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Nuke

Workers at Hanford nuclear facility caught dumping radioactive water illegally (VIDEO)


RT
Fri, 27 Oct 2017 20:36 UTC
nuclear hazard sign
© Berliner Verlag / Steinach / Global Look Press
Investigators are looking into the Hanford nuclear facility in Washington state, after contractors were filmed dumping radiation-affected water and later tried to bury the evidence at the site of one of the largest nuclear cleanup efforts in the world.

Several videos obtained by Seattle's KING-TV show workers at the Hanford facility's Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) dumping liquids from large metal containers that are labeled "Caution: radioactive materials."

"In nearly 25 years of working here I've never seen anything like that," a Hanford worker told KING.

The workers are employed by Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS), the organization responsible for cleaning approximately 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive and chemical waste stored in the containers at Hanford.

The facility dates back to the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. For decades, it produced the majority of the plutonium for the US nuclear weapons arsenal. In 1988, production stopped and the site became a burying ground for radioactive waste. Hanford has since become the most contaminated spot in the Western Hemisphere, prompting a multi-billion dollar clean-up process that isn't expected to be completed until 2060.
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Heart - Black

Fear and Loathing: Hillary Clinton's grievance tour

Matthew Walther
The Week
Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC
Hillary Hill Auditorium
© unknown
On Tuesday evening, it cost me $200 to obtain the privilege of sitting in one of the top rows in the upper balcony section of a massive auditorium and watching a tiny blue dot surrounded by phlegmy yellow light.

The amazing thing about this dot is that it could talk. This was confirmed by sound emerging from speakers hidden somewhere behind me and a glance at the not-even-movie-theater-sized screen behind it. The dot congratulated members of something it called "the Hillary Clinton Fan Club," which might be because the dot in question was, in fact, the aforementioned former secretary of state herself.

Clinton was here in the appropriately named Hill Auditorium allegedly to promote her new memoir, What Happened. It was the first book tour event that I have ever heard of charging admission, much less offering tickets - mine were among the cheapest - at prices that could easily get you into the Michigan-Ohio State game. There are 3,500 seats in the auditorium, and all of them looked full. But the really extraordinary thing was that Clinton didn't actually seem to want to talk about her book. What I heard instead sounded a lot like a cry for help.

A few weeks before Election Day last year, Clinton challenged Donald Trump to say that he would unconditionally accept the results on Nov. 8. It was a perfect gotcha question for someone of Trump's temperament and he spent days hemming and hawing and publicly weighing various nightmare hypotheticals, but eventually he said that he maybe kind-of would.

It is now clear that someone should have asked Clinton the same question.

Comment: Sometimes it is prudent to grease the 'squeaky wheel'. In this case, just remove it.

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UFO 2

Trump's gift card to Amazon: Open skies for trial run drone package delivery

Tim Johnson
McClatchy
Wed, 25 Oct 2017 02:44 UTC
Amazon drone
© Amazon
Donald Trump once predicted that Jeff Bezos and his Amazon empire would have "such problems" if he became president, but on Wednesday Trump gave the company a game-changing gift by opening up the skies to a drone pilot program for services like package delivery.

Trump signed a memorandum that allows states, municipalities and tribal groups to test drones for a sweeping array of activities such as disaster response, mapping, agriculture - and delivery of goods. Until now, the Federal Aviation Administration restricted drones from flying over people, operating at night or buzzing beyond the visual line-of-sight of the ground-based pilot.

"America's skies are changing," said Michael Kratsios, deputy assistant to the president in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "Our aviation regulatory framework has not kept pace with this change."

More than 1 million drone owners have registered with the FAA, Kratsios said, and commercial drone numbers are expected to soar fivefold by 2021.
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Propaganda

Protection of the narrative: Bana al-Abed and censorship

Tim Hayward
Tim Hayward Wordpress
Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC
Bana al-Abed Syria Aleppo
© Thaer Mohammed / AFP
Bana al-Abed
Personally, I would wish for the child a life of normality out of the public glare. Bana's parents and their associates, however, have wished instead to maximise her public exposure. In this, they have had the support of publishers, media, politicians and celebrities, notably J K Rowling.

As citizens, and as parents, people will all have their own views on this. What citizens and parents will not necessarily be able to do, however, is express those views with complete freedom in public; nor will they be able to inform them as fully as a free society would permit.

Anybody who wants to think and say things that conform to the carefully managed narrative from the authorised channels remains free to do so. Anybody who seeks to question it in public is liable to be censored. All critical reviews of Bana's book, for instance - and I personally saw scores of them when they were first submitted - have simply been deleted by Amazon. But that is the least of it.

Comment: See also:

Bana Alabed: A heartbreaking tale of propaganda and exploitation
"This is child exploitation to create the propaganda that promoted the terrorists in East Aleppo and was being used to destroy Syria" ~ Khaled Iskef
And from Eva Bartlett The Exploitation of Bana al-Abed in Aleppo
The exploitation of children in the propaganda war against Syria has become routine. However, the exploitation by the parents themselves is a new low of depravity. Such is the case of Aleppo child, Bana al-Abed, and the exploitation by her parents.


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Cross

Catholic Cardinal Sarah: Every nation has right to distinguish between refugees and economic migrants


Catholic Herald
Tue, 24 Oct 2017 17:51 UTC
cardinal sarah
© CNS
Every nation has a right to distinguish between genuine refugees and economic migrants who do not share that nation's culture, Cardinal Robert Sarah has said.

Speaking at the Europa Christi conference in Poland on Sunday, the African cardinal noted that the country refuses to accept the "logic" of migrant redistribution that "some people want to impose".

In comments reported by Polish magazine Gosc, Cardinal Sarah added that while every migrant is a human being who must be respected, the situation becomes more complex if they are of another culture or another religion, and imperil the common good of the nation.

World leaders cannot question the "right of every nation to distinguish between a political or religious refugee" who is forced to flee their own land, and "the economic migrant who wants to change his place of residence" without adapting to the new culture in which he lives.
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Attention

Christian hospital group in Belgium to face Vatican for defiantly granting euthanasia to mentally ill patients

Leonardo Blair
The Christian Post
Sat, 28 Oct 2017 13:01 UTC
Belgium euthanasia Catholic hospital

Doctor Stephane Mercier visits a patient at the palliative care unit of the AP-HP Paul-Brousse hospital in Villejuif near Paris.
A group of Catholic psychiatric hospitals in Belgium could soon be stripped of their Catholic identity if they fail to stop granting euthanasia to mentally ill patients in defiance of an order from Pope Francis that they end the practice.

"As the Brothers of Charity Organization decided in its meeting on Sept. 11 not to adapt its vision statement on the performance of euthanasia, and thus allowing euthanasia under certain conditions in their institutions, by which it goes against the request of the Vatican to conform to the Catholic doctrine in this matter, and given the fact that the attempts to enter into consultations in Belgium did not produce the desired result, the Brothers of Charity Organization will be invited by the Vatican to explain their vision, after which a final decision will be made," the Brothers of Charity Generalate in Rome announced in a statement earlier this month.

Brother René Stockman, worldwide leader of the Rome-based Brothers of Charity who opposes euthanasia, had warned its Belgian arm this summer that the group would lose the right to call themselves Catholic if they didn't abandon its defiant euthanasia policy adopted in March. He told The Wall Street Journal that the chain of hospitals could lose buildings that belong to the Catholic Church. He said that despite inviting the board to Rome to explain their position on euthanasia, the Vatican will be making no compromise on their stance against it.

Comment: Euthanasia is not the last stop for mental illness

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Pistol

Police looking for gunman in Edison, NJ Halloween party shooting


mycentraljersey.com
Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC
Edison Township, nj welcome board
© mycentraljersey.com
Police are looking for the gunman who shot and injured two men who were attending a Halloween party at a hotel in Raritan Center early Friday.

None of the injuries are considered life-threatening, according to police.

Police said a 21-year-old man from Newark was shot in the arm and abdomen and a 20-year-old man from East Orange was shot in the leg. Both men were transported to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick for treatment of serious injuries.

About 12:42 a.m., police were dispatched to a report of a disturbance at the E Hotel Banquet and Conference Center, 3050 Woodbridge Ave., where a large group of people had been attending a Halloween party.

When police arrived, they found party guests fleeing from the hotel's banquet hall on foot and in cars. Other guests were found inside, some arguing and fighting, police said.
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Bomb

13 killed, 16 injured in attack on hotel in Somali capital, Mogadishu


RT
Sat, 28 Oct 2017 16:41 UTC
Somali attack
© Feisal Omar / Reuters
Somali security officers secure the scene of a suicide car bomb explosion, at the gate of Naso Hablod Two Hotel in Hamarweyne district of Mogadishu, Somalia October 28, 2017.
At least 13 people have been killed and 16 injured in a suicide car bomb attack on a hotel in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, according to police. The attack was followed by gunfire, with a second blast reportedly being heard in the area minutes later.

The assailants targeted the popular Nasa-Hablod hotel located near the presidential palace and frequented by Somalia's politicians and local elites. Al-Shabab extremist group claimed responsibility for the attack, adding that its fighters are still inside the hotel.

Comment: See also: Two bomb blasts strike Mogadishu, Somalia; 22 people killed

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Robot

Exponential improvements in AI means you could lose your job to a robot much sooner than you think

Kevin Drum
Mother Jones
Sat, 28 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC
robots jobs
I want to tell you straight off what this story is about: Sometime in the next 40 years, robots are going to take your job.

I don't care what your job is. If you dig ditches, a robot will dig them better. If you're a magazine writer, a robot will write your articles better. If you're a doctor, IBM's Watson will no longer "assist" you in finding the right diagnosis from its database of millions of case studies and journal articles. It will just be a better doctor than you.

And CEOs? Sorry. Robots will run companies better than you do. Artistic types? Robots will paint and write and sculpt better than you. Think you have social skills that no robot can match? Yes, they can. Within 20 years, maybe half of you will be out of jobs. A couple of decades after that, most of the rest of you will be out of jobs.

In one sense, this all sounds great. Let the robots have the damn jobs! No more dragging yourself out of bed at 6 a.m. or spending long days on your feet. We'll be free to read or write poetry or play video games or whatever we want to do. And a century from now, this is most likely how things will turn out. Humanity will enter a golden age.

But what about 20 years from now? Or 30? We won't all be out of jobs by then, but a lot of us will-and it will be no golden age. Until we figure out how to fairly distribute the fruits of robot labor, it will be an era of mass joblessness and mass poverty. Working-class job losses played a big role in the 2016 election, and if we don't want a long succession of demagogues blustering their way into office because machines are taking away people's livelihoods, this needs to change, and fast. Along with global warming, the transition to a workless future is the biggest challenge by far that progressive politics-not to mention all of humanity-faces. And yet it's barely on our radar.
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Footprints

Optical illusion pedestrian crossing installed in Icelandic town to slow drivers down


RT
Sat, 28 Oct 2017 15:41 UTC
Pedestrian crossing
© Movementway / Global Look Press
A 3D zebra crossing has been rolled out in the Icelandic town of Ísafjörður in the hope that the optical illusion will impel drivers to slow down.

The creative road markings were installed after Icelandic environmental commissioner Ralf Trylla was inspired by a similar project in New Delhi, India aimed at tackling speeding. Trylla enlisted local Icelandic contractor Vegmálun GÍH who redesigned the crossing to create the appearance of stripes jumping out of the road.
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