Border Patrol Gone To The Dogs
Category: In The News
Flights, girls and cash buy Japan whaling votes
A SUNDAY TIMES investigation has exposed Japan for bribing small nations with cash and prostitutes to gain their support for the mass slaughter of whales.
The undercover investigation found officials from six countries were willing to consider selling their votes on the International Whaling Commission (IWC).
The revelations come as Japan seeks to break the 24-year moratorium on commercial whaling. An IWC meeting that will decide the fate of thousands of whales, including endangered species, begins this month in Morocco.Thanks Michelle Hester.
Flights, girls and cash buy Japan whaling votes – Times Online.
Coast Guard Sank Oil Rig
Mike Miller has run Calgary-based Safety Boss — which established an international reputation after successfully fighting the Kuwait well fires after the first Gulf War — for more than 30 years.
The U.S. Coast Guard erred, Miller said, in how it dealt with the fire aboard the Deepwater Horizon after the explosion on April 20 and before the drilling rig sank two days later.
He remains convinced that two days of pouring water on the fire swamped the ship, causing it to sink and sever the connection from the ocean floor to the surface, where it would have been easier to deal with the fire and contain the flow.
Oil well firefighters would know not to do that, he said.
“If you’re not successful in an hour you’re not ever going to be successful,” he told CBC News.
The U.S. Coast Guard made a ‘colossal’ mistake in how it fought the fire on the Deepwater Horizon, says Mike Miller. (Associated Press/U.S. Coast Guard)
“You have to hit these fires with overwhelming force. They’re not like a forest fire where you fight them for days at a time. Why they went on with that was just beyond me.”
The resulting aerial pollution would have been far less of a threat than oil in water, especially given that booms have limitations. In the Exxon Valdez tanker spill in 1989, booms only collected four per cent of the oil, and that was in an enclosed bay
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2010/06/02/f-gulf-spill-canadian-oil-industry.html#ixzz0pjLHVR87
via CBC News – Money – A game changer for Canada’s oil industry.
New Clue Found To Existence
In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.
The new effect hinges on the behavior of particularly strange particles called neutral B-mesons, which are famous for not being able to make up their minds. They oscillate back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay to muons.
via From Fermilab, a New Clue to Explain Human Existence? – NYTimes.com.
Furor Over Return Of Nurse’s Caps
At JFK Medical Center, health care reform is already under way, in the shape of a traditional white nurse’s cap.
The nurses in the Atlantis hospital’s cardiovascular step-down unit have temporarily tossed their royal blue scrubs for retro nurses’ whites – starched cap, hose and shoes included.
As a remedy, many hospitals nationwide have adopted color-coded uniform policies. St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach, for example, addressed the problem when it implemented a new uniform policy in February.
Nurses now wear white tops and blue pants, pediatric nurses wear kid-friendly tops, unit secretaries are clad in khaki, and all clinical departments are assigned specific colors. Click on the link and read the flood of comments.
via Retro nurse’s outfit has returned to JFK Medical Center.
U-2, Before The Band
The U-2 is nicknamed the Dragon Lady for good reason. You never knew what to expect when you took it into the air, no matter how seasoned a pilot you were. This was an unfortunate consequence of its design. The trade-off of a plane built light enough to fly above 70,000 feet is that it is almost impossible to control. And 13 miles above the ground, the atmosphere is so thin that the “envelope” between stalling and “overspeed” — going so fast you lose control of the plane, resulting in an unrecoverable nose dive — is razor-thin, making minor disruptions, even turbulence, as deadly as a missile. The challenge is even greater near the ground, since to save weight, the plane doesn’t have normal landing gear.
Other risks were less benign, as I found when I was the ground officer for a pilot who radioed, “My skin feels like it’s crawling.” He had the bends so badly from changes in pressure that when he landed his body was covered with huge welts. Had the weather not cleared in time for him to land, these bubbles of nitrogen might have lodged in his brain or optical nerve — as they had in other U-2 pilots.
via Op-Ed Contributor – Flying with the Dragon Lady – NYTimes.com.
Behind the Ash Cloud Overeaction
* Attempts to measure the ash’s density were hampered because the main aircraft used by the Meteorological Office for this purpose had been grounded as it was due to be repainted.
* Computers at the Met Office, which earlier forecast a ‘barbecue summer’ last year and a mild winter for this year, produced a stream of maps predicting the ash would cover a vast area, eventually stretching from Russia to Newfoundland. But across almost all of it, there was virtually no ash at all, and none visible to satellites.
* Though there was some ash over Britain at times during the ban, the maximum density measured by scientists was only about one twentieth of the limit that scientists, the Government, and aircraft and engine manufacturers have now decided is safe.
Boob Bombs
The shocking new al-Qaeda tactic involves radical doctors inserting the explosives in women’s breasts during plastic surgery — making them “virtually impossible to detect by the usual airport scanning machines”.
Terrorist expert Joseph Farah claims: “Women suicide bombers recruited by al-Qaeda are known to have had the explosives inserted in their breasts under techniques similar to breast enhancing surgery.”
The lethal explosives called PETN are inserted inside plastic shapes during the operation, before the breast is then sewn up. Explosive experts allegedly told MI5 that a sachet containing as little as five ounces of PETN could blow “a considerable hole” in an airline’s skin, causing it to crash.
Avatar sparks 3-D Star Wars, Matrix, Lord of the Rings
Hollywood is preparing to re-release some past hits, including Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in 3-D following the record-breaking success of Avatar.
Experts now predict that 3-D will become the new multiplex standard within five years. This will be as dramatic a shift as when the “talkies” killed off silent movies in the early 20th century.
Retro-fitting a screen classic with 3-D imagery could take as little as four months, using software to manipulate a digital copy of the film.
via Avatar sparks 3-D makeover for action classics – Times Online.
Tiger Woods – Adrenaline Junkie Control Freak
During a trip to New Zealand for his caddie’s wedding, Woods went bungee jumping off a cable car suspended 440 feet over a river valley. On the same trip, he climbed behind the wheel of a race car and traded paint with the competition on a dirt track.
Woods spent a week at Fort Bragg going through Special Forces training with the Marines and became a master scuba diver, capable of holding his breath for four minutes at a time while exploring the ocean. He could stay on the ocean floor even longer, Woods explained, when he used a regulator. But the scenery was so much better without one.
“You don’t want any bubbles because that scares the fish off,” he said. “The only problem is that when you don’t make any bubbles, the sharks come around, too.”