Menu



error This forum is not active, and new posts may not be made in it.
PromoteFacebookTwitter!
Luis Miguel Goitizolo

1162
61587 Posts
61587
Invite Me as a Friend
Top 25 Poster
Person Of The Week
RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/1/2015 11:18:25 PM

13 DEAD AFTER SHOOTING AT UMPQUA COMMUNITY COLLEGE IN OREGON



A patient is wheeled into the Emergency Room at Mercy Medical Center. (Photo credit: Aaron Yost/The News Review)

A gunman opened fire at an Oregon community college Thursday, killing at least a dozen people before dying during a shootout with police, authorities said.

The shooting happened at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, about 180 miles south of Portland.

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said 13 people are dead. It was not immediately clear whether that number also included the 20-year-old gunman.

State police Lt. Bill Fugate told KATU-TV that at least 20 others were hurt.

Authorities offered no immediate word on the gunman's motive and said they were investigating.

PHOTOS: Deadly campus shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon


President Barack Obama speaks at the White House in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2015, about the shooting at the Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore. AP Photo/Susan Walsh


Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said the gunman was killed in an exchange of gunfire with officers. The sheriff did not say whether the shooter was killed by officers or took his own life.

"We locked our door, and I went out to lock up the restrooms and could hear four shots from the front of campus," UCC Foundation Executive Director Dennis O'Neill told the Roseburg News-Review.

A photographer for the newspaper said he saw people being loaded into multiple ambulances and taken to the local hospital.

The school has about 3,000 students. Its website was down Thursday, and a phone message left at the college was not immediately returned.


Neither state police nor the sheriff's office returned calls from The Associated Press seeking details.

The sheriff's office reported on Twitter that it received a call about the shooting at 10:38 a.m. The local fire district advised people via Twitter to stay away from the school.

Later in the day, students and faculty members were being bused to the county fairgrounds, the sheriff's office said.

Former UCC President Joe Olson, who retired in June after four years, said the school had no formal security staff, just one officer on a shift.

One of the biggest debates on campus last year was whether to post armed security officers on campus to respond to a shooting.

"I suspect this is going to start a discussion across the country about how community colleges prepare themselves for events like this," he said.

The White House said President Barack Obama was briefed on the situation by Homeland Security Adviser Lisa Monaco. He was to continue receiving updates throughout the day.

In a tweet, it was announced the college would be closed until Monday. Student activities for the weekend were also canceled.

The rural town of Roseburg lies west of the Cascade Mountains in an area where the timber industry has struggled. In recent years, officials have tried to promote the region as a tourist destination for vineyards and outdoor activities.

(abc7.com)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

+1
Luis Miguel Goitizolo

1162
61587 Posts
61587
Invite Me as a Friend
Top 25 Poster
Person Of The Week
RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/1/2015 11:55:33 PM

Thyroid cancer rates in Japanese children living near Fukushima catastrophe are skyrocketing


(Health Secrets) An oversight committee looking at the health of people living in the Fukushima Prefecture of Japan near the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility has found that the thyroid cancer rate in young people has jumped by an astounding 6,000% throughout the region since the disaster first occurred back in 2011.

Reports indicate that, since January of this year, 16 new cases of thyroid cancer have emerged, bringing the total number of young people diagnosed with the disease to 103. Correspondingly, as many as 127 people have been diagnosed with or are suspected of having thyroid cancer, according to Japan’s Asahi Shimbun.

The Fukushima Voice reports that, as of March 31, all 16 identified cases have been confirmed as definitive papillary thyroid cancer, with an additional nine suspected cases. The figures represent reported cases from both the first round of initial screening, which included looking at 368,000 individuals 18 years and younger, as well as a second round.

“Full-Scale Screening (the second-round screening), to be conducted every 2 years until age 20 and every 5 years after age 20, additionally targets those who were born in the first year after the accident, aiming to examine approximately 385,000 individuals in a 2-year period,” explains the Fukushima Voice.

Committee head determines that patient profiles of Fukushima thyroid cancer have a “striking similarity” to Chernobyl

In its estimation of the findings of these two screenings, the Interim Summary of the Thyroid Examination Evaluation Subcommittee determined that the sum of the new cases represents an “excess incidence” of pediatric thyroid cancer. The cases also represent “an order of magnitude” increase, stated the committee, following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

The committee was hesitant to peg Fukushima radiation as the cause, suggesting that over-diagnosis may also be a factor. But many of the committee’s members also agreed that Fukushima radiation has not been completely ruled out, as the profiles of the cases closely match those observed following the Chernobyl disaster back in 1986.

“There is a striking similarity between the [age] profiles of patients diagnosed during the period of latency after Chernobyl in Ukraine and currently in Fukushima,” states a presentation by Shinichi Suzuki, the man heading the Fukushima Thyroid Examination.

“In contrast, patients diagnosed in Ukraine after the period of latency, when radiation-induced tumors started to manifest, displayed principally a different age pattern. No such patient has been diagnosed in Fukushima thus far.”

Researchers say Japanese government blocked efforts to test for thyroid cancer in Fukushima following disaster

Part of the problem in clearly pinning down the cause of this thyroid cancer increase is that the regional government actively blocked such research from being conducted in the days and weeks following the disaster. Sakiyama Hisako, a former senior researcher at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences, told the media that he observed this firsthand when trying to conduct his own research.

Hisako says that “power was deployed to stop measurements of thyroid exposure being taken,” to quote Japan Focus.

Professor Tokonami Shinji from Hirosaki University is also quoted as saying that he “tried to measure exposure levels immediately after the explosions… but was halted by Fukushima Prefecture, which accused him of stirring up trouble.”

Prof. Shinji did, however, go on to test 65 Fukushima residents individually, one month after the disaster, and detected radioactive iodine in the thyroids of 50 of them, or 77%. This is suggestive of Fukushima fallout, as radioactive iodine is one of the many damaging isotopes released by nuclear reactors following a meltdown.

For more information:

http://ajw.asahi.com

http://enenews.com

http://fukushimavoice-eng2.blogspot.com

https://www.fmu.ac.jp[PDF]

http://www.japanfocus.org


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

+1
Luis Miguel Goitizolo

1162
61587 Posts
61587
Invite Me as a Friend
Top 25 Poster
Person Of The Week
RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/2/2015 12:24:01 AM

WND EXCLUSIVE

OBAMA PUTS U.S. ON 'FAST TRACK' TO WORLD GOVERNMENT


'Literally just one crisis away from that happening'


Published: 1 day ago




The United Nations 2030 Agenda endorsed by President Obama, Pope Francis and the U.N. General Assembly brings the world one giant step closer to true global governance.

The U.N. document approved Sunday in New York, “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” includes in its preamble the call for a “new universal agenda” for all of humanity.

But one big question looms.

How does such an ambitious plan get implemented?

The plan bypasses Congress and the legislatures of the world’s other 193 nations. Yet, the heads of state agreed to work toward implementation, largely through secret trade deals and backroom bureaucratic rule-making, experts told WND.

Very few members of Congress have likely even read the U.N. document that Obama has agreed to implement, says one expert in globalism.

“The only thing they are lacking right now is a sufficient crisis big enough to win enthusiastic public support in America and other nations in the world for full-on global governance,” says Paul McGuire, a Fox News and History Channel contributor and co-author of the new release, “Babylon Code: Solving the Bible’s Greatest End Time Mystery.”

babylon code coverThe U.N. document focuses on ending poverty and gender inequality, combating climate change and opening up borders to migrants and refugees.

“But, remember, the elite who are behind this are experts at manufactured crisis and their motto is ordo ab chao, which means ‘order out of chaos.’ This was a term coined by the Masonic leader Albert Pike,” McGuire told WND. “The new global order will be birthed by either a global financial crisis, the prospect of World War III involving Islam, Russia, Ukraine, NATO, Iran, Syria and Israel and a manufactured climate-change crisis.”

To address these crises, world leaders at the U.N. put their stamp of approval on a 15-year plan, the so-called 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development — a proposal some observers believe could be the first step toward the global superstate and cashless society predicted by biblical prophets.

“The real agenda of the globalist elite through all these ‘sustainable development’ and ‘social justice’ programs are to create a new global state,” says McGuire.

His book, co-authored with journalist Troy Anderson, takes an investigative approach to examining end-times prophecies and the current state of the world in the epic battle between good and evil.

“We read in the book of Revelation that in the last days Babylon will return as a ‘born-again’ world government, religion and economic system. What is happening now with the United Nations is Babylon rising again before our very eyes.”

Cliff Kincaid, director of the Accuracy in Media Center for Investigative Journalism, also has his eye on Pope Francis and the Vatican.

While the media paid great attention to the pope kissing babies and hugging adoring Americans, it gave little if any coverage to the real story of his visit, which was to endorse the U.N.’s march toward a new international order under the guise of “sustainable development,” Kincaid says in a recent article for AIM.

This agenda promises to radically affect the individual lives of ordinary Americans, yet they are being kept in the dark about its details.

The stated purpose of the U.N. “high panel’s” report is to “transform economies through sustainable development.”

The only American on this panel was John Podesta, former top climate-change adviser for Obama and now chairman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Podesta is also a member in the elitist Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and founder of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress.

“In addition to destroying the American system, the recommendations of this so-called high-level body, especially on the matter of ‘climate action,’ could also have a dramatic impact on the lives of people around the world, including the poor, who need access to energy and real economic development to escape poverty,” Kincaid writes.

technocracy rising 2According to Patrick Wood, author of “Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation,” the whole “sustainable development” meme is a ploy to replace capitalism and free enterprise with a global socialist system based on resource allocation and energy usage rather than on supply and demand and free-market activity.

Wood said the proposed “transformation” of the world’s current economic system “for a completely untried and untested one” is “dangerously absurd” and could make life worse for the people that the U.N. and Roman Catholic Church are supposed to help.

“Any honest economist would instantly balk at such Pollyannaish promises of utopia, and the American public should do so as well,” Wood told Kincaid. “The fact is that these wild promises of prosperity for all are merely the candy coating to deceive the world into going along with its own economic destruction.”

And the pope is fully on board with the U.N. plan to escort the world into global governance. Kincaid observes:

“In a pitch for global socialism, masked in flowery language, Francis, who insisted on his way to the U.S. that he was not a liberal, said, ‘I would like all men and women of good will in this great nation to support the efforts of the international community to protect the vulnerable in our world and to stimulate integral and inclusive models of development, so that our brothers and sisters everywhere may know the blessings of peace and prosperity which God wills for all his children.’”

He adds that while the pope says nice things about the poor, “the practical result of ditching capitalism for socialism will be more poverty, suffering, and death.”

Journalist and retired English professor Jerry B. Kane, writing about the 2030 Agenda in an article for Canada Free Press, notes that this new U.N. plan for humanity is more sweeping than the former plan, known as Agenda 21, which dealt mostly with the environment.

The preamble to the 2030 Agenda, which many see as the replacement for Agenda 21, specifically calls for an overhaul of the world’s “three dimensions of sustainable development,” which it lists as “the economic, social and environmental.”

It then gives 17 goals and 167 targets that must be met by all nations.

“Nearly every nation in the world is expected to sign on to the 2030 Agenda,” Kane writes. “But what happens to the nations that won’t sign on or go along with the plan? Or better yet, what happens to freedom of conscience, individual liberty, and free enterprise in those nations that do go along?”

‘One crisis away’

The goal is to get every nation to willingly sign onto the plan and thereby give up elements of their national sovereignty, which could be done more easily in a time of crisis, McGuire said.

“The U.N. vote is about to put America and the world on the fast track to a one-world government,” he told WND. “We are literally just one crisis away from that happening. It could happen overnight, and I don’t think most people realize this.”

In fact, the Telegraph, a major British newspaper, reported this week that the IMF was warning of just such an event, with a “mass default” in emerging markets where global corporations are exposed to weak economic conditions.

The trigger could be higher U.S. interest rates.

These corporations have “gorged themselves on cheap debt,” the IMF warned. But the rug will eventually be pulled out by the Federal Reserve, causing a cascading collapse.

Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 28, Obama argued that it is necessary for the U.S. to retreat as a world superpower so that global governance can rise up in its place.

Obama rejected arguments that “strong states must impose their will” or that “might makes right” and “order must be imposed by force.”

But what are the ideals in the U.N. charter that Obama proposes take the place of a superpower America?

What will global government look like?

For a clue on what global government will look like, McGuire says the real agenda was exposed by Lord Monckton, the former science adviser to Margaret Thatcher and now an exclusive columnist for WND.

Monckton warned on Oct. 14, 2009, that the true agenda of the U.N. climate treaty and Agenda 21 is to create an all-powerful world government and to transfer wealth from Western nations to Third World nations through the force of new U.N.-sponsored international laws.

One of the ways to do this redistribution is by allowing Third World refugees to migrate freely into the industrialized nations of the West.

“Monckton summed it all up when he said; the goal of the U.N. is to impose communist world government on the world,” McGuire said.

The world is now at a “tipping point” for this new system to be installed, he said.

“We see the world being deliberately brought to the brink of a financial crisis that is created through debt to the central banks in Europe and the Federal Reserve system in the United States,” McGuire said. “The economies of the world have been strategically impacted by trillions of dollars in debt, the slowing of economic growth due to U.N. sustainable development policies and the impossible demands of attempting to pay off these debts through higher taxes.”

These governments are obligated to pay pensions, retirement programs and other benefits to their people while their economies have been stagnating under the weight of socialist economic policies.

The sovereign debt crisis that started in Greece and Cypress will spread like a contagion through Europe and the U.S. And the growing wealth disparity is creating conditions where the people of the world, including the former American middle class, will cry out for socialist-style economic policies.

As Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF said, “a reboot of the global financial system is needed.” This may include a new world currency and a cashless society.

Islam’s role in creating new world order

To create a crisis that enables their new global order to be implemented, McGuire believes the elites have been stoking and manipulating the rise of worldwide Islam.

The Wahhabi sect, which is the most militant branch of Sunni Islam, is heavily financed by Saudi Arabia through its vast oil reserves, discovered near the Persian Gulf in 1939. The al-Saud dynasty later made a deal with the Rockefeller oil companies and in order for the dynasty to keep its power it had to agree to finance Wahhabism, McGuire said.

Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, created the rebirth of a militant Shia movement.

The growth of both sects of militant Islam are connected to U.S., European, Russian and American oil interests, McGuire said.

“Since the late 1970s when Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission, was helping train Osama bin Laden, the hands of the globalists have been all over the growth of militant Islam,” he said. “It appears Islam is being used as a destabilizing force in both Europe and the United States designed to breakdown a cohesive Judeo-Christian culture.”

Islam and liberal Christianity ‘moving closer’

McGuire said he’s received confidential reports from inside Germany regarding the flood of immigrants into Europe. Many inside Germany believe this was pre-planned with the pope’s appeal last year for Islam to move closer to Christianity.

More than 8,000 Muslims per day are entering Europe from various routes. They are creating violence and chaos, and the U.N. has said there is no end in sight with regard to the arrival of new migrants.

“Civil unrest is ready to explode, and the people are crying out for some kind of police state to manage the chaos, which appears to be the plan all along,” McGuire told WND.

McGuire believes the U.N. plan using climate change as a global crisis goes all the way back to 1992 and the U.N.’s Earth Summit on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A crisis as big as the world’s “climate” had to be manufactured and hyped by the world’s media before the U.N. could put forth an aggressive agenda calling for some kind of global government.

Using secret trade deals

“Beginning at the U.N.’s Earth Summit, the U.N. has used climate change, sustainable development and Agenda 21 as a Trojan horse to grab power. During the Sept. 25-27 summit, the U.N. presented its new 15-year plan to transform the world. What this transformation is really all about is forcing sovereign nations, including the United States, to surrender its rights under U.N. law and a U.N. global government,” McGuire said.

And that’s where the trade deals Congress allowed the Obama administration to secretly negotiate come into play.

“All the secret trade treaties that our government and other governments are signing are really all about circumventing our U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights and placing the United States and its citizens under the rule of U.N. law,” McGuire said.

“This is extremely dangerous because U.N. law, despite using terms like ‘human rights,’ offers no secure legal protection of the freedoms and rights we have guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights,” he said. “The Declaration of Independence states that we have been given, ‘certain inalienable rights by our Creator.’ This means that God, and not any human government, has given our rights and freedoms to us and, therefore, no human government has the right to take them away.”

The U.N. Convention on Human Rights claims to offer protections for people’s rights.

The U.S. Bill of Rights gives “freedom of religion,” “freedom of speech,” “freedom of the press,” etc. The U.N. gives similar rights and freedoms that can be taken away at any time and for any reason by human government.

“This is exactly the same strategy that the planners of the European Union like Jean Monnet used in destroying the rights and national sovereignty of individual European nations,” McGuire said. “Monnet and others created simple ‘trade treaties’ regarding coal and steel and would bury in these treaties subtle legal language that began the process of ending the rights of the independent European nations.”

Through a succession of such trade treaties, “the Europeans woke up one day and discovered they had lost their basic rights and freedoms and they were now legally forced to surrender their national sovereignty and accept the dictates of a European Union, but it was all done by stealth,” he continued. “This is exactly what is happening in the U.S. today with various trade treaties and the U.N. This is one of the reasons why John Boehner is going to resign because he is secretly signing away our constitutional rights along with other members of both political parties. And when the American people finally wake up, it will too late.”

When Obama said at the United Nations, “We cannot look backward,” and emphasized that global integration is an agenda that transcends the narrowly defined interests of nation states, he was revealing his belief that a sovereign nation like America must be brought down so a new global order can rise.

“President Obama is not acting alone when he said at the U.N., ‘Unless we work with other nations under the mantle of international law, we will not succeed,’” McGuire said. “What Obama and prominent leaders in both the Republican and Democratic Parties are currently in the process of doing is moving America away from the authority of U.S. constitutional law and placing us under the authority of international law through a series of secret trade treaties that no one can read.”

The late CBS anchorman, Walter Cronkite, known as “the most trusted man in America,” said in 1999, that the U.S. must give the United Nations the full power of a world government and both a police and military to enforce its international laws. Cronkite also said that America must give up its sovereignty for this U.N. world government to take over.


Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/09/obama-puts-u-s-on-fast-track-to-world-government/#SI2vhlhsYROMS7g4.99


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

+1
Luis Miguel Goitizolo

1162
61587 Posts
61587
Invite Me as a Friend
Top 25 Poster
Person Of The Week
RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/2/2015 10:34:16 AM

New Twist in Richard Glossip Case Raises Questions About Future of Lethal Injections

A typical lethal injection chamber. (Photo: Corbis)

On Wednesday, Sept. 30, Republican Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahomagranted a last-minute stay of execution for Richard Glossip, the man whose name appeared before the Supreme Court earlier this year in a case to determine the constitutionality of the controversial drug midazolam as a lethal injection ingredient used by the state.

Fallin issued her stay minutes before Glossip’s scheduled execution (he was prepared and pacing in his death cell, wearing only boxer shorts), after it became apparent that the final drug in the state’s approved three drug protocol, potassium chloride — which is injected to stop the heart and cause death — had not been procured for Glossip’s execution. Potassium acetate, which is another drug altogether, had been mysteriously substituted in its place.

The case took another twist on Thursday afternoon when Oklahoma Attorney General E. Scott Pruitt asked that Glossip’s execution — and the two other executions scheduled in Oklahoma during the month of November — be suspended indefinitely so that his office could investigate the Oklahoma Department of Corrections acquisition of a drug “contrary to protocol.”

Richard Glossip. (Photo: Oklahoma Department of Corrections)

“Because of the secrecy [surrounding the administration of the death penalty], we can only read through the lines of what we know and read,”Deborah W. Denno, the Arthur A. McGivney Professor of Law atFordham University School of Law and a leading expert on the legal issues surrounding the death penalty tells Yahoo Health. “The secrecy is going to shield a lot of information that would be very revealing about what happened.”

What we do know, however, is that this latest news in the story of Richard Glossip and his death penalty sentence is yet another variation on a theme of lethal-injection ineptitude that has been happening for years now in the United States. “There are only so many times they can say something was an isolated incident or an accident,” says Denno. “If you look at lethal injection from the very beginning, there have been endless ‘isolated incidents.’ At some point, it’s not an isolated incident but extraordinary recklessness.”

The Oklahoma protocol requires an inventory of everything used in an execution 48 hours before the execution. “Clearly that didn’t happen, since [the Oklahoma Department of Corrections] didn’t realize they had the wrong drug until very close before the scheduled execution,” Megan McCracken, the Eighth Amendment resource counsel with the U.C. Berkeley School of Law’s Death Penalty Clinic, tells Yahoo Health. “There was definitely a violation of protocol.”

After the infamously botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma in 2014 (Lockett suffered a prolonged death and was in obvious pain as he gasped for air), during which the execution team failed to follow the written protocol, the state revamped its protocol to assure the courts and the public that necessary changes had been made to fix what was broken. And yet, the slew of stays of execution show “the same level of carelessness all over again, and this raises significant concerns about this Department of Corrections’ ability to appropriately carry out executions,” says McCracken.

Potassium acetate, the ingredient that was going to be used for Glossip’s execution in place of potassium chloride, “is a salt — used therapeutically to replenish electrolytes in people who require an IV supplementation,” Kelly M. Standifer, of the University of Oklahoma College of Pharmacy explained to CNN. “Chemically, it’s in the same family as potassium chloride. They are formulated, however, in different concentrates.” And it’s never before been used for lethal injections.

“It’s just one problem after another.”

There are at least two ways executions can go wrong in a way that implicates constitutional protections. The first is if the execution is not carried out properly, or what’s known in the courts as maladministration. The second is if the drugs don’t work the way they need to work. “In Oklahoma, we have a confluence of both of these things,” says McCracken.

The execution of Kelly Gissendaner in Georgia on Tuesday — which was delayed for six months after it was discovered that the sedative to be used in the state’s protocol appeared uncharacteristically cloudy — is further evidence that when it comes to lethal injection, “it’s just one problem after another,” says Denno. “Once it looks like we’ve gotten rid of one problem, other problems pop up.”

Conspiracy theorists could surmise that this ineptitude is intentional, motivated by rebellion among Department of Corrections employees. But the truth is shockingly simple: “This process is being delegated to people and departments incapable of following the protocol,” says Denno. “They’re not rebelling against it: It’s just a matter of not having properly trained the people tasked with carrying it out.”

Which is why, Denno concludes, “it should demonstrate to the public that no matter where you stand on the death penalty, even if you’re for it, you shouldn’t want a process that is so inept.”


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

+1
Luis Miguel Goitizolo

1162
61587 Posts
61587
Invite Me as a Friend
Top 25 Poster
Person Of The Week
RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/2/2015 10:51:30 AM

Joaquin lashes Bahamas; Powerful hurricane could threaten US

Associated Press

Associated Press Videos
Joaquin Sweeps Across Bahamas, US Hit Uncertain

Watch video

ELEUTHERA, Bahamas (AP) — Hurricane Joaquin hammered islands in the central Bahamas with torrential rains that flooded homes and forecasters warned that the "extremely dangerous" Category 4 storm could grow even stronger as it roared on a path that could take it near the U.S. East Coast.

Surging waters reached the windows of some houses on Long Island in the Bahamas while on Eleuthera island people hauled sandbags and boarded up businesses as the storm neared Friday.

"It's going to be a scary storm," said 42-year-old construction worker Jason Petty as he pointed at towering clouds gathering in the distance in Eleuthera. "It looks nice now, but later on it's going to be terrible, just terrible."

There were no immediate reports of casualties, according to Capt. Stephen Russell, the director of the Bahamas National Emergency Management Agency.

Prime Minister Perry Christie said he was amending laws to mandate evacuations because some people were refusing to move into shelters.

"We do not know the impact of 130 miles an hour on those areas," he said, referring to the hurricane's winds. "We know it's a horrific kind of experience."

The storm is expected to move near or over portions of the central Bahamas overnight.

On Eleuthera, Christian minister Dawn Taylor said she believed Eleuthera would withstand the hurricane because Bahamians learned how to cope with storms after devastating Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which had winds of 155 mph (249 kph) and generated up to 50-foot (15-meter) waves.

Taylor said people on Eleuthera also are deeply religious and that their faith would carry them through.

"We depend on our God, and as long as he is with us, we will be fine and we will ride out the storm," she said.

The storm approached Eleuthera after it generated severe flooding on Acklins, where power went off overnight and phones were down. Russell said some of the roughly 565 people who live there were trapped in their homes.

Bahamas resident Shandira Forbes said she had spoken to her mother on Acklins by phone Thursday.

"She was calling for help because the sea was coming into her house," Forbes said. "People's roofs were lifting up. No one knew (about the storm), so there was no preparedness, there was no meeting, there was nothing."

Islands such as San Salvador, Cat Island and Rum Cay were expected to be hit hardest before the storm begins an expected shift toward the north, forecasters said.

Joaquin had maximum sustained winds of 130 mph (215 kph), the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said, calling it an "extremely dangerous" hurricane. As of 5 a.m. EDT Friday, the storm was located about 20 miles (35 kilometers) northeast of Clarence Long Island and was moving northwest near 3 mph (6 kph).

While Samana Cays is usually uninhabited, eight to 10 people were working there, staying in temporary housing, when the storm hit, said Parliament member Alfred Gray.

"If the buildings look like they won't withstand, there are some caves on the side of the rock that they can go into because it's not prone to flooding," he said.

Meanwhile, authorities in the nearby Turks & Caicos Islands closed all airports, schools and government offices.

The Cuban government issued a tropical storm warning for the provinces of Camaguey, Los Tunas, Holguin, and Guantanamo.

Joaquin was predicted to turn to the north and northwest toward the United States on Friday, but forecasters were trying to determine how it might affect the U.S. East Coast, which was already suffering flooding and heavy rains from separate storms.

"There's still a distinct possibility that his could make landfall somewhere in the U.S.," said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and hurricane center spokesman.

The Hurricane Center said parts of the Bahamas could see storm surge raising sea levels 5 to 10 feet (as much as 3 meters) above normal, with 10 to 15 inches (250 to 380 millimeters) of rain falling on the central Bahamas.

The Hurricane Center's long-term forecast showed the storm could near the U.S. East Coast along North Carolina and Virginia on Sunday or Monday.

"Residents of the Carolinas north should be paying attention and monitoring the storm. There's no question," said Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist with the center. "If your hurricane plans got a little dusty because of the light hurricane season, now is a good time to update them."

___

Associated Press writers Ava Turnquest in Nassau and Tony Winton in Miami contributed to this report.





Joaquin lashes Bahamas, could threaten U.S.


Forecasters warn that the "extremely dangerous" Category 4 hurricane may grow even stronger.
Could hit U.S. by Sunday


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

+1