Infinite Unknown

- CHINA IS ON FIRE: China Orders Troops And Tanks To North Korean Border, Deploys Anti Aircraft Carrier Missiles Off Cost Of Taiwan, Sends More Than 40 Fighter Jet To Senkaku Islands, And Warns Philippines To Immediately Withdraw From Disputed Islands (InvestmentWatch, April 28, 2013)

Tags: China, Global News, Government, Japan, Military, North Korea, Philippines, Politics, Senkaku Islands, Taiwan

YouTube Added: 04.12.2012

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Deadly flooding in the Philippines from a typhoon has claimed dozens of lives. A governor says at least 33 drowned when water dumped by the storm rushed down a mountain and engulfed the victims. Floodwaters also swept away a truck.

Tags: Environment, Global News, Philippines, Typhoon

- Typhoon pounds the Philippines, killing at least 7 (AP, Dec 4, 2012):

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — One of the strongest typhoons to hit the Philippines this year barreled across the country’s south on Tuesday, killing at least seven people and forcing more than 50,000 to flee from inundated villages.

Typhoon Bopha slammed into the Davao region at dawn, its ferocious winds ripping roofs from homes and its 500-kilometer- (311-mile-) wide rain band flooding low-lying farmland. The storm, packing winds of 160 kilometers (99 miles) per hour and gusts of up to 195 kph (121 mph), toppled trees, triggered landslides and sent flash floods surging across the region’s mountains and valleys. Continue reading »

Tags: Environment, Global News, Philippines, Typhoon

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Description:

Gerald Celente, the founder of the Trends Research Institute, at the Marriott Hotel in Munich, Germany, on November 3rd, 2012. Celente was holding a presentation later on on the Internationale Edelmetall- und Rohstoffmesse, the largest precious metals conference in Europe. You can find Gerald Celente at trendsresearch.com and trendsjournal.com.

Tags: Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Banking, Barack Obama, Bonds, Bush administration, China, Debt, Economy, Euro, Global News, Government, Great Depression, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Libya, Military, NATO, Nuclear, Nuclear weapons, Obama administration, Oil, Philippines, Politics, Portugal, Russia, Society, Spain, Syria, Taiwan, U.S., Vietnam, War, War Crimes, WWW III

YouTube Added: 31.08.2012

Tags: Earthquake, Environment, Global News, Philippines

An MQ-1 Predator armed with Hellfire missiles flies over southern Afghanistan. Photo: Air Force

- Hidden History: America’s Secret Drone War in Africa (Wired, Ag 13, 2012):

More secret bases. More and better unmanned warplanes. More frequent and deadly robotic attacks. Some five years after a U.S. Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle flew the type’s first mission over lawless Somalia, the shadowy American-led drone campaign in the Horn of Africa is targeting Islamic militants more ruthlessly than ever.

Thanks to media accounts, indirect official statements, fragmentary crash reports and one complaint by a U.N. monitoring group, we can finally begin to define — however vaguely — the scope and scale of the secret African drone war.

The details that follow are in part conjecture, albeit informed conjecture. They outline of just one of America’s ongoing shadow wars — and one possible model for the future U.S. way of war. Along with the counterterrorism campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen and the Philippines, the Somalia drone war demonstrates how high-tech U.S. forces can inflict major damage on America’s enemies at relatively low cost … and without most U.S. citizens having any idea it’s even happening.

Since 2007, Predator drones and the larger, more powerful Reapers — reinforced by Ravens and Scan Eagle UAVs and Fire Scout robot helicopters plus a small number of huge, high-flying Global Hawks — have hunted Somali jihadists on scores of occasions. It’s part of a broader campaign of jet bombing runs, naval gun bombardment, cruise-missile attacks, raids by Special Operations Forces and assistance to regional armies such as Uganda’s.

In all, air raids by manned and unmanned U.S. aircraft have killed at least 112 Somali militants, according to a count by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Fifty-seven innocent civilians also died in the raids, the nonprofit Bureau found. The dead jihadists have included several senior members of al-Qaeda or the affiliated al-Shabaab extremist group. In January, a drone launched three Hellfire missiles at a convoy near Mogadishu and killed Bilaal al-Barjawi, the mastermind of the 2010 bombing in Kampala, Uganda, that claimed the lives of 74 soccer fans.

In an escalating secret war, drones are doing an ever-greater proportion of the American fighting.

The Drones Are Coming

It wasn’t until relatively recently that U.S. drones were permanently stationed in East Africa. The military and CIA have operated armed versions of General Atomics’ one-ton Predator since 2001, but early on the remote-controlled warplanes were in high demand and short supply. Afghanistan and later Iraq monopolized the drones.

That was a big problem for the small U.S. force in East Africa struggling to keep tabs on increasingly radical, and dangerous, Somali militants. “The largest gap is knowledge,” Navy Rear Adm. Tony Kurta, former commander of U.S. troops in Djibouti, told Danger Room in 2009. Continue reading »

Tags: Africa, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Barack Obama, CIA, Drones, Global News, Government, Military, New World Order, Obama administration, Pakistan, Philippines, Politics, Society, Somalia, Surveillance, Technology, Terrorism, Terrorists, U.S., War, Yemen

- US Begins Military Exercises With Philippines (China Daily, April 17, 2012):

Nearly 7,000 American and Filipino soldiers began a 12-day military exercise in Manila on Monday amid wide suspicion of the annual drill’s aim at containing China and growing concerns over the South China Sea.

The joint exercise, named “Balikatan” or “shoulder to shoulder”, started with an opening ceremony attended by Philippine Armed Forces Chief General Jessie Dellosa and US Ambassador to the Philippines Harry Tomas at the military’s general headquarters in Camp Aguinaldo. It will continue through April 27.

Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, China, Global News, Government, Military, Obama administration, Philippines, Politics, U.S.

- Marine contamination reached Philippines last April (Fukushima Diary April 3, 2012):

Kobayashi fellow-researcher from Japan Atomic Energy Agency analyzed that 18,000 trillion Bq of Iodine 131 and cesium 134 + 137 directly leaked from Fukushima to Pacific ocean.

However, because it is the estimation after 3/26, it would be much more than that if it includes what leaked from 3/11 to 3/25.

Also, it will be a several times much as 18,000 trillion Bq to count the radiation to fall from air down to the sea.

From their simulation, marine contamination already reached Philippines by 4/10/2011, will reach Hawaii by March of 2014, where is 5300 km away from Fukushima. Continue reading »

Tags: Environment, Fukushima, Global News, Government, Health, Japan, Nuclear, Nuclear reactors, Philippines, Politics, Radiation

- No One Knows Truth About $300 Billion Bonds From Alleged ’34 Plane Crash (Bloomberg, Jan. 18, 2012):

Chris Estrella, a Filipino social worker, says he led a troop of five porters out of a Mindanao jungle in January 2000 with a weather-beaten iron and leather box crammed with $25 billion of U.S. government bearer bonds.

“The elders of the Umayamnon tribe told me an American plane crashed in their river in the 1930s,” Estrella, 47, says by mobile phone from a footpath between the tribal village and Davao, the largest city on the Philippine island. “The river dried up in the 1990s, and the natives went into the plane and found 12 boxes that contained $300 billion in bonds.”

Each box, emblazoned with the Great Seal of the United States and the words “Federal Reserved Bond,” held five gold coins struck with a portrait of George Washington on one side, Estrella says. They rested atop stacks of certificates purporting to have been issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in 1934 and redeemable in gold bullion. The notes bore the signature of then Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.

Such fixed-income instruments, also known as coupon bonds, belong to whoever holds them, rather than to a registered owner. Vouchers representing interest payments were attached to the 30- year bonds that were denominated in amounts of as much as $100 million. Estrella says he later brought three other similarly filled chests out of the jungle. Continue reading »

Tags: Bonds, Debt, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Global News, Government, Philippines, Politics, U.S.

Philippines storm victims look for missing relatives among houses swept away by rampaging flood waters in Cagayan de Oro, southern Mindanao. Photograph: Bobby Lagsa/EPA

- Philippines tropical storm kills hundreds (Guardian, Dec. 17, 2011):

The death toll from the devastating flash floods that swept across the southern Philippines in the wake of a tropical storm has risen to more than 400.

The Philippine National Red Cross (PNRC) said 436 people are now confirmed dead based on a body count in funeral parlours.

The storm sent walls of water cascading through coastal cities in the country’s Mindanao group of islands, with 215 killed in Cagayan de Oro and 144 in nearby Iligan and the rest in other southern and central provinces, said the aid agency’s secretary general Gwen Pang.

She said the hardest-hit areas were in the cities of Iligan and Cagayan de Oro, with many houses being swept into the sea. Most of the dead were swept away while they slept when floodwaters tore through their homes following 12 hours of torrential rain.

Earlier Colonel Leopoldo Galon, an army spokesman, said emergency workers had recovered 97 bodies, most of them children, in Cagayan de Oro.“I can’t explain how these things happened, entire villages were swept to the sea by flash floods,” Galon told Reuters. He said the death toll was expected to rise.

“I have not seen anything like this before. This could be worse than Ondoy,” he said, referring to a 2009 storm that killed hundreds of people in the capital, Manila.

Continue reading »

Tags: flash flood, Philippines, Storm