The solar wind today is a blistering 588 km/sec and there are five sunspot clusters active ont eh Sun. As predicted, a coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth's magnetic field at 0600 UT on March 17th. The impact lifted the solar wind speed from 300 km/s to 700 km/s and sparked a moderately strong (Kp=6) geomagnetic storm. Northern Lights spilled across the Canadian border into the United States as far south as Colorado:
Second Drone Spotted Over New York?
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
March 11, 2013
For the second time within a week, police are investigating reports of an unmanned drone spotted flying over New York within three miles of LaGuardia Airport.
According to journalist Christopher Robbins, police scanner audio revealed that the NYPD was called to look into an “unusual incident” concerning reports of a “drone flying” near exit 23 of the Long Island Expressway (LIE).
According to Robbins, the NYPD later reported a “negative result” after investigating the incident, although it is unclear whether this means they couldn’t identify the drone or had discounted the report altogether.
Last Monday, the crew of Alitalia Flight 608 reported a drone just 200 feet away from their aircraft as it approached John F. Kennedy airport. The drone was initially reported as having four engines, but the FBI later described the object as having four propellers and being only three feet wide.
The incident, which occurred at 1,750 feet and roughly three miles from runway 31R , prompted the FBI to ask the public for information on identifying the owner of the drone.
By law, remote controlled planes and drones can only fly to a maximum of 400 feet and operators must notify air traffic control if they are going to fly within three miles of an airport.
In May last year a military or police drone flying in controlled airspace over Denver almost caused a mid-air collision with a Cessna jet.
Last year, Congress passed legislation paving the way for what the FAA predicts will be around 30,000 operating in US skies by 2020.
Within months, the drone industry announced a campaign to “bombard the American public with positive images and messages about drones in an effort to reverse the growing perception of the aircraft as a threat to privacy and safety.”
As we reported in December, thousands of pages of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) documents newly released under the Freedom Of Information Act have revealed that the military, as well as law enforcement agencies, are already extensively flying surveillance drones in non-restricted skies throughout the country.
FAA documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting last August revealed that the FAA gave the green light for surveillance drones to be used in U.S. skies despite the fact that during the FAA’s own tests the drones crashed numerous times even in areas of airspace where no other aircraft were flying.
Critics have warned that the FAA has not acted to establish any safeguards whatsoever, and that Congress is not holding the agency to account.
Whose Drone is That?
Digital watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published several thousand pages of new drone license records on Wednesday confirming innumerable theorists' fears: that drones "regularly fly" in "national airspace all around the country."
The records, which were obtained by way of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), come from state and local law enforcement agencies, universities and—for the first time—three branches of the U.S. military: the Air Force, Marine Corps, and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the group writes on their Deeplinks blog.
According to the records, the Air Force has been testing out a variety of drones, from the smaller, hand-launched Raven, Puma and Wasp drones to the larger Predator and Reaper models largely responsible for countless civilian and foreign military deaths.
Breaking down the shocking capabilities of the various machines, Deeplinks writes that the technologies "takes surveillance to a whole new level." They continue:
According to a recent Gizmodo article, the Puma AE (“All Environment”) drone can land anywhere, “either in tight city streets or onto a water surface if the mission dictates, even after a near-vertical ‘deep stall’ final approach.” Another drone, Insitu’s ScanEagle, which the Air Force has flown near Virginia Beach, sports an “inertial-stabilized camera turret, [that] allows for the tracking of a target of interest for extended periods of time, even when the target is moving and the aircraft nose is seldom pointed at the target.” Boeing’s A160 Hummingbird, which the Air Force has flown near Victorville, California, is capable of staying in the air for 16-24 hours at a time and carries a gigapixel camera and a “Forester foliage-penetration radar” system designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Perhaps the scariest is the technology carried by a Reaper drone the Air Force is flying near Lincoln, Nevada and in areas of California and Utah. This drone uses "Gorgon Stare" technology, which Wikipedia defines as “a spherical array of nine cameras attached to an aerial drone capable of capturing motion imagery of an entire city.” This imagery “can then be analyzed by humans or an artificial intelligence, such as the Mind's Eye project” being developed by DARPA.
UFO’s over Ocala
Eyewitnesses said the aircraft looked like a bunch of helicopters flying in formation with a large plane.
The mystery aircraft were most recently spotted Monday between 2 a.m. to 3 a.m., witnesses said.
A Navy spokesman said the military does not conduct operations at the bombing range in the Ocala National Forest at that time of the morning.
Concern over $2.6m paid to Intrade founder
By Arash Massoudi and Gregory Meyer in New York and Jamie Smyth in Dublin
The founder of Intrade received $2.6m in insufficiently documented payments from the popular prediction markets company in 2010 and 2011, an audit revealed weeks before trading on the site was halted.
Auditors for the Dublin-based company – an online hub where people can bet on everything from presidential elections to papal conclaves – highlighted concerns about “significant financial irregularities” and the payments made to John Delaney, according to financial records Intrade recently filed with Ireland’s companies registration office. Mr Delaney, who launched Intrade’s parent company in 1999, died on Mount Everest in May 2011.
The documents also revealed that the company’s shareholders in 2011 included hedge fund managers Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller, and a trust connected to Christopher Hehmeyer, the current chairman of the National Futures Association, a US regulatory body. None of the shareholders could be reached for comment on Monday.
The revelations came a day after Intrade suspended all trading activity and froze its customer accounts. The company said in a notice on its site on Sunday that recently discovered “circumstances”, on which it did not elaborate, would be subject to an investigation and could uncover potential “financial irregularities”.
The discovery raises questions about the oversight of unregulated prediction markets and comes three months after the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued to stop the company from offering prediction contracts to Americans, who were the most active users of the site. Intrade did not refer to the CFTC case in its notice to customers on Sunday.
An Intrade official and Caulfield Dunne, the Dublin-based accountancy that performed the audit, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The financial accounts show payments made to Mr Delaney worth $1.4m in 2011 and $1.2m in 2010.
Brian Dunne, auditor at Caulfield Dunne, said in a written opinion on February 4 that proper books of account were not kept by Intrade for the year ended December 2011.
He noted the current directors of the company were only appointed in November 2012 and were not in a position to comment on the maintenance of the books prior to their appointment.
“The directors have also noted that they are aware of issues identified during the course of the audit with regard to significant financial irregularities in the internal accounts pertaining to previous years that had a material effect on the opening balances of the company at January 1 2011,” he said.
He added: “There was insufficient documentation regarding payments made into bank accounts in the name of the deceased former director and other third parties.”
The current directors say they have no knowledge to the background to these payments. They said the payments should be reflected in the profit and loss account as a prior year adjustment “until the matter has been fully resolved”. The financial accounts are signed by directors Imants Auzins and Ronald Bernstein.
The development comes almost exactly a year after the spread betting firm Worldspreads went into administration after telling regulators it could not repay £13m of client funds.
Worldspreads failed to segregate client money, instead mixing the funds with its own money, according to statements filed last year by Lindsay McNeile, the operator’s chairman. He said Worldspreads falsified its accounts to hide losses in the months leading up to its collapse.
There is no suggestion this happened at Intrade.
The number of visitors to the Intrade site has plummeted in the wake of the CFTC lawsuit, leading even boosters to question the predictive value of its markets. Bettors on Intrade entered contracts that paid $10 for correctly guessing the outcome of events from elections to the Academy Awards. Academics and journalists toasted the site as a novel way to divine the wisdom of crowds.
After the suit was filed in November 2012, Intrade had said it hoped to reopen inside the US. The CFTC case is pending in a federal court in Washington.
Last year the CFTC prohibited the Chicago-based North American Derivatives Exchange from introducing what would have been the first regulated US political event contracts, saying they “ involve gaming and are contrary to the public interest”.
As of early Sunday, wagers on the identity of the successor to recently resigned Pope Benedict XVI were among Intrade’s most popular markets. A total of 52,166 unique trades had occurred since January 1, compared with 1m in all of 2012, data published on the site showed.
Gallinpippers
As if deadly sinkholes and Burmese pythons weren't enough, now Florida may find itself contending with another summer of giant mosquitoes that pack a ferocious bite, LiveScience reports.
Dubbed gallinippers, the quarter-sized mosquitoes hatch after a flood or rainstorm, and saw a bumper crop after Tropical Storm Debby struck Florida last summer. Now another rainy season could produce even more.
A gallinipper is 20 times the size of a typical mosquito, "and it's mean, and it goes after people, and it bites, and it hurts," says Anthony Pelaez of Tampa's Museum of Science and Industry. A gallinipper bite "feels like you're being stabbed."
“Feels like you're being stabbed”
— Anthony Pelaez on gallinipper bites
What's more, they may be resistant to bug repellent (the Orlando Sentinel recommends a DEET-containing repellent all the same) and like to strike fish, wild animals, and pets.
Neat factoid: Entomologists don't always recognize the term "gallinipper," which arose in Southern folk culture. But the insect's first mention dates back to 1897, when a writer called it "the shyest, slyest, meanest and most venomous of them all."
They’re Stashing the Cash…Again
U.S.-based nonfinancial companies are parking record amounts of cash abroad, thanks largely to a tax code that encourages them to indefinitely keep profits from their foreign subsidiaries outside of the country.
Some of the largest companies in the U.S. greatly boosted their tax-avoiding cash stockpiles abroad last year, according to recent surveys of company filings from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
For example, the Jedi master of avoiding U.S. taxation, General Electric Company (NYSE:GE), increased its tax-free cash accumulation to $108 billion, up from an estimated $94 billion in 2010. Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq:MSFT) increased its stockpile to $61 billion, up 36 percent from 2011 and up from $30 billion in 2010. Apple Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL) raised its ante to $40 billion, up 73 percent from 2011.
Sixty of the country’s largest nonfinancial corporations kept $166 billion in cash outside of the U.S. last year, shielding more than 40 percent of their profits from taxes, according to a report in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. And that’s from total overseas earnings of $1.3 trillion, up 15 percent from 2011.
A separate analysis of 83 of the largest nonfinancial corporations found that companies increased by $183 billion their foreign-based cash accumulations, representing a 14.4 percent rise from 2011, according to Bloomberg. Microsoft, Apple and Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG) together hold $134.5 billion in cash abroad.
“The corporate system is broken and it’s broken primarily because of international,” Edward Kleinbard, a tax law professor at the University of Southern California, told Bloomberg.
The Journal’s survey said the propensity to keep profits outside of the U.S. was most prevalent among tech and healthcare companies; the 26 of them on the list of 60 kept $120 billion abroad last year.
In the first quarter of 2012, the Federal Reserve estimated in its Flow of Funds report that U.S. nonfinancial companies held $1.7 trillion in liquid assets (cash) in the first quarter of last year, but that figure only accounts for U.S.-based assets. According to the IRS figures, the total amount of liquid assets in the first half of last year was much higher: $5.1 trillion. That means for every dollar a U.S. nonfinancial company held inside the U.S., it held three dollars abroad.
According to Pulitzer Prize-winning financial journalist and author David Cay Johnston, the reasons for hoarding cash abroad are threefold: Profits held overseas aren't taxed if they’re owned by offshore subsidiaries; companies have had no incentive to invest these proceeds due to lackluster growth in jobs and wages that suppress demand for goods and services; and mountains of cash held in offshore accounts provides a nice cushion if the economy gets worse.
And here are some of the other egregious hoarders, according to the two analyses:
- Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE): $73 billion in overseas nontaxed liquid assets in 2012, up from $48 billion in 2010.
- Merck & Co. Inc. (NYSE:MRK): $53 billion, up from $40.4 billion in 2010.
- Johnson & Johnson: (NYSE:JNJ): $49 billion, up from $37 billion in 2010.
- Google: $33 billion in 2012.
- Devon Energy Corp (NYSE:DVN): increased its offshore cash by 48 percent last year.
- Occidental Petroleum Corporation (NYSE:OXY): up 47 percent from 2011.
- Honeywell International Inc. (NYSE:HON): up 43 percent from 2011.
Bill would ban lead ammunition in California
By TRACIE CONE | Associated Press – 8 hrs ago
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Environmentalists are pushing legislation to ban lead ammunition in California to prevent toxins from poisoning scavengers that eat animal remains left by hunters.
Final language of the bill was introduced Monday by Assembly Member Anthony Rendon, D-Lakewood, who said the legislation would remove a lingering source of pollution from the environment. It was sponsored by three major environmental groups — Defenders of Wildlife, Audubon California, and the Humane Society of the United States.
"There really is no question that lead ammo is a threat," said Kim Delfino of Defenders of Wildlife. "To pass a bill in California would set the stage for this happening throughout the country, the way low-emissions vehicle standards changed the market nationwide."
Lead is a neurotoxin that has thwarted efforts to restore endangered California condors to their historic habitat. It's the major cause of death for condors and affects other scavengers such as bald eagles, golden eagles and turkey vultures.
Opponents of restrictions on ammunition purchases argue that animals that suffer from lead poisoning could be getting it from another source. They cite the fact that incidences of poisoning have not declined despite a ban since 2008 on the use of lead ammunition in the eight-county area where condor recovery is under way.
The National Rifle Association has opposed all bans on lead ammo in the past. The gun rights group has dismissed studies from the University of California, Davis and the University of California, Santa Cruz that show poisonings of birds of prey are highest during hunting seasons and that the lead isotopes in their bloodstreams match ammunition. The NRA says those studies are flawed.
NRA officials did not immediately return telephone messages seeking comment on the new bill.
Studies have shown that nonlead ammunition fires as accurately, but in some calibers it is more expensive than bullets made of lead. Proponents of the ban argue that as nonlead ammo becomes more popular with hunters, the prices will continue to decrease.