Showing posts with label Begin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Begin. Show all posts

Monday, 4 April 2011

Third Day of Afghan Protests Begin

 

VOA News April 03, 2011


Officials in southern Afghanistan say two people died and at least 18 others were wounded during a third day of protests against the burning of a Koran by a radical U.S. pastor.


Authorities say the latest casualties occurred in Kandahar Sunday when hundreds of people took to the streets there and in the eastern city of Jalalabad. Most of those injured were wounded when a gas canister caught fire and exploded.


At least 10 people were killed and 83 wounded Saturday in Kandahar after protesters set cars and buildings on fire.


On Friday, a group of people stormed the United Nations complex in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, killing seven foreign workers.


The protests follow the March 20 burning of a Koran by the head of a small fundamentalist church in the U.S. state of Florida.


The pastor, Terry Jones, made international headlines last year when he announced he intended to burn the Muslim holy book on the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. He later canceled those plans after many, including top U.S. officials, urged him against it.


The Koran burning initially received little press coverage in Afghanistan. But after Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the act and religious leaders called for justice in their Friday sermons, thousands took to the streets across Afghanistan in protest.


Jones has denied any responsibility for the violence.


U.S. President Barack Obama has condemned the Koran burning, saying the desecration of any holy book, including the Koran, is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry. But he also said that to attack and kill innocent people in response is "outrageous, and an affront to human decency and dignity."


The U.N. special representative in Kabul, Staffan de Mistura, said Saturday a group of insurgents had infiltrated Friday's protest and launched the deadly attack.


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Thursday, 31 March 2011

Mosaic HIV vaccine imminent. Scientists to begin trialling breakthrough drug ‘next year’

Home » Health, North America, Science » Mosaic HIV vaccine imminent. Scientists to begin trialling breakthrough drug ‘next year’




An electron scan showsthe HIV-1 virus budding (in green) from a white blood cell in a laboratory.



An HIV vaccine that could outwit the deadly virus could undergo human trials in as little as a year’s time, scientists say.


The ‘mosaic vaccine’, which is being designed by an international team of investigators, works by being able to adapt to the virus as it mutates.


HIV’s ability to evolve rapidly is what lets it dodge current drugs.


Bette Korber from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, is one of the scientists who has worked on the project for 20 years.


She said: ‘We’re in the evolutionary fast lane studying HIV.


‘If you give just one drug, HIV evolves away from it. That why treatments involve three or four drugs at once.’


The HIV virus, which is largely made up of proteins, causes AIDS – a disease that destroys the body’s immune system leaving sufferers vulnerable to infections and tumours. The disease killed 1.8million people worldwide in 2009.


Traditional HIV vaccines are designed to stimulate the body’s immune system to recognize naturally occurring stretches of specific amino acids in the virus’ proteins.

Determined: Dr Bette Korber has dedicated her life to finding an effective vaccine for HIV after losing two friends to Aids.


However, a mosaic vaccine is composed of many sets of synthetic, computer-generated sequences of proteins. These can cue the body’s immune system to respond to a variety of HIV mutations.


It is put together using a huge database created by Korber and her colleagues at LANL, which contains information from hundreds of thousands of HIV fragments.


Such a vaccine could break a 25-year stalemate in the search for a cure of a disease that infects 7,500 people a day and kills two million a year. All previous vaccine trials have ended in failure.


Early computer models predicted that mosaic vaccines would perform better than natural HIV genes.


This was partly confirmed last year, when results published in Nature Medicine found mosaic vaccines provoked powerful immune responses in both mice and monkeys.


Now a consortium of researchers, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and National Institutes of Health, hope to launch human trials of a mosaic vaccine by late 2012.


Dr Korber, who has lost a couple of friends to Aids, said she had high hopes for the novel approach.


‘It has been the focus of my life to make a vaccine happen,’ she said.


‘At this point, because of the results in animal studies, I’m confident this is a good approach that merits testing in humans.’


If the early phase safety trial shows the vaccine is safe to use on humans, scientists can move on to a phase two trial where the vaccine would be tested on larger groups to assess how well it works.


An estimated 73,000 Britons have HIV, including more than 21,000 who are unaware that they have the virus.


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Monday, 28 March 2011

Will Third World War Begin During Winter Games in 2014?

WW3

On March 24, well-known Russian astrologists, shamans and parapsychologists gathered to discuss forecasts for near and distant future.


"The phenomenon that they call the world financial crisis, and which, as they believe, is now ending, was not the financial crisis per se. It was just an omen of the imminent crisis. The real financial crisis is going to take place in the future," astrologist Aleksei Kolov said in the beginning of the meeting.


The most impressive astrological forecast was made by Pavel Globa: "Many attack me now claiming that I was promising Russia a quiet year. What kind of quiet year is it if earthquakes rattle Japan. But Japan is not Russia.


There will be wars in the world this year, but everything will be fine in our country, except for the summer. The summer is going to be tough: there will be three eclipses in a row in June-July. This year, there will be six eclipses in total. We had such a catastrophic year as this one 20 years ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed," the astrologist said.


Eclipses will cause a lot of trouble this year, Globa warned. By the moment of the latest one, which is going to take place on December 10, armed conflicts will occur on the Balkans. Terrorists will plant a bomb at the Nobel Prize award ceremony.


According to Globa, this year can be compared to 1939 - the year preceding WWII, from the point of view of astrological data.


The participants of the meeting also unveiled the date for the beginning of Third World War. The new war is said to begin in March of 2014, during the Olympic Games in Sochi. It is also possible that the war may start five days after the Games end.


Globa did not say in which country exactly the war would begin. He only said that the African revolutions would slowly be moving towards Russia.


Massive protests will eventually spark in Central Asia, the astrologist said. According to Globa, such events are happening because of the Black Moon. NATO attacked Libya the day when the Black Moon allied itself with the sun.


When the Black Moon allied itself with Uranus, the Japanese earthquake occurred.


In the nearest future, one shall expect revolutions in Syria and Yemen. The Yemeni leader will be toppled only in three years, though. Algeria will be the luckiest country among them all: the riots there will not last long.


"I studied the horoscopes of the leaders of all countries of the region. The Algerian president is the only leader who has no charisma at all. By the way, his birthday is the same day with Gorbachev - March 2nd, 1931. He will leave peacefully. They'll even give him a yacht and a villa.


There will be no revolution in Algeria. As for Gaddafi's fate, the problem is that no one knows his birth date - it's either 1937 or 1940 or 1942. If he was born on June 7 indeed, he will die on his birthday - there is an eclipse just near that date. I don't believe that he is a Gemini. He acts like an Aquarius.


Newspapers have recently written that he is a son of a French pilot, they even published a photo of the pilot. I saw the photo - they both look the same indeed," Pavel Globa said.


Parapsychologist Larisa Vais did not predict anything positive either.


"It's going to be a long spring, the summer will be hot, six-fingered children and beasts will be born. I saw it inside of me," she said.


The parapsychologists also saw (inside of her as well, apparently) that the "supreme commander-in-chief" is already looking for his successor. The successor's name will start with a letter 'K'. Larisa Vais said that such visions had never tricked her before.


Back in 1996, Larisa saw a Ukrainian woman with a braid. The parapsychologist even mentioned that in one of her interviews to a well-known Russian journalist during those years.


Now Larisa Vais can see a woman as well. This woman, Vais said, would be ruling Russia from behind the back of her husband, the president.


Speaking about global problems, Larisa Vais said that Japan would suffer from other mammoth earthquakes. "A lot of people will die on the planet this year," she said.


Andrei Dondukov, a shaman from Tuva Republic, said that the year 2009 marked the beginning of the era of Yamaraj, the god of death. "Everyone will be held accountable for all they did. Death will be especially close on November 5," shaman said.


Dondukov confirmed Vais's predictions. According to him, men lost their true power a long time ago. "We are living in the era of pseudo-patriarchate. This era will soon end and matriarchate will return," he said.


Russia will survive this change of trend easily. Dmitry Medvedev will remain the nation's ruler. Medvedev is the man, whom Russian Buddhists recognized as the incarnation of female deity - White Tara.


When asked about Putin's role, Dondukov said that Putin is a fighter.


"Putin is a military man, and Medvedev does yoga. There are two types of men in general. One of them is the horizontal type - this is where military men refer to. There's also the vertical type of men - they aim for spiritual growth. Medvedev is a true czar, the Lord's Anointed. Putin is just a duke," shaman Dondukov said.

March 25, 2011 - Pravda.ru

Submitted by SadInAmerica on Sun, 03/27/2011 - 7:15pm.

View the original article here

Saturday, 26 March 2011

Thousands of angry ordinary Australians turn up and alarmist smears begin

In Canberra today over 3,000 people went out of their way, coming in on 30 buses from more than 1000 km away, to let Julia Gillard know that Australians do not want her Carbon Tax. The news made every major broadcast for several minutes. Protesters were referred to as “climate skeptics” (mostly).

Other rallies around Australia got hundreds of people even though they were organized in a hurry, with no advertising, and with no pre-formed coalition of networked groups. There was a very good crowd at the Perth rally on a hot day during business hours, and one heckler (John Brookes). The mood was striking.

This is random shoe-string grassroots action at the last minute and look what it can achieve. It’s just beginning.

The photo gallery at the Australian makes it clear how decidedly normal most people were and what their main messages are.

This is mainstream Australia rising up, yet already the Big-Green-PR machine is at work, doing all it can to deny the undeniable. As I drove home in Perth after our rally, ABC news-radio didn’t mention that 3,000 people had gathered, nor that protests had happened all over the country, they may have said that earlier, but all I heard was how Tony Abbot was under a “cloud” for having spoken at a rally with “extremists” — The Telegraph headlined it too. Labor MP Nick Champion, Labor Party backbencher, gets press time for for his free shot at calling them “extremists“. It’s just another form of name-calling, and if the media had any standards they would not propagate the namecalling without demanding he substantiate it. (Do write and tell me if any journalist asked Champion to explain why it’s extreme to ask for major policies to be put to an election first, or why we ought to expect some achievable outcome when we pay billions  — other than earning brownie-points for the UN). Does the word “extreme” mean anything?

[more...]

Bill Bard says…

Aussi anti carbon tax rallies.  ‘good on em’

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard Faces Protests

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard Faces Protests

Thousands of protestors are challenging Prime Minister, Julia Gillard’s, “undemocratic” climate policies demanding either an immediate election or that her government drops all such proposals. They say imposing the taxes would be a betrayal of democratic principles because Gillard was elected with no mandate to raise any such taxes.

Speaking at the event will be leading MPs and scientists opposed to climate taxes. In response one Government Minister (Albanese) labeled the rally participants as ‘ratbags.’

A press release by organizer, Viv Forbes, Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition (March 23, 2011) announces that 22 diverse associations representing tens of thousands of Aussies will put the Gillard government’s environmental tax policies to the test. The Carbon Sense Coalition claims “thousands of Australians all over the country have signed a letter to Prime Minister Julia Gillard opposing the carbon tax.”

[more...]

Bookmark and Share

View the original article here

Thousands of angry ordinary Australians turn up and alarmist smears begin

In Canberra today over 3,000 people went out of their way, coming in on 30 buses from more than 1000 km away, to let Julia Gillard know that Australians do not want her Carbon Tax. The news made every major broadcast for several minutes. Protesters were referred to as “climate skeptics” (mostly).

Other rallies around Australia got hundreds of people even though they were organized in a hurry, with no advertising, and with no pre-formed coalition of networked groups. There was a very good crowd at the Perth rally on a hot day during business hours, and one heckler (John Brookes). The mood was striking.

This is random shoe-string grassroots action at the last minute and look what it can achieve. It’s just beginning.

The photo gallery at the Australian makes it clear how decidedly normal most people were and what their main messages are.

This is mainstream Australia rising up, yet already the Big-Green-PR machine is at work, doing all it can to deny the undeniable. As I drove home in Perth after our rally, ABC news-radio didn’t mention that 3,000 people had gathered, nor that protests had happened all over the country, they may have said that earlier, but all I heard was how Tony Abbot was under a “cloud” for having spoken at a rally with “extremists” — The Telegraph headlined it too. Labor MP Nick Champion, Labor Party backbencher, gets press time for for his free shot at calling them “extremists“. It’s just another form of name-calling, and if the media had any standards they would not propagate the namecalling without demanding he substantiate it. (Do write and tell me if any journalist asked Champion to explain why it’s extreme to ask for major policies to be put to an election first, or why we ought to expect some achievable outcome when we pay billions  — other than earning brownie-points for the UN). Does the word “extreme” mean anything?

[more...]

Bill Bard says…

Aussi anti carbon tax rallies.  ‘good on em’

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard Faces Protests

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard Faces Protests

Thousands of protestors are challenging Prime Minister, Julia Gillard’s, “undemocratic” climate policies demanding either an immediate election or that her government drops all such proposals. They say imposing the taxes would be a betrayal of democratic principles because Gillard was elected with no mandate to raise any such taxes.

Speaking at the event will be leading MPs and scientists opposed to climate taxes. In response one Government Minister (Albanese) labeled the rally participants as ‘ratbags.’

A press release by organizer, Viv Forbes, Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition (March 23, 2011) announces that 22 diverse associations representing tens of thousands of Aussies will put the Gillard government’s environmental tax policies to the test. The Carbon Sense Coalition claims “thousands of Australians all over the country have signed a letter to Prime Minister Julia Gillard opposing the carbon tax.”

[more...]

Bookmark and Share

View the original article here

Wednesday, 16 March 2011

Mass evacuations begin from N. E. Japan, Tokyo

Russian military prepares for nuclear fallout

As the scale of the nuclear disaster unfolding at the stricken Fukushima’s nuclear plant begins to be finally realised, despite the Japanese government’s continued underplaying of the situation, mass evacuations are are underway with people fleeing Tokyo and North Eastern areas of the country in order to avoid a toxic cloud of radiation heading their way.

China became the first government to issue a mass evacuation order of all its citizens from the entire north east of Japan late last night.

Citing “the seriousness of and uncertainty surrounding the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant at present”, the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo announced that it would be sending buses to evacuate all Chinese nationals from the Miyagi, Fukushima, Ibaraki and Iwate prefectures.

There are thought to be over 22 thousand Chinese nationals working in those areas. Those that are bussed out will be flown out of the country via China Southern Airlines on huge 272 seater jets.

Austria followed suit by announcing it would be moving its embassy from Tokyo to Osaka, over 250 miles (400 kilometers) away, due to radiation concerns. France and Finland have also urged their citizens to leave Tokyo and either move to the South of Japan or get out of the country altogether.

The Czech military has reportedly sent in planes to evacuate its nationals, While Russia says it is preparing to remove all of its soldiers and civilians from the Kuril islands, which are disputed with Japan.

Inside Russia, in the Far East of the country, military units are reportedly preparing to evacuate towns on concerns of nuclear fallout, while residents are rushing to buy iodine pills.

The U.S. Embassy in Tokyo has issued a warning to Americans saying they “should avoid travel to Japan at this time.” Several other European countries have done the same.

Continues:
http://truthiscontagious.com/2011/03/15/mass-evacuations-begin-from-north-east-of-japan-tokyo


View the original article here

Saturday, 12 March 2011

USA to begin body-scanning pedestrians?

Over at Forbes, there's a truly alarming write-up of documents uncovered by our friends at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which reveal a TSA Research Proposal to Body-Scan pedestrians and train passengers: Giving Transportation Security Administration agents a peek under your clothes may soon be a practice that goes well beyond airport checkpoints. Newly uncovered documents show that as early as 2006, the Department of Homeland Security has been planning pilot programs to deploy mobile scanning units that can be set up at public events and in train stations, along with mobile x-ray vans capable of scanning pedestrians on city...

View the original article here