Three weeks before Passover, a plague of locusts is swarming from Egypt to Israel, sparking fears among farmers in the region.
The timing of the insect invasion is eerie, because the Bible's Book of Exodus tells of 10 plagues that hit Egypt before Moses and the Jews were allowed to leave for the Promised Land. A plague of locusts was the eighth on the list - but Pharaoh didn't relent until the 10th plague, which killed off all of Egypt's firstborn sons. Every year at Passover, Jews commemorate how they were spared.
This time, even the Israelis are worried that the locusts are out to get them. "They may not have ruined Pharaoh, but they could ruin us," one farmer, Tzachi Rimon, told Israel's Channel 10 TV.
Earth Changes
© Unknown
The ships include several massive cargo vessels stranded off the city of Colon, near the Caribbean side of the Panama Canal.
No injuries or environmental damage were immediately reported, although residents reported a smell of petroleum in the vicinity of a ship that appeared to have a ruptured hull.
"Everybody's got a little comment with every bag they're buying," said Mike McIntosh, who works at Dressel's Hardware in Oak Park just outside Chicago. Workers had started to stock the shelves with tools and supplies associated with spring and summer, only to find the shovels and salt they thought they'd hold for another year were still in demand. "Everybody's a bit surprised, but it's good for us, we've got a lot of this stuff to move," he said. On Monday, the system moved across the Dakotas and Minnesota, dropping up to a foot of snow in some areas and freezing rain in others. Some schools closed and officials warned motorists to stay off the roads.
Neely said previous observations suggest that increases in stratospheric aerosols since 2000 have counter balanced as much as 25 per cent of the warming scientists blame on human greenhouse gas emissions. "This new study indicates it is emissions from small to moderate volcanoes that have been slowing the warming of the planet," said Neely in the study published in journal Geophysical Research Letters. The new project was undertaken in part to resolve conflicting results of two recent studies on the origins of the sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, including a 2009 study led by the late David Hoffman of NOAA indicating aerosol increases in the stratosphere may have come from rising emissions of sulfur dioxide from India and China.
Remains of an ice meteor on a factory roof in Spain.
Climate experts have long warned that global warming could bring an increase in extreme weather, such as hurricanes and drought. They never mentioned 20-pound chunks of ice falling from the clear blue sky, tearing through roofs, shattering windshields, and gouging impact craters. Yet reports of such "clear-sky ice fall events" have been on the rise worldwide in recent years, and in February Spanish researchers offered further evidence that the increase could be due to climate change.
Caroline Guy pictured below the 18-inch hole left in her caravan when a block of ice allegedly fell from a passing plane
The huge icicle crashed through restaurant owner Caroline Guy's static caravan leaving an 18-inch hole.
Miss Guy, 52, was woken up by what she thought was an 'explosion' on Saturday morning, initially thinking she was being burgled.
The mother-of-two investigated her home but could not find anything suspicious until later that day when she went to clean the static caravan which is positioned on her land.
It was then that she discovered the hole in the caravan's roof, aw sell as another similar hole in its floor.
Comment: The standard line on these ice falls is that they are always from "leaky planes", but there is a more troubling explanation.
Giant Ice Meteors Fall From Clear Skies
Officials in Seffner, Florida, are investigating a second sinkhole that has formed less than two miles from the one that opened up underneath a house on Thursday and killed Jeff Bush.
The sinkhole is located behind a home and is roughly 10 feet deep. Officials for Hillsborough County Code Enforcement say there are no injuries nor structural damage at this time, WFLA-TV reported.
The hole is straddling across a fence, affecting at least two properties, USA Today reported.
Experts say thousands of sinkholes form yearly in Florida because of the state's geology, though most are small and deaths rarely occur.
"There's hardly a place in Florida that's immune to sinkholes," Sandy Nettles, who owns a geology consulting company in the Tampa area, told the Associated Press. "There's no way of ever predicting where a sinkhole is going to occur."
The effort to find the body of a Florida man who was swallowed by a sinkhole under his Florida home was called off Saturday and crews planned to begin demolishing the four-bedroom house.
The 20-foot-wide opening of the sinkhole is almost completely covered by the house and rescuers feared it would collapse on them if they tried to search for Jeff Bush, 37. Crews were testing the unstable ground surrounding the home and evacuated two neighboring homes as a precaution.
Hillsborough County Administrator Mike Merrill said heavy equipment would be brought in to begin the demolition Sunday morning.
"At this point it's really not possible to recover the body," Merrill said, later adding "we're dealing with a very unusual sinkhole."
The 20-foot-wide opening of the sinkhole is almost completely covered by the house and rescuers feared it would collapse on them if they tried to search for Jeff Bush, 37. Crews were testing the unstable ground surrounding the home and evacuated two neighboring homes as a precaution.
Hillsborough County Administrator Mike Merrill said heavy equipment would be brought in to begin the demolition Sunday morning.
"At this point it's really not possible to recover the body," Merrill said, later adding "we're dealing with a very unusual sinkhole."
© The Bismarck Tribune via AP
Snow-covered trees form a scenic canopy over Bismarck, N.D., on Monday, March 4, 2013, in the wake of a slow-moving winter storm that passed through the state.
Snow-covered trees form a scenic canopy over Bismarck, N.D., on Monday, March 4, 2013, in the wake of a slow-moving winter storm that passed through the state.
The storm was expected to peter out by the time it hits New York and Boston later in the week, but not before it creates a mess for commuters from Upper Mississippi and Ohio River valleys eastward to the Atlantic Coast.
Significant snowfall will make travel dangerous Monday night and Tuesday in the Upper Midwest, especially around major cities like Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Chicago. The Weather Channel warned that major delays were likely Tuesday at O'Hare and Midway airports.
Chicago is expected to get its biggest snowfall of the season - as much as 10 inches by Tuesday evening. The National Weather Service said accumulation rates of one to two inches an hour beginning Tuesday morning would make "snow removal difficult and travel extremely dangerous."
"Consider only traveling if in an emergency," it said in issuing a winter storm warning for the city.
Unseasonably warm temperatures Monday melted some of the winter's snow in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul - just in time for a new blast of winter that could drop as much as 7 inches of new snow overnight and Tuesday.
The devastating tsunami in Japan in March 2011... is man-made global warming really to blame?
But 'man-made global warming' is an explanation that leaves so much unexplained. Our sun clearly plays an important role in regulating the planet's climate, but increased numbers of earthquakes, rising volcanic activity and indications that 'climate change' is taking place on other planets in our solar system clearly point to some other factor driving these changes.
In last week's SOTT Talk Radio show, we looked back at periods of 'climate change' in the course of human history, noting that increased fireball flux also occurred during such times. Does the recent Russian overhead meteor explosion portend similar environmental catastrophe for humanity today? Are we on the cusp of another Dark Age?
Running Time: 02:07:00
Download: MP3
Comment: And to learn more about the Bible and true history of human kind, read Comets and the Horns of Moses by Laura Knight-Jadczyk