The Raw Story

Thursday, 15 January 2015

Storm Rachel: 100mph gales leave 2,000 homes without power and cause travel chaos across UK

Bad weather has caused travel chaos with lorries queueing to board Dover ferries

Gale force winds of up to 101mph blasted through Britain today as the churning low-pressure vortex - dubbed Storm Rachel - sparked commuter chaos.

But as the storm caused damage, delays, disruption and power failures, forecasters have warned the worst could still be to come.

Some 149 flood alerts and 32 flood warnings have been issued across Britain this morning, the Environment Agency confirmed.

The Met Office has also cautioned a "be aware" weather warning remains in place across the whole of England, Wales, Northern Ireland and central and southern Scotland for rain and high winds.

The highest recorded windspeed in the UK today is 101mph - reported in Great Dunsell, Cumbria while other exposed and coastal areas documented speeds of 70mph.

A Met Office spokesperson said: "After something of a lull, a further spell of very strong winds, this time from the west, is expected from late Thursday morning onwards into the evening, again with gusts of 70mph or more in places.

"The public should be aware of the risk of disruption to transport and possibly to power supplies."

More than 1,200 homes in Dorset are without electricity this morning after severe winds brought trees crashing down onto overhead lines, said Southern Electric Power Distribution.

The supplier confirmed its engineers were battling to restore supplies and said the most-affected areas included Charminster, Wimborne and Poole.

The barrage of strong winds blasting Britain last night also left some 750 homes in Wales without power.

Blocked: An overturned gritter on a country lane in Carmarthenshire in South-West Wales, as parts of the country were hit by snow

Police officers said fallen trees had also blocked numerous roads across South-West.

One motorist was rescued by Fire and Rescue services after rising floodwaters left him stranded in his car near the village of Corfe Mullen, in Dorset.

Storm Rachel has also affected hundreds of train travellers today.

Commuters passing through Dover Priory, in Kent were delayed for more than an hour after strong winds brought a tree crashing down onto the train tracks.

South West Trains confirmed travellers should expect delays of up to half-an-hour between Bournemouth and Southampton due to flooding near Brockenhurst.

Meanwhile, Operation Stack is in place on the M20 in Kent with a huge tailback of convoys of lorries heading to Dover where cross-channel ferries are being disrupted because of the weather.

The A249 Sheppey crossing in Kent was closed because of high winds but has since reopened.

Several roads across Scotland have been shut after cars ground to a halt in snowy roads and lorries jack-knifed dangerously in the icy conditions.

A dozen schools and nurseries in the Highlands have been shut due to bad weather.

As strong winds and heavy rain continue to lash the UK, the AA yesterday reported it had rescued 57 vehicles and attended 8,200 breakdowns in northern England and Scotland.

Cumbria Police cautioned motorists about the increasingly icy conditions after reports of more than 40 road collisions throughout the county.

Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.

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What percentage of terror attacks in the United States and Europe are committed by Muslims? Guess. Nope. Guess again. And again...

"Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims." How many times have you heard that one? Sure, we heard Fox News's Brian Kilmeade say it, but to me, that was simply part of the Fox News plan to make their viewers dumber, as we saw again this past weekend when its terrorism "expert" Steve Emerson was caught fabricating the story that Birmingham, England, is closed to non-Muslims. But more alarmingly, even some reasonable people have uttered this statement.

And that comment is often followed up by the question: Why don't we see Christian, Buddhist, or Jewish terrorists?

Obviously, there are people who sincerely view themselves as Muslims who have committed horrible acts in the name of Islam. We Muslims can make the case that their actions are not based on any part of the faith but on their own political agenda. But they are Muslims, no denying that.

However, and this will probably shock many, so you might want to take a breath: Overwhelmingly, those who have committed terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe aren't Muslims. Let's give that a moment to sink in.

Now, it's not your fault if you aren't aware of that fact. You can blame the media. (Yes, Sarah Palin and I actually agree on one thing: The mainstream media sucks.)

So here are some statistics for those interested. Let's start with Europe. Want to guess what percent of the terrorist attacks there were committed by Muslims over the past five years? Wrong. That is, unless you said less than 2 percent .

As Europol, the European Union's law-enforcement agency, noted in its report released last year, the vast majority of terror attacks in Europe were perpetrated by separatist groups. For example, in 2013, there were 152 terror attacks in Europe. Only two of them were "religiously motivated," while 84 were predicated upon ethno-nationalist or separatist beliefs.

We are talking about groups like France's FLNC, which advocates an independent nation for the island of Corsica. In December 2013, FLNC terrorists carried out simultaneous rocket attacks against police stations in two French cities. And in Greece in late 2013, the left-wing Militant Popular Revolutionary Forces shot and killed two members of the right-wing political party Golden Dawn. While over in Italy, the anarchist group FAI engaged in numerous terror attacks including sending a bomb to a journalist. And the list goes on and on.

Have you heard of these incidents? Probably not. But if Muslims had committed them do you think you our media would've covered it? No need to answer, that's a rhetorical question.

Even after one of the worst terror attacks ever in Europe in 2011, when Anders Breivik slaughtered 77 people in Norway to further his anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and pro-"Christian Europe" agenda as he stated in his manifesto, how much press did we see in the United States? Yes, it was covered, but not the way we see when a Muslim terrorist is involved. Plus we didn't see terrorism experts fill the cable news sphere asking how we can stop future Christian terrorists. In fact, even the suggestion that Breivik was a "Christian terrorist" was met with outrage by many, including Fox News's Bill O'Reilly.

Have you heard about the Buddhist terrorists? Well, extremist Buddhists have killed many Muslim civilians in Burma, and just a few months ago in Sri Lanka, some went on a violent rampage burning down Muslim homes and businesses and slaughtering four Muslims.

Or what about the (dare I mention them) Jewish terrorists? Per the 2013 State Department's report on terrorism, there were 399 acts of terror committed by Israeli settlers in what are known as "price tag" attacks . These Jewish terrorists attacked Palestinian civilians causing physical injuries to 93 of them and also vandalized scores of mosques and Christian churches.

Back in the United States, the percentage of terror attacks committed by Muslims is almost as miniscule as in Europe. An FBI study looking at terrorism committed on U.S. soil between 1980 and 2005 found that 94 percent of the terror attacks were committed by non-Muslims . In actuality, 42 percent of terror attacks were carried out by Latino-related groups, followed by 24 percent perpetrated by extreme left-wing actors.

And as a 2014 study by University of North Carolina found, since the 9/11 attacks, Muslim-linked terrorism has claimed the lives of 37 Americans. In that same time period, more than 190,000 Americans were murdered (PDF).

In fact in 2013, it was actually more likely Americans would be killed by a toddler than a terrorist. In that year, three Americans were killed in the Boston Marathon bombing. How many people did toddlers kill in 2013? Five, all by accidentally shooting a gun .

But our media simply do not cover the non-Muslim terror attacks with same gusto. Why? It's a business decision. Stories about scary "others" play better. It's a story that can simply be framed as good versus evil with Americans being the good guy and the brown Muslim as the bad.

Honestly, when is the last time we heard the media refer to those who attack abortion clinics as "Christian terrorists," even though these attacks occur at one of every five reproductive health-care facilities? That doesn't sell as well. After all we are a so-called Christian nation, so that would require us to look at the enemy within our country, and that makes many uncomfortable. Or worse, it makes them change the channel.

That's the same reason we don't see many stories about how to reduce the 30 Americans killed each day by gun violence or the three women per day killed by domestic violence. But the media will have on expert after expert discussing how can we stop these scary brown Muslims from killing any more Americans despite the fact you actually have a better chance of being killed by a refrigerator falling on you.

Look, this article is not going to change the media's business model. But what I hope it does is cause some to realize that not all terrorists are Muslims. In fact, they are actually a very small percent of those that are. Now, I'm not saying to ignore the dangers posed by Islamic radicals. I'm just saying look out for those refrigerators.

Often enough, it is human nature to conform. This tendency makes us follow the lead of computers, even if the machines give us the wrong advice. This is the finding of a study in Springer's journal that investigates how people make judgment calls after playing role-playing video games. The research was led by Ulrich Weger of the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany.

Real-life encounters and face-to-face contact with other people are on the decline in a world that is becoming increasingly computerized. Many routine tasks are delegated to virtual characters. People spend hours role-playing through virtual-reality video games by taking on the persona of a virtual character or avatar.

Such video games can even lead people to acquire and practice real-life skills and new viewpoints. Weger and his fellow researchers therefore explored how role-playing video gaming influences social behavior and decision-making. Participants in their study first played an immersive game for seven minutes as an avatar. Afterwards, they completed a job selection task in which they had the option of overriding incorrect choices made by a computer.

It was found that role-playing as the avatar in an immersive video game, compared to merely watching others play, makes people identify with a computer. They do so to such an extent that they actually start to conform to its decisions and follow its judgment -- sometimes even if it is downright wrong. This shows that people conform, even when opinions are voiced by nonhuman agents. This is especially prevalent in ambiguous cases.

The reason for such behavior might be found in people's tendency to strive for accuracy. It leads to so-called information conformity, wherein people lose faith in their own skills and competence. They align themselves with others who are deemed to make accurate judgement calls on a matter -- even if in the current case they make less accurate judgments.

The researchers believe there is a need to systematically reflect on gaming practices and on the consequences of what happens when people enter the artificiality of a virtual world. This is especially important in light of the fact that video gaming is becoming more widespread, especially among young males.

"Parents, educators, and players will need to take these consequences into consideration and take appropriate countermeasures," says Weger. "For instance, at the very least it would be appropriate to reflect on what it really means to be human. We need to examine how this humanness can be educated and strengthened when it is shifted towards a more robot-like nature during virtual journeys as an avatar. The long-term consequences of such virtual reality gaming is also difficult to estimate -- for instance in terms of a potential alienation from real-life encounters. By the time we know for sure what the consequences really are, it is likely going to be more difficult, perhaps impossible, to take appropriate countermeasures."

Journal Reference:

Ulrich W. Weger, Stephen Loughnan, Dinkar Sharma, Lazaros Gonidis. Virtually compliant: Immersive video gaming increases conformity to false computer judgments. , 2015; DOI: 10.3758/s13423-014-0778-z

A group of Russians claim to have captured the best footage of bigfoot.

The adventurers spotted what they described as a hairy bear-sized humanoid that marched out of the woods before disappearing seconds later.

The recording came when a group of people from the city of Adygeisk set off in search of the mysterious creature after a local TV station reported that it had been sighted in a remote region.

They said they had questioned the people at a mountainside lodge who claimed to have seen the creature, and managed to get several independent confirmations that there was something out there.

[embedded content]

Eyewitness Ludmila Hristoforova who spoke to local TV station said: "The creature was big, looking like a bear, but not a bear. From the door we've seen something big and shaggy."

Another homeowner Andrei Kazarian said: "I heard footsteps and we were pretty sure there was no one else around because we knew for sure everyone else was inside the house. Although we didn't see anyone, we saw its huge footprints.

"They were 5 to 6 centimetres deep and couldn't come from a human foot. We took a plaster cast of them and we estimate that it probably would have taken about 200 kilos to press the snow down that much."

The local team then set off to investigate, and as they headed off into the forest said they were stunned when they heard the crunching of snow, and managed to grab footage of a hairy creature as it emerged from the trees.

After taking a plaster cast of the alleged footprint, the group have now handed their findings to local scientists for analysis.

The footage has already attracted a lot of interest with some suggesting it was just a stunt to bring in tourists, and others convinced that this was the first form of conclusive proof that the yeti exists in the area.

The brains of some Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans who survived blasts from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and died later of other causes show a distinctive honeycomb pattern of broken and swollen nerve fibres throughout critical brain regions, including those that control executive function. The pattern is different from brain damage caused by car crashes, drug overdoses or collision sports, and may be the never-before-reported signature of blast injuries suffered by soldiers as far back as World War I.

Vassilis Koliatsos, M.D., professor of pathology, neurology, and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, recently published a study in that found survivable blasts may cause hidden brain injuries that play a role in the psychological and social problems some veterans face after coming home.

"This is the first time the tools of modern pathology have been used to look at a 100-year-old problem: the lingering effect of blasts on the brain," says Koliatsos, senior author of the study that used molecular probes to reveal details in the brains of veterans who died months or years after an IED blast. "We identified a pattern of tiny wounds, or lesions, that we think may be the signature of blast injury. The location and extent of these lesions may help explain why some veterans who survive IED attacks have problems putting their lives back together."

Soldiers have struggled with bomb-induced brain damage since 1914, when German and Allied forces tried to blast one another out of entrenched positions with monthslong bombardments. Many World War I fighters survived the barrage outwardly unscarred, but with an array of cognitive and psychological difficulties known as shell shock. After World War I, mass bombardments of troops were rare, and shell shock became uncommon. Now renamed blast neurotrauma or blast injury to brain, it has re-emerged due to insurgent forces' widespread use of IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To understand this puzzling ailment, a team of eight researchers examined the brains of five male United States military veterans who survived IED attacks but later died. The remains were donated to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Three died of methadone overdoses that could have been accidental, Koliatsos says, since the drug is commonly prescribed to treat soldiers' chronic pain. One died of a gunshot wound to the head, and one died of multiple organ failure. The researchers compared the veterans' brains to those of 24 people who died of a range of causes, including motor vehicle crashes, opiate overdoses and heart attacks.

The researchers used a molecular marker to track a protein called APP that normally travels from one nerve cell to another via a long nerve fiber, or axon. When axons are broken by an injury, APP and other proteins accumulate at the breaks, causing swelling. In the brains of people killed in car accidents, the swellings are large and bulb-shaped. In cases of methadone overdose, these axonal swellings are small.

In the brains of four of the five veterans who survived wartime blast injuries, the axonal bulbs were medium-sized and usually arrayed in a honeycomb pattern near blood vessels. "We did not see that pattern in other types of brain injury," says Koliatsos.

Under a microscope, brain sections from three different individuals show (left) axons with large, bulb-shaped lesions characteristic of a motor vehicle crash; (centre) many smaller lesions characteristic of a blast injury; and (right) fewer lesions characteristic of an opiate overdose.

The veterans' brains did not show signs of the neurodegenerative disease known as punch-drunk syndrome, which is caused by multiple concussions. But near the damaged axons, a second molecular probe revealed specialized cells, called microglia, that are involved in brain inflammation.

"In brains that had been exposed to blasts, we see microglial cells right next to these unusual axonal abnormalities," Koliatsos says. Brain inflammation develops slowly, so microglia don't normally appear in drug overdose cases. Their presence suggests the veterans who overdosed had pre-existing brain injuries.

The researchers found these distinctive lesions in a number of places in veterans' brains, including in the frontal lobes, which control decision making, memory, reasoning and other executive functions. The lesions may be fragments of nerve fibers that broke at the time of the blast and slowly deteriorated, or they may have been weakened by the blast and broken by some later insult like a concussion or drug overdose.

"When you look at a brain, you are looking at the life history of an individual, who may have a history of blasts, fighting, substance abuse or all of those," Koliatsos says. "If researchers could study survivors' brains at different times after a blast -- a week, a month, six months, one year, three years --that would be a significant step forward in figuring out what actually happens over time after a blast."

A century after the first reported cases of shell shock, the struggle to overcome this invisible injury continues. Doctors treating IED survivors "often see depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and substance abuse or adjustment disorders. Life is very difficult for some of these veterans," says Koliatsos. "It's important to understand that at least a portion of these difficulties may have a neurological foundation."

Mystery: The strange pulsating purple light is causing confusion in the North East

More sightings of a UFO hovering in the North East skies have been revealed.

The suspected alien spacecraft was first captured on video in the sky above North Tyneside by venture capitalist Craig Lowther on Monday night.

The 43-year-old, from Tynemouth, noticed a pulsating light in the sky and reached for his camera.

He said: "I am out at night a lot walking the dog but this is like nothing I have ever seen before."

[embedded content]

Since the footage went live on the 's website, people from across the region have got in touch to share their experiences.

Karl Findlay, from Brunswick Village, said spotted an object in the night sky the very next night.

He said: "On Tuesday night at about 8.30pm I was bringing my bins into the yard when I happened to notice a strange green object floating in the sky. I managed to catch this on video.

"When I've been looking back at the video I zoomed in and spotted a star-like shape in the sky, which looked quite like the object from the original video."

Andrew Phinn, 32, from North Shields, said he also saw something in the sky in the direction of Tynemouth on Monday.

He said: "I went out into the back yard for a cigarette. It was about 11.40pm.

"I was looking out towards Tynemouth when I saw a white light in the sky. It was flickering.

"It did not move at all but it could not have been a star, because it was too low."

Although mystery still surrounds what was spotted in the skies, it's not the first time UFOs have been reported in the region.

Ministry of Defence files released last year revealed many worried people had claimed to have seen strange lights in the sky. One person even claimed they'd seen an alien in their home.

Since the year 2000, 26 reports have been made of extra-terrestrial encounters, with fast-moving flashing lights the most regular complaint.

Across the UK there were 1999 UFO sightings looked into by the MoD between 2000 and November 2009, when they stopped counting.

© Reuters

Netanyahu and Hollande attend a ceremony at the Paris Grand Synagogue to the victims of the Paris attacks this week.

A classified Israeli foreign ministry document, leaked to the daily , warns that 2015 will see Israel's standing on the world stage steadily deteriorating. It predicts

"worsening drift in Europe toward Palestinian positions, more parliaments recognizing the State of Palestine, fear of sanctions and labeling merchandise [to separate settlement products from tariff-free Israel-proper products] and no certainty that the United States will continue after Israel's March elections to protect Israel with its veto."

The document is said to be a summary of an interministerial assessment roundtable convened by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, and is signed by foreign ministry deputy director-general Gilead Cohen. It was circulated to Israel's ambassadors around the world, reported.

In addition to labeling settlement products and parliamentary votes to recognize Palestine, the foreign ministry document warns of European nations halting the supply of replacement parts for Israeli equipment and demanding compensation for damage caused by Israel to European projects in the territories.

"The Europeans are creating a clear link between political and economic relations, and in this context it should be remembered that Europe is Israel's main trading partner."

European diplomats and politicians increasingly view Israel as responsible for the failure of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, claiming that Israel sets unreasonable conditions for a peace agreement in order to continue deepening its hold on the West Bank.

The tensions surrounding Prime Minister Netanyahu's visit to Paris this week are an outgrowth of that growing gulf of suspicion. As diplomatic correspondents Barak Ravid and Asher Schechter both reported, French president Francois Hollande initially asked Netanyahu not to come to Paris for the Sunday solidarity rally, because he wanted to avoid injecting the divisive Israeli-Palestinian issue into the rally's theme of national and Europe-wide unity and solidarity.

Once Netanyahu announced that he was coming, Hollande made clear to him that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas would be invited as well.

Netanyahu has said repeatedly since last week's Paris attacks, in his initial sympathy statement and again in his remarks Monday at the site of the kosher supermarket attack, that the terror plaguing Europe is the same as the terror Israel faces. He said he hoped Europe would "wake up in time" to the terrorist threat. He continued: "Israel supports Europe in its fight against terrorism and it's time Europe supported Israel in the same fight."

His comments have caused resentment in France. Like most of Europe, French leaders regard Israel's conflict with Arab terrorists as fundamentally different from the jihadist terrorism spreading from Syria to the European continent. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is seen as a territorial dispute, albeit with religious overtones where Hamas is concerned, while Al Qaeda and ISIS are seen as essentially nihilistic movements that seek to undermine Western civilization.

As for "waking up" to the terrorist threat, French observers note that they are carrying the fight against Al Qaeda in Mali on their own, had one of the largest NATO troop contingents fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and maintain what's considered one of the best counter-terrorism intelligence operations in the West.

In effect, Netanyahu's call for Europe to "wake up" and "support Israel" in its struggle against terrorism is seen as a demand that Europe acquiesce in his effort to entrench Israeli presence in the territories, rather than withdrawing and permitting a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 lines.

The Raw Story

Focused on providing independent journalism.

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Thursday, 15 January 2015

Storm Rachel: 100mph gales leave 2,000 homes without power and cause travel chaos across UK

Are all terrorists Muslim? Nope, not even close.

Welcome to the machine: People conform to norm, even if it's a computer

Proof of bigfoot? New 'yeti' video shows giant hairy beast walking through Russian forest

Surviving an IDE blast: Hidden brain damage found

Strange purple object in the sky over Tynemouth, UK

Classified Israeli report sees rift with Europe growing

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