There are so many pertinent articles today, just take your pick.
The most prominent theme today seems to be the vast number of rumors of war from around the world. In addition, however, we also see pestilence, earthquakes, movements towards the inevitable 'Mark of the Beast', rising totalitarianism and continual loss of freedom as we approach the Tribulation:
A Russian fighter jet made multiple, close-range passes near an American warship in the Black Sea for more than 90 minutes Saturday amid escalating tensions in the region, U.S. military officials said Monday.
In the first public account of the incident, the officials said the Russian Fencer made 12 passes, and flew within 1,000 yards of the USS Donald Cook, a Navy destroyer, at about 500 feet above sea level.
The U.S. warship issued several radio queries and warnings using international emergency circuits, but the Russian aircraft did not respond.
"This provocative and unprofessional Russian action is inconsistent with international protocols and previous agreements on the professional interaction between our militaries," said Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman.
Russia’s military carried out a flight test of a new multi-warhead intercontinental ballistic missile on Monday amid growing tensions with the United States over the crisis in Ukraine.
The SS-27 Mod 2 road-mobile ICBM was launched around 2:40 a.m. EST from Russia’s Plesetsk launch facility, located about 500 miles north of Moscow.
“The main purpose of the launch is to validate the reliability of a batch of this class of missiles made at the Votkinsk Plant,” Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Yegorov told state-run Interfax-AVN.
An unspecified number of simulated nuclear warheads landed at an impact range on the Kura test range on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in the Russian Far East, Yegorov said. The distance is around 3,500 miles.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s whirlwind tour of China in early April saw a tense exchange with his Chinese counterpart Chang Wanquan over the United States’ pivot to Asia. China would “make no compromise, no concession, no treaty,” Chang said, adding, “the Chinese military can assemble as soon as summoned, fight any battle and win.” Hagel, for his part, said that the United States was “fully committed” to is treaty obligations with the Philippines and with Japan — which administers the Senkakus, the disputed islands which China claims and calls the Diaoyu. In the days leading up to U.S. President Barack Obama’s late April trip to the region, where is visiting Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Malaysia — and pointedly not China — there is a worrying amount of strain among China, Japan, and the United States. Are temperatures running so high that China might actually seize the Senkakus by force? Or are these worries overblown?
The U.S.-China relationship has a way of providing something for everyone, and on this score Hagel’s visit to Beijing met all expectations.
Proponents of the concept of a “new model of major country relations” could come away seeing the visit as an exemplar of win-win engagement given the spate of concrete agreements to deepen bilateral dialogue and military-to-military cooperation.
Antithetically, those predisposed to view China’s rise in competitive terms could point to the fact that substantive discussions devolved into literal finger wagging as the issues plaguing the “new” relationship looked a whole lot like those that used to trouble the “old” one.
The CIA director was sent to Kiev to launch a military suppression of the Russian separatists in the eastern and southern portions of Ukraine, former Russian territories for the most part that were foolishly attached to the Ukraine in the early years of Soviet rule.
Washington’s plan to grab Ukraine overlooked that the Russian and Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine were not likely to go along with their insertion into the EU and NATO while submitting to the persecution of Russian speaking peoples. Washington has lost Crimea, from which Washington intended to eject Russia from its Black Sea naval base. Instead of admitting that its plan for grabbing Ukraine has gone amiss, Washington is unable to admit a mistake and, therefore, is pushing the crisis to more dangerous levels.
If Ukraine dissolves into secession with the former Russian territories reverting to Russia, Washington will be embarrassed that the result of its coup in Kiev was to restore the Russian provinces of Ukraine to Russia. To avoid this embarrassment, Washington is pushing the crisis toward war.
The Russian government has already made it completely clear some weeks ago that the use of violence against protesters in eastern and southern Ukraine would compel the Russian government to send in the Russian army to protect Russians, just as Russia had to do in South Ossetia when Washington instructed its Georgian puppet ruler to attack Russian peacekeeping troops and Russian residents of South Ossetia.
Washington knows that the Russian government cannot stand aside while one of Washington’s puppet states attacks Russians. Yet, Washington is pushing the crisis to war.
For Russia this could be a fatal mistake. There is no good will in Washington, only mendacity. Russian delay provides Washington with time to build up forces on Russia’s borders and in the Black Sea and to demonize Russia with propaganda and whip up the US population into a war frenzy. The latter is already occurring.
Washington does not want the Ukraine matters settled in a diplomatic and reasonable way. It might be the case that Russia’s best move is immediately to occupy the Russian territories of Ukraine and re-absorb the territories into Russia from whence they came. This should be done before the US and its NATO puppets are prepared for war. It is more difficult for Washington to start a war when the objects of the war have already been lost. Russia will be demonized with endless propaganda from Washington whether or not Russia re-absorbs its traditional territories. If Russia allows these territories to be suppressed by Washington, the prestige and authority of the Russian government will collapse. Perhaps that is what Washington is counting on.
The situation in Ukraine hotted up this weekend and threatens to blow this morning with the Kiev government affecting to send “anti-terrorist” troops into the eastern cities where ethnic Russians seized buildings. (In the olden times of Europe, they had witches and devils. Now, thanks to our example, they have “terrorists.”) While this impending civil war would be rather dire for Ukraine, it presents the obvious questions: 1) does it matter to anyone outside the region? And in particular, 2) is it any business of the USA?
War hawk kibitzers on the sidelines (e.g. The New York Times) are making a big deal of the 40,000 Russian troops marshaled around the border of eastern Ukraine. So what? That’s just a few thousand more than the 33,000 US troops deployed to Afghanistan, America’s current “nation-building” project. But the troop numbers swing to our side of the balance beam if you throw in the nearly 3,000 American boots-on-the-ground stationed in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic, and the roughly 15,000 in Kuwait and Bahrain. I don’t remember the Russians complaining very much about all this US military hyper-activity in their part of the world over the past decade.
Aren’t a number of things obvious about the Ukraine situation? Such as: the Russians have a greater interest in preventing chaos there than the US has in any provisional disposition of the Ukrainian border and the composition of its government. Such as: for most of the 20th century Ukraine was essentially a Russian province, and at various times before that the ward of several other eastern European kingdoms. Such as: Russia has a huge investment in gas pipeline infrastructure in Ukraine upon which depends a substantial portion of its national income, not to mention the winter-time comfort of most of the countries in western Europe.
This is turning into a Vietnam moment for the US political scene. Where are the Fullbrights and Bobby Kennedys of today who have the guts to rally US citizens against insane government behavior? What elected officials among all the bought-off Koch Brother catamites and Wall Street errand boys will stand up for reality-based principle? When will the young people of this country pull their eyeballs away from their iPhones and their heads out of their cloacal vents? When will the United States begin the long-overdue task of getting its own act together?
An expansion to the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation's existing fingerprint database to include facial recognition has raised concerns among privacy advocates, due to its ability to contain images of innocents as well as criminals.
The FBI's next generation identification (NGI) biometric database contains over a hundred million individual records of people's fingerprints.
It being expanded to feature much more biometric information such as palm prints, voice signatures, iris scans and facial recognition, the agency said, in order to more quickly and accurately identify individuals.
Controversially, the NGI database will contain facial recognition data of millions of non-criminal citizens, documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation under the US Freedom of Information Act reveal.
Some 4.3 million images for non-criminal purposes will be in the database by next year as part of employers' background checks, which represents a threat to privacy, the EFF said.
The introduction of the NGI means the FBI would link its criminal and non-criminal databases for the first time.
Every record would have searches running against them, the EFF said, meaning non-criminal citizen's facial images could end up being searched as part of criminal investigations.
The FBI's next generation identification (NGI) biometric database contains over a hundred million individual records of people's fingerprints.
It being expanded to feature much more biometric information such as palm prints, voice signatures, iris scans and facial recognition, the agency said, in order to more quickly and accurately identify individuals.
Controversially, the NGI database will contain facial recognition data of millions of non-criminal citizens, documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation under the US Freedom of Information Act reveal.
Some 4.3 million images for non-criminal purposes will be in the database by next year as part of employers' background checks, which represents a threat to privacy, the EFF said.
The introduction of the NGI means the FBI would link its criminal and non-criminal databases for the first time.
Every record would have searches running against them, the EFF said, meaning non-criminal citizen's facial images could end up being searched as part of criminal investigations.
Hand scanning has become an alternative payment method for people in a city in southern Sweden, researchers at Lund University said Monday.
Some 1,600 people have signed up already for the system, which its creator says is not only faster but also safer than traditional payment methods.
"Every individual's vein pattern is completely unique, so there really is no way of committing fraud with this system," researcher Fredrik Leifland said in a statement.
"You always need your hand scanned for a payment to go through."
While vein scanning technology existed previously, it has not been used as a form of payment before.
"We had to connect all the players ourselves, which was quite complex: the vein scanning terminals, the banks, the stores and the customers," Leifland added.
Thousands of Nicaraguans woke up in the streets Monday after a sleepless night rocked by two strong earthquakes, part of a string of tremors that have kept the Central American country on edge since late last week.
A magnitude-6.1 quake Thursday evening has been followed by hundreds of small aftershocks and at least seven quakes powerful enough to send people running in panic from homes and businesses, including a magnitude-6.6 tremor Friday.
The Sandinista government has placed the country on red alert, the highest possible level, and is urging Nicaraguans to sleep outside their homes until further notice.
On Sunday night, the country was hit by magnitude-4.6 and magnitude-5.6 quakes. On Monday morning, members of the 23 families sheltering at the bar moved chairs off the tables to make room for more people.
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Loved that Bundy Ranch video- brought a lump to my throat!
ReplyDeleteMaranatha!
Thought I'd share this because of the way he describes signs as significant..
ReplyDeletehttp://raybentley.com/2014/04/14/the-four-blood-moons-begin/