Yaphet Kotto UFO

Credit: World Net Daily A decision from the U.S. Supreme Court means the federal government now has an open door to “detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker,” critics of the high court’s ruling said. The high court by its own order this week refused to review  an appellate-level decision that says the president and U.S. military can arrest and indefinitely detain individuals. Officials with  William J. Olson, P.C.,  a firm that filed an amicus brief asking the court to step in, noted that not a single justice dissented from the denial of certiorari. “The court ducked, having no appetite to confront both political parties in order to protect the citizens from military detention,” the legal team told WND. “The government has won, creating a tragic moment for the people – and what will someday be viewed as an embarrassment for the court.” WND reported earlier when the indefinite detention provisions of...

Archaeologists digging in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. A team of Spanish archaeologists has unearthed what one expert says could be one of the most ancient images of Jesus, painted on the walls of an underground structure in an Egyptian tomb. The Egyptologists from Catalonia made the discovery in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, with the tombs said to date from the 6th and 7th centuries. Read more >> Source: World Net Daily

Credit: The Independent A genetic disease has been cured in living, adult animals for the first time using a revolutionary genome-editing technique that can make the smallest changes to the vast database of the DNA molecule with pinpoint accuracy. Scientists have used the genome-editing technology to cure adult laboratory mice of an inherited liver disease by correcting a single “letter” of the genetic alphabet which had been mutated in a vital gene involved in liver metabolism. A similar mutation in the same gene causes the equivalent inherited liver disease in humans – and the successful repair of the genetic defect in laboratory mice raises hopes that the first clinical trials on patients could begin within a few years, scientists said. Read more >> Source: The Independent

Ukraine crisis: Tortured politician’s widow mourns, as Russia vows to defend its interests Credit: The Independent ‘So many holes in his body’. Elena Rybak describes the terrible injuries suffered by her husband but refuses to blame pro-Kremlin militants The death of her husband under torture had played a part in thepresident of Ukraine’s decision to resume military operations against separatists. But Elena Rybak’s immediate feelings were very personal: devastating grief and numbing incomprehension about what had happened. There was the added horror of seeing the body of someone she loved with terrible injuries inflicted. The body of Vladimir Rybak – a town councillor and member of Yulia Tymoshenko’s Our Ukraine Fatherland party – had been found floating in the river, having disappeared after a confrontation with separatist militants.   Read more  >> Source: The Independent

Face-recognition software: Is this the end of anonymity for all of us? Credit: The Independent The software is already used for military surveillance, by police to identify suspects - and on Facebook. Now the US government is in the process of building the world's largest cache of face-recognition data, with the goal of identifying every person in the country From 2008 to 2010, as Edward Snowden has revealed, the National Security Agency (NSA) collaborated with the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to intercept the webcam footage of 1.8 million Yahoo users. The agencies were analysing images that they downloaded from webcams and scanning them for known terrorists who might be using the service to communicate, matching faces from the footage to suspects with the help of a new technology called face recognition. The outcome was pure Kafka, with innocent people being caught in the surveillance drag...

Philosophy Can Change Your Life by: Dr. Andrew Jeffrey The word 'philosophy' comes from two Greek words,philo, meaning love, and sophia, meaning wisdom or knowledge.  A "philosopher" in Ancient Greece was literally a "lover of knowledge."  Originally, all theoretical studies, from rhetoric to marine biology, were considered to fall under the scope of philosophy.  For example, one ancient philosopher, Aristotle, wrote on both of those two subjects, as well as logic, ethics, politics, physics, metaphysics, psychology, theatre, and zoology.  It is likely he wrote on mathematics as well, but many of his works are lost to us.  If you go far enough into the intellectual history of any theoretical subject you find philosophy and philosophers at its roots.  It was believed by nearly all philosophers in antiquity that a correct description of the self and the world would carry with it an implicit prescription concerning the way one should live one'...

Credit: The Independent South Korea ferry disaster: Captain and crew committed 'unforgivable, murderous acts' says President Park Geun-hye South Korean President Park Geun-hye has condemned the captain and some crew members of the sunken Sewol ferry, saying they committed “unforgivable, murderous acts” by delaying the ship’s evacuation. During a cabinet briefing on Monday, Park accused captain Lee Joon-seok and his crew of telling “passengers to stay put but they themselves became the first to escape, after deserting the passengers." "Legally and ethically this is an unimaginable act,” she said. As the ship carrying 476 people sank on Wednesday,  Lee told passengers to stay in their cabins , and waited more than half an hour to issue an evacuation order - by which point the ship had tilted. Around 240 people missing people are still believed to be trapped inside.   Read More >> Source:  The Independent

Credit: The Independent Shocking footage shows the moment car is hit by train after ignoring red light at level crossing Transport police in Texas have released remarkable CCTV footage of the moment a Metro train collided with a 4×4 after ignoring a red light on a level crossing. The black vehicle is seen performing a U-turn before driving around the barriers on the crossing and through a red lightindicating the imminent arrival of a train. The footage then shows the moment of impact as the train smashes into the side of the vehicle. Four people were in the car at the time of impact but all escaped with only minor injuries. According to KHOU news service police have said the driver, Raunel Arreola-Moreno, could now face charges after the accident near Reliant Park in Houston . Source: The Independent

Credit: The Independent The vice principal of the Danwon High School, where over 300 of its students were on board the sunken South Korea ferry, has been found hanged, local police have said. Kang Min-Kyu was found dead near a school gymnasium on Jindo island where many of the rescued and relatives of those still missing have gathered, the Yonhap News Agency has reported. The 52-year-old, who has been missing since Thursday, was rescued along with 178 others. Over 260 people are still missing. A police officer says the vice principal, identified only by his surname Kang, was found dead on the island of Jindo where rescued passengers have taken shelter. He did not provide any further details. The news of the death came on Friday as rescuers scrambled to find hundreds of people still missing from the ferry, which capsized with over 470 people on board off SouthKorea’s southwestern coast.   Read more ...

Government policy to force strong readers in schools to learn phonics is 'a form of abuse', claims leading educator Credit: The Independent Children who are fluent readers are being damaged by the Government’s insistence on using synthetic phonics in the classroom, a leading academic warns today. Dr Andrew Davis, from Durham University’s School of Education, argues that the insistence on being taught to read through phonics is tantamount to “a form of abuse”. In a pamphlet to be launched tomorrow night, he will claim rival camps in the debate over how to teach children to read are acting like “religious fundamentalists”. The evidence that phonics or any other prescriptive method for teaching children to read is fundamentally flawed, he says. Able readers, he argues, are likely to be put off by the Government’s requirement that they read books specially written only to feature words for which they have been taught through p...

Credit: The Independent Hubble Space Telescope spots clouds on alien worlds Astronomers have spotted clouds in the atmospheres of two planets outside our solar system, with a pair of research papers suggesting that these sorts of cloudy alien worlds might be far more common than previously thought. Two separate research teams examined data from the Hubble Space Telescope relating to the extra solar planets GJ 1214b and GJ 436b. Located 42 light-years away from Earth, GJ 1214b is a prime example of a ‘super-Earth’ planet whilst GJ 436b - 36 light-years away - is a ‘warm Neptune’. Super-Earths are planets with a mass between that of Earth and Neptune (GJ 1214b has a radius 2.7 times that of Earth) whilst warm Neptunes are, as the name suggests, hot versions of our own Neptune. They maintain a close orbit to their star of less than one astronomical unit (roughly the average distance from the Earth to the Sun, or around 90,00...

Credit: The Independent Ukraine troops kill three in deadly clashes at port base ahead of Geneva talks Three pro-Russian separatists have been killed and thirteen moreinjured in the bloodiest attack in eastern Ukraine since the crisis began. The bloodshed came after gunfire was exchanged between Ukraine forces and pro-Russian militants during an attack on a National Guard base in the BlackSea port of Mariupol. On Wednesday, pro- Russian troops seized six military vehicles  and disarmed Ukrainian troops in a somewhat humiliating defeat for the interim government’s “anti-terrorist programme”. Some troops attempting to reclaimcaptured sites in over a dozen towns and cities were sent home on buses in Kramatorsk, while pro-Moscow demonstrators took over yet another site, the mayor's office at Donetsk, after holding the administrative building in the city for weeks.   Read more >> So...

Credit: news.com.au THE Prime Minister has given the most detailed information about where the crucial black box flight recorders from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 are expected to be. Tony Abbott gave Chinese President  Xi Jinping  a private and detailed briefing in Beijing about the latest on the search for the missing  Boeing 777-200ER  aircraft which had 154 Chinese people on board. The MP told the President before a State dinner with the Australian premiers at theGreat Hall of the People in Beijing — an unprecedented audience — that search teams led by the Australian ship Ocean Shield had narrowed down the area in the Indian Ocean where pings from the flight recorders are being received to a grid of around 10km by 10km. He told President Xi that there is now a high degree of confidence that the signals were the black boxes.   Read More >> Source: news.com.au

The recent arrest of California Democratic state senator Leland Yee on charges that he financed his campaign for California Secretary of State through illegal campaign donations and the smuggling of weapons on the international black market has focused attention on the secret societies which prominent Chinese businessmen and politicians belong. Arrested along with Lee was Chinatown's Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow, a former gangster and the head of the Chee Kung Tong Masonic organization in San Francisco. The Chee Kung Tong, one of a number of Chinese secret society brotherhoods, is officially a part of international Freemasonry. Many observers of Chinese tong and secret society activities were surprised that the FBI would aggressively target Chinese secret societies in a manner similar to the FBI's past actions against Italian organized crime syndicates. Given the CIA's and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services', use of Chinese Masonic sec...

Credit: wlox.com JACKSON COUNTY, MS (WLOX) - They were caught on camera the night of February 16. Mysterious lights that appeared in the sky over the 150 acres that Rainer and Edith Shattles call home in the Cumbest Bluff area of Jackson County. Were they a phenomenon that's simple to explain, or something else? The Shattles never tire of looking at the strange images caught by their trail cameras on that clear winter night. "We have unusual things happen around here that happen, but it's usually associated with our grandchildren. But this case, we didn't know what it was," Edith recalled. "I was looking for a nice buck to be showing up on the trail cameraactually."   read more >> Source: wlox.com

AFP Photo / David McNew An energy company is hoping to use a little-used, 53-year-old Pennsylvania law in order to launch a fracking operation on land even if landowners oppose the action. The incident revolves around a potential oil and gas site in New Bedford, Pennsylvania, where four landowners have refused to sign leases authorizing a new drilling operation by Texas-based Hilcorp Energy. According to the company, 99 percent of the area’s landowners have signed leasespermitting the operation in exchange for cash and royalties, but the holdouts – representing 35 of the 3,267 acres in limbo – have been adamant in their refusal to budge.   read more >> Source:  rt.com