Category: News

On 13 November 2013, the 26k gross ton ferry Ostend Spirit (previously Pride of Calais) went out with a prolonged blast of the ship’s whistle as she threaded the needle between two ship hulks at Turkey’s Aliaga Ship demolishing yard. In her heyday, she was owned by P&O and sailed the English channel between England and France (Dover-Calais route) from 1987 for over two decades. The video above shows her last hurrah before she would be taken apart and recycled.

The video below is from Bangladesh, which offers one of the most jaw-dropping sights of the modern world. For as far as the eye can see, along a stretch of coastline, hundreds of mammoth supertankers lie beached on the sand. This is where the world’s ships come to die. Thousands of workers, some of them children, are paid just 47 cents a day to break up these rusting giants with their bare hands.

A police helicopter erupted into a spinning ball of flames after its blades clipped a fire truck in the centre of San Miguel, Chile.

The chopper was attending a car crash early on Sunday morning when it landed at an intersection in the city’s downtown area. Police closed off the street to allow the helicopter to land and assist at a crash caused by a drunk driver which left three police officers seriously injured. When a fire truck made its way into the secure zone it edged too close to the chopper, nicking one of its spinning blades.

All four of the choppers blades were struck off as well as the tail rotor, sending the EC-135 into a death spin. The chopper twisted and twirled around on its metal skids sending sparks off in all directions. The out-of-control chopper then collided with a police car, knocking the cab to the ground where it exploded.

The pilot was left in serious condition with multiple fractures while the other three officers were being treated in hospital, according to Soy Chile.

Using of a combination of Duplo and Lego bricks, the Aussies have erected a 32.8 foot Lego Christmas tree at the Pitt Street Mall in Sydney. A team of five dedicated builders spent 1,200 hours planning and constructing the mammoth tree which will be on display until December 26th.

As well as being absolutely huge, this display also has some really cool sub-builds like a Christmas Koala, Santa holding a surfboard (it is summer in Australia after all), basketball sized ornaments and a big pile of gifts and a reindeer that was designed by 10-year-old Lego Club member Luke Francis. If that isn’t overwhelming enough, the whole display also lights up!

Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl from Danny Cooke on Vimeo.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to visit Chernobyl whilst working for CBS News on a ’60 Minutes’ episode which aired on Nov. 23, 2014. Bob Simon is the correspondent. Michael Gavshon and David Levine, producers.

For the full story cbsnews.com/news/chernobyl-the-catastrophe-that-never-ended/

—-> ***Soundtrack ‘Promise land’ by Hannah Miller – licensed on themusicbed.com

Chernobyl is one of the most interesting and dangerous places I’ve been. The nuclear disaster, which happened in 1986 (the year after I was born), had an effect on so many people, including my family when we lived in Italy. The nuclear dust clouds swept westward towards us. The Italian police went round and threw away all the local produce and my mother rushed out to purchase as much tinned milk as possible to feed me, her infant son.

It caused so much distress hundreds of miles away, so I can’t imagine how terrifying it would have been for the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who were forced to evacuate.

During my stay, I met so many amazing people, one of whom was my guide Yevgen, also known as a ‘Stalker’. We spent the week together exploring Chernobyl and the nearby abandoned city of Pripyat. There was something serene, yet highly disturbing about this place. Time has stood still and there are memories of past happenings floating around us.

Armed with a camera and a dosimeter geiger counter I explored…

dannycooke.co.uk Follow me on twitter @dannycooke

Shot using DJI Phantom 2 (GoPro3+) and Canon 7D

Christmas Tree harvesting at Noble Mountain Christmas Tree Farm in Oregon. Pilot Dan Clark flying a Northwest Helicopters, LLC 206B3 Jetranger November of 2008. Oregon is the nation’s biggest producer and exporter of Christmas trees, selling about 7.3 million trees a year, more than twice that of No. 2 North Carolina.

The largest Christmas tree producer in the state is Holiday Tree Farms of Corvallis, shipping about 1 million trees a year. Manager Dave Silen says a shift toward more family gatherings this year could help sales. The holiday trees represent a $101 million industry in Oregon.

http://www.thenorthwestreport.com/les…

Video of a mysterious flash lighting up the sky over Russia’s Sverdlovsk region last Friday calls to mind the enormous fireballs that fell over Chelyabinsk in early 2013 and Murmansk in April. But at least one expert seems sure that this particular phenomenon may not be celestial in origin.

A meteor-watching blog quotes Marco Langbroek of the Dutch Meteor Society: “I doubt this one is a meteor.” He points out that the onlookers already seemed to be aware of a red glow in the sky before the flare-up — and that when the light does appear, it’s stationary. “To me, it looks like a fire or series of small explosions and subsequent large explosion or flash fire reflecting on a cloud deck,” he concluded.

A local news site suggests there’s an old chemical plant outside the nearby town of Rezh, the explosion of which would be consistent with this phenomenon, and one local on the forum of Astronomy.ru wrote there were also reports of the military setting off ammunition.

Russian officials were not anxious to throw any light on the dramatic eruption.

The regional office of the Emergencies Ministry refused to comment on the happening.

A two-day search by some 200 French police and members of the armed forces for a wild cat roaming through towns and across a major highway came to one conclusion Friday: It isn’t a tiger.

The wild cat caught in several fuzzy photographs in the town of Montevrain was spotted again Friday morning by truckers on a main route between Paris and eastern France.

But in a statement late Friday, the regional administration near the search site said experts have concluded that the wandering animal isn’t a tiger, but a feline of an unknown species. France’s national hunting office could not be reached for comment.

One theory is that the mystery cat could be a lynx — the wild cat once common in France before being hunted out of existence. It was reintroduced in France in the 1970s, according to the wildlife group Ferus.

But the nearest known lynx habitat, the Vosges Mountains, is 350 kilometers (215 miles) away from where the cat was first spotted Thursday.

Residents of Montevrain and two other towns were urged to stay indoors — but most people seemed to be taking the big cat hunt in stride, even as a helicopter buzzed over woods east of Paris.

“He was also seen by truck drivers on the road,” said Christian Robache, the mayor of Montevrain. A Total gas station near the sighting was briefly closed, and police officers guarded a local school Friday as children arrived for class.

But the operator of Disneyland Paris, one of Europe’s top tourist destinations, said it wasn’t taking any special precautions because the animal isn’t deemed a threat. The theme park in the region is surrounded by a large wall.

[Read more at the NY Times]

In the face of widespread Internet data collection and surveillance, we need a secure and practical means of talking to each other from our phones and computers. Many companies offer “secure messaging” products – but how can users know if these systems actually secure?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released its Secure Messaging Scorecard, evaluating dozens of messaging technologies on a range of security best practices.

You can read the full Secure Messaging Scorecard here.

“The revelations from Edward Snowden confirm that governments are spying on our digital lives, devouring all communications that aren’t protected by encryption,” said EFF Technology Projects Director Peter Eckersley. “Many new tools claim to protect you, but don’t include critical features like end-to-end encryption or secure deletion. This scorecard gives you the facts you need to choose the right technology to send your message.”

The scorecard includes more than three dozen tools, including chat clients, text messaging apps, email applications, and technologies for voice and video calls. EFF examined them on seven factors, like whether the message is encrypted both in-transit and at the provider level, and if the code is audited and open to independent review. Six of these tools scored all seven stars, including ChatSecure, CryptoCat, Signal/Redphone, Silent Phone, Silent Text, and TextSecure. Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime products stood out as the best of the mass-market options, although neither currently provides complete protection against sophisticated, targeted forms of surveillance. Many options—including Google, Facebook, and Apple’s email products, Yahoo’s web and mobile chat, Secret, and WhatsApp—lack the end-to-end encryption that is necessary to protect against disclosure by the service provider. Several major messaging platforms, like QQ, Mxit, and the desktop version of Yahoo Messenger, have no encryption at all.

“We’re focused on improving the tools that everyday users need to communicate with friends, family members, and colleagues,” said EFF Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo. “We hope the Secure Messaging Scorecard will start a race-to-the-top, spurring innovation in stronger and more usable cryptography.”

The Secure Messaging Scorecard is part of EFF’s new Campaign for Secure and Usable Cryptography, and was produced in collaboration with Julia Angwin at ProPublica and Joseph Bonneau at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy.

Read the full Secure Messaging Scorecard here.

This article first appeared on Electronic Frontier Foundation and is republished under Creative Commons license.

A disturbing report has emerged that Alabama school district paid a former FBI agent $157,000 to monitor the social-media accounts of students, resulting in 14 expulsions last year.

The program targeted 600 of Huntsville’s 24,000 students over the past year through a program called SAFe, Students Against Fear. Teachers or students could anonymously tip Chris McRae, the ex-FBI agent, about alarming things, and McRae would then scour their social-media accounts for signs linking them to drugs, weapons, gangs, or sex.

McRae was working under a $586,000 contract that the Huntsville school district paid to T&W Operations. AL.com noted that the school spying was not the only suspicious activity being conducted by T&W:

Jeannee Gannuch, co-founder of the South Huntsville Civic Association, said after the online program came to light, she noticed T&W was following her civic group on Facebook. Gannuch, who has at times been critical of city officials, said she blocked the consulting firm.

“My tax dollars are paying for a hired hand to watch a political organization? That doesn’t seem right,” said Gannuch.

T&W claims they are unaware of the allegations.

[via AL.com]

Drivers in Virginia bared witness to such a bizarre sight that as one onlooker remarked, “We must be in the Twilight Zone.” A large semi-truck convoy, comprised of more than 120 vehicles had a police escort as they made their way down Interstate 95.

Numerous onlookers took videos of the trucks, which were then posted to the Internet and sparked many conspiracy theories.

LiveLeak picked up one such video, dubbing the footage as “a very strange convoy of trucks.” The woman shooting the video could be heard saying, “On the interstate, numerous state troopers, followed by a line — everything is blocked off — followed by a line of duplicate Conway freight trains.” The woman also noted that other drivers were filming the event as well.

Officially, there was a perfectly charitable explanation for the barrage of semi-trucks flying down Interstate 95. According to the Virginia State Police, the truckers were participating in the “World’s Largest Truck Convoy,” a charity event that donates all funds to the Special Olympics.

A closer examination of event, however, aroused skepticism among many internet observers and commentators. In particular, calculations of the cost of fuel, labor, and work hours lost nearly may not be worth nearly as much as the only $20,000 that was raised. Reddit user Camblor rightly points out:

110 trucks to raise $20,000? That seems ridiculous. The value of the trucks alone would be around (110 x $130k) $14.3 million, and thats before the cost of fuel, maintenance, insurance, drivers, police escorts, the strain on traffic… There’s got to be a better way to raise the coin.

Edit: I’m not suggesting they bought the trucks for this purpose, but that equipment is worth $14.3 million in capital because it can do a certain amount of work resulting in cashflow/dividends. There’s a huge opportunity cost in tying up that equipment. Same goes for the tied-up public infrastructure, police, and other resources. Plus all the other stuff. It’s insane.

Most alternative theories center around the Special Olympics story being used as cover for the the transportation of secret military weapons, Ebola response equipment, or supplies for a secret post apocalyptic bunker. Even if the fundraising story is true, Reddit user ThatBeardedCarGuy believes that the US government was still watching the event closely:

Some food for thought. The Interstate System was designed to transport troops and military supplies across the large distances of the continent in relatively short time. Ike saw Germany’s defense network during his time in Europe during WWII and championed the cause back home.

We began this project in 1956, but only very recently has the original plan been completed. Figure with all the war rhetoric and tensions between countries, there is bound to be a test of our network at some point.

I’ll be interested to see if anything comes of it through official channels. Doubtful, but this convoy was a test of some sort. Charity event or otherwise, powerful people were watching this with an eye on how it could be implemented if all hell broke loose. It would be a waste not to.

[via Reddit]