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Σάββατο 16 Απριλίου 2016

WATCH: Muslim Migrant Mobs Riot under Paris Metro, VIOLENT CONFRONTATIONS




n April 14, there was a violent altercation between Muslim migrants under the subway at the Paris Metro train station before the intervention of security forces.
Paris: Clashes between migrants under the Skytrain at Stalingrad. Stalingrad is a Paris Métro station on the border between the 10th arrondissement and the 19th arrondissement at the intersection of lines 2, 5, and 7, located at the Place de Stalingrad
The Parisian has this:
Affrontements entre migrants sous le métro aérien à Stalingrad
Dans la nuit du 14 au 15 avril un long affrontement s’est déroulé entre migrants avant que la police n’intervienne. Un riverain a filmé la scène.



Look at Paris. And Obama wants to bring this here.

Turning Paris into the Middle East. Last month, the French police claimed to have cleared this camp under the Metro el in Paris. Its the second time they claimed to have cleared it.

On March 30, Vice reported this:




Paris Police Just Moved 1,000 Migrants Out of a Squalid Subway Camp

Police in Paris forcibly moved almost 1,000 migrants early on Wednesday from a squalid camp under the elevated Stalingrad metro station, in the north of the city.

The operation to clear the camp was carried out jointly by the police, city authorities, and the French Office of Immigration and Integration. For security reasons, traffic was interrupted along the boulevard that runs alongside the camp, and the Stalingrad metro station was temporarily closed.

Speaking to VICE News on Tuesday, Qayoom, an Afghan national from Nangarhar province, described dismal living conditions at the camp: “Even animals don’t live like this,” he said. Before he fled the unrest in Afghanistan, Qayoom owned a store.

Two gendarmes patrol a street near the Stalingrad camp on Wednesday morning. The writing on the wall says “Set borders on fire!” (Pierre Longeray/VICE News)

The migrants will be housed by the city for up to a month, unless they file an asylum claim, in which case the accommodation will be extended for the duration of the asylum process. According to the authorities, 941 migrants were rehoused this morning, including 50 women with children, who were given special help from the city.

In a joint statement released Wednesday, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said that they were “committed to solving [the crisis] and to preventing camps from being built in Paris and in the Île-de-France [the region surrounding the capital], by providing shelter and guidance to migrants.”

The statement also noted that the Stalingrad camp had been completely cleared.

The Stalingrad camp was already evacuated on March 7, 2015, when 393 migrants were offered alternative accommodation in the city. At the time, a number of migrants said they had missed the buses chartered to take them to the emergency housing, and had returned to their former location.

Over the past three weeks, a growing number of Afghan, Somali, Eritrean and Sudanese migrants had found shelter under the elevated metro tracks in the north of the city.

Νέα σεισμική δόνηση μεγέθους 7,3 βαθμών έπληξε την Ιαπωνία


News of the World
15 σκότωσε ένα ιαπωνικό νέο σεισμό 15 σκότωσε ένα ιαπωνικό νέο σεισμό
Νέα σεισμική δόνηση μεγέθους 7,3 βαθμών της κλίμακας Ρίχτερ Σάββατο, 16 Απρ. περιοχή / Απρίλιο Κιούσου, νοτιοδυτικά της Ιαπωνίας, η ίδια περιοχή πλήττεται από μια ισχυρή γείωση τρόμο την Πέμπτη.
Όπως πολλοί ως 19 άνθρωποι σκοτώθηκαν, και δέχεται πάνω από ένα χιλιάδες ασθενείς για θεραπεία σε ιατρικές εγκαταστάσεις. Σύμφωνα με το σεισμό στην Ιαπωνία Μετεωρολογική Υπηρεσία συνέβη περίπου μία ώρα και είκοσι - . Πέμπτο λεπτό το πρωί του Σαββάτου φορά την Ιαπωνία έχουν καταχωρηθεί στο Νομό Κουμαμότο ανακινείται ζωηρά «έξι συν" κλίμακα των ιαπωνικών σεισμούς που κυμαίνονται από το μηδέν σε επτά, και οι μετασεισμοί που συνεχίζονται.




Το μόνο εργοστάσιο πυρηνικής ενέργειας είναι σήμερα λειτουργούν στην Ιαπωνία , που βρίσκεται στο Kyushu, δήλωσαν αξιωματούχοι των δύο πυρηνικών αντιδραστήρων εκεί ήταν λειτουργεί κανονικά. Αυτό έχει εκτοπίσει περίπου 69.000 ανθρώπων από τα σπίτια τους στο Νομό Kumamoto. Η περιοχή είναι βιώνει μια διαταραχή των πολλών βασικών δημοσίων υπηρεσιών, όπου ο ίδιος παρέμεινε σχεδόν 160 χιλιάδες σπίτια χωρίς παροχή ηλεκτρικού ρεύματος και φυσικού αερίου ήταν διαταράσσεται σε ορισμένες περιοχές της επαρχίας επηρεάζονται.


Παρασκευή 15 Απριλίου 2016

Scientists Discover ‘Cloud’ of Swarming Crabs off Panama Coast

Scientists Discover ‘Cloud’ of Swarming Crabs off Panama Coast


Scientists Discover ‘Cloud’ of Swarming Crabs off Panama Coast
Image: WHOI/Vimeo
Descending in a submersible in waters off Panama, scientists noticed something strange happening near the seafloor. It was a drifting fog of sediment, disturbed by something below. Diving deeper, the scientists found the cause: crabs, thousands of them, swarming in a way never before recorded.
“We just saw this cloud but had no idea what was causing it,” said Jesús Pineda, a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the lead author of a paper on the crabs published on Tuesday.
“At first, we thought they were biogenic rocks or structures. Once we saw them moving, swarming like insects, we couldn’t believe it.
“Nothing like this has ever been seen, where we have this very dense swarm at the bottom,” Pineda said. “We have no idea why they might be doing this.”
Video Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Scientists think they’ve solved the mystery of how volcanic lightning forms




Night sky lights up as Chile's Calbuco erupts

Play Video0:52
Lightning flashed and the sky over Chile's erupting volcano Calbuco glowed orange overnight, as it spewed smoke and ash into the air. (Reuters)
Lightning in volcanic eruptions has been somewhat of a mystery until now. It’s not that scientists don’t know how lightning forms — charge separation! — but they didn’t understand how it happens in volcanoes to produce such stunning eruptions of lava, ash and electricity.
It didn’t help that volcanic lightning is difficult to study. You have to be there to observe the eruptions, which don’t typically run on a regular schedule. Also, lightning usually only happens in the most intense eruptions, and it is often confined to the very beginning.
But two studies published recently in the Earth science journal Geophysical Research Letters help to illuminate the lightning mystery.
Lightning in volcanic eruptions is caused by the same reason it occurs in thunderstorms — negative and positive charges separate in the atmosphere, and the strike of lightning restores the charges to balance. In thunderstorms, ice crystals are the particles that electrified. But why the charge separation occurs in volcanic eruptions has been, up until now, not well-understood.
There were a few theories, one of which suggested that the ash ejected from the volcano already carries a certain charge, which then interacts with and separates from the charges in the atmosphere. That’s not what these studies found. It turns out volcanic lightning seems to be generated by at least two different physical processes.
One study — led by Alexa Van Eaton, a volcanologist at the U.S. Geological Survey Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash. — analyzed lightning strokes during the April 2015 eruption of the Calbuco volcano in Chile. The World Wide Lightning Location network, composed of over 50 lightning sensors around the globe, detected thousands of lightning strikes during the massive eruption that attracted worldwide attention.
Van Eaton and her team compared the lightning strikes with the movements of the ash cloud as it was blown downwind. They found that as the very high cloud wafted away, so did the lightning. This strongly suggests that in the case of very large and intense eruptions, ice crystals are at play in the formation of lightning, just as they are in thunderstorms.
How did they know that it wasn’t the ash particles that were creating the charge? “The lightning basically decoupled from all the other ash particles that were falling to the ground,” Van Eaten told the American Geophysical Union. “Instead, they seem to follow the ice crystals that stayed high in the atmosphere.”
Van Eaten’s team also found the presence of lightning very low to the ground, as ash and gas flowed away from the caldera. This suggests that ice isn’t always the cause of volcanic lightning and that ash can create a similar charge.
In another study, scientists recorded video of volcanic lightning in eruptions of Sakurajima, a highly active volcano on the island of Kyushu in Japan, and analysed the video against infrasound and electromagnetic field measurements. They found that during an explosion, particles of ash and debris rub up against each other, which creates a build-up of electrical charge.
Corrado Cimarelli, a volcanologist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and lead author of the study, concluded that electrical charges are fundamental to eruptions. “Where there is ash violently ejected in the atmosphere, there will be electrical discharges, independent of the magnitude of the eruption,” he told the American Geophysical Union.

Japan earthquake: tens of thousands flee in fear of aftershocks and volcanoes





At least 44,000 people evacuated following 6.4-magnitude quake that killed at least nine





Moment earthquake hits Japan

Richard Smart in Tokyo

Friday 15 April 2016 11.37 BST




Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from earthquake-hit southern Japan as dozens of aftershocks struck and officials monitored nearby volcanoes for signs of activity.



At least nine dead as houses collapse in Japanese earthquake

Read more

A total of 44,000 people were evacuated late on Thursday in the town of Mashiki after amagnitude-6.4 earthquake collapsed buildings and damaged other infrastructure. Nine people have been confirmed dead, ranging in age from 29 to 94. A further eight are in serious condition, and more than 850 were injured.

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) has warned there are likely to be strong aftershocks for the next week and advised people to stay away from any buildings that look unstable.

There are also concerns about volcanic activity in the wake of the quake. The island of Kyushu, where the earthquake happened, is a highly volcanic area. A level 2 warning – meaning people should not approach a volcano’s crater – has been in place for Asosan in Kumamoto prefecture on the island since November 2015.

Rescuers dramatically pulled an eight-month old baby girl from a collapsed house in Mashiki early on Friday. Video footage provided by the National Police Agency showed the baby gently carried away in a blanket by helmeted rescuers from the rubble of the home.

The girl whose name has not been released, reportedly did not suffer any injuries. Her mother, grandfather, grandmother, and older brother were in the living room and kitchen of the home as she slept in another room on the first floor when the quake shook the southern island of Kyushu.

The family members, who all managed to escape, tried to rescue the baby but the house collapsed.
A baby is carried away by rescue workers in Mashiki town. Photograph: HANDOUT/Reuters

The town, in Kumamoto prefecture, was the hardest hit by the quake and suffered eight of the nine deaths.

Head teacher Sosuke Tanaka hosted about 300 people at West Hiroyasu elementary school, which was turned into an evacuation centre, and said many in Kumamoto suffered a sleepless night. “We saw earthquakes through the evening, so many did not manage to get a proper night’s rest,” he said. About 120 aftershocks have been observed since the initial earthquake, more than 15 of which measured 3 or higher on the Japanese intensity scale.
A local resident rests with a pet dog at an evacuation centre after an earthquake in Mashiki town. Photograph: Kyodo/Reuters

At the Mashiki gymnastics centre, Yoko Marume said more and more people have been evacuating since the earthquake. “We had about 200 overnight, but now, I would say there are about 500,” she told the Guardian. “People have been gathering here from across the city, it’s a big space. Most are shaken, many believe that their houses could fall down.”

Junko Seto, an 80-year-old woman, told the Asahi Shimbun: “My husband returned to our house to see how things looked, and he says there isn’t room to stand because of the mess caused.”

“I want to go home and get things in order, but with the aftershocks I am too scared to go home yet.”

Japan’s Self Defense Forces have entered Hiroyasu, in a mountainous region of Kumamoto prefecture, to inspect the damage caused to roads and housing by the earthquake. “There has been significant damage to wooden housing around here,” Tanaka told the Guardian.
The stonewall of Kumamoto Castle is damaged by a magnitude-6.5 earthquake in Kumamoto city. Photograph: Yusuke Ogata/AP

Rations of bread and water were distributed to evacuees in the early hours of Friday. Marume said lunch boxes had arrived for evacuees at the gymnastics centre.

The initial temblor measured a maximum 7 on the Japanese intensity scale, equivalent to the force of the 1995 Kobe disaster and the March 11, 2011, earthquake in east Japan. So far, however, the damage caused in Kyushu seems low in comparison.

A spokeswoman for the JMA said: “We are watching closely, but we have seen no change in Asosan or other volcanoes since the earthquake.”

Sakurajima, in neighbouring Kagoshima prefecture, erupted in February.

Inflatable space stations could orbit the Earth by 2020


Bigelow Aerospace believes its inflatable habitat can democratize space.



 


The latest SpaceX launch ferried not just supplies for the ISS, but also aninflatable module designed to add a small living room on the space station. That module was made by Bigelow Aerospace, which has just announcedthat it teamed up with United Launch Alliance to send its much, much bigger inflatable stations called B330 to Low Earth Orbit. One B330 can add a 330-cubic-meter (or 12,000-cubic-foot) living space to the ISS -- that's 30 percent of its total size, whereas the model that piggybacked on Falcon 9 can only expand the station by five percent.

In order to fit inside an Atlas V rocket, a B330 will be folded when it takes off from Earth. Even then, the Atlas V is the only rocket with a big enough payload compartment to accommodate one. That likely played a huge part in Bigelow's decision to strike a deal with ULA.
Besides expanding the ISS, several B330s can be linked together to form an independent space station, as well. The companies can then rent them out to private corporations and institutions that want to perform non-government scientific research in microgravity. They also think that some companies like Disney could turn them into exciting and (quite literally) out of this world tourist destinations.
If NASA agrees to test the B330 on the ISS like it agreed to test out its smaller predecessor for the next two years, then it will be financing the first module's launch. Either way, the duo aims to send the first of the two inflatable habitats they're planning to space sometime in 2020.

Συνελήφθησαν στις 8 Απριλίου στην Κωνσταντινούπολη οι δύο Ρώσοι πράκτορες που φέρονται να δολοφόνησαν τον Τσετσένο Abdulvakhid Edelgireye την 1η Νοεμβρίου 2015.

Two ‘Russian spies’ caught in Istanbul

ISTANBUL


Two Russian “spies” alleged to be involved in the killing of Chechen militant Abdulvakhid Edelgireyev in Turkey were caught in a joint operation that took six months to prepare by the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) and police on April 8 in Istanbul, a report has claimed.

The alleged spies, 52-year-old Iurii Anisimov and 55-year-old Aleksandr Smirnov, were caught while they were doing intelligence work for another plot, daily Habertürk reported. The alleged spies, who refused to talk during interrogations, have been arrested.

According to reports, Edelgireyev was approached by a white car, and was then shot and stabbed by assassins in a car on Nov. 1, 2015, in the Kayaşehir district of Istanbul. 

Police operations revealed that the car used was rented 20 days before the assassination by Russian citizen Aleksandr Nasyrov, who arrived in Istanbul on Sep. 11, 2015. 

Nasyrov rented two cars every other day between Sep. 11 and Sept. 16, 2015, while in Turkey. The cars were then left in a parking lot in the western province of Yalova.

Nasyrov stayed alone in a hotel in Istanbul and left Turkey on Sep. 16, 2015, from Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport. 

According to the report, the police tracked Nasyrov’s movements in Turkey and found Anisimov and Smirnov had stayed in a hotel in Yalova in separate rooms between Sep. 11 and 13, 2015. 

They then travelled to Istanbul from Yalova and stayed in two separate hotels in Istanbul’s touristic Sultanahmet district between Sep. 14 and 16, 2015.  Nasyrov then met Smirnov and Anisimov close to their hotels. 

No press statement was released after the investigation into the Russians. 

The suspects arrived in Istanbul once again on April 4 and went to Yalova via car. Police caught the duo upon their return to Istanbul from Yalova, according to Habertürk reports.

Investigations revealed that both had reentered Turkey using fake passports. Fake Interpol IDs, a number of photos of Russian state officials, a USB memory stick, five cell phones with numbers and PIN/PUK information glued to them and U.S. dollars with consecutive serial numbers were found on the spies.  

According to initial information obtained from the USB, the suspects took photos of parking areas, license plates, security cameras, hotel rooms and obscure parts of the rooms. 

The alleged spies tracked the movement of security cameras for a day and took photos of the camera’s positions on an hourly basis.  



Τετάρτη 13 Απριλίου 2016

US Navy Unveils Sea Hunter, an Autonomous Submarine Hunter

US Navy Unveils Sea Hunter, an Autonomous Submarine Hunter


US Navy Unveils Sea Hunter, an Autonomous Submarine Hunter
Image: DarpaTV/YouTube
This week, the US military christened an experimental, autonomous warship that can operate for months at a time without a crew. The newly-named Sea Hunter was developed by research agency DARPA as part of its ACTUV program — a rather unwieldily acronym that stands for Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel. The 132-foot vessel is powered by diesel engines and is designed to operate without even human remote control.
The unarmed ship was originally conceived as submarine-hunter, but military planners say it’s emerged as a flexible platform that could fulfill many roles. “What we’ve kind of realized over the course of the program is that it’s a truck,” ACTUV manager Scott Littlefield told IEEE Spectrum“It’s got lots of payload capacity for a variety of different missions.”
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Photo: DARPA
Today is christening day for DARPA’s Sea Hunter, a full-scale prototype of an autonomous surface vessel that’s designed to be able to launch from a pier and go out on its own for weeks or months at a time, for thousands of miles at a stretch.
The 132-foot-long, diesel-powered vessel was built by U.S. defense contractorLeidos under DARPA’s ACTUV program, a somewhat clunky nested acronym that stands for Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel.
The ship, now a joint project with the U.S. Office of Naval Research, was originally conceived as a tracker of stealthy diesel-electric submarines, but it’s a flexible platform. “What we’ve kind of realized over the course of the program is that it’s a truck,” program manager Scott Littlefield tells IEEE Spectrum. “It’s got lots of payload capacity for a variety of different missions.”
Unmanned ships are nothing new. They can, for example, be launched far from shore off a larger vessel and controlled remotely by a human operator. But this arrangement places constraints on the size of such a ship, and its range as well, since it can only carry so much fuel.
ACTUV explores what can be done with a stand-alone vessel, one that could launch from a pier. Launching in this way frees up the size and range constraints on the ship. But it also raises the rather undesirable prospect of trying to remotely operate a ship thousands of miles away via satellite. “You really don’t want that to be a remote-controlled vessel,” says Littlefield. “You want it to be fairly autonomous so that it can do things like obstacle avoidance on its own without being joysticked around by a person.”
Building that autonomy, Littlefield says, “was probably the most difficult technical challenge from a DARPA perspective.” To cross the seas the ship must adhere to the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, a set of rules that govern, among other things, when a vessel has the right of way and should stay the course and when it is supposed to “give way,” maneuvering itself to avoid a collision with another ship.
Since the maneuver has to be detectable by the operator of the other vessel, it can’t be too subtle. “Course changes are preferred to speed changes because they’re more observable,” Littlefield explains. So is one big change as opposed to a series of smaller ones: drama over precision, you might say. “To some degree you want to make the maneuvers appear as though they’ve been made by a human operator,” he says. “That’s what other people are going to expect to see.” Dauntingly optimized traffic situations, like this vision of a future intersection where all the cars are autonomous, will have to wait.
Some of ACTUV’s autonomous testing has already been done over the last two years or so using a “surrogate”—a 40-foot work boat based on the U.S. Gulf Coast that has the same software and above-water sensors. That ship, with human monitoring, made an autonomous voyage from Gulfport, Miss., to nearby Biloxi. Although it was a short distance, Littlefield says the waterway is fairly congested and so a good test.
Sea Hunter, which is currently in Portland, Ore., will soon be shipped south to San Diego, Calif. When it arrives in May, Littlefield says, engineers will be ramping up testing of its autonomous functions. The vessel is slated for two years of testing in San Diego, he says. During that time, DARPA will hand the vessel off to the Office of Naval Research.
Sea Hunter uses radar and an automatic ship identification system to keep track of its surroundings. The ACTUV research team is also exploring using cameras to help with visual classification of vessels, since rules vary with vessel type.
Here’s a video of a very clean-looking Sea Hunter during its launch in January and a subsequent speed test.