Americans Are Retiring Later, Dying Sooner and Sicker In-Between
October 23rd, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
The U.S. retirement age is rising, as the government pushes it higher and workers stay in careers longer.
But lifespans aren’t necessarily extending to offer equal time on the beach. Data released last week suggest Americans’ health is declining and millions of middle-age workers face the prospect of shorter, and less active, retirements than their parents enjoyed.
U.S. Preparing to Put Nuclear Bombers Back on 24-Hour Alert
October 23rd, 2017Via: Defense One:
The U.S. Air Force is preparing to put nuclear-armed bombers back on 24-hour ready alert, a status not seen since the Cold War ended in 1991.
That means the long-dormant concrete pads at the ends of this base’s 11,000-foot runway — dubbed the “Christmas tree” for their angular markings — could once again find several B-52s parked on them, laden with nuclear weapons and set to take off at a moment’s notice.
“This is yet one more step in ensuring that we’re prepared,” Gen. David Goldfein, Air Force chief of staff, said in an interview during his six-day tour of Barksdale and other U.S. Air Force bases that support the nuclear mission. “I look at it more as not planning for any specific event, but more for the reality of the global situation we find ourselves in and how we ensure we’re prepared going forward.”
Goldfein and other senior defense officials stressed that the alert order had not been given, but that preparations were under way in anticipation that it might come. That decision would be made by Gen. John Hyten, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, or Gen. Lori Robinson, the head of U.S. Northern Command. STRATCOM is in charge of the military’s nuclear forces and NORTHCOM is in charge of defending North America.
Possibly Related: Air Force Recalling Retired Pilots
Boom Has 76 Pre Orders for Future Supersonic Passenger Jets
October 22nd, 2017Via: TechCrunch:
Boom has a new design for its XB-1 Supersonic Demonstrator jet, the working prototype aircraft it’s creating to prove out its tech before beginning work on building real, commercial supersonic passenger aircraft. The new design was revealed Tuesday at the Paris Air Show, along with new business milestones: Boom has orders for 76 aircraft thus far, across five airline customers.
That’s a lot of orders booked for an aircraft that doesn’t actually exist yet, from a small startup, but you can tell why airlines are excited. Boom’s promise is one of reducing flight time significantly on popular intercontinental business routes, with economics that will roughly match current business-class fares for travelers while offering sustainable economics for airplane operators at the same time.
Insect Ecosystem Collapse
October 22nd, 2017Via: Guardian:
They are multitudinous almost beyond our imagining. They thrive in soil, water, and air; they have triumphed for hundreds of millions of years in every continent bar Antarctica, in every habitat but the ocean. And it is their success – staggering, unparalleled and seemingly endless – which makes all the more alarming the great truth now dawning upon us: insects as a group are in terrible trouble and the remorselessly expanding human enterprise has become too much, even for them.
Does it matter? Oh yes. Most of our fruit crops are insect-pollinated, as are the vast majority of our wild plants
The astonishing report highlighted in the Guardian, that the biomass of flying insects in Germany has dropped by three quarters since 1989, threatening an “ecological Armageddon”, is the starkest warning yet; but it is only the latest in a series of studies which in the last five years have finally brought to public attention the real scale of the problem.
Trump Says He’ll Allow Release of Kennedy Assassination Files
October 21st, 2017My guess is that anything released will support the official narrative, but… Maybe not.
Via: AFP:
US President Donald Trump said Saturday he will allow long blocked secret files on the assassination of John F Kennedy to be opened to the public for the first time.
The November 22, 1963 assassination — an epochal event in modern US history — has spawned multiple theories challenging the official version that Kennedy was killed a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
So the release of all the secret documents has been eagerly anticipated by historians and conspiracy theorists alike.
Trump’s announcement followed reports that not all the files would be released, possibly to protect still relevant intelligence sources and methods.
But Trump appears to have decided otherwise.
“Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened,” he said in a tweet.
The files are due to be opened in their entirety Thursday, nearly 54 years after Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas — unless the US president decides otherwise.
Millions of classified Kennedy files have been made public under a 1992 law passed in response to a surge in public demand for disclosure in the wake of Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-heavy movie on the assassination.
But the law placed a 25-year hold on a small percentage of the files that expires October 26.
Some reports put the number withheld at 3,100. Tens of thousands of files that had been released with portions blacked out are also set to be fully declassified.
Air Force Recalling Retired Pilots
October 21st, 2017Via: USA Today:
President Trump signed an executive order Friday allowing the Air Force to recall as many as 1,000 retired pilots to active duty to address a shortage in combat fliers, the White House and Pentagon announced.
By law, only 25 retired officers can be brought back to serve in any one branch. Trump’s order removes those caps by expanding a state of national emergency declared by President George W. Bush after 9/11, signaling what could be a significant escalation in the 16-year-old global war on terror.
“We anticipate that the Secretary of Defense will delegate the authority to the Secretary of the Air Force to recall up to 1,000 retired pilots for up to three years,” Navy Cdr. Gary Ross, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement.
But the executive order itself is not specific to the Air Force, and could conceivably be used in the future to call up more officers and in other branches.
Global Pollution Is the World’s Biggest Killer and a Threat to Survival of Mankind, Study Finds
October 21st, 2017Via: USA Today:
Pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death in the world, accounting for three times more deaths in 2015 than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, according to a sweeping global study published Friday in The Lancet medical journal.
The report by the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health blames pollution for an estimated 9 million premature deaths, about 15 times more than all wars and other forms of violence. It concludes that pollution “endangers the stability of the Earth’s support systems and threatens the continuing survival of human societies.”
Catalonia Crisis: Spain Moves to Suspend Autonomy
October 19th, 2017Via: BBC:
Spain is to start suspending Catalonia’s autonomy from Saturday, as the region’s leader threatens to declare independence.
The government said ministers would meet to activate Article 155 of the constitution, allowing it to take over running of the region.
Catalonia’s leader said the region’s parliament would vote on independence if Spain continued “repression”.
Catalans voted to secede in a referendum outlawed by Spain.
Some fear the latest moves could spark further unrest after mass demonstrations before and since the ballot on 1 October.
Spain’s supreme court declared the vote illegal and said it violated the constitution, which describes the country as indivisible.
Over 30,000 Published Studies Could Be Wrong Due to Contaminated Cells
October 18th, 2017Via: Science Alert:
Researchers warn that large parts of biomedical science could be invalid due to a cascading history of flawed data in a systemic failure going back decades.
A new investigation reveals more than 30,000 published scientific studies could be compromised by their use of misidentified cell lines, owing to so-called immortal cells contaminating other research cultures in the lab.
The problem is as serious as it is simple: researchers studying lung cancer publish a new paper, only it turns out the tissue they were actually using in the lab were liver cells. Or what they thought were human cells were mice cells, or vice versa, or something else entirely.
If you think that sounds bad, you’re right, as it means the findings of each piece of affected research may be flawed, and could even be completely unreliable.
“Most scientists don’t intentionally publish findings on the wrong cells,” explains one of the researchers, Serge Horbach from Radboud University in the Netherlands.
“It’s an honest mistake. The more concerning problem is that the research data is potentially invalid and impossible to reproduce.”
Related: Dr. Mary’s Monkey by Edward T. Haslam
UK Spies Using Social Media Data for Mass Surveillance
October 18th, 2017Via: TechCrunch:
Privacy rights group Privacy International says it has obtained evidence for the first time that UK spy agencies are collecting social media information on potentially millions of people.
It has also obtained letters it says show the intelligence agencies’ oversight body had not been informed that UK intelligence agencies had shared bulk databases of personal data with foreign governments, law enforcement and industry — raising concerns about effective oversight of the mass surveillance programs.
The documents have come out as a result of an ongoing legal challenge Privacy International has brought against UK intelligence agencies’ use of bulk personal data collection as an investigatory power. (The group also has various other active legal challenges, including to state hacking).
It says now that the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (IPCO) oversight body “sought immediate inspection when secret practices came to light” as a result of its litigation.
The use by UK spooks of so-called bulk personal datasets (BPDs) — aka massive databases of personal information — was only publicly revealed in March 2015, via an Intelligence and Security Committee report, which also raised various concerns about their use.
