(Reuters) - Thieves in central Mexico on Thursday stole a pick-up truck carrying dangerous radioactive material, authorities said.
The load of Iridium-192 was normally used in industrial radiography, Mexico's interior ministry said in a statement. It was housed in a specialized container and would only pose a health risk if the housing was tampered with, it said.
Experts say a dirty bomb is a more likely threat than a nuclear bomb in a terrorist attack.
However, they say a dirty bomb carries more potential to terrorize than cause a large loss of life.
Nuclear expert Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment think-tank said Iridium-192, a common medical and industrial isotope with many applications, "in theory" could be used as a radiological weapon.
But, "the perpetrators would have to accumulate enough material to disperse it effectively which may be difficult since in many cases small amounts of Ir-192 are used in sources," he told Reuters in an e-mail.
#2
The problem is that OSHA has a zero tolerance standard for radiation, ergo, any detectable radiation is a hazard.
Given that, a relatively small amount of iridium taped to a kicker charge of about 100 lbs of C4 set off in a public area would provide enough radiation to set off the detectors and force a massive and extremely expensive cleanup operation and the loss of use for YEARS with anything showing detectable radiation.
PBS did a show a number of years back and said 10 lbs of iridium in bomb set off in the Washington Metro would cost over $1 TRILLION to clean up.
So there you have it. A dirty bomb is an economic weapon designed to deny use and cost zillions to clean up...not really designed to kill or to destroy just deny use. Sorta like a neutron bomb or a low yield nuke set off as an airburst with the fireball not touching the ground.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
07/04/2014 12:00 Comments ||
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#3
The excitement created by generations of fear mongering. BTW - Hiroshima today. It wasn't a 'dirty' bomb, it was just the bomb.
The load of iridium 192 was found abandoned on a street a few miles from where the truck was stolen in the industrial Mexico City suburb of Tlalnepantla, Luis Felipe Puente, the head of the country's civil protection agency, said on Twitter.
Military troops mounted a security perimeter around the small container emblazoned with logos for hazardous materials until it was removed from the site by the country's nuclear safety commission, according to media reports.
[CNSNEWS] Catholic Archbishop Paul Coakley, head of the archdiocese of Oklahoma City, condemned a scheduled Black Mass by a satanic group, for which tickets are being sold at the Oklahoma City Civic Center, as "sacrilegious," a "blasphemous mockery of the Mass." Why bother noticing it at all? They're only doing it to piss people off.
The archbishop also called upon community leaders and board members of the Oklahoma City Civic Center to "remedy this situation," stressing that he hoped they did not want to "enable or encourage such a flagrantly inflammatory event." Relax. If all the participants turn to pillars of salt you can laugh your ecclesiastical ass off. If not, figure it was beneath the notice of God and the devil both.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/04/2014 00:00 ||
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A California high school is at the center of a tuberculosis outbreak linked to an infectious student who tested positive for active TB in February, county health officials said Wednesday. Are they covered by Obumblecare?
Four more students at Grant Union High School in Sacramento have contracted active TB. Three related tuberculosis cases are considered an outbreak, Sacramento County Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman Laura McCasland said. If three is an outbreak how many is an epidemic?
Four relatives and friends of the student who initially tested positive have also contracted active TB bringing the total to nine known cases.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
07/04/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
What is the epidemiology of this outbreak. How was the TB vectored. Were any of these students exposed as the result of illegal immigration?
We have a school system of about 50K students. I am not aware of any TB in the student population.
#2
TB is largely a disease resulting from poverty. As the US continues to decline expect more of this. For now it's almost 100% imported, but with declining US wealth and the idiocy of politician run healthcare it will become endemic here. We'll also get plague, cholera and the rest, but TB is what will wind up killing us all.
#3
TB is rampant in Latin America. I can't help but wonder if that is why many of these DREAM ACT children coming north have been ushered into Federal installations.
Tips? Keep your firearm clean. Line up the rear sight with the front sight. Maintain good gun control. Don't point a firearm at anyone unless you intend to shoot them. Be safe...
[AnNahar] Æthiopia is facing a huge wave of refugees from South Sudan, where the specter of famine threatens to heap further misery on a people already blighted by civil war, the U.N.'s food aid agency warned on Wednesday.
"The numbers are increasing exponentially in a very short period of time," said Abdou Dieng, head of the World Food Program's Æthiopia operations.
More than 158,000 South Sudanese refugees have already crossed the border to reach camps in neighboring Æthiopia, according to U.N. figures released Wednesday.
At least 1,500 more are arriving every week, and the U.N. forecasts South Sudanese refugee numbers could double to 300,000 by the end of the year.
"The situation is not improving in South Sudan, so we expect that they will continue to come. If there is a famine in South Sudan, as many people think there will be, that will push more people to come into Æthiopia," he told news hounds.
All told there are currently almost 570,000 refugees -- largely women and kiddies -- in camps in the country.
Apart from the South Sudanese, most are from Somalia, which huge numbers fled amid conflict and a 2011 drought, and Eritrea ...is run by the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), with about the amounts of democracy and justice you'd expect from a party with that name. National elections have been periodically scheduled and cancelled; none have ever been held in the country. The president, Isaias Afewerki, has been in office since independence in 1993 and will probably die there of old age... , where mounting numbers are escaping the iron grip of the country's regime.
"The government has a policy that they call the 'open-door policy' for refugees. Æthiopia today is hosting one of the biggest refugee numbers, without talking too much about it," said Dieng.
The U.N. needs around $20 million (14.6 million euros) per month to help feed refugees in Æthiopia, but is facing a massive funding shortfall and fears that its coffers will be empty by October, he added.
South Sudan only gained its independence from Sudan three years ago after decades of fighting, and has been ravaged by ethnically-tinged conflict between rebels and the government since December.
The fighting has driven more than one million people from their homes, meaning that many farmers have missed the planting season.
[Libya Herald] The acting Libyan ambassador to Tanzania, Ismail Nwairat, has did away with himself, according to the embassy in Dar es Salam. Nwairat shot himself on Tuesday afternoon, an embassy statement published yesterday said.
According to it, he locked himself in his office and then shot himself in the chest. On hearing the shot staff broke into the office to find Nwairat lying in a pool of blood.
He was rushed to hospital but pronounced dead on arrival.
An investigation has been launch by the police in Dar es Salaam.
The diplomat's body is to be flown back to Libya.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/04/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
Oh yeah. Suicide.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
07/04/2014 8:13 Comments ||
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#2
shot himself in the chest back of the head. Three times
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/04/2014 10:35 Comments ||
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[Dhaka Tribune] Slain Fulgazi upazila chairman Ekram's family has alleged that the prime suspects of the murder case have been seen freely moving around in the district.
Nearly a month and a half ago, Ekram was killed by a gang of criminals in the Feni district town in broad daylight. Assailants shot at Ekram and then set fire to his vehicle to burn him to death.
After the murder, police managed to arrest more than two dozen people. However,
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
07/04/2014 00:00 ||
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[BUSINESSWEEK] A top Ukrainian security official says government troops have cleared more than a dozen towns of armed pro-Russia separatists and now control two-thirds of the eastern regions at the center of the insurgency.
National security council secretary Andriy Parubiy said Friday that Ukrainian forces are still attacking rebel positions with artillery and planes. He said 17 villages had been secured by government forces since a unilateral cease fire expired Monday.
He said Ukrainian forces now control 23 of 36 local regions within Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, two regions along the Russian border that have declared independence from the government in Kiev.
The rebels are still fighting back. Rebels shelled the Donetsk airport overnight and an AP news hound said a radar or communications tower there was still burning in the morning.
Putin tells Obama he wants better ties, equal treatment
President Vladimir Putin ...Second and fourth President and sixth of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead... called for an improvement in ties between Russia and the United States on Friday in an Independence Day message to Barack Obama I inhaled. That was the point... , urging Washington to treat Moscow as an equal partner.
Relations between the two presidents and countries are at a low ebb following disagreements over the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, and over human rights One man's rights are another man's existential threat. , democracy and defence matters.
"The head of the Russian state expressed hope that ... ties between the two countries will develop successfully on the basis of pragmatism and equality despite difficulties and disagreements," the Kremlin said in a statement, outlining a telegram sent to Obama on the July 4 holiday.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/04/2014 10:12 ||
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[AnNahar] Gunmen dressed in camouflage rubbed out three Ukrainian coppers and maimed another in the restive eastern city of Donetsk on Thursday, the regional interior ministry said.
The bodies of the officers were found near the railway in the northwest of the industrial city, which is also the administrative center of the separatist region of Donetsk.
The interior ministry said in a statement that the assailants had expeditiously departed at a goodly pace and that a search and an investigation were under way.
Donetsk and the neighboring border region of Lugansk were overrun by pro-Kremlin gunnies in early April and have remained under their effective control since.
Kiev in April launched an offensive aimed at regaining control of the vital provinces, which lie at the heart of Ukraine's coal and steel industry.
Ensuing fighting has claimed more than 460 lives, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Monday cancelled a 10-day ceasefire aimed at launching negotiations.
European mediators are trying to arrange a another truce between Kiev and Moscow, which denies backing the insurgency, and new talks are due to be held by Saturday.
[Rooters] The hydraulic ramp of a Turkish freighter taps down on the eastern Mediterranean port of Haifa and, under a full moon, 37 trucks roll off onto an otherwise empty pier.
In a convoy that stretches hundreds of meters, the trucks travel east across northern Israel, bringing goods from Europe to customers in Jordan and beyond.
Until three years ago the cargo these trucks carry — fruits, cheese, raw material for the textile industry, spare parts, and second-hand trucks — would have come through Syria. But civil war has made that journey too perilous.
Three years after Syria plunged into violence, Israel is reaping an unlikely economic benefit. The number of trucks crossing between Israel and Jordan has jumped some 300 percent since 2011, to 10,589 trucks a year, according to the Israel Airports Authority. In particular, exports from Turkey — food, steel, machinery and medicine — have begun to flow through Israel and across the Sheikh Hussein Bridge to Jordan and a few Arab neighbors. Turkey's Directorate General of Merchant Marine, part of that country's transport ministry, said that transit containers shipped to Israel for passage on to other countries increased to 77,337 tonnes in 2013 from 17,882 tonnes in 2010.
The trade, though still small, is growing enough to encourage long-held Israeli hopes that the Jewish state can become a commercial gateway to the Arab world. Israel plans to invest at least 6 billion shekels ($1.7 billion) in infrastructure over the next six years to improve the trade route. In the past, some Israeli businessmen and diplomats have lamented the way politics have hurt economic opportunities; others have kept any trade with their Arab neighbors quiet so as not to upset them. Now they see a chance to boost economic and political relations.
#1
But it's Tobacco and all icky and everything.
The worst problem with the Big Government theory is that, at some point, everything not forbidden becomes mandatory. They're not there so you can have choices, and you won't when they're done. It's easier for them that way.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
07/04/2014 9:10 Comments ||
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#2
The 4th branch of government, the unbridled bureaucracy, needs to be reined in.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...Second and fourth President and sixth of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead...
