Wednesday, February 3, 2016 AND the week prior

Global Disaster Watch - daily natural disaster updates.

**Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.**
Martin Luther King Jr.


LARGEST QUAKES so far today -
None 5.0 or larger.

Yesterday, 2/2/16 -
5.7 NORTHEAST OF TAIWAN
5.6 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN

2/1/16 -
5.2 OFF E. COAST OF N. ISLAND, N.Z.
6.2 KERMADEC ISLANDS REGION

1/31/16 -
5.3 BOUGAINVILLE REGION, P.N.G.
6.0 BALLENY ISLANDS REGION
5.0 CENTRAL PERU
5.6 ADMIRALTY ISLANDS REGION, P.N.G.

1/30/16 -
5.3 ADMIRALTY ISLANDS REGION, P.N.G.
5.1 SOLOMON ISLANDS
5.0 KURIL ISLANDS
5.5 BISMARCK SEA
5.1 KAMCHATKA PENINSULA, RUSSIA
7.2 KAMCHATKA PENINSULA, RUSSIA
5.0 OFF COAST OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
5.3 KURIL ISLANDS
5.1 STATE OF YAP, MICRONESIA

1/29/16 -
5.3 COQUIMBO, CHILE
5.2 MOLUCCA SEA
5.1 SOUTH SANDWICH ISLANDS REGION
5.0 BABUYAN ISL REGION, PHILIPPINES
5.3 SANTA CRUZ ISLANDS

1/28/16 -
5.0 PACIFIC-ANTARCTIC RIDGE

1/27/16 -
5.3 CENTRAL MID-ATLANTIC RIDGE
5.0 TONGA
5.1 STATE OF YAP, MICRONESIA

1/26/16 -
5.2 HINDU KUSH REGION, AFGHANISTAN
5.0 NEW IRELAND REGION, P.N.G.
5.2 SUMBA REGION, INDONESIA
5.1 NEW IRELAND REGION, P.N.G.
5.4 NEW IRELAND REGION, P.N.G.
5.1 SOLOMON ISLANDS
5.0 NEW IRELAND REGION, P.N.G.
5.4 FIJI REGION
6.0 NEW IRELAND REGION, P.N.G.
5.0 FIJI REGION

1/25/16 -
5.4 NORTH OF HALMAHERA, INDONESIA
5.0 STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR
5.2 STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR
5.3 STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR
5.0 STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR
6.3 STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR
5.1 PALAU REGION
5.7 TONGA

1/24/16 -
5.1 NORTH OF SOLOMON ISLANDS
5.0 SOUTHERN ALASKA
7.1 SOUTHERN ALASKA
5.2 SOUTHEAST OF LOYALTY ISLANDS

1/23/16 -
5.5 EASTER ISLAND REGION
5.2 VANUATU
5.1 HINDU KUSH REGION, AFGHANISTAN

1/22/16 -
5.1 SOUTHERN IRAN
5.5 VANUATU REGION
5.3 SOUTHERN EAST PACIFIC RISE

1/21/16 -
5.0 KEPULAUAN TALAUD, INDONESIA
6.5 OFF COAST OF JALISCO, MEXICO
5.0 STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR
5.2 SOUTHWEST INDIAN RIDGE
5.4 KERMADEC ISLANDS, NEW ZEALAND
5.0 MOLUCCA SEA
5.1 TONGA REGION

1/20/16 -
5.1 KURIL ISLANDS
5.9 NORTHERN QINGHAI, CHINA
5.4 PACIFIC-ANTARCTIC RIDGE

1/19/16 -
5.0 HALMAHERA, INDONESIA
5.4 SOUTHEAST OF LOYALTY ISLANDS
5.0 BOUGAINVILLE REGION, P.N.G.
5.5 TAIWAN REGION
5.3 SIMEULUE, INDONESIA
5.5 TAIWAN REGION
5.2 SIMEULUE, INDONESIA


1/18/16 -
5.1 HALMAHERA, INDONESIA
5.9 SOUTH OF FIJI ISLANDS
5.1 KERMADEC ISLANDS REGION
5.2 NORTH OF HONDURAS

1/17/16 -
5.0 MID-INDIAN RIDGE
5.2 BANDA SEA
5.1 CUBA REGION
5.2 CUBA REGION

1/16/16 -
5.4 SERAM, INDONESIA
5.0 SOLOMON ISLANDS
5.2 SOUTHERN SUMATRA, INDONESIA
5.1 FIJI REGION
5.2 OFF COAST OF BIO-BIO, CHILE

1/15/16 -
5.2 LA RIOJA, ARGENTINA

Indonesia - One dead, 22 injured as quake hits Maluku. A 5.4 magnitude quake that struck South Buru regency in Maluku on Sunday killed one and injured many others. 19 suffered light injuries and three suffered serious injuries in the quake. The quake, at a depth of 10 kilometers, hit the southern part of Maluku's Buru Island on Sunday at 6:22 a.m. It was also felt in the neighboring regency of Buru, damaging hundreds of houses and a mosque. The local administration and South Buru Disaster Mitigation Agency had difficulty managing the disaster and assisting victims because of limited access, high waves and bad weather in reaching the affected location.

In Oklahoma, now the U.S.'s earthquake capital, people are talking nervously about the big one as man-made quakes get stronger, more frequent and closer to major population centers.

Alaska - Mushing through a 7.1 quake on rolling, cracking, spurting river ice - While many Alaskans were uneasy during Sunday’s magnitude-7.1 earthquake, most had the security of being at home, close to family and near reliable Internet and phone lines to find out exactly what happened and where the worst damage occurred. However, some mushers, including those competing in the weekend’s Northern Lights 300 Sled Dog Race from Big Lake to Finger Lake and back, did not have such modern conveniences.
“It was the longest two minutes of my life... One of the last places I want to be during a 7.1 earthquake was running dogs down the middle of a frozen river. The ice was rippling and waving like a waterbed when someone jumps up and down on it. I was having a hard time keeping my feet. As the ice rolled and jumped, it cracked and snapped all around me. Water came shooting up through the cracks, and I was trying to figure out if we were all going to wash away.”

Puget Sound, Washington - A continuous tremor has been shaking from Vancouver Island south toward Olympia. Hundreds of tremors registered across the Pacific Northwest within a 25-hour span starting Monday. The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network plotted 427 tremors on a map. "What's happening is there's an episode where the deep plate boundary is kind of rumbling." The tremor can last three weeks and happens about once a year. It's been shaking 30 miles under Puget Sound since Dec. 22.
A seismologist believes the tremor is related to the 4.3 earthquake that shook under Victoria, British Columbia on Dec. 30. That quake was the largest in the Puget Sound region since the Nisqually quake of 2001. Seismologists are not alarmed.

Really Big One’ article puts NW earthquake risk on White House agenda - A story in The New Yorker about the Northwest’s coming megaquake and tsunami helped inspire the White House to plan a seismic resilience summit.

VOLCANOES -
Chile - Several recent events suggest that a set of glacier-covered volcanoes in the southern Chilean region of Bío-Bío, which have been showing increasing activity since December, may be likely to erupt. The three mountains, known as the Nevados de Chillán, reach over 3200 meters in elevation, and have a set of glaciers totaling over 2 square kilometers in area on their summits. They have a long record of eruptions, with historical documentation from the 17th century. Radiocarbon evidence records eruptions that took place about 8000 years ago.

Azerbaijan's largest volcano awakes - One of the largest volcanoes of Azerbaijan Akhtarma Pashali awoke in the country’s Hajigabul region on the night of January 25. The mud volcano has ceased erupting. No victims were reported, as no settlements are located around the area. Akhtarma Pashali is located in 35 kilometers of the city of Shirvan. The diameter of the crater is approximately 10 square kilometers. The last eruption of this mud volcano occurred in 1963, while the first eruption of the volcano was reported in 1948. Over a thousand mud volcanoes are known to exist in the world.

Peru - Arequipa: Misti volcano is awake. The last eruption of great magnitude at Misti was 2,000 years ago. The Misti volcano has long been considered ‘asleep.’ However, studies by the Southern Volcano Observatory reveal that it is awake and emitting gases. It is currently considered the greatest risk in the South American country, as thousands of habitants reside near its crater.

The Popocatépetl volcano is one of the most dangerous volcanoes of the world, located 35 miles from Mexico City. It billowed huge clouds of black smoke and ash on Saturday. People living within a distance of 10 miles from the mountain are on yellow alert, which means they are all set to evacuate immediately in case activity increases. Before the last Popocatépetl eruption in 2000, 41,000 people were evacuated beforehand, due to early warnings. With 20 million people, Mexico City is the fourth biggest city in the world.

Hawaii - Mauna Loa is considered one of the largest active volcanoes on the face of the earth. Lava reaching temperatures over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit cover almost 90 percent of Mauna Loa, so one of the last things you would expect to find there are ice caves. The “Mauna Loa Ice cave” and the “Arsia Cave” are hidden more than 11,000 feet up Mauna Loa’s northern slope and are in danger of a complete meltdown.

Half of the three million people living in Naples in Italy have now been told they live within a new yellow danger zone of the Vesuvius supervolcano, the infamous peak which was responsible for the historic destruction of Pompeii in 79AD. People have been warned in the event of a catastrophic eruption those in the yellow zone could be hit by falling ash and rocks.
Officials in the city have added around 1.5 million people living in 63 towns and villages on the outskirts of Naples to an existing red-zone of 600,000 people, within the closest 200 square kilometres to the peak, who were already deemed most at risk - taking the total to 2.1 million.

Philippines - Authorities in Lanao del Sur are investigating the cause of a fire that destroyed the mountain forests of Butig town near Cagayan de oro City, in the Philippines on Thursday night, with the nearby Mount Makaturing volcano high on the suspect list. The magma mount is one of the most active in the Philippines and sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire.
The 1,940-metre peak is believed to have erupted 10 times in the past, and could be due another as the last on record was in March 1882. According to locals, heavy smoke enveloped the area near the town as well as Alamada in Wao town and the blaze appeared "lava-like," as it glowed from the distance throughout Thursday night and into the early hours. Officials will probe if there is a connection between the volcano and the forest fire and the risk of any eruptions.

Indonesia - More than 1,200 people Wednesday remained evacuated from a 1.9-mile containment zone around Mount Egon in Kupang, eastern Indonesia, after toxic gas and volcanic ash erupted Tuesday. Within a 400 mile radius of Mount Egon there are also 25 other volcanoes and five of them are said to be currently erupting, while there are ten other eruption warnings in place.
Russia - There are fears seismic activity is also growing in the area around the Zhupanovsky volcano. Officials in Russia had to cancel flights near the Zhupanovsky volcano on Russia's eastern coast after it spewed lava five miles into the air, also Tuesday. The Russian explosion affected local air traffic, but the huge ash cloud is also drifting east over the Pacific Ocean so the impact on flights could be much wider.

TSUNAMI / FREAK WAVES / ABNORMAL TIDES -

Chile - If you thought Snowpocalypse 2016 was bad, be thankful that you weren’t along the coast of central Chile. El Niño whipped up a storm in the Pacific Ocean that battered the Chilean resort city of Viña del Mar. The waves rushing into the streets were so powerful that a wall of water actually engulfed a government SUV, overturning it.

Oregon - Sneaker wave south of Coos Bay: Caught on camera. The owner of the High Tide Cafe in Coos Bay, was recording the scene at the beach when a sneaker wave came in, sending him and others scrambling for safety.

There is evidence that a 9,300-foot-tall volcano on the island of Fogo, one of the world’s largest and most active volcanoes, collapsed during an eruption 73,000 years ago and generated an 840 foot wave so big that it swept over nearby Santiago Island. The findings raise the possibility that Fogo or another volcano could cause a similarly scary event today. Other volcanic islands, including some in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, are close to heavily-populated areas.

Ireland - Safety warnings Monday as hurricane force gusts set to batter Galway. The Road Safety Authority and Galway City and County Councils have issued safety warnings as hurricane force gusts were expected to batter Galway. Storm Henry was making landfall this lunchtime, bringing gusts of up to 130 kilometers per hour. A status orange wind warning – MET Eireann’s second highest alert level – was issued for Galway and eight other counties.
A second yellow wave alert was in place for Galway’s coastal regions, as high winds were expected to result in exceptional wave heights of up to 15 metres. The RSA said drivers should beware of fallen debris and strong crosswinds on exposed roads. Galway City Council was advising people to exercise extreme caution outdoors, especially near exposed shores.

TROPICAL STORMS -

No current tropical storms.

Texas - Galveston County commissioners have approved final plans for a $4.2 million hurricane emergency response shelter on the highest spot on Bolivar Peninsula. The agreement was recently reached with the High Island Independent School District. The 9,500- square-foot gymnasium-type building will be constructed, starting in March, on school property.
The building, reinforced to withstand hurricane-force winds, will not be an emergency shelter during mandatory evacuations. If a hurricane hits, the structure will be the base camp for emergency personnel to distribute supplies and park vehicles. Hurricane Ike slammed Galveston in 2008 and caused $29 billion in damage. More than three dozen people died.

Australia - Port Lincoln is experiencing severe flooding after being hit by the remnants of Cyclone Stan more than 3,200km away. The city located on the Eyre Peninsula in the Australian experienced strong rainfall after ex-Cyclone Stan crossed the South Australian border last night. The rain has hampered drivers and businesses with reports that there was 50mm of rain recorded at 9am with an additional 20mm recorded at lunchtime.
Cyclone Stan was previously a category two system with residents in Western Australia’s Pilbara region preparing for a potential category three cyclone over the weekend after a red-alert warning was issued. The ex-cyclone has since been downgraded but it was still strong enough to wreak havoc on Port Lincoln, 3,206km away from Pilbara, before sweeping through Adelaide.

Global Weather Oscillations says the 2016 - 2017 Atlantic hurricane season will be the strongest in over 4 years. GWO has issued the most accurate predictions of any organization over the past 7 years, and says - unlike the past three hurricane seasons that were dominated by hostile atmospheric conditions that subdued hurricane activity since 2013, and during the 2015 El Niño season - The next few years will be in a “Climate Pulse Hurricane Enhancement Cycle” that will provide very favorable conditions for development of tropical storms and hurricanes.

Raining fish in Ethiopia - Unusual fish-rain occurred on Sunday at 11: 30 pm in Dire Dawa City in the Eastern part of Ethiopia for a few minutes both in rural and urban areas. People in these areas were stunned by the occurrence. The Ethiopian Agricultural Research Institute Livestock Director said that this phenomena occurs due to cyclone. In meteorology, a cyclone is an area of closed, circular fluid motion rotating in the same direction as the Earth.
This is usually characterized by inward spiraling winds that rotate counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. If it is high cyclone, it can pick up fish with the help of air and come again down not far from the sea. "But I do not think it sprung from the Red Sea. It could not happen due to simple cyclone for it does not have the capacity to jack up fish." "We have information but we dispatched a team of professionals to examine the causes and consequences of the occurrence as it is the first of its kind in the country."

SEVERE RAIN STORMS, FLOODING, LANDSLIDES -

An invasion of poisonous snakes washed downriver in recent floods forced authorities to close beaches to summer holidaymakers in northern Argentina, officials said Monday. Floodwaters in the Rio Plata and Rio Parana carried a species of water lily and with it countless crawling, slithering creatures, south to beaches at the mouths of those rivers near Buenos Aires.
"We are raising awareness of the risk and danger present today. There are otters and species of snakes that are poisonous. The beaches of Quilmes have been closed as a precaution. We were cleaning up the coast during the week and while doing so we saw the snakes under the water lilies."
Inland river beaches were also closed over the weekend in the northern city of Rosario. Locals there spotted displaced animals such as otters, a wild boar and a fox cub as well as snakes, scorpions and stinging insects. Water covered the beaches and even the terraces of seaside bars in Rosario, as summer temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius. "It is dangerous because when there is not much beach there is more risk of coming into direct contact with rodents or snakes, whose dens are all flooded." Experts have blamed severe flooding in recent weeks in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay on the El Nino extreme weather phenomenon.

United Kingdom - Village suffers 'biblical' non stop rain for 81 DAYS and even the livestock are 'depressed'. Rain has fallen every day in the Welsh village of Eglwyswrw since October 26 and residents, farmers and their animals are all fed up.

This year the Met Office announced a new scheme to name the most furious storms to hit Britain - Storm Jonas hit Bristol Wednesday, bringing with it flooding and strong gusts. The Met Office confirmed it would not be naming this storm, which has killed nearly 30 people in the United States, because its impact and intensity has not been strong enough. But forecasters said that, had the storm ticked the criteria worthy of a name, it would have used Jonas rather than selecting Gertrude - which is next on the Met Office's alphabetically ordered list.

Flood warnings in place as Met forecasts more rain for UK - Cumbrian village of Glenridding flooded for fourth time this winter as more rain is forecast for end of week followed by cold snap at weekend. The Met Office has issued yellow warnings for rain across much of the country as the tail-end of the storm that battered the US at the weekend continued to sweep in from the Atlantic with more heavy rain expected on Friday. More than a dozen flood warnings remain in place for parts of north-west, north-east and south-west England and Wales.

Australia - One-in-100-year' rainfall triggers flash flooding in Geelong and surrounds. (Photos and video at link)

Australia - Darling Downs residents have been warned to brace for a massive storm and 'super cell' expected to reach the region tomorrow, bringing with it damaging weather conditions. Higgins Storm Chasers have issued a warning with a surface and upper trough bringing large hail, up to 8cm in diameter, damaging winds over 90kmhr, heavy rain with flash flooding and frequent lightning. The system will peak on Friday as a very potent storm set up.
"As far as severe storm set ups are concerned this ranks in the top five over the past 12 months and people need to be made well aware of the dangerous potential during Friday." There is an extreme risk of severe storms and possible supercells are forecast to heavily impact the entire South East of the state including central districts on Friday. The rare weather conditions are stretching over 2000kms up and down Eastern Australia.

HEAVY SNOW / EXTREME COLD -

French Foreign Legionnaires killed in Alps avalanche - Five French Foreign Legionnaires have been killed and six injured in an avalanche while on a training exercise in the Alps. The avalanche came down close to Valfrejus, not far from the Italian border, where some 50 soldiers were training off-piste. Search dogs and helicopters immediately began looking for the soldiers. Last week, two school pupils and a Ukrainian tourist were killed by an avalanche nearby.
A teacher is under investigation for manslaughter after he apparently led his pupils on to a closed ski run shortly before the avalanche in Les Deux Alpes, 124km (80 miles) away from Valfrejus. Heavy snow has fallen in the Savoie region recently. About 10 of the military team were immediately found by rescuers - but five had gone into cardiac arrest, and died. All the soldiers taking part in the exercises had avalanche detection kits, and rescuers were on the scene within minutes.
Two of those found by rescuers were taken to hospital suffering from hypothermia. "For now the circumstances aren't very clear. We're still trying to carry out the rescue and trying to count everyone in the area, to know if we still have people there who've been buried." In 2012, an avalanche swept away five members of the 2nd Foreign Engineer Regiment, killing one.

Winter storm in Midwest; tornadoes punch Deep South - Heavy snow and high winds continued to sweep across much of the Midwest with near-blizzard force on Tuesday, causing highway closures in Nebraska and flight cancellations in Colorado. Nasty weather also hammered the South, with tornado warnings issued in Mississippi and Alabama. At least two tornadoes hit Mississippi.

EXTREME HEAT & DROUGHT / WILDFIRES -

Zimbabwe - Drought: Farmers fear the worst. Farmers have already lost cattle and crops in the severest drought to hit the nation in a quarter of a century. But the worst may be yet to come.

Low water levels at Victoria Falls highlight southern Africa’s worst drought in 30 years - Tourists post pictures on social media of iconic falls known as “The Smoke That Thunders” looking decidedly tame as farmers endure record drought that will cause hunger across the continent.

Drought pushes Australian wildlife into crowded care - North Queensland wildlife carers are overrun with animals in care as drought conditions continue over much of the state. "It has just been dry for so long. We haven't had a good wet season really since Cyclone Yasi, so since then it has just been getting worse and worse." The group would normally attend about 500 macropods (kangaroos and wallabies) each year, but last year the number was more than 800.

El Niño: Urgent Need for Support as Drought Affects 14 Million People in Southern Africa - Families in drought-affected areas in southern Mozambique are rapidly running out of food, after the poor harvest of the previous year.

Ethiopia urged international donors on Sunday to offer aid promptly for relief operations to support 10.2 million people critically short of food, and said it was committed to allocating as much of its own funds as necessary.

2nd Disastrous Drought Year for Endangered California Salmon - Endangered native salmon suffered a second straight disastrous year in California's drought, with all but 3 percent of the latest generation dying in too-shallow, too-hot rivers, federal officials said Monday.

'GLOBAL WEIRDNESS' / CLIMATE CHANGE -

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has embarked on a whole new version of its international cloud atlas, used by weather observers worldwide to ensure that clouds are described in a uniform fashion. The atlas was first published in 1939 based on work extending back to the 1800s. This opens the door for entirely new ways of presenting and documenting the world’s seemingly endless variety of clouds.
Another cool feature this time: you’ve got a chance to pitch in. The WMO launched a website in October that allows anyone to submit their photos and videos for consideration in the upcoming atlas. Your odds of getting imagery accepted will be highest if you go for the more obscure, harder-to-document cloud types and if you can provide details on the geographic and meteorological context of your image

Prof Stephen Hawking Has More Bad News For Humanity: We’re About To Wipe Ourselves Out - he said that our rush to understand and improve life through science and technology could be humanity’s undoing. He has previously suggested that colonising other planets will be the only way that the human race can survive, but he warns that we may lose Earth to some kind of major disaster before we have a chance to properly do so. Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years.
By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race. "However, we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period.” It’s not the first time the professor has mongered doom; he has previously warned that AI robots will wipe us out unless we ban them first and that hostile aliens are about to destroy us.

The 21st century could be humanity’s last, according a leading scientific thinker - and what replaces us could be very strange indeed. Seth Shostak of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California argues that three big scientific advances are on the cusp of changing humans forever.
‘We can eventually produce offspring that are as different from us as dogs are from gray wolves. ‘The haphazard, bottom-up alterations to our species occasioned by Darwinian evolution will yield to the directed improvements of future engineers. Shostak believes that three technologies - genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and space travel - are about to change the human race forever.
Technologies such as ‘designer babies’ and computers which connect directly to human minds will soon change us profoundly. ‘The development of general artificial intelligence will surely be the most dramatic driver of change, because it is less a matter of improving our descendants than replacing them with our engineered successors. ‘Perhaps we can promulgate our culture and ourselves by putting chips in our brains or simply uploading our brains to the machines. But you can be sure that the result will not be Homo sapiens as we’ve known him for 50 thousand years.
He also says that genetically engineered humans will not just be possible - but inevitable. ‘The relentless interplay of science and technology ensures that genomic knowledge will spawn a growing number of applications. Curing disease is one of these, and it’s obviously desirable. But our efforts won’t be limited to merely fixing ourselves; we’ll also opt for improvement. You may hesitate to endorse designer babies, but hot-rodding our children is as much on the horizon as the morning sun.

El Nino rain spurring growth of deadly mushrooms - El Nino rain is helping to alleviate California's drought, but it's also spurring the growth of mushrooms that can be deadly to pets.

SPACE WEATHER -

COLORFUL CLOUDS IN THE STRATOSPHERE - Clouds in the stratosphere are very rare. Yet for the past week they have been seen every day. These fantasticaly-colored clouds are floating more than 80,000 feet above Earth's surface. Normally, the thin air up there is crystal clear. Not this week. Water molecules are crystalizing in the lower stratosphere and the resulting ice crystals are assembling into polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs).
Also known as "nacreous" clouds, PSCs form in the lower stratosphere when temperatures drop to a staggeringly-cold -85ºC. High-altitude sunlight shining through tiny ice particles ~10µm wide produce bright iridescent colors by diffraction and interference. Because these clouds require extreme cold, they are most often seen around the Arctic Circle. In recent days, however, they have been spotted as far south as the UK. Indeed, a "stratospheric cloud event" appears to be underway.

It’s possible that there is a “mirror universe” where time moves backwards, say scientists. Although we experience time in one direction—we all get older, we have records of the past but not the future—there’s nothing in the laws of physics that insists time must move forward. In trying to solve the puzzle of why time moves in a certain direction, many physicists have settled on entropy, the level of molecular disorder in a system, which continually increases. But two separate groups of prominent physicists are working on models that examine the initial conditions that might have created the arrow of time, and both seem to show time moving in two different directions. When the Big Bang created our universe, these physicists believe it also created an inverse mirror universe where time moves in the opposite direction.

HEALTH THREATS -
RECALLS & ALERTS

Why hasn't the mystery of Gulf War Syndrome been solved? - The term Gulf War Syndrome first hit the headlines after US and British soldiers reported unusual symptoms on their return home. The two governments set up disease registers, with more than 100,000 veterans being assessed, but these failed to find a pattern to symptoms which could indicate a new condition.
A study in 2009 found Gulf veterans were two to three times more likely to report 53 different symptoms, including chronic fatigue and nerve pain, compared with soldiers deployed to Bosnia. None of the symptoms were unique to the Gulf War, but they were experienced in far higher numbers. "They're known as medically unexplained physical symptoms...there is no obvious physical problem causing it."
One popular theory was that soldiers had become ill after exposure to depleted uranium in tank shells. However, troops not exposed to this were just as likely to suffer chronic health problems later on. The same was true of those exposed to fumes from burning oil wells. In fact, no link could be found between veteran ill health and specific jobs or tasks. Pesticides have also been suggested as a cause, perhaps affecting the nervous system. But detailed studies found no evidence of damage that could explain this.

Healthy People Who Were Vaccinated for the Flu Continue Dying - More deaths among otherwise healthy people are being reported all across the United States among children and adults who received this year’s flu vaccination. The flu shot causes Guillain-Barré Syndrome, and is not very effective in preventing the flu. He also explains that the CDC does not follow the law for vaccines in requiring long-term safety testing for the influenza vaccine like they do with other vaccines, as it is impossible to test a vaccine that changes every year.
So the flu vaccine is basically an experimental vaccine that they want to give out to 300 million people every year. There are also no studies showing the safety of giving the flu vaccine to the same person every single year. However, Dr. Geier points out that the CDC is in the business of distributing flu vaccines, because they represent 300 million doses per year, whereas all the childhood vaccines together only number 20 million.
He goes on to explain that flu is “the wrong thing to vaccinate against” because you have to keep re- vaccinating against it every year, unlike childhood infectious diseases, such as smallpox, that are only vaccinated for once.

One person has died and 12 others are hospitalized after eating packaged salads linked to a listeria outbreak. The salads were sold under a variety of names and came from a processing facility in Springfield, Ohio, run by Dole. The dozen who were hospitalized come from six states - Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Indiana. The fatality was in Michigan. Reports about these infections started coming in July.
The CDC is warning people not to eat salads packaged under the name Dole, Fresh Selections, Simple Truth, Marketside, The Little Salad Bar and President's Choice. The salads are sold to restaurants as well. If you have one of these packaged salads in your fridge look for the letter "A" at the beginning of the manufacturing code. Those are the ones you want to throw away.

6 Things A Food Poisoning Expert Refuses To Eat - Pre-cut and pre-washed produce. Uncooked sprouts. Red meat cooked medium rare, especially ground meat. Raw oysters and other raw shellfish. Raw or undercooked eggs. Unpasteurized (“raw”) milk and unpasteurized packaged juices.
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