Telegraph – The Ministry of Defence will destroy all future UFO reports it receives so it does not have to make them public, a previously secret memo discloses. Britain’s official UFO investigation unit and hotline were closed down at the start of December. Since then reports of strange sights in the skies sent to the MoD have been kept for 30 days before being thrown out, the newly released policy document shows. This stance was adopted so defence officials would not have to publish the information in response to freedom of information (FoI) requests or pass it to the National Archives. Read article
Ed – One could be forgiven for thinking this is just lazy public servants not wanting to have to deal with FOI requests. But if that were the case, why bother creating any paperwork in the first place?
BBC – Thousands of UFOs have been spotted in the last 20 years around the UK, according to newly released documents. More than 6,000 pages of reports describe people’s experiences with unidentified flying objects between 1994 and 2000. Read article
Daily Mail - Police have been handed ‘Chinese-style’ powers to enter private homes and seize political posters during the London 2012 Olympics.Little-noticed measures passed by the Government will allow officers and Olympics officials to enter homes and shops near official venues to confiscate any protest material.Breaking the rules could land offenders with a fine of up to £20,000.Civil liberties groups compared the powers to those used by the Communist Chinese government to stop political protest during the 2008 Beijing Games. Read Article
The Times – Forensic accountants are investigating irregularities at the London Development Agency after discovering a £100 million hole in its 2012 Olympics accounts, The Times has learnt.A team from KPMG has been called in to find the source of the discrepancy, which was unearthed during a routine audit. Read Article
Reuters – Russia is ready to dramatically cut its nuclear stockpiles in a new arms pact with the United States if Washington meets Russia’s concerns over missile defense, President Dmitry Medvedev said on Saturday. “We are ready to reduce by several times the number of nuclear delivery vehicles compared with the START-1 pact,” he told a news conference in Amsterdam. “As far as warheads are concerned, their numbers should be lower than envisaged by the Moscow 2002 pact,” he added. He was referring to an interim pact called the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) which commits the sides to further cuts in their arsenals to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads by 2012. Read Article
New Scientist – Ocean currents push floating rafts, plastic trash, and warm air around the planet – now the Earth’s magnetic field can also be added to the list, according to a controversial new hypothesis.Physicist Gregory Ryskin of Northwestern University has proposed that the oceans’ currents are responsible for the slow wandering of the magnetic poles.The hypothesis has provoked a strong reaction among geophysicists, with one that New Scientist spoke to labelling it “garbage”. Most agree that the magnetic field is generated by movements of the molten iron that makes up Earth’s outer core. However Ryskin says his idea that ocean movements may affect the field is worth investigating.Oceans could drag the field along global currents, and they could also generate their own weak magnetic field, he says. Read Article
Reuters – An ancient burial pit containing 45 severed skulls, that could be a mass war grave dating back to Roman times, has been found under a road being built for the 2012 British Olympics.Archaeologists, who have only just begun excavating the site, say they do not yet know who the bones might belong to.”We think that these dismembered bodies are likely to be native Iron Age Britons. The question is — how did they die and who killed them,” said dig head, David Score, of Oxford Archaeology. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Teenagers will be awarded the equivalent of a GCSE in “thinking” under new plans. They will be taught the difference between an argument and a rant and how to separate fact from opinion, it was disclosed. Topics covered in the new course – drawn up by one of Britain’s biggest exam boards – will include debate over the existence of UFOs, a belief in the after life and arguments for and against euthanasia. Read Article
The Historian – Doublespeak for creating thought-crime of thinking outside the box?
The Times – BRITISH police are studying Chinese-style surveillance tactics as they prepare security for the 2012 London Olympics, a leaked Scotland Yard report has revealed. The report, marked “restricted”, reveals that among the “Big Brother” tactics deployed at last summer’s Beijing Games was the installation of miniature microphones in thousands of taxis. The bugs transmitted passengers’ conversations to a police control room. There, officers could activate disabling devices to stop the cabs if they suspected criminal activity. In another operation, athletes, visitors and journalists were believed to have been tracked by tiny microchips on their tickets and passes. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – A number of people claim to have seen UFOs in Cambridgeshire after dazzling orange lights flashed across the night sky. Witnesses claimed to have seen up to 50 of the mystery bright beams at around 11.30pm in Huntingdon. Scott Boswell, 37, a former pilot and soldier from nearby Hinchingbrooke, captured some of the lights on his camera. Read Article
NASA – An international panel of experts led by NOAA and sponsored by NASA has released a new prediction for the next solar cycle. Solar Cycle 24 will peak, they say, in May 2013 with a below-average number of sunspots. “If our prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 24 will have a peak sunspot number of 90, the lowest of any cycle since 1928 when Solar Cycle 16 peaked at 78,” says panel chairman Doug Biesecker of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. It is tempting to describe such a cycle as “weak” or “mild,” but that could give the wrong impression.”Even a below-average cycle is capable of producing severe space weather,” points out Biesecker. “The great geomagnetic storm of 1859, for instance, occurred during a solar cycle of about the same size we’re predicting for 2013.” Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Alien life does exist but the truth is being covered up by the United States government, former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell has claimed. Mr Mitchell, who was part of the 1971 Apollo 14 moon mission, made the claims in a talk to the fifth annual X-Conference – a meeting of those who believe in UFOs and other life forms. He also said he had attempted to investigate the 1947 ‘Roswell Incident’, which some believe was the crash-landing of a UFO, but had been thwarted by military authorities. Read Article
LA Times – Area 51. It’s the most famous military institution in the world that doesn’t officially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada’s high desert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear testing ground. Then again, maybe not— the U.S. government refuses to say. You can’t drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restricted—all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those that have been declassified for decades. Read Article
Seattle Examiner – Long scorned as “mysticism” and “parascience,” concern about the year 2012 has now surfaced in a mainstream NASA report on the potential impacts on human society of solar flares anticipated to peak in 2012. The Obama administration and other national governments are not aggressively focused on contingency preparations for the 2012 solar flare impacts, or on introducing available anti-gravitic, new energy sources that would transform centralized high-power electrical grid systems into de-centralized, anti-gravitic and quantum process energy sources. These new energy sources are less vulnerable to destructive solar storms, have no negative environmental impact, and could unleash unprecedented economic and social transformation. Read Article
New Scientist – IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power. A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun. It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Declassified government files have revealed how Ministry of Defence (MoD) officials launched a top-level probe into a diamond shaped aircraft seen hovering above a Scottish village. Read Article
AP – EU and Nato help should be called upon to boost security at the London 2012 Olympics, an influential group of peers has said. Lord Jopling, chairman of the European Union committee, urged the Government to begin talks with the EU Monitoring and Information Centre (MIC) civil protection unit “as a matter of urgency”, and expressed “surprise” that this has not already been taken in hand. “It is increasingly clear that the 2012 Olympics could be a prime target for terrorists and it is vital the Government takes every possible step to ensure other EU member states are fully prepared to assist the UK in the case of a potential attack,” he said. Read Article
The Historian – Expect a further dramatic erosion of Britain’s civil liberties “just to make sure”
New Scientist – NASA’s Phoenix lander may have captured the first images of liquid water on Mars – droplets that apparently splashed onto the spacecraft’s leg during landing, according to some members of the Phoenix team. The controversial observation could be explained by the mission’s previous discovery of perchlorate salts in the soil, since the salts can keep water liquid at sub-zero temperatures. Read Article
Latin American Herald Tribune – General Motors plans to invest $1 billion in Brazil to avoid the kind of problems the U.S. automaker is facing in its home market, said the beleaguered car maker. According to the president of GM Brazil-Mercosur, Jaime Ardila, the funding will come from the package of financial aid that the manufacturer will receive from the U.S. government and will be used to “complete the renovation of the line of products up to 2012.” Read Article
The Guardian – What if the doomsayers are right … what if society, as we know it, really is about to collapse? Do you have what it takes to make it in a world without electricity and running water? Tanya Gold offers an essential survival guide Read Article
The Examiner – Evidence that U.S. space agency NASA has defrauded U.S. taxpayers for billions of dollars could scrap NASA’s case against UK hacker Gary McKinnon. Credible witnesses have claimed that NASA has altered or destroyed its photos containing images of UFOs. This could become a legal and public relations nightmare for NASA. Read Article
New Scientist – Methane gas in the Martian atmosphere is concentrated in three specific regions, according to the most sensitive measurements yet made. The discovery will likely stoke further debate on the source of the gas, which could be created through geological processes but might be tantalising evidence of life below the Martian surface. Read Article
Sky News – A human rights group has warned an advanced CCTV surveillance system being developed for the London 2012 Olympics would not be legal. The DYVINE system would allow a central police control room to remotely tap-in to any CCTV network in London and plot the information on a detailed 3D map. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – UK
Deposits of carbonate, formed in neutral or alkaline water, were spotted by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
“Obviously this is very exciting,” said John Mustard of Brown University in Rhode Island. “It’s white – it’s a bulbous, crusty material.”
Carbonate is formed when water and carbon dioxide mix with calcium, iron or magnesium. It dissolves quickly in acid, so its discovery counters the theory that all water on Mars was at one time acidic.
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