Is an ISIS false flag nuclear attack on America planned within the next 12 months?

    

Captured British journalist John Cantlie has written an article for the Islamic State in which he claims that the possibility of an ISIS nuclear attack on America has risen "infinitely."

The article appeared in the new edition of Dabiq, the ISIS online english magazine with Madison Avenue design cues. Cantlie was abducted by ISIS in 2012 and is now apparently being forced to write their english language propaganda.

Claiming ISIS has billions of dollars, Cantlie outlined how the terrorist group could acquire the weapon and transport it into America. Press TV reports:

British journalist John Cantlie wrote in the article ISIL "has billions of dollars in the bank, so they call on their wilayah (Province) in Pakistan to purchase a nuclear device through weapons dealers with links to corrupt officials in the region."

"The weapon is then transported overland until it makes it to Libya, where the mujahidin move it south to Nigeria," the journalist said.

He added that "drug shipments from Columbia bound for Europe pass through West Africa, so moving other types of contraband from East to West is just as possible."

Cantlie continued the weapon and accompanying radicals would then move up through Central America and Mexico before entering the US.

"From there it's a quick hop through a smuggling tunnel and hey presto, they're mingling with another 12 million 'illegal' aliens in America with a nuclear bomb in the trunk," he wrote.

"Perhaps such a scenario is far-fetched but it's the sum of all fears for Western intelligence agencies and it's infinitely more possible today than it was just one year ago," Cantlie said.

Another report, this time by Zerohedge, provided more details:

Three weeks after the first supposed attack by Islamic State supporters in the US, in which two ISIS "soldiers" wounded a security guard before they were killed in Garland, Texas, the time has come to raise the fear stakes.

In an article posted in the terrorist group's English-language online magazine Dabiq (which as can be see below seems to have gotten its design cues straight from Madison Avenue and is just missing glossy pages filled with 'scratch and sniff' perfume ads ) ISIS claimed that it has enough money to buy a nuclear weapon from Pakistan and "carry out an attack inside the United States next year."

In the article, the ISIS columnist said the weapon could be smuggled into the United States via its southern border with Mexico.

Curiously, the author of the piece is John Cantlie, a British photojournalist who was abducted by ISIS in 2012 and has been held hostage by the organization ever since; he has appeared in several videos since his kidnapping and criticized Western powers.

As the Telegraph notes, "Mr Cantlie, whose fellow journalist hostages have all either been released or beheaded, has appeared in the group's propaganda videos and written previous pieces. In his latest work, presumed to be written under pressure but in his hall-mark style combining hyperbole, metaphor and sarcasm, he says that President Obama's policies for containing Isil have demonstrably failed and increased the risk to America."

While ISIS is obviously conducting a propaganda campaign through the captured journalist, one has to wonder if the possibility of a nuclear attack on America may be more real than most believe.

So how easy would it actually be for terrorists (or elements of our own intelligence agencies working with the supposed terrorists) to carry out a nuclear attack on America?

"With nuclear material having been stolen on multiple occasions in Mexico, and close terrorist ties to intelligence organizations in the middle east, it appears that if an organization was committed to acquiring nuclear material they could do so. Finding the scientists to build such a weapon, whether dirty or actual, wouldn't be all that difficult. Moreover, smuggling such a device into the U.S. is possible, as evidenced by a 2011 report which confirms that at least one nuclear weapon of mass destruction was seized as it entered the United States," reported Mac Slavo.

It seems clear that if a nuclear attack were to happen in the United States, certain elements of the government would almost have to be involved for they are the ones who originally created the terrorist group.

"Thanks to a lawsuit by Judicial Watch, a 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency assessment has been released, in heavily redacted form, that indicates the US Intelligence Community knew from the beginning that its regime change policy in Syria would boost al-Qaeda and ISIS. Yet they did it anyway. They knew they needed the extremists if they were going to achieve their goals. But what about the blowback," read a report on the Ron Paul Institute website.

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"We have definitive confirmation via declassified documents that the Islamic State is a creation of the U.S. Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency, and their influence across the middle east was predicted well in advance of anyone ever having heard the name ISIS or ISIL. We also know that false flag operations, such as the German Reichstag fire of 1933, are often used by governments (or rogue elements within a government) to implement changes to existing political and social paradigms."

Whatever the case may be, the fact that a terrorist group that was created by the U.S. government is now publicly talking about a nuclear attack on American soil should, at the very least, raise eyebrows throughout the informed populace.

It is also important to consider the numerous reports in the last three years throughout the alternative media that claimed that the powers that be were planning a nuclear false flag attack.

While most of the reports gave specific dates that have come and gone, the idea that rogue elements of our government may be in on a false flag nuclear attack as a last resort has been discussed repeatedly in conspiracy circles.

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New 'Peace' lobby pressures US Presidential candidates to favor war

Here comes the peace.

    

There is a long history of the U.S. military-industrial complex lobbying the government for funding and influencing foreign policy, e.g., to help pick out countries to bomb or invade.

However, the latest pressure group to be formed in the run up to next year's U.S. presidential elections is an insult to basic intelligence. It calls itself Americans for Peace, Prosperity and Security but literally hides its sinister motives in broad daylight. The name sounds so innocent, so appealing and credible. After all, don't we all want peace, prosperity, and security!?

Except this group wants everything but that. For them a $600 billion military budget is not nearly enough. As is often the case, you just need to look at the names of board members to see right through the organization's name.

According to the :

Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers has formed a new pressure group, now active in Iowa and New Hampshire, to serve as the "premiere national security and foreign policy organization during the 2016 debate" and to "help elect a president who supports American engagement and a strong foreign policy."

Roger's group, Americans for Peace, Prosperity, and Security, is hosting candidate events and intends to host a candidate forum later this year. The organization does not disclose its donors. But a look at the business executives helping APPS steer presidential candidates towards more hawkish positions reveals that many are defense contractors who stand to gain financially from continued militarism:

• Advisory Board Member John Coburn is chairman and CEO of VT Systems, a company that delivers communications technology for the Defense Department.
• Advisory Board Member Stephen Hadley is a principal at the consulting firm RiceHadleyGates and serves as a board member to defense contractor Raytheon, a position that pays him $228,007 in annual compensation.
• New Hampshire Board Member Rich Ashooh lists his employment as Director, Strategy at BAE Systems.
• New Hampshire Board Member James Bell is the chief executive of EPE Corporation, a manufacturing company that says it is a "premier supplier to the defense community."
• Advisory Board Member John Engler is the president of the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group for major corporations, including defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Technologies and Northrop Grumman.
• New Hampshire Board Member Ken Solinksy is founder of Insight Technologies, a night vision and electro-optical systems firm acquired by L-3 Communications.
• New Hampshire Chairman and Advisory Board Member Walt Havenstein is the former chief executive of BAE Systems and SAIC, two of the largest defense contractors in America. Havenstein, who left SAIC in 2012, was paid partially in company stock options.

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Towards a militarized police state in America? Explosive new revelations over "Jade Helm 15 exercise" and potential false flags

© http://ift.tt/1HMwVQH

    

A growing segment of the American population is waking up to the implications of the Jade Helm 15 military operation to be conducted by Special Forces in conjunction with local law enforcement, the FBI, DHS, the DEA and Border Patrol across the entire Southwest. This massive unprecedented exercise will also commence in June sooner than first announced and last for 10 weeks through the summer till September 15.

The risk of it triggering civil unrest or that it may coincide with a potential false flag scenario followed by another possibly timed crisis situation is both feasible and real, despite mainstream media's ridicule dismissing any such possibilities as pure paranoid conspiracy theory. What we do know for sure is this nation has turned into a militarized police state and that both the military and the government lie all the time.

We also are aware of the globalists' long planned agenda of a national crisis that would induce Obama to quash civil unrest by declaring martial law. A recent poll of Americans found that near half (45%) see Jade Helm as imposing more control over the states. If martial law doesn't actually come to pass this time around, it certainly sets the stage for next time in this incrementally increasing militarization of America.

We also know that a specific Department of Defense manual FM 3-39.40 has existed since 2010 delineating how the federal government in cooperation with the UN will respond to civil disturbance that includes FEMA camp roundups to fill waiting empty Haliburton-refurbished prison camps after a $385 million no bid contract during the former CEO Cheney's vice presidency. We also know that each prison camp includes a tribunal section and a mortuary section along with psychological officers responsible for reprogramming US detainees. Despite this layout presented so matter-of-fact and by-the-book, Americans will be killed. During the upheaval of a national crisis, a lethal outcome is also most probable. Meanwhile, countdown to global war appears to be ticking away as troops from virtually every nation are busily training in preparation for a likely West versus East endgame scenario of World War III.

President Kennedy spoke of subversive forces operating inside the shadow government several months prior to those same forces killing him. And those demonic forces posing as our international crime syndicate government boldly went on unconsequenced by the JFK assassination to stage the worst false flag in history on 9/11 giving birth to the neocons' war on terror. And it's been all downhill ever since with nonstop wars, a runaway deficit (over $18 trillion), a fragile and broken global economy, and within a few years after 9/11 a militarized totalitarian police state. Long gone is America's once democratic republic, replaced by a fascist oligarchy controlled by a military-security-prison complex. As Obama's personal army, Homeland Security has grown gluttonously evil bringing tyranny and oppression to the United States of America as never before.

But to those of us aware enough to study and learn from history, there are no accidents and no surprises here. Armed with the latest technology, the global elitists in control have done their homework, long in advance manipulating everything in its Orwellian place for these shuttering events and developments to unfold. From the overreaching CIA grooming their Manchurian Candidate president to his unqualified meteoric rise to puppet power, Obama was the perfect made man for the job. Obscured by a shadowy, made over past that includes a fake birth certificate, he was steeped in Communist ideology and socialist collectivism by his deep connection with ex-terrorist Bill Ayers (who also was the Common Core architect responsible largely for dumbing down public education) and fellow mentor Saul Alinsky. Obama displayed dazzle as an early orator on the big stage of big politics, wore the right skin color to prey on people's hope for change and progress, appearing as a different kind of leader who many thought would represent the common people, a unifier and uplifter for the downtrodden. Boy were they dead wrong!

Once elected, Obama became the Manchurian Trojan Horse presidential imposter occupying the White House. This is the same man as presidential candidate who bragged and promised as a former constitutional law professor for over 10 years that he'd be the most open and transparent president in US history after the criminal Bush regime. Then once Obama became president, he only demonstrated that he is the most secretive and closed off president in history. Even worse, in the same speech he denounced Bush and Cheney for violating America's rule of law, he proposed to develop "an appropriate legal regime for indefinite prolonged detention of American citizens" prior to ever breaking the law based purely on the government's suspicion that they may become a future threat to national security. This statement uttered early in his first term ominously spelled out his sinister agenda to lock up and throw away the key to any citizen that he and his minions believe might become a future threat.

Based on Obama and his administration's subsequent actions, their definition of "future threat to national security" is simply anyone who disagrees with his treasonous policies, DHS declaring them a greater threat than even ISIS, which is really quite telling. Those citizens honest and brave enough to expose the criminal truth about his evil agenda betraying our Constitution, nation and people have been singled out and targeted on dissident watch lists.

Americans believing in our Constitution who object to the feds' criminality of constantly violating the nation's rule of law that used to protect citizens with privacy rights over unlawfully invasive surveillance and search and seizure, the right to peaceful assembly to public protest, the right to own a gun, the right to freedom of speech and religion, the right to due process, the right to habeas corpus dating back to the 1066 Magna Carta, all these previously guaranteed civil liberties under Bush-Obama were usurped and denied Americans. The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act was a traitorous package deal depriving us of all these rights, as well as violating and repealing the 1878 Posse Comitatus law prohibiting US military from involvement in civil matters that fall under state National Guard and law enforcement jurisdiction.

This president and his DHS in one fell swoop have equated US patriots who are returning veterans from warfronts (regardless of war) as potential home grown terrorists. So after placing their life on the line for their nation in combat, risking and often incurring serious life threatening injuries while experiencing the trauma of witnessing their comrades die sacrificing their lives for their nation, upon return home from US Empire's blood for oil wars, their nation turns on them in betrayal, calling them terrorist threats and developing a criminally subversive plan to remove not only their private weapons violating their Second Amendment right, but physically removing them from society by locking them away in prison or worse killing them under false suspicion they might become homegrown terrorists. This is how our diabolically treasonous and insane government led by our current commander-in-chief repays our veterans. It's unbelievably despicable that America's come to this.

© Global Research
The Last Whistleblowers.

    

On to another targeted population, Obama has harassed, threatened, accused and locked up more journalists and whistleblowers than any previous administration ever. Moreover, he has charged more whistleblowers with violating an antiquated 1917 espionage act for treason than all past presidencies combined, sentencing them to jail time 25 more times than all previous combined. The least transparent president in history also denied more Freedom of Information Act requests in 2014 than all previous administrations, only proving himself to be the most vindictive, revengeful, secretive despot president in history.

When Obama came to power everything was in place for the globalist war machine to continue uninterrupted, unleashing the same imperialistic US Empire aggression launched by the war criminal invaders and occupiers Bush and Cheney. Following his globalist marching orders, Obama seamlessly maintained the Empire's role as world policeman and murderous bully around the globe. He prolonged the war in Iraq for another three years in time to claim credit for ending the Iraq War during his reelection campaign. In the other decade-long war he ensured the fighting in Afghanistan would continue unabated for another half dozen years. Then with the help of Israel and Saudi Arabia, he created ISIS, which conveniently provided the fine print disclaimer ensuring the US-NATO military presence in both war ravaged nations would be on an as needed, permanent basis.

In the meantime hidden from public view, Obama guaranteed the proliferation of new, sneakier kind of lower intensity, out of sight, out of mind wars around the world fought by none other than the killer elite Special Forces. Now Americans cannot even tell you who the US is at war with because it's all a deep state secret. Did I mention Obama's the most secretive prez in history? Investigative reporter and author Nick Turse has determined the exponential growth of US Special Operations at last count over a year ago is deployed in more than 134 nations around the globe with the highest concentration throughout most of Africa and much of Central and East Asia. That's most nations on earth along with a thousand US military posts around the world.

Expanding the presence of US proxy wars, Obama refined a new and improved formula for churning out the most barbaric, savage, seemingly unstoppable monster enemy of them all - the Islamic State (IS). Pretending IS jihadists are the most evil enemy since Russian Communists, complicit in showcasing their staged youtube beheadings to horrify the world for effect, Obama secretly engineered their expanding global dominance in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and possibly just eight miles from the US border near El Paso in Mexico where reports from Judicial Watch recently claimed a high ranking Mexican police and a military officer stated ISIS is currently undergoing joint training operations with the drug cartel ostensibly to potentially terrorize Americans on US soil during Jade Helm. Of course the US government vehemently denies the presence of Islamic State in Mexico yet speculation still lingers based on US FBI and DHS meetings with Mexican authorities. In any event, the bottom line if the US really wanted to destroy ISIS, as the most lethal killing force on earth, it could eliminate Islamic State forces within a month.

Apparently it was two homegrown ISIS fighters from Arizona that showed up in Dallas bent on a shooting spree at a cartoon contest lampooning Islam earlier this month in what seemed a staged event, the same state deemed "hostile" by the Jade Helm game plan. Then came the bizarre mass biker gang shootout killing 9 in Waco, Texas a week ago. Evidence is coming to light that hidden ISIS recruiters are presently embedded in US, UK and Canada college campuses around those Western nations attempting to entice non-Muslims to join their cause. Based on a recent UN report almost two months ago, more than 25,000 new recruits did join from most countries in the world just since June last year. Whether ISIS is really here in North America amongst us or not, Washington's been hyping the eminent dangers posed by right wing domestic terrorists lurking to kill government authorities like police, almost as if to prep us for an upcoming false flag that could occur during Jade Helm.

As the US-created hired gun, after training, arming and financing Obama's secret ally that holds a calling card reading "Terrorism-R-Us-Will-Travel," Obama and his globalist puppet masters have been increasingly outed with incontrovertible evidence of newly declassified documents that the so called ISIS enemy is actually a mere extension and creation of the US, its Western allies and their oligarch masters. It was just released that the Pentagon had devised a plan back in August 2012 for the rise of ISIS (that we never even knew existed then) to later take over two key Iraqi cities Mosul and Ramadi. Is it any wonder that Iraqi security forces simply cut and ran without a fight from both cities?

The latest disturbing revelations surfacing are disclosures from whistleblowers inside the military high command and a recently retired Homeland Security officer. One recently purged lieutenant general among the 270 high ranking military officers Obama has forced out of the service has just revealed in an email that this summer's Jade Helm will in fact bring not only dissident extraction but the start of "a ground war, city by city, street by street" to America. The anonymous retired three star general went on to write:

Additionally what is coming will be unlike any civil war in history, it will be very personal, the government will call the Patriots forces terrorists and traitors, they will arrest, intern, torture and murder suspected terrorists families, this will result in bloody reprisals which will start a vicious cycle lasting for years.

Lending credibility to his dire prediction was the general's assignment in 2012 to be part of a Pentagon study assessing the rank and file personnel in all the US armed forces on whether they would be willing or not to fire upon and kill US citizens in a civil war scenario. He revealed that 80% of the National Guard would side with the American people, 90% of the Marines also, 60% of the Army would, the Navy would remain on active patrol in defense to interdict any possible foreign intervention and only the Air Force will side with Obama's government at 75%. So from his email he believes the majority of US military would fight right alongside Americans against the government oppressors. It was alluded that a number of veterans up and down the ranks would also be armed as patriots actively resisting the government attack on its own citizens, which would far outnumber the treasonous government forces. But the bottom line according to this high ranking flag officer, an all-out civil war is fast approaching where many US citizens are likely to die and be imprisoned.

Another anonymous career insider from Homeland Security just admitted:

Preparations have been finalized to respond to a crisis of unprecedented magnitude within the United States. The response will include the use of lethal force against US citizens under the instructions of Barack Obama.

The whistleblower described the atmosphere inside the DHS mega-bureaucracy as forebodingly paranoid where no one trusts anyone and workers are leaving in droves. Afraid of information leaks, conditions have become so oppressive to create an ultra-hostile, toxic work environment. The DHS retiree maintains that the upcoming crisis will be "rooted in an economic collapse." He said a key precursor just before the crash to look for will be falling gold and silver prices. The orchestrators behind it are the Wall Street bankers who of course like with every fixed crash in the past will be busily buying up all the precious metals for untold illegal profiteering. The insider maintains that America's already sliding into crash mode though most people don't realize it yet, adding:

The 'big bang' comes at the end, when people wake up one morning and can't log in to their bank accounts, can't use their ATM cards, and find out that their private pension funds and other assets have been confiscated.

He states that the above scenario of a cyberattack on the US banking system is but one possible plan he was privy to. Though the whistleblower admitted that DHS, the NSA and IRS are all militant, totalitarian arms of the White House, he doubly emphasized that it's not Obama pulling all the strings:

[Obama] is a creation of the globalists who have no allegiance to any political party. He is the product of decades of planning, made for this very time in our history. He was selected to oversee the events I just disclosed. Who has that ability? He's a product of our own intelligence agencies working with the globalists. He should be exhibit 'A' to illustrate the need to enforce the Logan Act.

Unlike the whistleblowing general, the former Homeland Security employee said he did not know the exact timing of when he foresees the plan being executed with high probability of two near simultaneous false flags triggering martial law and the violence directed against US citizens. But the general did, feeling certain that Jade Helm would go live in response to government induced crises. Because we live in an interconnected global economy, the disaster that will soon afflict the US will reverberate with ripple effects around the globe. And though many Americans will refuse to believe any such malevolent harm can possibly come to the United States that relative to most of the world has had it so good for so long, the globalists responsible are heartless evildoers who have no compassion or guilt for the atrocities and suffering they directly inflict on humankind. Bringing down America puts them one huge step closer to one world government. It will be up to us patriots like the revolutionaries of our War of Independence to fight for our liberty and life for a rebirth of a new nation fashioned after what originally was our Founding Fathers' lasting legacy.

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Baikal Technologies announces the Baikal-T1 microprocessor with MIPS P5600 CPU

    

Baikal Electronics, a fabless semiconductor company specializing in ARM-based and MIPS-based processors and systems on a chip (SoC), has announced the release of engineering samples of its new Baikal-T1 multi-core microprocessor created using a 28 nanometer process and designed for use in consumer and industrial devices.

The Baikal-T1 will become the first Russian offering for the communications market to use a MIPS Warrior CPU, boasting highly competitive properties in terms of performance, technology node and compatibility, the company said. At the heart of the chip sits a dual-core MIPS P5600 CPU clocked at 1.2 GHz. The Baikal-T1 also includes multiple high-speed (1G/10G Ethernet, PCIe, SATA 6G, USB) and low-speed interfaces (GPIO, I2C, UART, SPI). The package measures 25 x 25 mm and is manufactured on 28nm process technology, achieving less than 5 W of total power consumption - an ideal figure for fanless device designs.

The MIPS P5600 CPU is an OmniShield-ready, 32-bit CPU from Baikal's high-performance P-class range of Warrior processors; it boasts a superscalar, out-of-order (OoO) design that implements Release 5 features such as hardware virtualization for increased security and reliability, and a 128-bit SIMD engine for high performance on data parallel operations.

The MIPS P5600 recently achieved a 5.6 CoreMark/MHz, the highest score per core for 32-bit licensable microprocessor IP, Baikal added.

Additional features of the CPU include EVA (Enhanced Virtual Addressing) and XPA (eXtended Physical Addressing), two technologies that extend the limits of traditional 32-bit architecture. For example, XPA extends the amount of addressable physical memory in devices to a maximum of 1 Terabyte; in addition, as typical networking-related workloads require a larger address space, EVA extends the amount of virtual addressing to almost the full 4GB space. Therefore, the combination of these two features will help to alleviate bottlenecks in software performance, Baikal claims.

Development of the Baikal-T1 was carried out with the support of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, under a special program established in 2008 to foster the development of Russia's electronic component base, the company said. Additional financial backing was provided by the investment firms T-Nano and T-Platforms, though the company refused to divulge how much.

Baikal's release comes just weeks after another Russian firm, the Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies (MCST), unveiled what it claimed was Russia's first domestically-made microprocessor, the Elbrus-4C. MCST claimed at the time its chip was the most high-tech processor ever built in Russia, built using a 65nm process and offering a performance comparable with Intel Corp's Core i3 and Intel Core i5 processors.

Engineering samples of the Baikal-T1 will be available on June 1.

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Swarm of twenty-three earthquakes reported near Costa Rica's Irazu volcano

© Tico Times/Google
The epicenters of 23 temblors are in an area near the Irazú Volcano.

    

In a span of eight hours on Monday night and into early Tuesday, experts from the University of Costa Rica and the National University registered at least 23 temblors with epicenters located north of the province of Cartago, some 22 kilometers northeast of the Costa Rican capital.

Ronny Quintero, a seismologist at UNA's Volcanological and Seismological Observatory of Costa Rica (OVSICORI) reported that the temblors originated on local faults west of Irazú Volcano's main crater. Experts said they are not directly related to the volcano's activity. The first occurred at 8:19 p.m. with a magnitude of 3.1 and and an epicenter 10 kilometers northwest of Pacayas. Several minor earthquakes with magnitudes ranging from 2.4 to 3.7 followed, mainly in areas north and east of Cartago in the cantons of Jiménez and Oreamuno. Most of the minor quakes went unnoticed by local residents.

The strongest, at magnitude-4.2, was registered at 8:50 p.m. with an epicenter 9 kilometers northeast of San Rafael de Oreamuno. The most recent was reported at 7:09 a.m. on Tuesday with a magnitude of 2.4. OVSICORI received reports from residents throughout the Central Valley who felt at least three of the temblors, but there has been no significant damage or injuries.

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New Comet: C/2015 K4 (PANSTARRS)

BET nr. 4108, issued on 2015, May 27, announces the discovery of a comet (magnitude ~18) by PANSTARRS survey in three w-band exposures taken with the 1.8-m Pan-STARRS1 telescope at Haleakala on May 24.5 UT. The new comet has been designated C/2015 K4 (PANSTARRS).

We performed follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 20 unfiltered exposures, 30-sec each, obtained remotely on 2015, May 26.3 from U69 (iTelescope network - Auberry California) through a 0.61-m f/6.5 astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is a comet with a ill-defined central condensation surrounded by diffuse irregular coma about 6" in diameter.

Our confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)

© Remanzacco Observatory

    

M.P.E.C. 2015-K114 assigns the following preliminary parabolic orbital elements to comet C/2015 K4: T 2015 May 1.79365; e= 1.0; Peri. = 357.56; q = 2.01; Incl.= 80.25

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This may be the earliest murder victim in human history

© Javier Trueba/Madrid Scientific Films
This is a frontal view of Cranium 17 showing the position of the traumatic events T1 (inferior) and T2 (superior).

    

Wounds discovered on a 430,000-year-old human skull discovered in Spain could indicate that the individual was one of the first-ever murder victims, according to a new study published in the May 27 edition of the open-access journal .

In the study, Dr. Nohemi Sala from Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos, Spain, and her colleagues explain that the skull was discovered at Sima de los Huesos, a site located deep within a series of underground caves located in northern Spain.

The skull, known as Cranium 17, was found with the skeletal remains of at least 28 individuals dating back to the Middle Pleistocene period. The specimen is comprised of 52 cranial fragments recovered during a series of excavations at the site over the past two decades, and contains a pair of penetrating lesions on the frontal bone, just above the left eye, Dr. Sala's team said.

Injured skull discovered at possible early burial ground

By analyzing the skull using modern forensic techniques, such as contour and trajectory analysis of the traumas, the study authors discovered evidence that the fractures were produced by two separate impacts with the same objects. The impacts came at slight different trajectories around the time of death, the authors said, and are unlikely the result of an accident.

The site where they were discovered is only accessible through a 13-meter deep vertical shaft, they said in a statement, but the injuries do not appear to be consistent with a fall down the shaft. Instead, the type and location of the fractures, and the belief that they appear to have been caused by two blows with the same object.

This discovery has led the authors to conclude that the injuries came as a direct result of intentional, lethal interpersonal aggression. In other words, Dr. Sala and her colleagues explained that this individual may be the victim of "the earliest case of murder" in human history.

In addition, they noted that if this one individual was killed, his or her body was probably carried by other humans to the top for the vertical shaft, then dumped into it. Such an act would appear to indicate that it and the rest of the bodies found at the Sima de los Huesos site had been placed there intentionally, and that the site could potentially be an ancient burial ground of sorts.

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