The Raw Story

Thursday, 15 January 2015

Spate of rare deep sea tropical fish found on Norfolk beaches, UK

© Ajay Tegala

The ocean sunfish on Blakeney Point, spotted by Ajay Tegala, coastal ranger for the National Trust on the north Norfolk coast.

Nature lovers are surprised at a spate of tropical fish sightings on the north Norfolk coast over the New Year period.

Washed up dead ocean sunfish, known as mola mola, have been spotted on Blakeney Point, Cley and Holkham and Sheringham beaches.

Identified by its distinctive fins, Mola Mola prefer water over 13C - the water around Blakeney Point is around 7C.

The last time this particular fish was spotted on Cley beach and Blakeney Point was two and three years ago, respectively.

A giant sunfish was washed up on Overstrand beach in 2012 and another mola mola was spotted on Sea Palling beach in 2010.

Ajay Tegala, coastal ranger for the National Trust on the north Norfolk coast, saw the rare fish which was just under one metre long by the lifeboat house on Blakeney Point this month.

He said: "It was a bit of a surprise because it was the first time I have seen one. It is not something you commonly see.

"I wouldn't be surprised if we see more fish like this because we are getting more species in our waters."

A sunfish was spotted on Sheringham beach before Christmas and another was seen on Cley beach on December 21.

At the start of this year there were sightings on Holkham beach on January 3, Blakeney beach on January 4 and the Blakeney Point lifeboat house on January 8.

Christine Pitcher, display supervisor at Great Yarmouth Sea Life Centre, said the fish off north Norfolk could have been blown off course from warmer waters.

She said: "It could be down to strong currents or wind. We could have more sightings of this kind of fish if the waters warm up or currents change. Mola mola are fairly rare around the UK and especially rare around north Norfolk because the sea is not warm at this time of year."

Sunfish facts

■ The ocean sunfish is the heaviest known bony fish in the world and has an average adult weight of 1,000kg.

■ The species is native to tropical and temperate waters around the world and prefer swimming in open water.

■ Sunfish can be as tall as they are long when their dorsal and ventral fins are extended.

■ They live on a diet consisting mainly of jellyfish.

■ Adult sunfish range from brown to silvery-grey or white, with a variety of mottled skin patterns. Some of these patterns may be region-specific.

■ Records show that some sunfish can swim 26km in a day, at a top speed of 3.2km/h. They also swim with ocean currents.

■ Sunfish swim at depths of up to 2,000ft and adults spend a large portion of their lives submerged at depths greater than 660ft.

■ When sunfish spend a long time in water at temperatures of 12C or lower it can lead to disorientation and death.

Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.

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It was a tenth of that, 100,000 tons, that caused the Lake Nyos disaster

7000 ft below the city of Decatur, Illinois, population 74,710 people, is a high pressure reservoir which contains 1 million tons of CO2.

From the press release:

One of the largest carbon sequestration projects in the U.S., the Illinois Basin - Decatur Project (IBDP) has reached its goal of capturing 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and injecting it deep underground in the Mount Simon Sandstone formation beneath Decatur, Illinois. The project is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of carbon capture and storage. IBDP director Robert Finley talked about the million-ton milestone with News Bureau physical sciences editor Liz Ahlberg. Finley is director of the Advanced Energy Technology Institute at the Illinois State Geological Survey, part of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois.

The reservoir has been created to demonstrate the viability of carbon sequestration - capturing large quantities on carbon, to prevent the CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere.

The University of Illinois scientists responsible for this demonstration project assure us that the reservoir does not pose a safety threat. According to a University of Illinois press release;

"Extensive monitoring takes place during and after injection to be sure the stored CO2 stays in place. Monitoring techniques include using geophysical technology to confirm the position of the CO2 underground and wells to monitor groundwater and soils.

No out-of-bounds health, safety or environmental risks were observed from this properly designed and managed storage site. Appropriate risk mitigation and management plans were an integral part of the overall project planning. Extensive monitoring took place before, during and now after the injection to be sure the CO2 stays in place. The first line of monitoring begins deep below the ground, so we know if any leakage occurs long before any CO2 might reach the surface."

http://ift.tt/1x0bx0m

They're probably right - when you create a demonstration project, a showpiece for what you hope will become a lucrative business, you want to make sure nothing goes wrong. I'm sure that elaborate precautions have been taken to prevent any possibility of adverse news, in the hope that this reservoir will be the first of many.

However, as the scientists responsible for the project admit, a serious carbon sequestration effort will need to store a lot more than a million tons of CO2. "... One million tons is scalable in its behavior to the 3 million tons that would be emitted annually from a typical medium-sized, coal-fired power plant. ..."

If just one of those proposed sequestration projects suffers a major containment breach, say if an earthquake cracks the geological structure, or if a mistake or greed leads to the reservoir being overloaded, the result could be a disaster.

In Africa, in 1986, an abrupt release of an estimated 100,000 - 300,000 tons of CO2 killed 2,500 people up to 25km (15.5 miles) from the source of the release.

http://ift.tt/1x0bzVO

A similar release near a major city would kill a sizeable fraction of the city's population. The region of devestation was comparable to the loss of life which would be caused by a large nuclear explosion - the only reason a lot more people didn't die, was Lake Nyos is a sparsely inhabited rural region.

The Lake Nyos CO2 release was so deadly, because CO2 is heavier than air - when the huge CO2 cloud boiled out of lake Nyos, it hugged the ground, displacing all breathable air to an elevation 10s of ft above ground level, suffocating almost everyone in its path.

Its not just people and animals which would be affected - car engines would also stall, as the blanket of CO2 choked off the supply of oxygen.

If carbon sequestration becomes commonplace, sooner or later someone will get greedy and careless, and will be careless in their choice of geological reservoir, and / or will overload their geological reservoir to boost their bottom line. And that carelessness will, in my opinion, almost inevitably lead to a catastrophic loss of life.

Your blood type may put you at risk for heart disease

People whose blood type is A, B or AB have an increased risk of heart disease and shorter life spans than people who have type O blood, according to a new study.

But that doesn't mean people with blood types other than O should be overly concerned, because heart disease risk and life span are influenced by multiple factors, including exercise and overall health, experts said.

In the study, researchers followed about 50,000 middle-age and elderly people in northeastern Iran for an average of seven years. They found that people with non-O blood types were 9 percent more likely to die during the study for any health-related reason, and 15 percent more likely to die from cardiovascular disease, compared with people with blood type O .

"It was very interesting to me to find out that people with certain blood groups - non-O blood groups - have a higher risk of dying of certain diseases," said the study's lead investigator, Dr. Arash Etemadi, an epidemiologist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The researchers also examined whether people's blood type may be linked with their risk of gastric cancer, which has a relatively high incidence rate among the people living in northeastern Iran. They found that people with non-O blood types had a 55 percent increased risk of gastric cancer compared with people with type O blood, according to the study, published online today (Jan. 14) in the journal

The association between blood type and people's disease risk and life span held even when the researchers accounted for other factors, including age, sex, smoking, socioeconomic status and ethnicity.

Previous studies have shown that people with non-O blood types may be at higher risk of certain cancers and cardiovascular disease, but it was less clear whether blood type is linked with life span, Etemadi told Live Science.

About 11,000 people in the study provided information about their blood's biochemistry, including their cholesterol levels, glucose levels and blood pressure. But only certain metrics stood out - for example, the people with type A blood tended to have higher levels of total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol, also known as the "bad" cholesterol.

It's possible that higher cholesterol levels could partly explain the increased mortality risk. People with non-O blood types also have an increased tendency to form blood clots, and this higher coagulation might lead to more heart problems, Etemadi said.

Moreover, the gene that is responsible for blood type is on the same chromosome as some of the genes responsible for controlling blood cholesterol, Etemadi said.

But it's unlikely that the cholesterol link is solely responsible for the difference in people's life span, he said. "We think that it's a mixture of both causes that contribute to this increased mortality," Etemadi said.

Although people with non-O blood types may have these increased risks, they should "absolutely not" be concerned that their blood type is the determining factor in their health, said Dr. Massimo Franchini, director of hematology and transfusion medicine at the Carlo Poma Hospital in Italy, who was not involved with the study.

"Belonging to a non-O blood type represents only a risk factor (among many others), and actually, there are many and many millions of people worldwide with non-O blood type that do not have, and will never develop, any of these diseases," said Franchini, who wrote a commentary on the study that was also published in the journal. "Thus, in my opinion, a healthy lifestyle still remains the main factor able to influence the health status of an individual."

Vladimir Putin and Alexei Miller, the head of Gazprom

First, I was a little skeptical. Then more and more sources confirmed what seems to be a fact: Russia will completely stop the delivery of gaz through the Ukraine and all Russian gaz will now flow through Turkey (see Bloomberg and LifeNews). Not only that, but the Russians have told the Europeans that if they want Russian gaz, they will have to build their own pipeline to Turkey at pay for it all.

The Europeans appear to be shell-shocked. Maros Sefcovic, the European Commission's vice president for energy union, declared that this decision made "no economic sense". As if the nonstop economic and political warfare waged by the EU against Russia did make any sense!

I can image the faces of the Eurobureaucrats when Alexei Miller, the head of Gazprom, told them that "now it is up to them to put in place the necessary infrastructure starting from the Turkish-Greek border" while the Russian Energy Minister Novak added that "the decision has been made, we are diversifying and eliminating the risks of unreliable countries that caused problems in past years, including for European consumers."

In other words, the EU just lost it all and so did the Ukraine. Keep in mind that the EU has no other options then to purchase the Russian gas from Turkey while Russia can simply do without gaz exports to Europe because China has already signed a contract covering the exact same amount of gaz and possibly much more.

Let's see now how the infinitely corrupt, arrogant, criminally irresponsible European elites will cope with an agriculture choking in useless surplus stocks, a society waging ideological war on 1.6 billion Muslims, and now with no energy.

The always irreplaceable Poles have come up with a brilliant strategy it appears: they will "not really" invite Putin to the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz even though Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet military. I am sure that Putin will be both impressed and heartbroken.

Nowadays every time I hear any news out of Europe, I always think that Victoria Nuland's famous "f**k the EU" and how Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, called his colleagues the "great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies". I share exactly the same sentiments: let them "Charlies" now freeze in their own pathetic mediocrity.

They were arrested for sexual abuse involving a minor, but now former Aledo Police Officer Steven Bonynge says that he was treated unfairly by being forced to resign.

Officers Bonynge, 32, and Seth Degelman, 30, had been investigated by the Aledo Police Department after they received a complaint about their sexual abuse of a juvenile. That's according to Aledo Police Chief J. Michael Sponsler who spoke with reporters from local WQAD 8.

The Chief pointed us to a statement released from attorney Blaise Rogers of Gullbert, Box & Worby, LLC, who said he represents Bonynge. It said that the victim was "slightly under the age of 17." In other words, she was 16.

But Steven Bonynge later seemed to want to distance himself from the case, saying, "I am not his sole attorney. I am just the messenger. William K. Gullberg and Kyle J. Worby are the partners working on the case as well."

Bonynge found himself slapped with a class 2 felony aggravated criminal sexual abuse, meaning that he used a weapon in the commission of the assault.

Former Officer Degelman, for his part, was charged with class 3 felony. That charge was indecent solicitation and aggravated criminal sexual abuse. Again, the "aggravated" bit means he used a weapon in the commission of the crime.

Both officers resigned their positions, Aledo Mayor Chris Hagloch said.

Rogers, the officer's attorney, said that Bonynge's resignation was "a direct result of administrative mismanagement by the Aledo Police Department, a reckless disregard for his personal and professional integrity, as well as his rights in the criminal justice system."

"The accusations do not include the use of force, threat, intimidation, or coercion," he continued.

Bonynge now claims that he was "being forced out." He adds that his "resignation is involuntary," claiming that his arrest and treatment "has been unconscionable."

Are you crying a river for him yet?

He's not done. The copy of the resignation letter provided by Rogers, continues the sob story, saying: "I am innocent of this criminal charge but it appears that I have already been convicted by my superiors."

"Resigning for these reasons is discouraging but, given the circumstances I was put in, I do not have any choice," the former cop adds. "I know I will not have the opportunity to be rehired or to continue my employment by the Aledo Police Department, but I would like to say that I have performed my duty faithfully and I have nothing but the utmost respect for the residents of Aledo and Mercer County."

Homeless children in Manila are being rounded up by Philippines' police in an attempt to clean the city up for the Pope's visit, reports.

Children as young as 5 are being arrested and detained in subhuman living conditions. They are often held for months before being let go onto the streets. Unfortunately, the government has not provided any support for these children, and they often end up back in the temporary prisons.

Children are locked up alongside convicted criminals, and guards often are apathetic or look the other way while children are physically and sexually abused by inmates. The captured children sleep on and eat off of concrete floors, often using buckets as toilets. In some instances, children were chained to poles in these cellars.

Father Shay Cullen, who was nominated for a Nobel Prize, runs a missionary about 100 miles from Manila and recently traveled through these temporary prisons to help children and adopt some to the missionary. One boy, Mak-Mak, had scabies and had been abused by adult inmates during his times in the prison. He was apparently abandoned by his parents and was picked up on the street by Manila police while cleaning up for the Pope. Cullen brought Mak-Mak to his missionary to rehabilitate him.

An inmate in a temporary cell said: "Lots of children have been brought here lately. We're told they're being picked up from under the road bridges where the Pope will travel."

This practice is not new, though, as Manila first started to arrest children without cause during the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders' Summit in 1996, according to Catherine Scerri, deputy director of Bahay Tuluyan, a charity that helps street children. The country and specifically Manila have been blamed for child abuse of this kind in the past but have not been punished for it.

Rosalinda Orobia of the Social Welfare Department said, "There is no question that children should be kept off the streets, but a campaign to do so just for the duration of a dignitary's visit helps nobody except the officials who want to put on a show and pretend all is well in our cities."

Thousands of the arrested children will be let go after the Pope's stay. However, most will be arrested again once a new internationally televised event comes to Manila.

One boy has been arrested 59 times yet still lives on the streets on Manila.

The citizens of Manila are outraged when they find out about these injustices, but many of them have been very well hidden by the city government.

Father Cullen hopes that the Pope speaks out about child abuse during his visit to Manila and that doing so will help put an end to the injustice towards children.

© Albuquerque Police Department

Detective Keith Sandy, far right, moves up the ridge behind an APD K-9 officer in last March’s confrontation with James Boyd in a photo taken from officer Dominique Perez’s helmet video camera.

The day after a New Mexico prosecutor charged two police officers in the shooting death of a mentally ill homeless man last year, Albuquerque officials refused to allow representatives from the District Attorney's office to participate in the investigation of a new officer-involved shooting that occurred on Tuesday.

According to KRQE, Chief Deputy District Attorney Sylvia Martinez was barred from a briefing about a shooting that occurred Tuesday evening because, she was told, the District Attorney's office "has a conflict of interest because we charged the officers" who shot the homeless man last year.

The District Attorney's office typically plays a vital role in investigating police-involved shootings - issuing warrants, providing legal counsel for the officers involved, and determining whether a shooting was justified - but when DA Martinez attempted to enter the briefing about Tuesday's shooting, City Attorney Kathryn Levy told her that the officers "wouldn't be needing any legal advice or help" and that she "could go home."

"I have never seen anything like this ever," District Attorney Kari Brandenburg told KRQE. "Clearly, this could compromise the integrity of the investigation of this shooting."

In 2004, the District Attorney's office signed an agreement with the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) that allowed it to oversee the APD's investigation of officer-involved shootings. Last year, Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry signed a settlement with the United State Department of Justice (DOJ) that implemented measures to combat the widespread use of excessive force by APD officers.

According to DA Brandenburg, the APD's decision to exclude the District Attorney's office from investigating Tuesday's shooting violates both those agreements.

"It is my opinion that they violated [the agreement with the DA's office]," she said, adding "that means they also violated their agreement with the DOJ."

The APD recently investigated whether DA Brandenberg bribed and intimidated witnesses in a criminal case against her son, turning the case over to the New Mexico Attorney General's Office in December. However, General Counsel David Pederson from the state Attorney General's Office told KRQE that the investigation was "unusual," given that no one at the AG's Office knew about it until it was reported by the media.

"I've been here three years," he said, "and I can't remember another time when an investigatory agency just dropped something off like that. I also can't recall a time when a police agency turned over an investigative file to the news media apparently before turning it over to a prosecuting agency. That's unusual, and it leads to a lot of questions about what's going on here."

The Raw Story

Focused on providing independent journalism.

Kiev orders crackdown on Russian TV channels

What I did after police killed my son

Emerging solar plants scorch birds in mid-air

Thursday, 15 January 2015

Spate of rare deep sea tropical fish found on Norfolk beaches, UK

Catastrophe in the making: 1 million tons of pressurised CO2 stored beneath Decatur, Illinois

Wednesday, 14 January 2015

Your blood type may put you at risk for heart disease

Following through: Russia will completely stop the delivery of gaz through the Ukraine

Cops say 'it's not fair' they were forced to resign after being busted for sexual abuse of a minor

In preparation for the Pope's visit, Manila police arrest homeless children and detain them in brutal conditions

City of Albuquerque bars DA from latest officer involved shooting the day after charges filed in shooting death of James Boyd

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