Russian Analyst Urging Attacks on Major U.S. Landmarks

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

By Su-Lin Tan. A Russian geopolitical analyst says the best way to attack the United States is to detonate nuclear weapons to trigger a supervolcano at Yellowstone National Park or along the San Andreas fault line on California’s coast.

The president of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems based in Moscow, Konstantin Sivkov said in an article for a Russian trade newspaper on Wednesday, VPK News, that Russia needed to increase its military weapons and strategies against the “West” which was “moving to the borders or Russia”.

He has a conspiracy theory that NATO – a political and military alliance which counts the US, UK, Canada and many countries in western Europe as members – was amassing strength against Russia and the only way to combat that problem was to attack America’s vulnerabilities to ensure a “complete destruction of the enemy”.

“Geologists believe that the Yellowstone supervolcano could explode at any moment. There are signs of growing activity there. Therefore it suffices to push the relatively small, for example the impact of the munition megaton class to initiate an eruption. The consequences will be catastrophic for the United States – a country just disappears,” he said.

“Another vulnerable area of ​​the United States from the geophysical point of view, is the San Andreas fault – 1300 kilometers between the Pacific and North American plates … a detonation of a nuclear weapon there can trigger catastrophic events like a coast-scale tsunami which can completely destroy the infrastructure of the United States.” (Read more from “Russian Analyst Urging Attacks on Major U.S. Landmarks” HERE)

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Russian Tanks and Fighters Enter Eastern Ukraine, Says Kiev

By Damien Sharkov. 22 Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine’s separatist-held eastern territories over the weekend, as pro-Moscow forces continue to seep into Ukraine’s war-stricken Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Donetsk’s local pro-government officials reported yesterday.

In a statement published on Donetsk’s regional government website, the deputy head of Ukraine’s anti-separatist military operations in Donetsk and Luhansk Valentin Fechev, condemned the “cynical lies” of pro-Russian fighters who have accused Ukraine of violating the ceasefire between the two sides, and instead gave a recent recap of Russian violations.

Fechev told the regional government website that 22 tanks had crossed from Russia via the border town of Gukovo, into Ukraine’s Luhansk region, heading toward the city of Sverdlovsk for maintenance. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Spokesman for Missouri State Auditor Found Dead 1 Month After Boss Killed Himself

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

The spokesman for the Missouri auditor was found dead Sunday from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, just a month after the suicide of his former boss, GOP gubernatorial frontrunner Tom Schweich.

Jefferson City police said Monday that Robert “Spence” Jackson was found dead Sunday evening at his home in the capital city. A police statement said Jackson’s death is being investigated as a suicide.

Jackson had been the spokesman for Missouri Auditor Tom Schweich, who shot himself to death on Feb. 26 at his home in the St. Louis suburb of Clayton. Jackson had remained as the office spokesman after Schweich’s death.

The 44-year-old Jackson also had previously served as the spokesman for former Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt.

Jackson was a strong critic of Schweich’s political adversaries, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Schweich killed himself Feb. 26 at his home in Clayton minutes after telling a reporter that Republican state Chairman John Hancock had started an anti-Semitic “whispering campaign” against him. (Read more from “Spokesman for Missouri State Auditor Found Dead 1 Month After Boss Killed Himself” HERE)

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U.S. Signed Agreement with Mexico to Teach Immigrants to Unionize

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

The federal government has signed agreements with three foreign countries — Mexico, Ecuador and the Philippines — to establish outreach programs to teach immigrants their rights to engage in labor organizing in the U.S.

The agreements do not distinguish between those who entered legally or illegally. They are part of a broader effort by the National Labor Relations Board to get immigrants involved in union activism.

The five-member board is the agency that enforces the National Labor Relations Act, the main federal law covering unions. In 2013, Lafe Solomon, the board’s then-acting general counsel, signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Mexico’s U.S. ambassador. The current general counsel, Richard Griffin, signed additional agreements with the ambassadors of Ecuador and the Philippines last year.

“Those are the only countries that the NLRB has MOUs with,” said spokeswoman Jessica Kahanek.

The agreements are substantially similar, with several sections repeated verbatim in each one. All three documents state that the No. 1 outreach goal is “to educate those who may not be aware of the Act, including those employees just entering the work force, by providing information designed to clearly inform [that nation’s] workers in the United States of America their rights under the Act and to develop ways of communicating such information (e.g., via print and electronic media, electronic assistance tools, mobile device applications, and links to the NLRB’s web site from the [country’s] web sites) to the … workers residing in the United States of America and their employers.” (Read more from “U.S. Signed Agreement with Mexico to Teach Immigrants to Unionize” HERE)

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You’ll Never Guess What a Reporter Says John Kerry’s Response to a Nuke Deal Was

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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry testifies at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while on Capitol Hill in WashingtonSecretary of State John Kerry allegedly responded in a most unusual way to a reporter’s question Friday whether a nuclear arms deal could be reached with Iran before the March 31 deadline.

“Allah willing,” Kerry replied — in Arabic, according to Laura Rozen, a reporter covering the Iran nuclear talks in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the Washington, D.C.-based online publication, Al-Monitor.

As news reached the public Friday that a deal may be forthcoming, Rozen tweeted:

Friend of colleague ran into @JohnKerry at chocolate shop tdy. She said friends in #Iran are looking forward to deal. He said ‘inshallah’

— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) March 27, 2015

“Inshallah” is Arabic for “Allah willing,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. (Read more from “You’ll Never Guess What a Reporter Says John Kerry’s Response to a Nuke Deal Was” HERE)

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Disgusting: New Spa-Like Abortion Clinic Is Part of a Trend to De-Stigmatize the Procedure

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Photo Credit: Life News

Photo Credit: Life News

With its natural wood floors and plush upholstery, Carafem aims to feel more like a spa than a medical clinic. But the slick ads set to go up in Metro stations across the Washington region leave nothing to doubt: “Abortion. Yeah, we do that.”

The Maryland clinic, opening this week in Montgomery County’s tony Friendship Heights area, specializes in the abortion pill. The advertising reflects its unabashed approach — and a new push to de-stigmatize the nation’s most controversial medical procedure by talking about it openly and unapologetically.

Plagued by political setbacks in recent years, abortion rights activists are seeking to normalize abortion, to put a human face on the women getting the procedure and, in some cases, even putting a positive spin on it.

In Los Angeles County, groups recently sent women door-to-door in conservative neighborhoods to talk about their abortion experiences in the hope of changing minds. A number of Democratic lawmakers have publicly acknowledged having undergone the procedure. And new online projects solicit personal testimonials, including from women who have no regrets about terminating their pregnancies.

At Carafem, staff members plan to greet clients with warm teas, comfortable robes and a matter-of-fact attitude. (Read more from “New Spa-Like Abortion Clinic Is Part of a Trend to De-Stigmatize the Procedure” HERE)

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Report Says Iran May Be Keeping Elements of Nuclear Program in Syria, North Korea

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AlgeAs world powers race to close a nuclear deal with Iran, recent reports have indicated that not all elements of Iran’s nuclear program may be domestic, but that some of it may be located in Syria and as far away as North Korea. In light of the secrecy surrounding the talks going on in Lausanne, Switzerland these reports are receiving some attention, according to The Israel Project, a Washington DC-based advocacy group.

If true, the implications of the reports are far reaching. The Israel Project said that the debate in these reports “involves how Iran has dispersed its nuclear assets to Syria and North Korea, which means that any envisioned deal would only slow a part of the Iranian nuclear program, while flooding the Iranians with cash to bolster what’s left over.”

Last November, as an earlier deadline for the talks approached, the issue came up regarding Iran moving its nuclear program’s assets to Syria, but now the debate is including North Korea. And according to the Israel project, “Even if everything goes right in slowing Iran’s nuclear work on Iranian soil…the deal wouldn’t touch all of the places and ways the Iranians are going nuclear.”

The reports indicate that Germany’s Der Spiegel revealed the existence of an undisclosed nuclear facility in Syria where as much as 50 tons of enriched uranium may have been taken, so that while it remained in Syrian territory, it was nonetheless under Iranian control. The facility is located deep in the Qalamoun region, near the town of Qusayr, territory controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force and Iran’s terror proxy Hezbollah. (Read more from “Report Says Iran May Be Keeping Elements of Nuclear Program in Syria, North Korea” HERE)

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Spanish Hospital Conducts World’s First Successful Complex Face Transplant

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FaceA Spanish hospital said Monday it has successfully carried out the world’s most complex face transplant, reconstructing the lower face, neck, mouth, tongue and back of the throat of a man terribly disfigured by disease.

A team of 45 physicians, nurses, anaesthesiologists and other health professionals carried out the 27-hour operation in early February at Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, the hospital said in a statement.

“This is the first time that a transplant of this complexity is performed in the world,” the statement said.

“The patient evolution after the surgery was successful, similar to any transplant patient at the hospital. Now he is already at home and only comes to the hospital to do routine checkups.”

The patient, a 45-year-old man who does not wish to be identified, had suffered a condition called arteriovenous malformation for the past 20 years, causing a massive deformation of his tissues. (Read more from “Spanish Hospital Conducts Complex Face Transplant” HERE)

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Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria from American Cattle Become Airborne, but Is It Life-Threatening?

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cattle-yardAirborne particulate matter wafting off American cattle yards contains antibiotics, bacteria, and antibiotic-resistant DNA, a new study finds. Environmental tests on the spread of antibiotics have been performed in the past, but this is the first time researchers have examined aerial dispersion. The work suggests airborne transmission may be contributing to an emerging global health problem, where doctors find it increasingly difficult to treat life-threatening infections.

For some time now, scientists have worried that we may be entering a “post-antibiotic era,” when the drugs that once defeated potentially fatal infections are no longer effective. Simply put, the bacteria causing infections in many cases are now immune to (or “resisting”) the drugs. Since antibiotic-resistant bacterial DNA, if imbibed in water or consumed in meat, can be transferred to humans, many researchers say misuse and overuse of veterinary pharmaceuticals may be responsible, in part, for this global health threat. Large, commercial food operations rely on veterinary drugs, including antibiotics, to promote bigger growth of the animals. However, after the animals excrete the drugs, these antibiotics enter the environment via runoff, leaching, and the spread of manure.

For this new study, then, environmental toxicology researchers at Texas Tech University decided to look at whether these drugs become airborne. Over a period of six months, they gathered airborne particulate matter from 10 commercial cattle yards each with a capacity of 20,000 to 50,000 head of cattle, within 200 miles of Lubbock, Texas.

“Mass of [particulate matter] collected immediately downwind of feedyards was significantly different than that collected immediately upwind of each feedyard,” the authors wrote in the study. (Read more from “Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria from American Cattle Become Airborne, but Is It Life-Threatening?” HERE)

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The Pentagon Ups the Ante in Syria Fight

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JORDAN-MILITARY-EXERCISEThe Special Forces group that ousted the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001 is preparing to deploy to Jordan to train Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State, but many of the U.S. military’s most elite warriors have a gnawing fear that those efforts may be too little, too late.

Four years after the start of the uprising against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, the Army’s 5th Special Forces Group is getting ready to establish a multinational special operations task force in Jordan to train and equip Syrian rebel forces that the United States deems “moderate” — which means allied with neither the Islamic State nor al Qaeda’s local affiliate, al-Nusra Front.

But daunting challenges lie ahead for 5th Group. They include finding and vetting enough moderate rebels to make a difference on the battlefield; potential friction with the CIA, which has its own rebel training program going on in Jordan; the Obama administration’s refusal to let special operations forces fight alongside the rebel forces they have trained; and a confusing chain of command that none of the relevant American military headquarters seem willing or able to explain.

To complicate matters further, the general in charge of the training mission in Jordan is considered one of the special operations community’s most capable senior officers, but as things stand he is scheduled to rotate out of the country just as the training effort gets underway.

The stakes are enormously high for Washington and its allies. The Obama administration has publicly vowed to keep U.S. forces out of the line of fire in the campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, in part to guard against the prospect of more American fatalities in a conflict the U.S. public had overwhelmingly turned against in recent years. The White House is instead hoping that members of some of the military’s most secretive and elite units can rebuild the shattered Iraqi army and stand up a force of tribal militias willing to fight the Islamic State, while simultaneously helping to train and equip a new rebel force in Syria. Failure in either location is likely to embolden the United States’ enemies in the region — Iran, the Assad regime, the Islamic State, and al-Nusra Front — and seriously damage American prestige. (Read more from “The Pentagon Ups the Ante in Syria Fight” HERE)

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Access Denied: Reporters Say Federal Officials, Data Increasingly off Limits

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Photo Credit: Washington Post

Photo Credit: Washington Post

Stacey Singer, a health reporter for the Palm Beach Post in Florida, was perusing a medical journal in 2012 when she came across something startling: a federal epidemiologist’s report about a tuberculosis outbreak in the Jacksonville area. Singer promptly began pursuing the story.

But when she started seeking official comment about the little-reported outbreak, the doors began closing. County health officials referred her to the state health department. State officials referred her to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even though the CDC’s own expert had written the investigative report, the agency’s press office declined to let Singer speak with him. A spokesman told her it was a local matter and sent her back to the state office in Tallahassee.

Through public records requests, Singer eventually was able to piece together the story of a contagion that had caused 13 deaths and 99 illnesses — the worst the CDC had found in 20 years.

“It’s really expensive to fight this hard” for public information, said Singer, now an editorial writer at the newspaper. She suspects that officials were slow to respond because news of the TB outbreak might have harmed Florida’s tourism industry. “They know that to delay is to deny. . . . They know we have to move on to other stories.”

The stories aren’t always as consequential or as dramatic as a TB outbreak, but Singer’s experience is shared by virtually every journalist on the government beat, from the White House on down. They can recite tales with similar outlines: An agency spokesman — frequently a political appointee — rejects the reporter’s request for interviews, offers partial or nonresponsive replies, or delays responding at all until after the journalist’s deadline has passed. (Read more from “Access Denied: Reporters Say Federal Officials, Data Increasingly off Limits” HERE)

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