Over 1,600 terrorists in Britain, claims MI5

MORE than 1,600 people in the UK are suspected of “actively” planning terror attacks, the head of MI5 claimed yesterday.Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said the Security Service was currently dealing with up to 30 alleged “mass casualty” terror plots against British targets in the UK and abroad.

She said MI5 and the police were tackling 200 groups or networks totalling more than 1,600 identified individuals in the UK who were “actively engaged in plotting or facilitating terrorist acts”.

Dame Eliza’s assessment came in her first public speech since the 7 July terror attacks last year, to an audience of academics.

“Today we see the use of home-made improvised explosive devices, but I suggest tomorrow’s threat will include the use of chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology,” she said.

Dame Eliza told her audience that MI5′s caseload of UK-based terror sympathisers – many of them British citizens – had increased by 80 per cent since January.

She voiced concern that many of those involved were young men and teenagers as young as 16, who were being radicalised by friends and by material on the internet. – scotsman

That’s nothing. Using my super secret super powers I am personally fighting 25,349 demons from the planet Spazmodium. They feed on the heads of Earth babies and they have 13,325 different plans to do just that! They are recruiting people right now by putting bad ideas into our air molecules. Everyone who breathes may be radicalized by them. I, people, am your only hope.

Did an angel appear over the State Fair?

The South Carolina State Fair experience can be described in many ways, but you probably won’t hear it called ‘heavenly.’ That is, unless you’re talking to one Columbia family who recently showed off their “sign from above.”On the last Friday of the fair in October, Catherine Austin and her sons were high atop the ferris wheel when they took severl digital photos. It wasn’t until they got home that they noticed something out of this world, something some might call a heavenly host.

“It looks just like an angel,” Catherine says. “It even has a ray of light that comes from the bottom toward the body of the angel and it’s centered right in the middle of the picture – and I believe in angels. It’s just an angel.”
As you can imagine, Catherine has showed the picture to a lot of people, but not everyone sees what she does. – tampabays10

Hi people. Xeno the ghostbuster here. Okay, here is an enhancement just turning down the brightness of the original photo using Photoshop.

A quick look at this photo with some tools shows that it is most likely a ruby-throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris).
First we enhance the original photo and we notice very sharply defined wings and a patch of red near the throat. You can also see the distinctive notch in the wing.

The dark head and beak and the dark feathers on the tail make it possible to see the angel shape.

To test my theory, in the adjustments to one photo of a ruby-throated hummingbird below I have simulated the lighting conditions of the “angel” photo.

I believe the results are close enough to say that the best earthly explanation is the hummingbird.

French troops almost fired at Israel jets-minister

French peacekeeping troops in Lebanon recently came within two seconds of firing missiles at Israeli fighter jets that approached as if to attack them, French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said. Speaking to the lower house of parliament on Wednesday night, she said this was the latest in a string of incidents in which Israeli warplanes had “adopted a hostile attitude” to French and German forces and said it was “not tolerable”. “A catastrophe was narrowly avoided by our troops,” Alliot-Marie said, according to a transcript of her comments. She did not say exactly when or where the events took place. Israeli F-15s descended rapidly and then rose quickly as if they were dropping bombs or firing at the French ground forces, which are part of U.N. peacekeeping force UNIFIL, she said. “In legitimate defence, our soldiers removed the covers from the missile battery and were two seconds away from firing at the planes that were threatening them,” she said. – reuters

Allen concedes, Democrats take Senate

Republican Sen. George Allen conceded the Virginia Senate seat to Democrat Jim Webb on Thursday, giving Democrats effective control of the Senate.

“The people of Virginia … have spoken. I respect their decision,” Allen told supporters in Richmond.

With the Virginia victory, Democrats and their two nominally independent allies will have 51 seats in the Senate beginning in January, just enough for the party to gain control of the 100-seat chamber for the first time since 2002. The Democrats will also control the House for the first time since 1994. Webb defeated Allen by around 7,000 votes. Allen said he had decided to forego a recount in order to spare Virginians a protracted and partisan legal battle. Political analysts noted that Virginia recounts have historically produced swings of only a few hundred votes.

One slave monkey can pick 300 coconuts a day for a few bananas

Wow, I have to think about this one morally. How do you all feel about this?

Here are three amazing photos of Thailand’s ‘working monkeys’.The monkeys ? pig-tailed macaques ? can quickly scamper up the trunk of a coconut palm, select the ripe ones and with a twist and pull, the fruit drops to the ground.

“One monkey can pick up about 300 coconuts a day,” said Somboon Cheumuang, the monkey?s owner, who lives in Chumphon province in southern Thailand. “The monkey works 10 times quicker than a man,” he adds.

In what may look like slave labour, about 1,200 trained monkeys are working as coconut pickers, and all for a couple of bananas a day. – dailymail

Geller: Psychic led Americans to Saddam

Did a clairvoyant help U.S. commandos ferret Saddam Hussein out of his hiding place in Iraq three years ago?Israeli-born celebrity psychic Uri Geller, best known for his spoon-bending antics, says the power of the paranormal led U.S. troops to the fugitive Iraqi ex-dictator.”You remember when they found Saddam Hussein in Iraq? A soldier walked over to a rock, lifted it and then found a trap-door and found him in there,” Geller told Reuters.”Well, I know that that soldier walked over to that rock because he got information from a ‘remote viewer’ from the United States.”Geller, who says he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, said his information came from a high-level source involved in U.S. paranormal programs.A U.S. military spokesman in Iraq had no immediate comment. At the time of his capture, U.S. commanders said a source close to the fugitive had given him up under interrogation.

A Brazilian psychic tried last year to claim a $25 million bounty offered for Saddam’s capture, saying he had described the hiding place in letters to the U.S. government. – reuters

One option, the one I’d lay odds on, is that remote viewing is actually worthless despite it’s use by our government, but the hype around it causes other countries to spend resources looking at dead ends, and to believe we have super psychic powers, etc. Disinformation.

Due to hammering by virus wielding blog spammers (we know who you are and you will be caught) this post is closed to comments. Email me if you have some juicy info.

Bird IQ study has surprises.

The insult of ‘bird-brain’ is generally applied to scatty people who cannot hold much in their heads. But it seems this may be doing an injustice to our feathered friends. Scientists have discovered that the common pigeon actually has an astonishingly good long-term memory.

In tests they found a single bird can memorise 1,200 pictures. …
[In the] new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), … birds were given a food reward if they correctly pecked the key that matched the image. Baboons were given a similar test but had to push a button instead. Both species were tested over the course of several years to see just how much they could remember.

To the amazement of the scientists from the Mediterranean Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences in Marseille, France, the pigeons were able to memorise up to 1,200 pictures and the correct responses. Baboons performed much better with some managing to remember 5,000 successfully.

Despite the difference in the capacity of their memories, the researchers noted some key similarities in their reaction times and rate of forgetfulness. ‘Birds and monkeys differ considerably in physiology and evolutionary history,’ he said. ‘Despite millions of years of divergent evolution they demonstrate highly similar memory profiles.’

The study is not the first to shed light on some of the remarkable abilities of pigeons. Italian researchers have found they owe their sense of direction to ‘odour maps’ they make of areas they pass over. Last year scientists also attempted to rate the intelligence of a whole range of birds. They found crows, rooks, jays and ravens topped the lead for bird IQ – however the New World quail was crowned the dunce of the avian world. – dailymail

UK radar station causing car engine and electrical troubles

If you happen to live in the small village of Trimingham (population 370) on the northeast coast of Norfolk, England and while driving past the Royal Air Force Trimingham radar station your car’s engine and lights seem to be cutting out, or your speedometer is spinning out of control like something straight out of the X-Files, you’re not hallucinating. According to the BBC, the Ministry of Defence has “admitted that a fault at a radar dome was responsible for causing electrical problems with dozens of cars” and that it “will consider claims for compensation after and inquiry found the radar was ‘out of alignment.’” Apparently this isn’t a new problem, given that the dome was previously out of alignment from November 2005 until February 2006, but now the MoD is denying that the problem has resurfaced. However, the local mechanic, Neil Crayford, told the BBC that he’s “dealt with 30 calls over a couple of months.” We wonder if for a few extra hundred quid Mr. Crayford would hack your in-dash display so that you could use that radar signal to monitor maritime activities in the North Sea. – engaget

Cell transplants ‘restore sight’

Cell transplants have successfully restored vision to mice which had lost their sight, leading to hopes people could benefit in the same way. UK scientists treated animals which had eye damage similar to that seen in many human eye diseases.

They were able to help them see again by transplanting immature retinal stem cells into their eyes.

UK experts welcomed the study, published in the magazine Nature, saying it was “stunning” research. If the results can be translated into a treatment for human eye disease, it could help the millions of people with conditions ranging from age-related macular degeneration to diabetes. – bbc

Scientists melt diamonds

Reducing a diamond to liquid is not easy. That’s why scientists used the world’s largest X-ray generator, the Z machine, to subject nanometers thick tiny squares of diamond to immense pressure — 10 million times the atmospheric pressure at sea level.????”It’s very difficult to reach those pressures,” said Marcus Knudson, a Sandia experimenter.

????The pressure was created by using?the machine’s magnetic fields to hurl small plates at the diamond at 34 kilometers per second (21 miles per second).

????Why? Researchers wanted to know?how?diamond reacts to a range of extreme pressures. They want to know if diamond could be used to encase BB-sized fuel pellets needed to?power a nuclear fusion reaction. – xin