The Raw Story

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Tuesday, 2 September 2014

Mexico baffled as 50 tons of fish turn up dead

Nearly 50 tonnes of popoche chub fish are latest incident of dead fish removed from lagoon in disastrous year for species. Mexicans are baffled at the sudden death of thousands of fish in a lake in the centre of the country, a dramatic intensification of a problem that no one has yet been able to explain. Nearly 50 tonnes of dead popoche chub fish were removed at the weekend from Lake Cajititln, a lagoon in the central state of Jalisco. Fishermen, firefighters, town hall workers and staff from the state agricultural ministry pulled hundreds of thousands of dead popoche chub fish from the lake and buried them in a pit. The incident comes after of a series of smaller waves of dead popoche chub in the lake in recent months, including one last week, ensuring that 2014 is already by far the worst year for the species, which has been under attack for the past few years. The authorities in the lakeside town of Tlajomulco de Ziga, about 25 minutes' drive south of the city of Guadalajara, had previously blamed the deaths on "a cyclical phenomenon caused by temperature variations and the reduction of oxygen".

Mystery UFO sighting that baffled police captured on camera in Pennsylvania

Unknown flashing lights from the unidentified flying object even left the local police without an explanation There is no question in Stephanie Wilkerson's mind about what she saw in the night sky this week. When a giant circle of flashing lights appeared over her Pennsylvania home, she ran to grab her neighbour who brought his binoculars to take a closer look. After the lights started to change colour, the pair called 911 and began filming the strange sight on a mobile phone. In an interview with ABC New, Stephanie said: "I thought it was a plane until I realised it wasn't moving." "I watched it for about 20 minutes and I started noticing it changing colours," she added.

Google drone program: The "inside" view

A zipping comes across the sky. A man named Neil Parfitt is standing in a field on a cattle ranch outside Warwick, Australia. A white vehicle appears above the trees, a tiny plane a bit bigger than a seagull. It glides towards Parfitt, pitches upwards to a vertical position, and hovers near him, a couple hundred feet in the air. From its belly, a package comes tumbling downward, connected by a thin line to the vehicle itself. Right before the delivery hits the ground, it slows, hitting the earth with a tap. The delivery slows, almost imperceptibly, just before it hits the ground, hardly kicking up any dust. A small rectangular module on the end of the line detaches the payload, and ascends back up the vehicle, locking into place beneath the nose. As the wing returns to flying posture and zips back to its launch point half a mile away, Parfitt walks over to the package, opens it up, and extracts some treats for his dogs. The Australian test flight and 30 others like it conducted in mid-August are the culmination of the first phase of Project Wing, a secret drone program that's been running for two years at Google X, the company's whoa-inducing, long-range research lab. Though a couple of rumors have escaped the Googleplex - because of course Google must have a drone-delivery program - Project Wing's official existence and substance were revealed today. I've spent the past week talking to Googlers who worked on the project, reviewing video of the flights, and interviewing other people convinced delivery by drone will work. Taken with the company's other robotics investments, Google's corporate posture has become even more ambitious. Google doesn't just want to organize all the world's information. Google wants to organize all the world.

Mountain lion 'stalks' woman near Telluride, Colorado

A lone hiker had a frightening encounter with a mountain lion Monday in San Miguel County. A sheriff's office spokesperson says the feline predator "stalked" the woman in Placerville which is about 16 miles northwest of Telluride in southwestern Colorado. The woman, 40-year-old Kyra Kopenstonsky of Placerville was on a trail when she spotted the mountain lion in close proximity to her. She told deputies the big cat kept following her and she called a friend for help. That friend called 911 at 4:45 p.m. Two deputies met the hiker at the trailhead where she eventually emerged "shaken, but uninjured."

Just one Facebook post can get you labeled a terrorist by the U.S. government

Innocent people's lives are being ruined. Why isn't anyone watching the watchlist? The US government's web of surveillance is vast and interconnected. Now we know just how opaque, inefficient and discriminatory it can be. As we were reminded again just this week, you can be pulled into the National Security Agency's database quietly and quickly, and the consequences can be long and enduring. Through ICREACH, a Google-style search engine created for the intelligence community, the NSA provides data on private communications to 23 government agencies. More than 1,000 analysts had access to that information. This kind of data sharing, however, isn't limited to the latest from Edward Snowden's NSA files. It was confirmed earlier this month that the FBI shares its master watchlist, the Terrorist Screening Database, with at least 22 foreign governments, countless federal agencies, state and local law enforcement, plus private contractors. The watchlist tracks "known" and "suspected" terrorists and includes both foreigners and Americans. It's also based on loose standards and secret evidence, which ensnares innocent people. Indeed, the standards are so low that the US government's guidelines specifically allow for a single, uncorroborated source of information - including a Facebook or Twitter post - to serve as the basis for placing you on its master watchlist. Of the 680,000 individuals on that FBI master list, roughly 40% have "no recognized terrorist group affiliation", according to the Intercept. These individuals don't even have a connection - as the government loosely defines it - to a designated terrorist group, but they are still branded as suspected terrorists.

Israel makes massive land grab in the West Bank - steals over 400 more hectares

The United States sees Israel's announcement on Sunday of a land appropriation for possible settlement construction in the occupied West Bank as "counterproductive" to peace efforts and urges the Israeli government to reverse the decision, Reuters reported a State Department official as saying. Israel laid claim to nearly a thousand acres (400 hectares) in the Etzion settlement bloc near Bethlehem, a move which an anti-settlement group termed the biggest appropriation in 30 years and a Palestinian official said would cause only more friction after the Gaza war. "We have long made clear our opposition to continued settlement activity," the U.S. official said. "This announcement, like every other settlement announcement Israel makes, planning step they approve and construction tender they issue is counterproductive to Israel's stated goal of a negotiated two-state solution with the Palestinians." "We urge the government of Israel to reverse this decision," the official said in Washington. Comment: Ooh, yeah. That's gonna make Israel change its mind. Israel announced plans on Sunday to expropriate 400 hectares (988 acres) of Palestinian land in the Bethlehem area in the south of the occupied West Bank, the military said, Agence France-Presse reported. "On the instructions of the political echelon... 4,000 dunams at (the settlement of) Gevaot is declared as state land," the army said, adding that concerned parties have 45 days to appeal. Comment: Nice touch, but court appeals are never successful if you are a Palestinian. It said that the step stemmed from political decisions taken after the June killing of three Israeli teenagers snatched from a roadside in the same area, known to Israelis as Gush Etzion settlement bloc. Comment: So in addition to bombing Gaza to the point where estimates say it will take over twenty years to reconstruct it, the psycho Zionists now help themselves to some more Palestinian territory. But they say they want peace. Hypocrites. Israel has named three Palestinians from the southern West Bank city of Hebron as being behind the murders. The Etzion settlements council welcomed Sunday's announcement and said it was the prelude to expansion of the current Gevaot settlement. It "paves the way for the new city of Gevaot", a statement said. Settlements watchdog Peace Now expressed alarm. "As far as we know, this declaration is unprecedented in its scope since the 1980s and can dramatically change the reality in the Gush Etzion and the Bethlehem areas," it said.

This Google Glass app that measures human emotions is so, so creepy

It's not like we need any more reminders about how creepy Google Glass can be, but developers never stop surprising us. An new app from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute that uses facial tracking, proprietary tools and Glass, can measure human emotions. In real time. The technology, dubbed SHORE (Sophisticated High-speed Object Recognition), gauges emotions such as anger, happiness, sadness and surprise and projects this information directly onto the screen of your Glass, right across the face of the person you're looking at. It doesn't just stop there. It also estimates their age and their gender, a feature, Fraunhofer says, can lead to applications in interactive gaming and market research. This is like RoboCop, but real, and on your face. Now. If there are multiple people in a frame, you will get separate emotional attributes for all of them. All processing happens directly on the Glass CPU, which means that your Glass device is probably going to last you all of 20 minutes as Geek.com points out.
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