Posted: 18 Apr 2014 03:35 PM PDT

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Alien wildlife species, such as killer shrimps and zebra mussels, are invading Britain at a rate never seen before, the UK parliament’s green watchdog warns. Meanwhile, giant Asian hornets that have caused six deaths in France are on their way to the UK.
MPs from the Environmental Audit Committee urged the British government to introduce new laws to tackle invasive plants and animals which may pose a threat to the environment, economy and human health.
In 2012, 1,875 alien species were established in Britain, 282 of which had become “invasive,” the committee said in a report published Wednesday. The figure of such species is growing by 10 a year, MPs warned.
“The growth of international trade and travel means more non-native plants and animals are being introduced into Britain than ever before and as our climate changes more species are likely to find a foothold here,” said the chair of the committee, Labour MP Joan Walley, as cited on the watchdog’s website. “Not all of these species will become ‘invasive’, but the ones that do can harm native wildlife, clog up our waterways, cause costly problems for homeowners and sometimes even harm human health.”
However, it is too expensive to control or eradicate all invasive species, she said, so the government has to be smart and pick the fights that it knows it can win.
“We may just have to live with gray squirrels and rhododendrons in much of the UK, but we can and must control other invasive species – like the killer shrimp devastating eco-systems in our rivers and lakes. Identifying potentially invasive species prior to arrival is critical as once organisms like the frightening Asian Hornet are here, they can be very difficult to control.”
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The Asian Hornets (Vespa mandarinia)- which can grow up to 5 centimeters in length – have terrorized France since their arrival in the country in 2004 from the Far East in a shipment of Chinese pottery. According to the report, they have already killed six people in France.
The killer shrimp (Dikerogammarus villosus), a crustacean of up to 3 centimeters in length, originate in the Black and Caspian seas. According to evidence provided by the committee, the species was first detected in Cambridge in 2010. It currently appears in four places in England and Wales. But the risk is huge of the species “spreading out and destroying native invertebrates, fish eggs and impacting on fish stocks.”
MPs also say that alien species, such as Japanese Knotweed, the Oak Processionary Moth, the Ruddy Duck and Zebra Mussels, not only have an impact on biodiversity by supplanting local species, but can also affect people’s health and business.
For instance, zebra mussels – which got their name for striped patterns on their shells – clog pipes raising water treatment costs, the report says. Floating Pennywort deprives fish of oxygen, Giant Hogweed can give skin inflammations and the pollen of Common Ragweed causes asthma. Meanwhile, the Oak Processionary Moth can cause both respiratory and skin problems.
As for economic affect, dealing with Japanese Knotweed alone cost Britain £165 million. “The cost of removing it from the Olympic site was £70 million,” the panel said in the report. Gray squirrels are estimated to cause £10 million of damage to trees in Britain each year.
The committee criticized the current system of ‘listing’ species to be monitored and controlled for being too slow. It believes that the government must implement legal changes to provide a mechanism for eradicating invasive species before they become established. Meanwhile, species on the existing national lists that are already well established in Britain should be reviewed.
“Scotland has introduced legal powers to be able to take effective action, quickly and comprehensively, when invasive species are identified as a threat. They use ‘species control orders’ to allow access to land to establish the presence of invasive species, and to implement any necessary control measures. The Law Commission have concluded that such powers should be replicated in England and Wales. We agree. The Government needs to get these implemented straightaway,” Walley said.
The report was published to coincide with the vote at the European Parliament on a bill to introduce a blacklist to counter invasive alien species of plants, animals and insects on the territory of member states. On Wednesday, European MPs backed the legislation banning species declared to be of “Union concern.” The bill has yet to be formally approved by the council of ministers.
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Posted: 18 Apr 2014 03:13 PM PDT

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A second mystery around the disappearance of Flight MH370 has largely gone unnoticed: why hasn’t the United States been in the forefront of providing information about it? The implications of this question are massive.
America has a fleet of the most sophisticated spy satellites, called “keyhole” satellites, covering the earth’s surface daily with imaging systems comparable to those of the Hubble Space Telescope, but instead of data from any of these, we read of data from China and France. One can understand that the CIA does not want others to understand fully the capabilities of its satellites, but surely the lives of more than two hundred people are cause for some information, however indirectly supplied.
Then again, the American military has some of most sophisticated radars on earth, and there is, without a doubt, an installation of the highest capability at the secret base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. How could there not be? But we have read of no data from them, only from others less capable of telling us what happened.
Could it be that the United States shot down Flight MH370, either accidentally or deliberately, and now wants to keep it secret? The possibility of recovery of the full wreckage, even if its location were found, from 4 miles under the sea amongst underwater mountains is extremely remote at best, so the United States can remain confident that physical evidence will never emerge.
There would be nothing unprecedented in such an act: on at least 3 occasions, regrettably, America’s military has shot down civilian airliners, only admitting eventually to the one they could not hide. They are also indirectly responsible for a fourth.
Iran Air Flight 655 was stupidly shot down in 1988 by the USS Vincennes in Iranian waters during the Iraq-Iran War, not only killing 290 people including 66 children, but there was a long period afterwards in which the U.S. admitted no wrong-doing, offered no apology, and no compensation to its victims (only 8 years later was a quiet settlement made).
It was a quite vicious set of circumstances and the injustice of it led unquestionably to the motive for bombing Pan Am Flight 103, killing 259 people and 11 on the ground, later the same year by people still unknown.
TWA Flight 800 over the East Coast of the United States was certainly the victim of a shipboard American anti-aircraft missile accidentally released. The evidence included radar tracks and eye witnesses. But the U.S., instead of admitting its horrible error and compensating victims, conducted a long and almost farcical investigation headed up by the same FBI that gave us the farcical investigation into the Kennedy assassination.
Last, the fourth hijacked plane on 9/11, United Flight 93, of “Let’s roll” pop legend, which crashed over Pennsylvania was almost certainly shot down by an air-to-air missile from a fighter plane. A plane was seen by witnesses, the distribution of the wreckage tends to support a shoot-down, and just the sheer impossibility of America’s hundreds of billions of dollars in air defences staying asleep at the switch for a fourth event the same day argue powerfully for an attack.
I have no idea what event (a rogue pilot, a hijacker?) led to Flight MH370 turning off its communications, changing course, and flying low, but I do know that the event could not have gone unnoticed by America’s military-intelligence eyes and ears, especially when its new course showed any possibility of Diego Garcia as a destination, a place which is top secret and from which America forcibly removed the locals when it leased it from Britain.
It will likely remain one more “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” as Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union, an expression now entirely suitable to a great many of the activities of the United States.
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Posted: 18 Apr 2014 02:59 PM PDT

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Actress Kirsten Dunst has come under fire for expressing her opinion that it is still OK for women to embody traditional gender roles and depend on a man from time to time.
In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar in the U.K., the actress, who played a damsel in distress in 2002′s Spiderman, apologetically commented on how women taking on roles at home traditionally held by the female head of household, like nurturing children, has been turned into a dirty thing.
Lacking the proper political correctness filter, she also dared to say the world needs men to act like men and women to be women.
Here’s are her sentiments:
“I feel like the feminine has been a little undervalued. We all have to get our own jobs and make our own money, but staying at home, nurturing, being the mother, cooking, it’s a valuable thing my mom created. And sometimes, you need your knight in shining armor. I’m sorry. You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman. That’s why relationships work.”
Cue feminist outrage.
“..[O]ver the years Kirsten Dunst has continued to be somewhat of an insufferable person, as evidenced by this interview…” one blogger at Uproxx wrote, erroneously interpreting Dunst’s statement as an attack on men who like cats over dogs.
Another blogger at the uber-feminist Jezebel, under the headline “Kirsten Dunst Thinks Ladies In Relationships Should Wife the F**k Out,” insisted that Dunst having an opinion which differed from her own made her “kind of dumb.” This was the same Jezebel writer who months ago first defended, then profusely apologized for, a deleted tweet in which she wished death on Wisconsin’s pro-gun, anti-abortion governor, Scott Walker.
Outrage from the feminist “thought police” over Dunst’s relatively mild commentary illustrates how the militant left promotes tolerance, yet disallows people the “right to dissent from prevailing leftist views,” David Limbaugh writes for CNS News.
“It’s not enough to support equal pay for equal work or to believe that women have the right to pursue any professional career they want,” says Limbaugh, referring to Dunst’s comments. “The feminists demand that women adopt their attitude of hostility toward traditional gender roles, even when people choose them, as opposed to being forced into them.”
As we outlined last month, the mainstream feminist movement was long ago hi-jacked, and since then funded, by corporate interests, more concerned with the money they earn off of taxing women than they are with women’s rights.
Attempts to ridicule Dunst over her off-hand comment illustrate perfectly how “mainstream feminism habitually disparages women taking on traditional gender roles as somehow being a form of bondage to a patriarchal society.”
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Posted: 18 Apr 2014 01:53 PM PDT

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Tech giants are attempting at transmitting Internet signals to remote parts of the world using aircraft deployed in atmospheric space.
The course of action could draw upon drones, satellites, high-altitude balloons, blimps or other flying machines.
With this end in sight, Google acquired Titan Aerospace this week, a maker of solar-powered drones. Titan’s drones are able to fly for five years at an altitude of some 65,000 feet (20,000 meters).
“It’s still early days, but atmospheric satellites could help bring Internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation,” said a Google spokesman.
A similar idea comes from Facebook, which last month unveiled its “Connectivity Lab” aimed at spreading the Internet with drones, satellites and solar-powered planes.
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said recently that he sees a potential in drones because they “have more endurance than balloons, while also being able to have their location precisely controlled.”
“And unlike satellites, drones won’t burn up in the atmosphere when their mission is complete,” he added.
It, however, is not clear whether the atmospheric space would prove an accessible medium for Internet signals.
“It’s all very interesting but the technology is very unproven,” said Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies.
“People have played with it for years and it is not going anywhere,” said Jack Gold, analyst with J. Gold Associates.
“I don’t think it’s cost-effective for companies like Google and others to put up a thousand drones just to get people access.”
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Posted: 18 Apr 2014 01:35 PM PDT

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The manager of the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant has admitted not having full control of the facility. Contrary to the statements of the Japanese PM, TEPCO’s Akira Ono said attempts to plug the leaks of radioactive water had failed.
“It’s embarrassing to admit, but there are certain parts of the site where we don’t have full control,” Ono told reporters touring the plant this week, reported Reuters. Last year, the Japanese PM attempted to assure the world that the situation at the stricken nuclear power plant was under control.
However, over the last couple of months the clean-up procedure at the plant has been fraught with difficulties.
Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), the plant’s operator, has consistently faced contaminated water leaks at the Fukushima plant.
Water has to be pumped over the facilities stricken reactors in order to keep them from overheating, but this process creates large quantities of contaminated water which has to be stored in tanks on the site.
Ono acknowledged to press that in TEPCO’s rush to deal with the stricken facility following the earthquake-triggered tsunami in 2011, the company may have made mistakes.
“It may sound odd, but this is the bill we have to pay for what we have done in the past three years,” he said. “But we were pressed to build tanks in a rush and may have not paid enough attention to quality. We need to improve quality from here.”
TEPCO will have to improve the quality of the tanks so the plant can survive the next 30-40 years of the decommissioning process, Ono went on to say.
The plant’s manager said that the number one aim was to keep the radioactive water from getting into the ocean.
“The ultimate purpose is to prevent contaminated water from going out to the ocean, and in this regard, I believe it is under control,” Ono said. But a series of leaks have obliged officials to “find better ways to handle the water problem.”
In the latest blunder at the plant, TEPCO mistakenly flooded the Fukushima facility’s basements with radioactive cooling-tank water. Earlier this week the Japanese newspaper the Asahi Shimbun reported that around 200 tons of water had found its way into waste disposal facilities under the power plant. TEPCO said they were working to fix the leakage as soon as possible.
Cleaning up Fukushima is becoming an increasing headache for the Japanese authorities. Experts predict that fully decommissioning the stricken plant is a process that could take decades, costing the country billions of dollars.
Following the multiple meltdown of the Fukushima plant in 2011 that was triggered by a tsunami, the Japanese government pledged to abandon nuclear power by 2010. However, in spite of public outrage, the government was forced to reactivate its nuclear power plants because of massive energy shortfalls.
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