The Military Built Another Multimillion-Dollar Building in Afghanistan That No One Used
July 20th, 2015Via: ProPublica:
Unlike many buildings commissioned by the U.S. in Afghanistan, the new military warehouse facility in Kandahar was well built, an inspector general investigation concluded.
There was, however, one glaring problem: no one was around to use the gleaming, $14.7 million complex. The four warehouses and an administration building were empty, because the intended occupants, the Defense Logistics Agency, had already ended their mission in Kandahar.
The Army had decided to send DLA home in August 2013, six months before the warehouses were completed. The project, however, “continued uninterrupted,” without any attempts to reevaluate or downsize it, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR. Instead, the military added $400,000 of modifications to the buildings — knowing DLA would never use it, SIGAR wrote in a report released today.
In the end, the facility finished two years behind schedule and cost $1.2 million more than anticipated.
As combat operations in Afghanistan concluded in 2014, a familiar pattern emerged with the military’s construction projects: They were routinely over budget, past deadline and often never used.
Stephen Hawking and Russian Billionaire Start $100 Million Search for Aliens
July 20th, 2015Hmm. This is Hawking back in 2010:
In a new Discovery Channel documentary, which premiered Sunday night, British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said that communicating with aliens could be a threat to Earth.
Hawking said it is likely that alien life exists, but a visit from extraterrestrials might be similar to Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas.
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”
And now…
Via: Breakthrough Initiatives:
Yuri Milner was joined at The Royal Society today by Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Frank Drake, Geoff Marcy, Pete Worden and Ann Druyan to announce the unprecedented $100 million global Breakthrough Initiatives to reinvigorate the search for life in the universe.
The first of two initiatives announced today, Breakthrough Listen, will be the most powerful, comprehensive and intensive scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. The second, Breakthrough Message, will fund an international competition to generate messages representing humanity and planet Earth, which might one day be sent to other civilizations.
Pension Funds Burn Cities as $1 Trillion Shortfall Set to Grow
July 19th, 2015Via: Bloomberg:
The cost to American cities for their cash-strapped pension funds is starting to look a lot worse, and it’s not because the stock-market rally may be losing steam.
Houston was warned by Moody’s Investors Service this month that it may be downgraded because of mounting retirement bills, the latest municipality put on notice as the company ignores bookkeeping gimmicks that let cities mask the size of their debt for years. The approach foreshadows accounting rules for even top-rated issuers that are poised to cause pension shortfalls to swell as new financial reports are released.
“If you’re AAA or AA rated and you’ve got significant and visible unfunded pension obligations, you’ve only got one direction to go in terms of rating, and that’s potentially down,” said Jeff Lipton, head of municipal research in New York at Oppenheimer & Co. “It’s the presentation on the balance sheet that is now going to drive urgency.”
Cities that shortchanged pensions for years are under growing pressure to boost their contributions, even after windfalls from a stock market that’s tripled since early 2009. Janney Montgomery Scott has said growing retirement costs are “the largest cloud overhanging” the $3.6 trillion municipal-bond market, where investors are demanding higher yields from borrowers under the greatest strain.
Detroit-Area Doctor Sentenced for Widespread Cancer Treatment Fraud
July 15th, 2015Via: The Detroit News:
U.S. District Judge Paul Borman on Friday called Fata’s crimes “horrific and unprecedented” before sentencing him for the complex, far-reaching conspiracy aimed at defrauding Medicare and Blue Cross Blue Shield of $34 million by prescribing unnecessary treatments. Fata, 50, is ineligible for parole.
Fata’s conspiracy ensnared several hundred patients across Metro Detroit. He was accused of giving cancer patients overly aggressive doses of chemotherapy while treating others with the powerful drug for cancers they did not have.
Nearly One-Third Of 847,000 Veterans In Backlog For VA Health Care Already Died
July 15th, 2015Via: Huffington Post:
More than 238,000 of the 847,000 veterans in the pending backlog for health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs have already died, according to an internal VA document provided to The Huffington Post.
NASA’s Three-Billion-Mile Journey to Pluto Reaches Historic Encounter
July 14th, 2015Via: NASA:
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is at Pluto.
After a decade-long journey through our solar system, New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto Tuesday, about 7,750 miles above the surface — roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India – making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth.
Son of Boston Police Captain Arrested as Possible Terrorist
July 14th, 2015Via: ABC:
The estranged son of a respected Boston police captain was arrested July 4 by FBI agents as part of a counter-terrorism operation against alleged ISIS-inspired domestic terrorists, federal officials told ABC News today.
Alexander Ciccolo, 23, of Adams, Mass., was taken into custody on gun charges after buying two pistols and two rifles from an undercover FBI confidential informant, federal officials said. In a search of his apartment, officials reported they found it loaded with possible bomb-making equipment including a pressure cooker, a variety of chemicals, an alarm clock, along with “attack planning papers” and “jihad” paperwork. FBI agents said he used the name Abu Ali al-Amriki and neighbors said he was a recent convert to Islam.
London Is Now the Global Money-Laundering Centre for the Drug Trade, Says Crime Expert
July 13th, 2015Via: Independent:
The City of London is the money-laundering centre of the world’s drug trade, according to an internationally acclaimed crime expert.
UK banks and financial services have ignored so-called “know your customer” rules designed to curb criminals’ abilities to launder the proceeds of crime, Roberto Saviano warned. Mr Saviano, author of the international bestseller Gomorrah, which exposed the workings of the Neapolitan crime organisation Camorra, said: “The British treat it as not their problem because there aren’t corpses on the street.”
His warning follows a National Crime Agency (NCA) threat assessment which stated: “We assess that hundreds of billions of US dollars of criminal money almost certainly continue to be laundered through UK banks, including their subsidiaries, each year.”
Research Credit: Jb
Boeing Patents Laser-Powered Fusion-Fission Jet Engine for Airplanes, Spacecraft
July 13th, 2015Via: Ars Technica:
Assume the brace position. Boeing has received a patent for, I kid you not, a laser-powered fusion-fission jet propulsion system. Boeing envisions that this system could replace both rocket and turbofan engines, powering everything from spacecraft to missiles to airplanes.
The patent, US 9,068,562, combines inertial confinement fusion, fission, and a turbine that generates electricity. It sounds completely crazy—and it is completely unrealistic given our current mastery of fusion, or lack thereof—but, in the future perhaps, this could be a rather ingenious solution.
To begin with, imagine the silhouette of a big turbofan engine, like you’d see on a commercial jetliner. Somewhere in the middle of the engine there is a fusion chamber, with a number of very strong lasers focused on a single point. A hohlraum (pellet) containing a mix of deuterium and tritium (hydrogen isotopes) is placed at this focal point. The lasers are all turned on at the same instant, creating massive pressure on the pellet, which implodes and causes the hydrogen atoms to fuse. (This is called inertial confinement fusion, as opposed to the magnetic confinement fusion that is carried out in a tokamak.)
According to the patent, the hot gases produced by the fusion are pushed out of a nozzle at the back of the engine, creating thrust. But that’s not all! One of the by-products of hydrogen fusion is lots of fast neutrons. In Boeing’s patented design, there is a shield around the fusion chamber that’s coated with a fissionable material (uranium-238 is one example given). The neutrons hit the fissionable material, causing a fission reaction that generates lots of heat.
Finally, there’s some kind of heat exchanger system that takes the heat from the fission reaction, and uses that heat (via a heated liquid or gas) to drive a turbine. This turbine generates the electricity that powers the lasers. Voilà: a fusion-fission rocket engine thing.
New Zealand: “HPV Vaccine Has Done This to My Child”
July 12th, 2015Via: Youtube / Amber Smith:
This was a very hard video to post, my 12 yr old daughter was fine before her vaccine, now this is her life. We live in New Zealand and I thought our healthcare system was ok, we have been left to deal with this ourselves. I’m showing this because I want people to know what damage this vaccine can and does cause. Please research before deciding. I didn’t.
Related: European Union medicines agency investigating reports of rare but severe reactions
