Author: NW0.eu

The Taliban’s top military commander was captured in Pakistan, U.S. and Pakistani officials said on Tuesday, but the move may not deal a decisive blow to a group putting up fierce resistance to a NATO offensive.

More trouble looms for the IPCC. The body may need to revise statements made in its Fourth Assessment Report on hurricanes and global warming. A statistical analysis of the raw data shows that the claims that global hurricane activity has increased cannot be supported.

Fallout from the attempted bombing of a passenger jet on Christmas Day has meant more hassles for travelers, but for companies selling high-tech screening equipment it’s been a chance to hawk their products more aggressively.

When they first took off, the drones were hailed as the latest weapon in the war against crime.

Six British men and a blonde Irish woman are among an alleged hit squad wanted in Dubai for the assassination of a Hamas commander in his luxury hotel room.

Numerian (Feb 15)
Ask yourself who knows how much has really been borrowed by various governments around the world?
Greece is turning into a battle royal between the global financial elites and the average worker in the industrial West. This started out as a more limited struggle, pitting the finance ministers and central banks of the European […]

This is a great story for PKD fans and others alike. Read Nick Redfern’s “The Strange Tale of Solarcon-6” in the current issue of Fortean Times:

Undoubtedly, one of the prime reasons why Dick attracted attention from the FBI was a series of bizarre letters he penned to the Bureau in the early 1970s, in which he described his personal knowledge of an alleged underground Nazi cabal that was attempting to covertly manipulate science fiction writers to further advance its hidden cause.

And the nature of that cause was even more bizarre: to initiate a Third World War by infecting the American population with syphilis. On 28 October 1972, Dick wrote to the FBI and outlined his distinctly odd beliefs:

“I am a well-known author of science fiction novels, one of which dealt with Nazi Germany (called MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, it described an ‘alternate world’ in which the Germans and Japanese won World War Two and jointly occupied the United States).

“This novel, published in 1962 by Putnam and Co., won the Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year and hence was widely read both here and abroad; for example, a Japanese edition printed in Tokyo ran into several editions. I bring this to your attention because several months ago I was approached by an individual who I have reason to believe belonged to a covert organization involved in politics, illegal weapons, etc., who put great pressure on me to place coded information in future novels ‘to be read by the right people here and there’, as he phrased it. I refused to do this.”

A few months ago I posted a New Yorker story about synthetic biology. Now the New York Times reports that the stakes are getting higher, and scarier:

…The first thing to understand about the new science of synthetic biology is that it’s not really a new science; it’s a brazen call to conduct an existing one much more ambitiously. For almost 40 years, genetic engineers have been decoding DNA and transplanting individual genes from one organism into another. (One company, for example, famously experimented with putting a gene from an arctic flounder into tomatoes to make a variety of frost-resistant tomatoes.) But synthetic biologists want to break out of this cut-and-paste paradigm altogether. They want to write brand-new genetic code, pulling together specific genes or portions of genes plucked from a wide range…

Several huge spherical UFOs have recently been seen orbiting the Sun since January of this year. These objects were captured by NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). SOHO was launched in 1995 to study the Sun and is a joint venture between …

Via Disinformation

Paul Harris writes in the Guardian:
Tess Pennington, 33, is a mother of three children, and lives in the sprawling outskirts of Houston, Texas. But she is not taking the happy safety of her suburban existence lightly.
Like a growing army of fellow Americans, Pennington is learning how to grow her own food, has stored emergency […]

Newsweek has published what undoubtedly amounts to the most feeble, sophomoric, and embarrassing hit piece ever written, penned by an intern fresh out of college who pathetically attempts to dismiss manifestly provable conspiracies with one sentence throwaway jibes that sound like the fodder of an immature and misinformed middle school debate team.

I can personally attest that aspartame is a poison to be avoided at all costs. I guess that also applies to AminoSweet, as reported in Natural News:

In response to growing awareness about the dangers of artificial sweeteners, what does the manufacturer of one of the world’s most notable artificial sweeteners do? Why, rename it and begin marketing it as natural, of course. This is precisely the strategy of Ajinomoto, maker of aspartame, which hopes to pull the wool over the eyes of the public with its rebranded version of aspartame, called “AminoSweet”.

Over 25 years ago, aspartame was first introduced into the European food supply. Today, it is an everyday component of most diet beverages, sugar-free desserts, and chewing gums in countries worldwide. But the tides have been turning as the…

As the owner of a major airline, Virgin’s Richard Branson must think about the prospect of peak oil more than most of us. Apparently he’s a believer, as reported in the Christian Science Monitor:

Long-accustomed to being dismissed as alarmists, the arguments of those warning of an impending peak oil crisis are now being bolstered by support from multi-billionaires like Richard Branson.

A major report funded by the Virgin Airlines owner and other British business leaders warned this week that the world is running out of oil and predicts shortages and price spikes as soon as 2015. A future of painful hikes in the cost of food, heating, and travel in a world unprepared for surging oil prices was forecast by the Industry Taskforce for Peak Oil and Energy Security.

“Don’t let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did,” wrote Mr. Branson and other business executives in a forward to the report…

Linda Geddes writes in New Scientist:

A new way of using the genetic code has been created, allowing proteins to be made with properties that have never been seen in the natural world. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the creation of new or “improved” life forms incorporating these new materials into their tissue.

In all existing life forms, the four “letters” of the genetic code, called nucleotides, are read in triplets, so that every three nucleotides encode a single amino acid.

Not any more. Jason Chin at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues have now redesigned the cell’s machinery so that it reads the genetic code in quadruplets.

In the genetic code that life has used up to now, there are 64 possible triplet combinations of the four nucleotide letters; these genetic “words”…

Kate Connolly writes in the Guardian:

For decades she has been seen as a decorative companion to Adolf Hitler, an apolitical “dumb blonde” whose attentions served as an occasional diversion for the Führer. But the first academic biography of Eva Braun draws a different picture of the dictator’s long-standing girlfriend, claiming historians have hugely underestimated the role she played in his life.

Berlin historian Heike Görtemaker reveals her as a politically committed woman who won Hitler’s affections, enjoyed a healthy sex life with him, sympathised with Nazi politics and gave him psychological support. Görtemaker spent three years researching her book, Eva Braun: Life With Hitler, due out this month from the prestigious CH Beck publishing house. She was able to draw on previously unseen or little-known documents, letters, diary entries and photographs.

Via Disinformation

I recently posted a story about the Internet insanity that is Chat Roulette. The good old New York Times, always a little late to the party, actually does a nice follow up by interviewing the man behind the madness:
…The lingering mystery, though, was who was behind the site. The question was answered on Saturday […]

Via UFO news

Case Number:    21894
Event Date:    01/26/2010 16:54
Region:    Texas
Summary:  I take pictures of cloud formations as a hobby, found this ufo? object during a review of the pics
Background:
As a relaxing hobby, I enjoy taking pictures of various cloud formations, storms etc.
Event Time:
Jan 26th 2010 at 4:54pm
Event Location:
Addison Texas at the Intersection of Arapaho and Monfort
I […]

The so called “independent” investigation into the climategate emails scandal has descended into farce before it is barely off the ground as a third member of the six man panel has been revealed to hold strong views on human induced climate change.

It has been tough to keep up with all the bad news for global warming alarmists. We’re on the edge of our chair, waiting for the next shoe to drop. This has been an Imelda Marcos kind of season for shoe-dropping about global warming.

Weather stations which produced data pointing towards man-made global warming may have been compromised by local conditions, a new report suggests.