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AS SchNEWS PADDLES IN THE MURKY WATERS OF THE ARMS TRADE
This week London’s Excel Centre has been hosting the biennial death-fest DSEi – the world’s largest arms fair. Part funded and organised by the British government, DSEi is the place where warmongers tool up on the latest guns ‘n’ ammo. Both the weapons used by Colonel Gaddafi and those used against him are on sale at DSEi. The UK exported £33.8m of military and related products to Libya between Oct 2009 and Oct 2010.
This year the highlight of the weapons wankathon got stopped in its tracks before it even reached the fair. Six protesters in inflatable dingies launched themselves into the path of the HMS Dauntless last Saturday as it was on its way to Victoria Docks ahead of DSEI, causing it to come to an unscheduled stop in the waters near Barking, Dagenham. It finally docked some 4 hours later. Of the 6 protesters, one got away and the other 5 were briefly detained by the river police.
The Dauntless is a Type 45 Destroyer, one of the Royal Navy’s latest, most high-tech battleships, as well as one of the newest, commissioned just last year. Supposedly able to track and destroy jet fighters and other warships, it must have been embarrassing for the captain to be caught by surprise by the tiny blowup flotilla. No doubt it will now be retrofitted with anti-inflatable technology.
DSEi wouldn’t be DSEi without several days of creative non-violent protest and a massive pig-fest, and Indymedia have a timeline of the entire thing. (See http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/09/484571.html)
Tamara Hernandez today accepted she tried to kill the head of the Prisons, the long hated Albert Batlle i Bastardas .
se ha conformado con una condena de ocho años de cárcel, la mitad de lo que el ministerio público pedía inicialmente para ella, según fuentes judiciales.
Published September 2, 2011 Benefit talks & shows , Events Closed On October 27th, activist and singer/songwriter David Rovics will be performing in Detroit to raise much needed support funds for political prisoner Marie Mason. If you are in the Detroit area, check out this great event and bring as many of your friends with you!
If you are not near Detroit, you can look into organizing a benefit show with David through his website at http://davidrovics.com/organizeShow.php. David is a long time friend and supporter of Marie, talking about her case regularly on tour as well as writing the song, Marie for her. Learn more about David Rovics and his upcoming “No Fracking Way” Tour at www.davidrovics.com.
13th Sept European Astronomers believe they have found a second planet outside our solar system that seems to be in the right zone for life, just barely., among 50mnew plant discoveries a
nnounced Monday, but it’s about 3.6 times the mass of Earth, temperatures there may range from 85 to 120 degrees with plenty of humidity, 35 light years away an
d may not have water .
We are living through an ast
onishing rush of new discoveries of planets in deep space.
Dozens of teams around the world are competing frantically to find such planets.
On 23rd Sept up to 1000 new planets may be announced by Nasa’s Kepler project which includes the orbiting detector, ground telescopes and supercomputers and focuses just on 1/400th part of the sky
Only in the last year have humans been able to detect Earth size planets, combining supercomputing, the latest techniques and space based observatories.
Only in the last months has it been proven that Earth sized planets are relatively common, so statistically there must be MILLIONS of th
em in the Universe
The latest batch of data from Kepler will be publicly released on Sept 23rd. Dozens of scientific teams are working flat out on the mass of new data already out.
Just 3 months ago an amazing new technique called BLENDER has come on line The blend of the foreground target star and the background eclipsing binary using the NASA supercomputer, Pleiades, to make more than 1015 (a 1 followed be 15 zeros or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000) or a quadrillion calculations to test a transiting planet.
Only last February the first roc
ky planet near Earth size was discovered. But it turned out to be an inferno.
Now there are 1000s of new candidates being discovered in just Kepler’s small field of vision, plus new planets being found by dozens of other discovery centers around the world, and huge new precision instruments being built.
There are various interactive sites where you can follow the story. For the Kepler project Nasa is the best.. see HERE
Its been a depressing race.. to see if 2011 will be the worst or the 2nd worst year for Arctic Ice loss. Now the first reports that it’s the worst ever are coming in.The Arctic lost sea ice very rapidly in the first half of July. Ice loss slowed in late July-early August, but resumed again later in August. Web cam 1 has tipped but not fallen over completely, as you can see in the images.
The North Pole skull cap shrank to about half a percent under the previous record low set in September 2007. University of Bremen physicists said there was uncertainty in July about whether the ice melt would surpass the previous record.
They said their studies indicated that continuing ice decline was related to man-made global warming.
“It seems to be clear that this is a further consequence of the man-made global warming with global consequences,” researchers said in their report. “Directly, the livehood of small animals, algae, fishes and mammals like polar bears and seals is more and more reduced.”
As Arctic sea ice has continued to decline, it also has become drastically thinner overall, the report said.
The researchers said that previously the melting ice had been attributed to yearly weather anomalies. But now it is believed the massive melt is due in part to global warming and the increasing albedo effect, which has to do with the power of the surface to reflect sun. As more ice melts, instead of having white ice reflect more of the sun’s rays, you have a larger amount of open water that absorbs those same rays. Therefore, warmer temperatures lead to even more ice melting….A typical Runaway Climate Change loop.
Loss of Arctic ice means…
Accelerated global warming, loss of habitat and species, worse ocean acidification threatening disaster, unpredictable methane blowouts from the seabed, methane release from melting permafrost ‘bogs’, (methane is shorter lived but more than 20 times worse than CO2), warmer oceans means more storms and hurricanes in the tropics, coral die off threatening biosphere, oil gas and mineral exploration and extraction, causing pollution and more climate change ( a man made feedback loop).
It’s not the heat we put out that is the problem, it’s the CO2,. There are
plenty of other energy technologies that don’t produce CO2. It’s just a case of switching soon enough, before the change becomes irreversible. So it’s a very good idea to stir people up, because there’s a lead time and later may be too late.
Alternatives include wind, sun, geothermal, and theres even a CO2-Free ”gasoline”.. NH3 fuel, which has been suppressed by big oil and could power cars, trains , planes etc more cheaply and pollution free. SEE HERE..https://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/category/ammonia-nh3-co2-free-fuel/
The Free 