interesting to study where Williams has been because police sources tell me when it comes to criminal charges “there will be more.”

depends who you know

Feb 10

Posted by A. Peasant in Africa, CIA, Corruption & Crime, Egypt, Media, Minerals, Nigeria, Oil, Terrorism, The West | No Comments

1. Sahara becomes desert of terrorism. CIA supported terrorism. also notice however, the illusion that  France and the EU are presented as “opposite” to the US by the expert. the “good” West vs the “bad” West. haha! sorry the same people own all of The West.

Senegal’s president Abdoulaye Wade urged African leaders and the West to join forces in the fight against al-Qaeda’s North African branch, saying it has to be done to prevent the Sahara from becoming a “terrorism desert.” Abdoulaye Wade’s appeal came as African Union heads of state gathered to tackle the continent’s crises and conflicts at the bloc’s summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.Wade was supported by his colleagues from other African countries. They were united in their opinion that African counties could not fight al-Qaeda on their own. Wade said it was an “international issue.”

…Americans spent over 0.5 billion dollars for the anti-terrorism struggle. Yet, the situation has only worsened with the increased number of terrorist attacks.

The situation has particularly worsened in the past two years. These years were marked both with the increased frequency of attacks as well as their impudence, i.e., police station attacks and embassy shootings. The leaders of the Maghreb Muslims appeal for jihad against ruling governments of North African countries. All this attests to the fact that the officials cannot properly control the situation even in their own capitals.

Last year, media released alarming information stating that the Islamist group was developing biological weapons, and in particular, was experimenting with plague agents. The war on terror affects the well-being of local residents increasingly more each year. According to experts, the struggle with al-Qaeda caused rise in basic consumer goods prices in Algeria, including potatoes prices.

…In other words, the participants of the Pan African summit had good reasons to be alarmed. On the other hand, as mentioned above, so far the US military aid has not yielded positive results in the struggle against several hundred militants. Under the circumstances, the opinion of an Algerian expert Jamal Gessel shared with Pravda.ru was quite surprising.

He said that there was very reliable information suggesting that the Islamist group was supported by CIA. Analysts of the French and Algerian Special forces (e.g., DGSE, France) are convinced that this is done to destabilized the situation in North African countries rich in natural resources (both oil and uranium). The other goal is to force French and Spanish oil-extracting competitors out of the area. The expert believes this is precisely why the Islamist group’s attacks are aimed against the French and Spanish, and why the American presence in the region is not effective.

Additionally, the expert does not rule out the situation when the US declares the region its strategic zone, like it happened in the Persian Gulf, and instills its hegemony in the area. The conclusion is the following: the hopes of North African countries to receive aid from the West greatly depend on what they mean by “West”, the USA or EU.

more @ pravda

2. despite problems with al qaeda, not to worry! Algeria is connected: looking to cooperate with South Africa on nuclear technology. oh hey Algeria signed the NPT, so no problem. um, didn’t Iran sign that thing too? yes. but that’s different.

Algeria has shown a keen interest in South Africa’s pebble bed technology, South Africa’s Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) company said on Monday.

CEO Jaco Kriek said in a statement that Algeria’s interest in PBMR technology “opens a real opportunity for two African countries to co-operate on nuclear.” The statement said a high-level delegation under the leadership of Mohamed Derdour, chairman of the Algerian Atomic Energy Commission (Comena), was in South Africa. “Algeria is, amongst others, exploring the possibility of building nuclear reactors the size of PBMR near inland villages to provide electricity and desalination,” Kriek said.

…According to Comena, Algeria was seriously pursuing nuclear technology as a means to diversify its energy sources and as a vehicle to reduce its dependency on a hydrocarbons economy….Derdour pointed out that Algeria, like South Africa, had signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. “Algeria has atomic energy agreements with Argentina, China, France and the United States. “We also have two research reactors, which were built by Argentina and China respectively”. Kriek said South Africa had a long relationship with Algeria, including the signing in 2003 of a memorandum of understanding on co-operation in the field of nuclear and radiation sciences between Comena and South Africa’s department of science and technology.

more @ iafrica

3. Egypt recalls ambassador from Algeria for “consultations” after some sports fans get rowdy

CAIRO (AFP) – Egypt recalled its ambassador in Algeria for consultations on Thursday after attacks against Egyptian football fans in Sudan and businesses in Algiers, the foreign ministry said on Thursday. An Egyptian foreign ministry official confirmed to AFP that the ambassador was recalled for “consultations”. Earlier in the day, Egypt summoned the Algerian ambassador in Cairo to protest against the disturbances.

The foreign ministry said that it informed the ambassador of “Egypt’s extreme displeasure with the assaults on Egyptian citizens who went to Khartoum to support the Egyptian team.”

It was the second summons in a week for ambassador Abdel Qader Haggar, who was called to the foreign ministry last week after Algerian fans attacked Egyptian businesses and homes in Algiers.

more @ yahoo news


4. Nigeria finally transfers power to Goodluck Jonathan

NIGERIA’S parliament empowered vice- president Goodluck Jonathan to run Africa’s most populous nation in place of an ill and absent president. It is hoped the move will provide a political end to a crisis that has ground the government to a virtual halt and triggered the resumption of an insurgency in the vital oil sector. But the move is not contemplated in the constitution, legal experts say, and could cause more friction between the Christian south, which gains the presidency at least temporarily, and Muslim north, which finds itself out of the seat of power.

more @ scotsman

5. NEXT: we told you so

This newspaper took the bold step of publishing a daring story on January 10 that President Umaru Yar’Adua is brain damaged and will not return to office. Titled,”Yar’Adua is brain-damaged”, the story detailed how some people that surround Mr. Yar’Adua were preventing others including the vice president from having access to the president.

“President Umaru Yar’Adua is seriously brain damaged, is not able to recognise anyone… and can no longer perform the functions of the office of the president, according to multiple sources who have spoken to NEXT on Sunday,” the story declares.

While we double checked and confirmed our sources over and over, some newspapers went to town that our story was not true. Indeed there were stories that we spun a tale that cannot be substantiated. Amazingly, while these media houses buried their heads in the sand, NEXT stood up to be counted among the worthy elements of our society, and despite the furious denial even from some people in government, the story could not be counteracted.

Curiously, some folks in government were asking NEXT editors for what was going on with Mr. Yar’Adua showing the level of secrecy concerning his health.

Subsequently, a man claiming to be Mr. Yar’Adua granted an interview to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on January 13 on the eve of a planned protest by eminent Nigerians like Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka and Tunde Bakare, the pastor of Latter Rain Assembly under the aegis of Save Nigeria Group.

Thereafter, seeing that the game was up, others now shifted gear, and joined the train of those asking that the Constitution be upheld. We are happy we started this.

source: next

6. MEND rebels watching the ‘drama’ unfold..will they continue to warn the oil company personnel to get out of the way so they can “attack?” do they still need to attack? maybe not. we’ll have to wait and see what this Goodluck Jonathan fellow has in mind for divvying up Nigeria’s oil resources.

LAGOS, Feb 10 (Reuters) - The main militant group in Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta said on Wednesday it was monitoring developments after Vice President Goodluck Jonathan assumed presidential powers, but declined to comment further.

“We are monitoring the unfolding drama and will react at the appropriate time,” the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) said in an email to Reuters. The group last month said it was ending a unilateral ceasefire and threatened renewed attacks on Africa’s biggest oil and gas industry amid delays to an amnesty programme caused partly by the absence of President Umaru Yar’Adua.

reuters

7. polluted water in Niger Delta — home of OIL COMPANIES — the cause of estimated 60% of deaths and 90% of disease in local communities. yes they can get oil out of a swamp but they can’t deliver clean water to poor people who insist on being IN THE WAY of their amazing oil production feats of engineering

Lack of access to safe water is a major source of poor health for millions of residents of Nigeria’s Niger Delta region, a NEXT investigation has shown. Majority of the citizens of the area affirm one of their most critical needs is safe drinking water.

Public health officials say water accounts for an estimated 80 per cent of all diseases and one-third of all deaths in the developing world. In the Niger Delta area, where the natural water sources have been polluted by oil production activities, they estimate that water could account for over 60 per cent of all deaths in the oil communities, and some 90 per cent of all diseases there.

Although the oil region is largely riverine, oil production activities appeared to have polluted the region’s natural water sources, making them increasingly unsafe for human consumption.

more @ next

8. Al Jazeera floats video of police killing unarmed civilians, from seven months ago. picked up widely. kind of confusing — if you don’t pay close attention you might think this is happening now.

google results show major coverage

Aster Van Kregten, a Nigeria expert with rights group Amnesty International, told Al Jazeera that the group’s research suggested extra-judicial killings were widespread in Nigeria.


“Our research shows that the Nigerian police are getting away with murder, they killed hundreds of people a year without any investigation - any investigation on whether the use of force was lawful or not,” she said. “What we saw on the footage happened seven month ago and we haven’t heard anything from the government whether they have arrested anyone and how far the investigation is going.”

Among those killed in the aftermath of the clashes between Boko Haram and the police, was Boko Haram leader Mohammed Yusuf.

more @ al jazeera

more utter BS on plane crash

Feb 10

Posted by A. Peasant in Experts, France, Lebanon, Mind-fucking, Terrorism | No Comments

1. Ethiopian plane ‘exploded’

BEIRUT - AN ETHIOPIAN jet which crashed off Lebanon’s coast last month exploded after take-off, Lebanon’s health minister said on Tuesday in the first such official comment since the mysterious crash.

Remarks by Jawad Khalifeh could not be immediately confirmed by other officials in Beirut and came as Ethiopian Airlines said one of the plane’s black boxes has been sent to France for analysis.

‘The plane exploded during flight and the cabin, as well as the bodies of those on board were dispersed into the sea, in different locations,’ Mr Khalifeh said to explain why some corpses were found dismembered. ‘The first bodies which have been retrieved following the crash were intact but after that, we began to find body pieces or mutilated corpses,’ he told reporters.

Transport Minister Ghazi Aridi refused to comment on the reported explosion. ‘I have no information about this,’ he told AFP.

source: straits times


2. pilot error pilot error pilot error….based on info from the black box, which we just recovered and sent to France, and which will not reveal it’s secrets for months and months…. but trust us it was pilot error that caused the plane to explode.

A judicial committee at the ministerial level met Wednesday to discuss future strategy and progress made in the search for more victims of the Ethiopian plane crash as a source close to the investigation into the disaster said the jet crash was caused by a pilot error.

“The investigation team has reached an early conclusion that it was pilot error, based on information from the black box,” the source told Reuters.

The team made up of Lebanese, French and Ethiopian officials headed to France Monday with one of the two black boxes for analysis.

Lebanese army marine divers pulled the flight recorder from the plane crash site off the coastal town of Naameh on Sunday.

Information Minister Tareq Mitri said following Wednesday’s judicial meeting that Lebanon has not received any official information about contents of the black box.

Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409 crashed in a fireball minutes after takeoff from Beirut airport early in the morning of Jan. 25.

The Boeing 737-800 plane with 90 people on board plunged into the sea off Naameh south of the airport in stormy weather.

Lebanese officials had blamed the pilot for failing to follow instructions from the control tower.

Defense Minister Elias Murr had said that a command tower recording shows the tower told the pilot to turn to avoid the storm, but the plane went in the opposite direction.

“We do not know what happened or whether it was beyond the pilot’s control,” he added.

Transportation Minister Ghazi Aridi had in turn said the control tower sent the pilot a second warning when he failed to heed the first one.

“The pilot, however, continued to fly the same route, then he made a sudden, strange turn before disappearing from the radar,” Aridi said on the day of the plane crash.

It was not clear why the pilot ignored the control tower or perhaps it was beyond his control. Being 737, like most other airliners, also is equipped with its own onboard weather radar which the pilot may have used to avoid flying into cumulonimbus, which is a rounded mass of cumulus cloud often appearing before a thunderstorm.

naharnet

not for nothing

Feb 10

Posted by A. Peasant in Afghanistan, Angola, Greece, Iran, Israel, Military, Mr. Bibi N. & Friends, NATO, NWO, Nuclear Weapons, Oil, Oligarchs, Russia, Saudi Arabia, UK | No Comments

1. heeeyy, good news….Russia’s top ten billionaires — TEH OLIGARCHS — doubled their wealth! turns out this crisis wasn’t so bad after all… PHEW! i dunno about you but i was really worried about those guys.

Russia’s top ten billionaires have almost doubled their aggregate wealth in 12 months to $139.3 billion, the Finans business magazine reported on Wednesday. The global economic crisis saw the combined fortunes of the top ten richest Russians fall from 221 billion to 75.9 billion in 2008, the magazine reported. Since then, however, massive state injections of funds into global financial markets and government support for companies owned by Russian oligarchs has seen the trend bucked.

The 2010 rating of Russian billionaires to be released by Finans next Monday includes 500 people with an estimated fortune of 3.3 billion rubles ($110 million) As many as 77 Russians have a wealth of over $1 billion each.

As before, tycoon and Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich is among Russia’s three richest people. His fortune will enable him to keep the club afloat for another 100 years, Finans reported.

The identities of the top two richest Russians will be revealed by the magazine on Monday.

MOSCOW, February 10 (RIA Novosti)

2. Saudi Arabia, Angola, Iran remain top 3 oil suppliers for China

Saudi Arabia, Angola and Iran remained the three largest oil sources for China in 2009, with the three supplying 47.7 percent of China’s total imports, according data released Wednesday by the General Administration of Customs (GAC).

GAC figures showed that China’s oil imports from the three nations last year stood at 41.86 million tonnes, 32.17 million tonnes and 23.15 million tonnes, respectively. They represented a year-on-year increase of 15.1 percent, 7.6 percent and 8.6 percent, respectively.

…Saudi Arabia, the largest oil supplier to China, accounted for 20.5 percent of China’s total imports in 2009. Angola supplied 15.8 percent while Iran contributed 11.3 percent, according to GAC data.

Other main oil suppliers to China included Russia, Oman and Sudan.

more @ people’s daily online

3. Greeks protest as government slashes public spending

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England was asked about Greece at a press conference on the BoE’s latest inflation report. His second statement could be translated as - their problem, not mine.  “I don’t think you can compare UK with Greece. We have different policies. We have very good track record and most importantly, the maturity of UK debt is much longer.” “This is an issue they’ll deal with within the euro area. It should be for my colleagues in the euro area to decide.”

…For a “I told you so” piece, here is Andrew Alexander of the Daily Mail, no friend of anything to do with the EU. His argument will be familiar to eurosceptics.

A particular flaw in having a ‘one-size-fits-all’ currency covering the rich and the poor, the cautious and the feckless, is that no member nation has its own currency which it can devalue or revalue in an attempt to extricate themselves from this crisis.

more @ guardian, many links

EU fear Greek ’spillover’ - “serious and persistent internal and external imbalance ‘threatens stability’ in the country. This in turn presents a ’serious risk of spillover into other parts of the euro area,’”

Berlin eyes ‘firewall’ to contain Greece debt crisis — “We are thinking about what we should do if the crisis spills from Greece into other euro countries,” said the official. “So it’s more about finding firewalls, containing the problem, than principally about helping the Greeks.”

nice. the EU: one big happy family.

4. Danny Ayalon faces hostile crowd in UK

(VIDEO) LONDON – Despite securing a promise by the UK’s Foreign Office that he would not be arrested upon arrival there, Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon was not exempt from the rage of pro-Palestinian demonstrators waiting for him both outside and inside a lecture hall in London. One protestor at the Oxford University hall, where Ayalon spoke Tuesday, waved the Palestinian flag and interrupted Ayalon’s lecture for several long minutes, during which he did not stop yelling at the Israeli minister and called him a “racist” and “a war criminal.”

more @ ynet

http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3846746,00.html

5. Marines gear up for assault - “hailed by officers as the biggest offensive in the eight-year-old war.” great. what could possibly go wrong?

Thousands of Afghan, US and Nato forces are expected to launch Operation Mushtarak (Together) in a bid to clear the Taleban out of Marjah, home to some 80,000 people, and expand the control of the Western-backed Afghan government. A US Marines officer said late on Tuesday that the operation, to be led jointly by Marines and the Afghan army had not yet begun. ‘The Marines have not started the operation in Marjah,’ he said, adding: ‘The operation will be led by the Marines and their Afghan partners.’  Officials and witnesses say families have fled, loading goats, furniture and clothes on to vehicles and heading to safety in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province around 20 kilometres to the north.

more @ straits times

6. bases in Afghanistan indicate permanent presence

Today, according to official sources, approximately 700 bases of every size dot the Afghan countryside, and more, like the one in Shinwar, are under construction or soon will be as part of a base-building boom that began last year.

Existing in the shadows, rarely reported on and little talked about, this base-building program is nonetheless staggering in size and scope, and heavily dependent on supplies imported from abroad, which means that it is also extraordinarily expensive. It has added significantly to the already long secret list of Pentagon property overseas and raises questions about just how long, after the planned beginning of a drawdown of American forces in 2011, the US will still be garrisoning Afghanistan.

…The Pentagon’s most recent inventory of bases lists a total of 716 overseas sites. These include facilities owned and leased all across the Middle East as well as a significant presence in Europe and Asia, especially Japan and South Korea. Perhaps even more notable than the Pentagon’s impressive public foreign property portfolio are the many sites left off the official inventory. While bases in the Persian Gulf countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates are all listed, one conspicuously absent site is al-Udeid air base, a billion-dollar facility in nearby Qatar, where the US Air Force secretly oversees its ongoing unmanned drone wars.

The count also does not include any sites in Iraq where, as of August 2009, there were still nearly 300 American bases and outposts. Similarly, US bases in Afghanistan - a significant percentage of the 400 foreign sites scattered across the country - are noticeably absent from the Pentagon inventory.

more @ asia times

7. Russia: large-scale war less possible, but threats remain

MOSCOW, February 10 (RIA Novosti) - Russia’s military policies are aimed at avoiding an arms race and military conflicts, but they should also correspond to real threats which the country faces, Russia’s security chief Nikolai Patrushev said in an interview with the Russian government daily.

On February 5, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced that he has approved the country’s new military doctrine, which allows preventive nuclear strikes against potential aggressors.

The Rossiyskaya Gazeta published on Wednesday the full text of the doctrine.

“The unleashing of a large-scale war is becoming less possible… At the same time, regions, where conflicts are possible, remain,” Patrushev told the paper, adding “these conflicts could lead to a war with the use of both ordinary and nuclear weapons.”

Among the threats which could destabilize the situation in the world, the Russian security chief named the expansion of NATO, the Iranian nuclear program, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

more @ ria novosti