Posted: 13 Jun 2014 12:32 PM PDT

A spokesperson for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) confirmed this week that a fleet of Russian bombers set off alarms in the United States after coming within 50 miles of California’s Pacific coast.
Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a spokesman for NORAD, told Washington Free Beacon reporter Bill Gertz that a pair of Tu-95 Bear H aircraft maintained by Russia came close to US airspace during practice bombing while four of the planes were conducting bombing runs near Alaska. According to Nuclear Threat Initiative nonprofit organization, Russia has 29 Tu-95 MS6 Bear H6s and 30 Tu-95 MS16 Bear H16s, which are equipped to fire both traditional and nuclear payloads at targets from the air.
David told the Beacon that this week’s incident occurred on Monday afternoon and was caught quickly by radar systems that monitored American air defense zones. The radar spotted all four Russian aircraft, he said, and two F-22 fighter jets used by the US Air Force were then mobilized to intercept the bombers.
“After tracking the bombers as they flew eastward, two of the four Bears turned around and headed west toward the Russian Far East,” Gertz wrote. “The remaining two nuclear-capable bombers then flew southeast and around 9:30 P.M. entered the US northern air defense zone off the coast of Northern California.
Those two aircraft, he added, made it within 50 miles of the coast before turning around. The pilots, Davis told the Beacon, appeared to have “acted professionally” and that their behavior was on par with activity that’s “not unusual” for long-range aviation training missions typically conducted by Russia during the summer months. Indeed, in recent weeks other Russian-owned Tu-95 bombers skirted UK airspace and have come close to US property in both Guam and California, The Aviationist reported last month. In March, Russia’s daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, said the nation’s Strategic Missile Forces began a three-day drill to make sure there was sufficient readiness to conduct a nuclear offensive.
“We assess this was part of training,” David added of this week’s incident, “And they did not enter territorial airspace.”
In spite of its age, David Cenciotti wrote for The Aviationist, the Tu-94 “still represents a significant strategic weapon in Putin’s arsenal.”
Earlier this week, Russian drills intensified when the nation’s military began exercises in the Baltic that the Defense Ministry said was a response to recent exercises in eastern Europe conducted by NATO forces. Allied nations currently maintain a presence there, much to the chagrin of Moscow, as tensions along Ukraine’s border with Russia remain high.
The US State Dept. reported last year that Russia may have an arsenal that contains as many as 1,400 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads and 894 deployed and non-deployed launchers.
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Posted: 13 Jun 2014 12:27 PM PDT

A research has shown that dinosaurs’ metabolism places them in the middle of the metabolic continuum, forbidding their definite classification as either warm or cold-blooded creatures.
The study used dinosaurs’ body mass and their growth rates to arrive at an evaluation of their metabolism.
University of New Mexico biologist John Grady said, “…By examining animal growth and rates of energy use, we were able to reconstruct a metabolic continuum, and place dinosaurs along that continuum. Somewhat surprisingly, dinosaurs fell right in the middle.”
“Our results showed that dinosaurs had growth and metabolic rates that were actually not characteristic of warm-blooded or even cold-blooded organisms. They did not act like mammals or birds nor did they act like reptiles or fish,” said University of Arizona evolutionary biologist and ecologist Brian Enquist.
He characterized dinosaurs’ physiology as one which is uncommon these days.
Grady compared dinosaurs to some existing animals such as the great white shark, leatherback sea turtle, and tuna, which can not be assigned to a definite classification as far as their metabolisms are concerned.
In 2011, a report showed that a team led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology who analyzed fossil teeth from two sauropods found that they were about as warm as most modern mammals, but cooler than what experts expected from animals of such gigantic size.
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Posted: 13 Jun 2014 12:08 PM PDT

Self-awareness is the capacity to pay conscious attention to all aspects of yourself: to use sensory capacities such as sight, hearing and touch to provide accurate information about the external world; to use feelings such as thirst, hunger, nausea, dizziness and physical pain to provide accurate information about the state of your body and what it needs; to use memory to store and provide access to learning from past experience; to use your ‘truth register’ to detect lies and other misinformation; to use intuition to ‘listen’ to and remain in touch with ‘the big picture’ of life as a whole; to use conscience to enable you to make and act on those difficult moral choices that, for example, might ultimately require you to act against social conventions or unjust laws; to use feelings such as fear, happiness, emotional pain, joy, anger, satisfaction, sadness, sexual arousal and a vast variety of others to tell you what is happening for you in any given situation and to give you the power to behave appropriately in this context when the time is right; and to use intellect to acquire, interpret, analyse and evaluate information from these and other sources, such as written material.
Self-awareness is also the capacity to synthesise all of the input from these and other sources in order to crystallise the appropriately precise behavioural option in any given circumstance. To disintegrate or rank these interrelated components of Self-awareness (for example, to regard ‘thinking’ as somehow separate from and superior to ‘feeling’) or to regard them as in conflict with one another, gets in the way of appreciating each function as a vital part of the whole even if temporary indecision precedes an integrated sense of how to proceed.
The mind is genetically programmed to be one integrated whole, not a conflicting set of components, but it is easily damaged so that one part of its capacity dominates or suppresses others. It is the ongoing destruction throughout childhood of the capacity to pay attention to all of this input, and particularly feelings, that progressively destroys the innate capacity to become Self-aware. What causes this damage? Terror. And what makes a mind react with terror thus disrupting all other functions simultaneously? Violence. And particularly the unrelenting onslaught of ‘invisible’ violence and ‘utterly invisible’ violence inflicted on children throughout their childhood. See ‘Why Violence?’http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence
If you want to know how serious this damage is, then consider some simple questions: Do you ever do what others tell you? Why? Do you know how to stand in a perfect posture (and can you do it)? Do you know what food makes you healthy (and do you eat it)? Do you deliberately frighten children to make them do what you want? Why do you believe that this is functional? And do you feel calmly and powerfully able to deal with any situation, including the looming threat of human extinction (or do you prefer to delude yourself that it isn’t happening)?
Self-awareness also enables the individual to prioritise but to not ‘forget’. For example, if an individual injures their leg while escaping a dangerous situation, the individual will need to prioritise escape over the injury. But, as soon as circumstances allow, the Self-aware individual will stop doing everything else to pay deliberate attention to the injury by specifically focusing on the pain and, if necessary, by applying the appropriate first aid treatment. Why?
All communications, whether in the form of feelings such as fear and anger, physical symptoms such as nausea and pain, and sensory signals such as sounds and smells, are designed to give your mind information about what is taking place but this information can only be fully utilised if you devote deliberate attention to this or these phenomena. In the case of physical pain, for example, the pain is designed to attract your attention and, if you focus your attention on the pain rather than fearfully suppressing your awareness of it (by distracting yourself or by taking painkillers, for example) as you were taught and terrorised into doing as a child, then your body will be in the optimum mode for responding to the pain, and what it signals, with the appropriate short and long term healing strategy.
Your attention is a vital ingredient of your healing: first, because it optimises your body’s capacity to identify and efficiently implement the uniquely appropriate healing strategy for this circumstance, and second, because it tells you what you need to do and what you need to change (if anything), both in the short and long terms, if complete healing is to occur.
If you focus attention on the pain, it will virtually always be both manageable and short-lived. Once it has your attention for the problem, your immune system will automatically start to mute the pain. Without attention full healing will never occur. Even worse, your body will store the disease or injury of which the pain is a symptom and this will keep manifesting one way or another repeatedly throughout your life resulting in chronically declining health, as well as more intense and longer-lasting bouts of pain requiring more frequent and ever-stronger distractions and drugs to suppress it, despite the fact that the human organism is designed to be as vigorous (even if differently so) in old age as in youth.
The purpose of emotional pain is the same as physical pain: to get your attention. But if emotional pain is not felt at the time (that is, it is fearfully suppressed), it will come back later to wallop you bigger and harder. Or kill you prematurely.
In summary then, just as an individual will fearfully (and either consciously or unconsciously) suppress their awareness of physical and emotional pain, they will also fearfully (and increasingly automatically and unconsciously) suppress their awareness of all aspects of their mind as a result of the violence inflicted on them throughout their childhood.
Hence, if you wish to acquire the Self-awareness that is your birthright, you will need to pay attention to (that is, to spend time feeling) the fear that makes you unconsciously suppress it.
How do you do this? The short answer is this: If you feel scared in a particular situation, try to consciously focus on feeling your fear – whether from a dream, a memory or some current event in your life – for as long as you can before reacting to it. For more details of this process, see ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ http://anitamckone.wordpress.com/articles-2/fearless-and-fearful-psychology/ It will be unpleasant but highly instructive.
If you wish to join the worldwide movement to end all violence and facilitate our shared journey to Self-awareness, you are welcome to sign online ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com
Self-awareness is your birthright: don’t let your fear take it from you.
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Posted: 13 Jun 2014 10:11 AM PDT

The US government is ‘urgently’ considering air assaults on Iraq and Syria in an attempt to flush out the al-Qaeda-linked Takfiri militants operating in the two countries, a US official says.
The unnamed official, quoted by the Guardian, said on Friday that the White House was “urgently and expediently” considering military action to halt the rapid advance of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
The revelation comes one day after US President Barack Obama said there are “some short-term, immediate things that need to be done militarily,” signaling a new openness to returning the US to war in Iraq.
According to unnamed officials, the Obama administration is examining an air assault using air force or navy warplanes and drone strikes, but manned aircraft are said to the preferred option, owing to their superiority against moving and maneuverable targets.
Meanwhile, a Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Guardian that the ISIL “is now across the border,” adding, “It is possible to take out the head, you’ve got to take out the heart…. Everything is being looked at.”
US Secretary of State John Kerry said in London that the Obama administration would make a decision quickly about action on the ISIL terrorists, adding, “I am confident the US will move rapidly and effectively to join with our allies in dealing with this challenge.”
Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after emerging from a briefing with defence officials on Thursday that a direct US military involvement in Iraq may revive the bloody conflict which erupted following the 2003 capture of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
“While all options should be considered, the problem in Iraq has not been so much a lack of direct US military involvement, but a lack of reconciliation on the part of Iraqi leaders,” he said.
Over the past days, Iraqi armed forces have been engaged in fierce clashes with terrorists, who have threatened to take their acts of violence to other Iraqi cities, including the capital, Baghdad.
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Posted: 13 Jun 2014 10:02 AM PDT

Residents of Slavyansk and its suburbs were awoken overnight on Thursday by what they say were incendiary bombs that were dropped on their city by Kiev’s military. Witnesses and local media reports suggested that the bombs might be phosphorous.
Much of the village of Semyonovka, located in the Slavyansk suburbs, was set ablaze. Local residents told RT that the ground didn’t stop burning for some time.
“We all saw what happened here yesterday. They used rocket launchers as well as incendiary bombs against us. The ground was on fire. How can the ground burn by itself. It burned for about forty minutes,” resident Roman Litvinov told RT over the phone.
“Starting from 2 a.m. everyone I’ve met has a sore throat and is coughing all the time. I think this is because of the burning. I think we’ll feel the true consequences later. There are still a lot of people here, a lot of children we haven’t managed to get out yet,” resident Tatyana told RT.
The use of incendiary bombs – designed to start fires using materials such as napalm, white phosphorus or other dangerous chemicals – is strictly prohibited by the UN.
Kiev authorities have denied reports that such weapons were used against civilians. The National Guard also refuted reports that phosphorous ammunition was used, its press service stated.
During the latest news briefing, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki veered away from answering an AP journalist’s question about the reported use of white phosphorus bombs by Kiev’s army. But when cornered, she let it slip that she was quite clueless as to the situation on the ground – saying she thought the reference was to the Russians using the bombs.
When asked about the report for the second time, Psaki replied: “By whom? By Russians?”
The journalist replied: “No, by the Ukrainians,” specifying that there is video and photographic evidence of the attack.
Psaki replied by saying, “No, I didn’t see those reports.”
Slavyansk, an industrial city in southeastern Ukraine with a population of over 100,000 people, has been a focal point of the government’s crackdown against the region. The city’s residential area has been under regular artillery fire for weeks.
“It does appear that there is at least a case to be argued that something similar, if not itself white phosphorous, was used overnight. I’ve seen the video, I’ve looked at it closely…[there are] whole signs, whole marks of white phosphorous use. For example, a very bright light burning and multiple burns coming down from the sky. It’s an airburst weapon that has been used, such as a mortar or a manned aircraft,” Charles Shoebridge, a former army officer, Scotland Yard detective, and counter-terrorism intelligence officer who has recently returned from Ukraine, told RT.
“White phosphorous cannot be put out with the use of water” and it will “burn through one’s body to the bone,” Shoebridge added. “If there is going to be large amounts used it can also be a poison – large amounts can be set to contaminate water supply.”
According to the video, “it’s very likely that white phosphorus” was used, Shoebridge added. “It’s very difficult to fabricate the video we saw combined with the evidence on the ground.”
Moscow demanded an immediate investigation into the reported use of incendiary bombs in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Thursday.
“We are concerned to hear reports that the Ukrainian military forces use incendiary bombs and some other indiscriminate weapons,” he said. “These reports should be probed into immediately.”
On Thursday, Russia introduced a draft resolution to the UN Security Council that condemns attacks on residential quarters and civilian facilities in southeastern Ukraine, said Vitaly Churkin, Russian envoy to the UN.
He also voiced concern over reports of the use of prohibited ammunition, including incendiary bombs, during the military crackdown.
The draft resolution calls for an immediate end to all violence and for a lasting ceasefire.
“The draft resolution will aim to stop the violence and support the political efforts the OSCE has been undertaking in vain so far. We urge the UN Secretary-General to support them,” Churkin said, adding that its adoption would demonstrate the UNSC’s support for the crisis settlement efforts.
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