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Retired Soviet Officer Rewarded for Averting Nuclear War

Igor Ogorodnev
RT.com
Sat, 25 Feb 2012 20:48 UTC
Stanislav Petrov
© RTStanislav Petrov, former Soviet lieutenant colonel, dons his formal uniform.
Most people become heroes for doing things. Stanislav Petrov became one through having the courage to do nothing - in the face of a potential nuclear threat.

­The retired Russian Lieutenant Colonel has picked up a major humanitarian accolade, the German Media Prize, for preventing possible catastrophic all-out conflict. The previous recipients of the award include Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, and the Dalai Lama.

­Teetering on the brink

­On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer at an early-warning anti-nuclear center just outside Moscow.

The clock had just struck midnight, when a piercing warning siren began to wail.

It was less than a month after the USSR had shot down a Korean passenger jet, and Cold War tensions were at their highest for years.

Petrov's computer showed that the United States had launched a ballistic missile towards the Soviet Union. In seconds, several more appeared.
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Star of David

Cassandra Wilson Cancels Israel Show: "I Identify With the Cultural Boycott of Israel"

Nora Barrows-Friedman
The Electronic Intifada
Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:53 UTC
Image
© Ynet News
US jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson has canceled her gig this weekend at the Women's Festival in Holon, following appeals by boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activists encouraging her to respect the Palestinian call for boycott. She took a public political stand just before she was due to board a plane to Tel Aviv.

Israeli daily Ynet reported (in Hebrew, translated) that Wilson announced, "as a human rights activist, I identify with the cultural boycott of Israel." The report also stated that concert promoters are considering legal action against her.

Activists from Boycott from Within, who drafted an appeal to Wilson last week, asked her not to "support selective empowerment of women under Israeli apartheid."

Comment: A recent post to Cassandra Wilson's Facebook Page stated:
Cassandra Wilson refused to sing in Apartheid Israel, and her page is being attacked by many Israeli extremists. Please click on her name below, and "like" on her page. Thanks.


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Handcuffs

Maternity Nurses "Aggressors," Not RFK Son: Doctor


CBSnews.com
Sat, 25 Feb 2012 15:05 UTC
Image
© Unknown
New York - A son of Robert F. Kennedy is facing misdemeanor charges after he struggled with nurses who tried to stop him from carrying his newborn son out of the maternity ward at a hospital near New York City.

Douglas Kennedy said he was trying to take the baby out of Northern Westchester Hospital for a quick walk when a group of nurses who thought the infant should remain indoors tried to stop him.

Security video obtained by WNBC-TV shows that the nurses stopped Kennedy from using an elevator, then tried to block him from using a stairwell.
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Nuke

Fukushima: Official Commits Suicide After Measuring Radiation in Tokyo Park

Madison Ruppert
End The Lie
Sat, 25 Feb 2012 13:59 UTC
Mizumoto Park from the air
© n/aMizumoto Park from the air in 1989
According to a Japanese news outlet, Iza, on July 1st, 2011 63-year-old Mr. Takashi Kabayama was found dead with a plastic bag over his head in his home office.

Kabayama was a member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly for the Liberal Democratic Party and had been measuring radiation in an assortment of locations throughout Tokyo.

He would then upload his findings to his blog for the world to read and on the day before he died (June 30, 2011) he measured 0.25 microSv/h in Mizumoto Park in the Katsushika ward located in Tokyo.

Fukushima Diary reported on February 22, 2012 via Gendai that ludicrously high levels of cesium contamination were discovered, also in Mizumoto Park.

These levels were so high that they "turned out to be the same level of [the] 'off-limits zone' in Chernobyl."
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Bomb

Suicide Bombing Outside Yemen Palace Kills At Least 20 As New President Sworn In


The Daily Telegraph, AU
Sat, 25 Feb 2012 02:09 UTC
Image
© AP PhotoAn explosion has killed at least 20 outside a presidential palace on the same day Yemen's newly elected President Abed Rabbu Mansour Hadi (pictured) is sworn in.
A suicide bomber blew up a vehicle outside a presidential palace in southeastern Yemen Saturday, killing 20 elite Republican Guards, under the command of outgoing president Ali Abdullah Saleh's son Ahmed, medics and a military official said.

"The bodies of 20 soldiers were taken to the mortuary and there are many others wounded," said a medic at the Ibn Sina hospital in the Hadramawt provincial capital Mukalla.

A military official said that "a pick-up truck driven by a suicide bomber exploded at the entrance of the presidential palace in Mukalla" as Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi was sworn in as the first new president in Sanaa since 1978.

A health official said the fatalities in the city of al-Mukalla were presidential guards. A security official said it was a suicide blast. He did not provide a death toll.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not allowed to speak to the press.

Southern separatists and Islamist insurgents are active in the region.
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Bomb

Nigeria Bombers Attempt Prison Break, 12 People Dead


Reuters
Sat, 25 Feb 2012 08:00 UTC
Gunmen set off bombs in an attempted prison break in the northeast Nigerian city of Gombe late on Friday and then blew up the local police station, triggering hours of battles that killed 12 people, the city's commissioner of police said.

Witnesses in Gombe heard multiple explosions and gunfire late on Friday in the city, which has been largely free of the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency plaguing the north of Africa's top oil producer.

"There were several explosions. They wanted to break open the prison, but the policemen on guard there repelled them," Gombe police commissioner Gandi Ebikeme Orubebe told Reuters by phone.

"So they attacked the police station and blew up everything there. Two policeman died, one soldier was injured," he said, adding that 10 other people, civilians and attackers, were also killed in the ensuing shootouts.

Three suspects were arrested, he said.
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Heart - Black

Crazy World: A crazed commuter shoves 23-year-old woman on to Tube tracks

Eddie Wrenn
Mail Online
Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
This is the shocking moment a crazed commuter launched an apparently random attack on a woman - pushing her on to the tracks of the London Underground.

The 23-year-old victim struck up a brief conversation with the thug and following a trivial row over the man's hat, he turned and shoved her on to the rails on the Northern Line at Leicester Square.

She only missed the live rail by inches, and was able to pull herself back onto the platform with the help of other travelers before the next train came down the platform.

Injuries to her side were so severe, witnesses initially thought she had been stabbed.
Crazy thug1
© British Transport PoliceTipping point: The vicious and dangerous attack was allegedly sparked by a 'trivial' row about the man's hat

Crazy thug 2
© British Transport PoliceDangerous: The man, in a fit of rage, violently shoves the woman onto the northbound Northern Line track

Crazy thug 3
© British Transport PoliceThe attacker risked his victim's life in two ways: She could have been electrocuted by the track's live middle wire, or she could have been hit by an oncoming train
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X

Sears to "Unload" 1,200 Stores?

Susanna Kim
ABC News
Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:18 UTC
Sears logo
© Getty Images
Sears might "unload" 1,200 stores in an effort to raise money, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. A majority stakeholder in Sears Holdings Corp., which operates Sears and Kmart, is hoping to receive $770 million in cash related to the stores.

Sears Holdings Corp., based in Hoffman Estates, Ill., Thursday reported a significant loss for the fourth quarter after a difficult holiday shopping season. The company had a net loss of $2.4 billion for the quarter that ended Jan. 28, including several one-time charges, compared to a profit of $374 million for the same period last year.

Sales dropped $518 million to $12.5 billion last quarter. Officials have tried to turnaround the company as same-store sales have fallen for six straight years.

Sears describes itself as the country's "fourth largest broadline retailer with over 4,000 full-line and specialty retail stores in the United States and Canada," according to its website.
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Bizarro Earth

Koran Burning Protests Spread to Pakistan

Muhammad Lila
ABC News
Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© ABC NewsKoran Burning Protests Spread to Pakistan
At least 10 people were killed and dozens wounded today as protests over the burning of Korans at a NATO base escalated, with the violence spreading into neighboring Pakistan.

Thousands of angry Afghans took to the street in Khost, Herat and Nangahar chanting "death to America" and burning effigies of President Obama. Protesters In Baghland attempted to storm a U.S. military base, destroying part of a security fence before police began shooting into the air to disperse the crowd.

The fresh wave of violence comes less than a day after Obama apologized for the Koran burning, which he said was a regrettable and unintentional error, and after an assailant dressed in an Afghan National Police uniform killed two U.S. soldiers.

In an attempt to calm rising tensions, the commander of ISAF and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, made a surprise visit - and an impassioned plea - to troops at the military base where the two US servicemen were based.
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Alarm Clock

Best of the Web: The West's Coming Apocalypse


Class War Films
Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:00 UTC
An excellent summation, at least from the political point of view, of where we are right now, how we got here, and the fact that the masses of humanity MUST wake up to the reality of the situation if the worst is to be mitigated.

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