News Stories

[ganbaru]

Snowden downloaded NSA secrets while working for Dell, sources say
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...97E17P20130815

One in 10 Americans have taken drugs prescribed for others: poll
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...97E06220130815

[KiraYamatoFan]

Originally Posted by GreyZone

The "old wounds" seem to be a huge issue in the far east... this seems like an up to eleven version of the whole "Dot Pixis from the shingeki no kyojin anime/ manga is based on a Japanease General from the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War and Koreans send death threats to the Manga author"

Corrected.

Please don't miswrite and misquote anything that could invite an unwanted flame war here. And seriously, that character from Attack on Titan rather reminds me of actor Armin Mueller-Stahl when he portrayed Col. Dimitri Vertikoff in The Peacemaker (1997).

[Sumeragi]

Originally Posted by Ledgem

Yeah, ArchmageXin. Outsiders should just leave themselves out of issues they have no understanding of

Edit: since this might be a bit obtuse, I'll clarify that this message was a slight against ArchmageXin's position as well as Sumeragi's stance of trying to stop conversation by telling people they don't know anything. Please continue to write about things you don't know about, otherwise we'd have no discussion and we wouldn't get any exchanges of ideas and information. Thanks.

The message behind my post was: Do the basic research before trying to argue something based on "universal values" which are actually being abused to justify highly political moves which trample on those "universal values".

[maplehurry]

Top Israeli official “sick” of commemorating Hiroshima, Nagasaki A-bomb victims.

[ganbaru]

Under fire, U.S. spy agency defends surveillance programs as lawful
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...97G00520130817

Virus targets the social network in new fraud twist
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...97F0XD20130816

[AnimeFan188]

Originally Posted by ganbaru

Under fire, U.S. spy agency defends surveillance programs as lawful
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...97G00520130817

NSA reportedly broke privacy rules thousands of times:

"The National Security Agency has overstepped its authority and broken privacy
rules thousands of times every year since being given new surveillance powers by
Congress in 2008, The Washington Post reported, citing an internal audit and other
secret documents."

See:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013...lar+Content%29

[NoemiChan]

Originally Posted by AnimeFan188

NSA reportedly broke privacy rules thousands of times:

"The National Security Agency has overstepped its authority and broken privacy
rules thousands of times every year since being given new surveillance powers by
Congress in 2008, The Washington Post reported, citing an internal audit and other
secret documents."

See:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013...lar+Content%29

It only means they're humans after all.... Human, born to make mistakes... love that song....

[Tom Bombadil]

[ganbaru]

Muslim Brotherhood faces ban as Egypt rulers pile on pressure
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...97C09A20130817

Analysis: Under fire, Venezuela's Maduro vows new graft crackdown
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...97E02U20130815

[SaintessHeart]

CIA acknowledges its mysterious Area 51 test site for first time

REUTERS - National security scholars at George Washington University have some good news and bad news for UFO buffs - the U.S. government has finally confirmed the existence of Area 51 in Nevada, but it makes no mention of little green men or alien spaceships.

The government acknowledged the existence of the mysterious aviation test site known as Area 51, a remote installation about 80 miles (130 km) northwest of Las Vegas, in a newly declassified CIA history of its U-2 spy plane program.

After decades of extreme secrecy surrounding the site, stoking conspiracy theories about UFOs and experiments on alien spacecraft, the CIA lifted its veil on Area 51 in response to a public records request from George Washington University scholars in Washington, D.C.

Publicly released online on Thursday by the university's National Security Archive, the 400-page CIA history contains the first deliberate official references to Area 51, also known as Groom Lake, as a site developed by the intelligence agency in the 1950s to test fly the high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane.

Other top-secret aircraft were tested there later, including the supersonic reconnaissance A-12 aircraft, code-named OXCART, and the F-117 stealth ground-attack jet, said archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson, who asked for the CIA's U-2 history in 2005.

A newly revised document restoring numerous references to Area 51 that had been redacted in earlier versions was furnished by the CIA a few weeks ago, he said.

"It's the first time that there must have been a senior-level decision to acknowledge the term 'Area 51' and its specific location," he told Reuters on Friday.

Chapter 2 of the CIA history recounts how Richard Bissell, the CIA officer then overseeing development of the U-2 plane by Lockheed, first spotted the site on an aerial scouting mission over Nevada in April 1955, accompanied by an Air Force officer and two others.

The four men landed their plane near an old, abandoned air strip at the edge of a salt flat known as Groom Lake near the northeastern corner of the Nevada Test Site, the nuclear proving ground then controlled by the Atomic Energy Commission.

IDEAL TEST SITE

The group agreed that Groom Lake would "make an ideal site for testing the U-2 and training its pilots." Bissell subsequently asked the Atomic Energy Commission to add the area to its Nevada real estate holdings, the account says.

"AEC Chairman Admiral Lewis Strauss readily agreed, and President Eisenhower also approved the addition of this strip of wasteland, known by its map designation as Area 51, to the Nevada Test Site," the document says.

To make the barren new facility seem more appealing to its workers, managers of the U-2 program dubbed the facility "Paradise Ranch," which was later shortened to "the Ranch."

Photos of the site and a newly declassified map outlining and labeling the location were also included in the document.

Richelson said he could recall at least two previous government documents in which an incidental reference to Area 51 appeared, but he assumed those were inadvertent because they were devoid of any other details or context.

The multiple detailed references to Area 51 in the latest CIA account - the document's index lists at least 12 mentions - show that they were deliberate, he said.

The intelligence agency had little to say about the disclosure.

"What readers of the CIA study will find is that CIA tests its U-2 and A-12 reconnaissance aircraft at the site in Nevada sometimes referred to as 'Area 51,'" CIA spokesman Edward Price said. "What readers won't find are any references to aliens or other conspiracy theories best left to the realm of science fiction."

Among the more sensational pieces of UFO conspiracy lore linked to Area 51 is that the remains of a flying saucer that supposedly crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, were brought to the site for reverse engineering experiments that attempted to replicate the extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Richelson said the CIA document makes no mention of any such theories. But he pointed to one passage that discusses the relationship between U-2s and unidentified flying objects "in the sense that people sighted U-2s in a time that they were very secretive and at very high altitude and didn't know what they were, and in that sense they were UFOs."

Only 400 pages? Cmon Vexx, stop smoking us. We know that there is 20 times as much info.

What about the plasma rifles? Railguns? Psychics? And the satellite sized version of the laser CIWS the USN is fielding?

[konart]

Originally Posted by Tom Bombadil

>Brave
>stop tank with bare hands
>staying in the line of fire

This is called stupid. Not brave.
And he wasn't shot by a tank, to be accurate.

Btw video is pretty boring. Here you go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCgsh...layer_embedded - all of them were bare handed.

[Tom Bombadil]

Originally Posted by konart

This is called stupid. Not brave.
And he wasn't shot by a tank, to be accurate.

Thank for elaborating my point. This guy will be called stupid and forgotten. The one man he was mimicking will be called a hero in long time to come. So does a man make a hero out of himself, or does someone else makes a hero out of a man?

[Cosmic Eagle]

Originally Posted by Tom Bombadil

Thank for elaborating my point. This guy will be called stupid and forgotten. The one man he was mimicking will be called a hero in long time to come. So does a man make a hero out of himself, or does someone else makes a hero out of a man?

I certainly won't forget...

[maplehurry]

A German envoy has urged Britons not to be too triumphant when they celebrate the centenary of the First World War.

[Badkarma 1]

Rather interestin that the Germans would try to tell the British how to celebrate the 100th anniversary of WW1. When they brought the joy of mustard gas to the battle field.
As for the veiled threat about the UKs standin in the EU, I doubt the Brits are terribly worried about it.

One of the members is Oxford University's Sir Hew Strachan, who says he understands Germany's position, but said the landmark can't all be about "waste and futility."

He added: "A lot of people fought and died thinking it was worthwhile. We need to respect what those motivations were."
I do believe this gentleman said it best. Dale

[Vallen Chaos Valiant]

People stopped using mustard gas not because it is banned, but because it is useless. Countermeasures are easy to implement, and in general people die from the meatgrinder warfare in WWI and not from gas.

[JokerD]

Clean-up begins after Japan volcano eruption

Clean-up workers Monday started removing a layer of grey ash that spread across a city in southern Japan after a volcano erupted at the weekend, spewing a plume 5,000 metres into the air.

Kagoshima city mobilised more than 60 street sweepers as well as water-spraying vehicles to remove ash that coated the streets, officials said.

The eruption of the 1,117-metre (3,665-foot) Mount Sakurajima overlooking the city happened on Sunday afternoon, spewing the highest ash plume from the volcano since an eruption in 2000.

Television footage showed the mushroom-shaped grey plume shooting upwards against the backdrop of a clear blue sky.

A large amount of volcanic ash fell in the northern and central parts of the city, causing a delay in train services and temporary poor visibility, forcing car drivers to use their headlights.

Residents turned to masks and umbrellas to protect themselves against the ash cloud, but there were no reports of injuries or damage, city officials said.

"The volcanic activity had been subdued by Monday morning," a local meteorological agency official said.

"There is no sign of large scale eruptions in the near future, but we have not yet lifted a two-kilometre (1.2-mile) no-go zone just in case."

The eruption also caused a small amount of lava to run down the side of the crater.

It was the highly active volcano's 500th eruption this year. Japan is a seismically active country with regular earthquakes and eruptions from volcanoes that dot the archipelago.

Kagoshima city is about 950 kilometres southwest of Tokyo.

500th eruption !!

[Sumeragi]

Originally Posted by JokerD

500th eruption !!

It's nothing special. Just the regular rhythm of life in Kagoshima.

[Mr Hat and Clogs]

Walking to work, tip your hat/coffee to the volcano when the ground rumbles and wish it a good morning?

[JokerD]

Originally Posted by Mr Hat and Clogs

Walking to work, tip your hat/coffee to the volcano when the ground rumbles and wish it a good morning?

Today being the 231th day of the year means a morning call, a night greeting each day with an occasional extra thrown in for good measure