The destructive eruption of the Kilauea volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island has captured the attention of people around the world. The volcano’s flowing lava has forced at least 1,700 residents to flee and has destroyed at least 35 structures, including 26 homes.

The Hawaii Civil Defense reported a total of 12 fissures have been formed and has pleaded with tourists to avoid the Leilani Estates. Kilauea’s eruption on Thursday prompted frequent earthquakes, including a 6.9 magnitude quake on Friday.

Before erupting last week, Kilauea volcano had been spewing basaltic lava nearly continuously for 35 years, according to Popular Science.

Several other active volcanoes are worth keeping an eye on for the next big eruption. Newsweekhas rounded up five volcanoes to keep watch over.

Kirishima, Japan

Kirishima volcano, one of the most active in Japan, is actually a group of 18 young, small stratovolcanoes north of Kagoshima Bay. A 2011 eruption at one of the volcanic cones, Shinmoedake, was the largest at Kirishima in more than half a century, according to Popular Science.

The super active Shinmoedake last erupted on March 1 and continued to erupt for several days.The Japan Times reported several dozen flights were canceled after it shot smoke and ash into the air.

Villarrica, Chile

The Villarrica volcano, which is also known by its Mapuche name Racapillan or “Pillan’s house,” is one of a few volcanoes around the world that has an active lava lake. In March 2017, Villarrica volcano gave a group of tourists quite the scare when it began to spew lava and fire into the air, according to The Daily Mail. The minor eruption did not harm anyone in the group.

Popular Science has reported that an increase in seismic and lava lake activity has been recorded since the middle of November 2017.

Bárðarbunga and Öræfajökull, Iceland

Iceland gets two volcano nominations on this list, the Bárðarbunga and Öræfajökull volcanoes, both of which are listed as “in normal, non-eruptive states.”

The first is for the country’s biggest volcano, Bárðarbunga. The volcano last erupted in 2015 and caused relatively minor disruptions. In November 2017, The Independent reported that locals had raised concerns due to increased seismic activity. However, Pete Rowley of the University of Portsmouth told the newspaper that the volcano is unlikely to do “much damage any time soon.”

The second, Öræfajökull volcano, is responsible for the country’s largest-ever explosive eruption in 1362. It last erupted in 1727 and 1728 and caused massive, deadly flooding after meltwater from subglacial lakes on the mountain were released, Popular Science reported. The volcano has experienced small seismic tremors since August 2017 and a depression on the surface of the ice inside the main crater appeared in November 2017.

Merapi, Indonesia

One of Indonesia’s most dangerous volcanoes, Merapi also happens to be the record holder for the deadliest eruption in the 21st century. Merapi volcano, which last erupted in 2010 and killed nearly 400 people, has frequent eruptions and is believed to be overdue for another one. Its current status is listed as “normal” by Indonesia’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources.


(newsweek)

TIBERIAS, Israel — Confrontation between Israel and Iranian forces in Syria sharply escalated early Thursday morning as Israel said Iran launched a barrage of 20 missiles toward its positions in the Golan Heights.

Heavy military jet activity, explosions and air-defense fire could be heard throughout the night in the area. An Israeli military spokesman said the rockets were fired by Iran’s Quds Force, a special forces unit affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, marking the first time Iranian forces have ever fired directly on Israeli troops.

The Israeli military said several of the rockets had been intercepted by Israel’s missile defense system, and sparks could be seen as they broke up in the sky.

No one was injured on the Israeli side, the military said.

The Syrian state news agency, however, reported that it was Israel that had fired on targets near the town of Quneitra, located just east of the Golan Heights. Syrian air defenses had responded, it said. It later reported a “new wave” of attacks.

The Israeli miliary said it “views this event with great severity and remains prepared for a wide variety of scenarios.”

Air-raid sirens sounded in the Golan Heights shortly after midnight. In nearby Tiberias, on the edge of the Sea of Galilee, explosions could be heard above the music of bars entertaining busloads of tourists. The explosions were followed by sporadic fire into the early morning hours.

With Syria’s civil war raging just across the border, Israeli residents of the Golan Heights have become used to the air-raid sirens and errant fire. But recent days have been different, and war jitters have spread across Israel.

On Wednesday, it had seemed like business as usual on the Golan, a plateau that rises dramatically behind the Sea of Galilee, captured from Syria by Israel in the 1967 war. Children went to school and wineries welcomed groups of tourists.

But Israel trucked in tanks and additional air defense batteries, and the military chief of staff touched down in a helicopter to tour the area to assess the army’s readiness.

On Tuesday, an airstrike attributed to Israel reportedly killed eight Iranian soldiers after Israel said it had detected unusual Iranian troop movements across the border and had intelligence about a possible attack from Syrian soil.

Iran had threatened to retaliate against Israel after an airstrike in April that killed seven Iranian soldiers at a base in Syria.

President Trump’s decision on Tuesday to pull the United States out of the nuclear deal with Iran has given Tehran less reason to exercise caution in confronting Israel, analysts said.

“U.S. withdrawal has accelerated the escalation between Israel and Iran,” said Ofer Zalzberg, and analyst at International Crisis Group. “Iran faces less restraint in terms of the timing for a retaliation,” he said, adding that Iran probably had been waiting for the U.S. decision before formulating its next move.

While Trump was in Washington announcing the withdrawal, Golan residents were being told Tuesday to open up their bomb shelters — the first time the army has instructed them to do so during seven years of civil war in nearby Syria.

At Kibbutz Ein Zivan, a few miles from the Syrian border, David Spelman had pulled up a text on his phone sent from the regional council just minutes after Trump finished speaking. It instructed residents to be “watchful and prepared.”

A populace with a pioneering spirit, Golan residents seemed accustomed to being on the fringe, close to Israel’s enemies. The Golan Heights was officially annexed by Israel in 1981, but that action has not been internationally recognized.

“You have different level of worries, but people are pretty seasoned here,” said Spelman, a former regional council member who has lived on the kibbutz since it was established in 1968.

“There are certain points of time that you have to face things head on, and Netanyahu is doing it,” he said of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“It’s a really tense time,” said one regional council official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss preparations. “We are telling the citizens to still have regular life; children are going to school. But our job and the army’s job and people involved in security, it’s 24 hours. It’s something a little more this time.”

At a winery on Ein Zivan, American tourists said Wednesday they were unaware that the U.S. government had told its employees to stay away from the Golan until the situation stabilizes.

“Seems like much ado about nothing,” one said after a tasting.

Amid warnings of a potential attack, some 62 percent of Israelis think a war is imminent, according to a poll commissioned Wednesday by Israel’s Hadashot news channel.

“Iran will retaliate through proxies, sooner or later, against Israeli military sites in the north,” Gary Samore, a former White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, said at a security conference in Herzliya, Israel.

But he said that no side is interested in a full-scale conflict, and there is debate in Iran over how to proceed. He said Iranian President Hassan Rouhani wants to avoid confrontation because he is trying to preserve the nuclear deal with world powers. But Iranian military commanders want to retaliate for the death of Iranian soldiers.

Rouhani said his government remains committed to a nuclear deal with Europe, Russia and China, despite the U.S. decision to withdraw, but is also ready to ramp up uranium enrichment if the agreement no longer produces benefits.

Netanyahu had been a leading advocate of a U.S. withdrawal, but his military chiefs had been more cautious. He met with Russian President Vladimir Putin Wednesday in Moscow. Russia, which is backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces alongside Iran, is seen as key in preventing ­Iranian-Israeli tensions from escalating.

Israel, determined not to let Iran expand its military presence in Syria, has struck over the border at least 100 times during the war, extending its targets from suspected arms convoys to Iranian-linked military bases.

“Iran is not fully inside. It has not yet succeeded in building what it wants to build there, and now is the time for Israel to push back,” said Chagai Tzuriel, director general of Israel’s Intelligence Ministry.

Ruth Eglash in Herzliya, Israel, contributed to this report.

The move reportedly comes in response to the government’s Black Economy Standing Taskforce. In addition to the cash purchase ban, the government has allocated a $319 million package to the Tax Office to develop new strategies to target the black economy.

Treasurer Scott Morrison said the Black Economy Standing Taskforce will include a rigorous identification system and “mobile strike teams,” in an effort to detect people making suspicious cash transactions, as well as a black economy hotline for citizens to report anyone suspected of engaging in illegal transactions.

“Cash provides an easy, anonymous and largely untraceable mechanism for conducting black economy activity,” the response said. “Cash payments make it easier to under-report income and avoid tax obligations. This allows businesses transacting in cash to undercut competitors and gain a competitive advantage.”

It said the task force had identified examples of “large undocumented cash payments being made for houses, cars, yachts, agricultural crops and commodities”, which contribute to the $50 billion black economy and “hurt honest businesses.”

Revenue Minister Kelly O’Dwyer said the ban on cash purchases of more than $10,000 would begin on July 1 of next year.

“This cash payment limit will capture high-value transactions and help stamp out opportunities for criminals to launder the proceeds of crime into goods and services, or for businesses to hide transactions to reduce their tax liabilities,” she said.

This of course is not a phenomenon unique to Australia, as there is an ongoing international “war on cash.” In the United States, Larry Summers, a former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard president, pushed and effort during the Obama administration to abolish $50 and $100 bills. There has also been talk within the EU of doing away with the €500 note. India has already made such moves.

While the publicly stated reason for these policies is to fight criminals, terrorists, money launderers, drug dealer, etc., by making it more difficult for them to move cash, the actual reason for the international “war on cash” is to give government more control and power.

A report in The Atlantic explains that while some believe that a cashless system would be “simple and elegant,” there are ominous implications about further centralization of power that must be considered:

Federal, state, and local law enforcement, as well as tax authorities, want to bring as much of the economy under their direct supervision as possible. … Forget folks who like cash. Never mind worries about forcing us all to run all spending through a corrupt corporate-banking system. Never mind the resilience of having a medium of exchange in the non-digital world that works when the power grid is down, when one’s smart phone is dropped in water, when one’s identity is stolen by hackers, or one’s account frozen by Visa or Bank of America because a purchase on vacation was deemed suspicious.

Friedersdorf goes on to clarify how the elimination of cash could dramatically erode financial privacy; pointing to Supreme Court case U.S. v. Miller:

There is no legitimate “expectation of privacy” in the contents of the original checks and deposit slips, since the checks are not confidential communications, but negotiable instruments to be used in commercial transactions, and all the documents obtained contain only information voluntarily conveyed to the banks and exposed to their employees in the ordinary course of business.

In a report for Forbes magazie, founder Steve Forbes elaborates on this line of thinking:

The real reason for this war on cash–start with the big bills and then work your way down–is an ugly power grab by Big Government. People will have less privacy: Electronic commerce makes it easier for Big Brother to see what we’re doing, thereby making it simpler to bar activities it doesn’t like, such as purchasing salt, sugar, big bottles of soda and Big Macs.

The movement against cash is clearly about centralized control of the economy, as international bureaucrats believe they can control the global economy better than the free market.

Forbes goes on to explain:

The move to destroy cash feeds into the economic commissars’ fantasy that they can better control the economy. Policymakers in Washington, Tokyo and the EU think the reason that their economies are stagnant is that ornery people aren’t spending and investing the way they should. How to make these benighted, recalcitrant beings do what they’re supposed to do? The latest nostrum from our overlords is negative interest rates. If people have to pay fees to store their money, as they do to put their stuff in storage facilities, then, by golly, they might be more inclined to spend it. To inhibit cash hoarding—when Japan announced it was imposing negative interest rates, the sale of safes soared—the authorities will want to do away with large notes.

Of course, one of the primary purposes of the Australian government’s movement against black markets and large cash purchases comes down to lost revenue for the state. In fact, the government reported that the package against black markets could potentially net the state billions of dollars more in revenue.

So, while governments like to use fear mongering about terrorism and drugs as a means of eliciting support for policies restricting the use of cash, the real motive behind these laws is clearly to give government more power. The ability to track every transaction provides an invaluable asset to a global spying apparatus (Five Eyes) that aims to sweep up all available information with no regard for the existence of individual privacy.

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(thefreethoughtproject.com)

Hawaii's Kilauea volcano could soon experience "explosive eruptions" that will bring acid rain, ash and rock projectiles, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has warned.

After hundreds of people were evacuated last week following an eruption and an earthquake, local officials announced late on Wednesday that another fissure had opened up in the volcano.

Commenting on the so-called ballistic projectiles, Tina Neal, the scientist in charge of the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, told Reuters: “This is the first of perhaps more events like that to come.”

Related: Hawaii hit by strongest earthquake in 43 years, as lava consumes homes

The USGS has estimated that by mid-May the volcano could begin shooting rocks weighing several tons for over half a mile.

"Steam-driven explosions at volcanoes typically provide very little warning," the USGS advisory explained.

“Once the lava level reaches the groundwater elevation, onset of continuous ashy plumes or a sequence of violent steam-driven explosions may be the first sign that activity of concern has commenced.”

“At this time, we cannot say with certainty that explosive activity will occur, how large the explosions could be, or how long such explosive activity could continue,” the report added.

Bad weather could also bring acid rain, according to the Weather Channel. Sulfur dioxide gas and other volcanic pollutants can form as volcanic smog when they settle with moisture and dust. The droplets in the so-called “vog” become sulphuric acid.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency the rain does not pose a serious threat to humans, but the vog buildup before acid rainfall can cause respiratory issues.

"Walking in acid rain, or even swimming in a lake affected by acid rain, is no more dangerous to humans than walking in normal rain or swimming in non-acidic lakes," the EPA says. "However, when the pollutants that cause acid rain are in the air, they can be harmful to humans."


(newsweek)