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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/26/2016 10:44:17 AM

Threatened in Mosul, Islamic State uses alternative tactics


BAGHDAD (AP) — Dozens of Islamic State fighters struck at dawn, storming government and security compounds in and around the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk last week, in a coordinated assault more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the front lines of the Mosul offensive.

Over the last two years, the extremists have adopted innovative tactics and launched diversionary attacks along the amoeba-like frontiers of their self-styled caliphate, and many now fear they have more surprises in store as Iraqi forces close in on Mosul, the militants' last urban bastion in the country.

The Kirkuk assault was carried out by more than 50 militants who may have been part of so-called sleeper cells. They struck targets in and around the city, pinning down Kurdish security forces for two days and killing at least 80 people. A similar attack was launched on the western town of Rutba, hundreds of miles from Mosul, over the weekend.

Here is a look at some of the other tactics the group may employ.

ATTACKS ON CIVILIANS

As it has suffered a string of battlefield setbacks over the past year, IS has increasingly returned to its roots as a brutal insurgent group, carrying out suicide bombings against civilians, mainly in and around Baghdad.

The group has sought to reassure its supporters that its long twilight struggle will continue, regardless of whether it loses territory. Vastly outnumbered in Mosul, it may respond with attacks on so-called "soft targets" in Iraq or further afield, perhaps seeking to replicate the devastation of the 2015 Paris attacks.

But Iraq is at the greatest risk.

"What happened in Kirkuk might be an introduction to a series of operations, and we cannot rule out the targeting of Baghdad," said Ahmed al-Sharifi, a Baghdad-based military analyst. "There are sleeper cells all over Iraq, particularly in Baghdad."

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

The choice of Kirkuk likely reflected a strategic calculation on the part of IS to sow tensions within the unlikely alliance arrayed against it. The city has long been at the center of a territorial dispute between the central government and the autonomous Kurdish region, where the Mosul operation has seen federal forces deployed for the first time in 25 years.

The Baghdad government and the Kurds are united against IS, but the Kurds have little interest in Mosul, a potentially ungovernable city with a Sunni Arab majority. The Kurds have long prized Kirkuk, however, and could divert their forces, known as the peshmerga, from Mosul to other fronts in order to defend territory they value more.

CHEMICALS AND DRONES

Closer to the front lines, IS may deploy new and unconventional weapons. IS used a homemade drone carrying C-4 explosives to attack French and Kurdish forces in northern Iraq earlier this month, killing two Kurds.

IS is believed to have used crude chemical weapons in both Syria and Iraq, and Iraqi forces have said they are going into battle with protective gear. Last month, an IS rocket initially believed to contain sulfur-mustard , a chemical agent that causes skin blistering, struck a military base used by hundreds of U.S. troops near Mosul. However, tests carried out by the U.S. military later came back negative, and U.S. Navy Capt. Jeff Davis said follow-up tests were done and the ultimate conclusion was that it was not sulfur mustard.

No one was wounded in the attack, but Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the time said the military had assessed it to be a chemical agent.

SUICIDE ARTILLERY

Suicide car bombs have featured in Middle East conflicts for decades, but IS might be the first insurgent group to deploy them against conventional forces on the battlefield as a kind of "smart" artillery. The group has already sent more than a dozen armored vehicles loaded with explosives careening toward front-line troops since the Mosul operation began.

Iraqi forces, with the aid of U.S.-led coalition aircraft, have gotten better at blowing them up before they reach their targets, but the weapons still pose a huge risk.

SCORCHED EARTH TACTICS

IS deployed another kind of chemical weapon last week when it torched a sulfur plant south of Kirkuk, sending a cloud of toxic smoke across the Ninevah plain that caused breathing difficulties and nosebleeds up to 30 kilometers (18 miles) away. The fumes mixed with the smoke from oil wells in the region that IS has set alight in recent weeks to try to create a smoke screen.

Many fear that as Iraqi forces converge on Mosul, the extremists could destroy factories, oil installations and other critical infrastructure in a scorched earth campaign. They may also seek to use civilians as human shields. Mosul is still home to more than one million people.

"UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS"

Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously warned of "unknown unknowns ," things we don't know that we don't know, which somehow captures the challenge posed by evolving militant groups.

The IS capture of Mosul in 2014 — and the fleeing of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police who were supposed to defend the city in the face of their advance — came as a shock to many people who had never imagined an extremist group could seize a major city. That they have persevered since then, holding onto large swaths of territory despite more than two years of U.S.-led airstrikes and a vast array of forces battling them, also testifies to their dark ingenuity.

"Every time we think we've countered terrorist tactics something new always happens," said David M. Witty, a retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel and former adviser to Iraqi special operations forces. "There's no end to it."

___

Follow Joseph Krauss on Twitter at www.twitter.com/josephkrauss . His work can be found at www.bigstory.ap.org/journalist/joseph-krauss .


(Yahoo News)


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

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/26/2016 10:51:29 AM
Grist Logo Grist Logo

Stuff that matters


A RISING TIDE SINKS ALL HOMES

Miami’s sea-level troubles aren’t just hitting the rich.

Miami Beach gets all the attention for its increased chronic flooding due to rising sea levels. But Miami’s poorer, inland neighborhoods on the other side of Biscayne Bay are also experiencing flooding from high tides.

CityLab reports on Shorecrest, an economically diverse neighborhood in northeast Miami that flooded during last week’s King Tide.

That’s just a sign of more frequent things to come. The Union of Concerned Scientists projects that by 2045, these sunny-day flooding events will increase from six to 380 times per year.

Miami has many neighborhoods across the bay from Miami Beach that are just as flood-prone but, being less wealthy, have fewer resources to deal with the impacts. Since all of Miami-Dade County lies barely above sea level, and sits atop porous limestone, even poorer neighborhoods farther inland are vulnerable.

Shorecrest residents complained to CityLab that they get less adaptation help from local government than richer neighborhoods. (Miami Beach is a separate, richer city from the city of Miami.) On Miami’s west side, predominantly low-income, Latino neighborhoods face flooding that could pollute their freshwater supply.

Florida and Miami need to get serious not just about climate adaptation, but climate justice.


(Grist)

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

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/26/2016 1:30:30 PM

Terrorists have a cheap new weapon that's surprisingly simple to deploy



The U.S. has been using a drone missile campaign to fight terrorists. Now, ISIS has turned the tables and scored success by using booby-trapped drones as its own weapons.

The terror group's ability to innovate and use small aircraft for nefarious purposes underscores how the off-the-shelf drone technology could supply extremists with a potent platform on our own soil to deliver explosives.

Moreover, there is evidence that international terrorists have looked at other ways to weaponize drones and "have been attracted to the high-lethality potential associated with the use of chemical and biological weapons," according to a report released Thursday by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point

"We have to be poised and ready on the U.S. side to innovate whenever a new threat appears, and this is definitely a new threat," said Andrew Hunter, director of the defense-industrial initiatives group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a defense think tank.

Islamic State has increasingly been using drones for surveillance and for attempted attacks on the battlefield, particularly against Iraqi forces, according to experts. Earlier this month, a small drone killed two Kurdish soldiers fighting the terror group when an explosive-laden craft unexpectedly detonated after being downed.

"It's an ongoing game of cat and mouse between the offense and defense like you see in a lot of military areas," said Hunter. "People have seen this coming. It's sort of a natural extension of the whole IED [or improvised explosive device] threat."

In July, the U.S. Army issued a new handbook to raise troop awareness of the threat of multiple swarming drones.

"They can be preprogrammed or remotely piloted as an expendable asset at relatively low cost," it stated. "The swarm itself can be used to disrupt our own reconnaissance efforts or overwhelm an entry control point."

The military is taking the threat seriously and expects the use of hostile drones to continue.

"Coalition forces understand that ISIL is a determined, adaptive and unscrupulous adversary," said a Department of Defense spokesman in a statement. "There is a wide array of technology angles we are looking into — from blocking the electromagnetic spectrum and disrupting control of the device, to physically capturing or disabling the device."

Additionally, the DoD spokesman said they are taking "appropriate precautions to protect Coalition forces and our partners on the ground from the full spectrum of threats in the operating environment so that they can carry out their mission of training, advising and assisting indigenous forces in Iraq and Syria as they work to deliver ISIL a lasting defeat."

Closer to home, the threat of a domestic terrorist using an inexpensive hobby drone in an urban area remains real. It's not just for the use of deadly payloads but the Combating Terrorism Center report also discusses how drones could be used "as a diversionary device to channel a crowd to another location where attackers could be lying in wait."

"The Department of Homeland Security has ongoing research and development efforts focused on the detection, tracking and interdiction of small Unmanned Aerial Systems," Patrick Carrick, the director of the federal government's Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency within the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement.

Experts suggest that the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) pose a nuisance threat, too. Rogue drones have been detected around stadiums, nuclear plants, prisons and even interfered with fire emergencies. There also have been drone intrusions in sensitive government locations in the nation's capital, including on the White House lawn.

We have ways to deal with the UAV threat, and major U.S. defense companies already known for big-ticket defense systems are active participants in selling the newest anti-drone technology.

"There is a need to roll things out here in the U.S. while we're also protecting our soldiers internationally," said Doug Booth, Lockheed Martin's director of business development for cyber and electronic warfare.

Lockheed Martin (LMT) has two anti-drone systems. One, a Star Wars-like laser weapon technology has not been field tested yet. Another is what's known as Icarus, a non-kinetic system that has been fielded and designed to detect, recognize and intercept drones.

According to Booth, Lockheed has "a classified customer" for the Icarus system and has conducted several other field exercises for additional customers who are "getting ready to obtain the system."

Meanwhile, Boeing (BA) shot down its first UAV during a 2007 test aboard a combat vehicle. The company has since made its new drone-killing technology — known as Compact Laser Weapons System — more portable and has demonstrated how it can track and disable UAVs.

"We've tried to reduce the size, weight and the footprint of these laser weapons to try to get them down into a size that is more applicable to a modern battlefield," said Rich Choppa, Boeing's director of global sales and marketing for strategic missiles and defense systems.

In April, Boeing mounted the anti-drone device on a Stryker armored vehicle made by General Dynamics (GD) and shot down over 20 UAVs. Choppa said the test included other targets, and pointed out that it was done at the request of the U.S. Army.

"We're on the cusp of the first purchase by the military of these types of systems," said Choppa. "I believe we'll see them on the battlefield."

Elsewhere, Raytheon (RTN) demonstrated a laser weapon system in 2010 that destroyed four drones; it has shown missiles can do the job, too. In addition, there's a Phalanx rapid-fire weapon system capable of countering UAVs. The defense contractor declined comment for this story.

There also are several international companies at the forefront of new anti-drone tech. SkyWall, from U.K.-based OpenWorks Engineering, uses a shoulder-mounted weapon that fires a projectile with a net to capture drones. Then there's a "kamikaze" solution known as the Hero-30 from UVision, an Israeli company that uses a suicide drone to find UAV targets and rams into them.

Yet another anti-drone system is the Battelle DroneDefender, which uses a radio-jamming "rifle" that severs the link between the drone and controller.

DroneDefender could be useful to local and state public safety agencies but the defense contractor said current U.S. law makes electronic jamming illegal to those groups, and only certain federal departments can purchase or use the system.

"We have a lot of interest from others, but currently we're not allowed to sell to those folks," said Dan Stamm, one of the inventors of the DroneDefender and manager of counter UAS programs for Battelle. About 100 of the jammer units have been sold to the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security, according to the Ohio-based contractor.

A newcomer in the anti-drone market is SkySafe, which is developing its own disruptive technology for taking down drones. In April, the startup raised $3 million in funding from an investor group led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. SkySafe's website says the California-based company is currently seeking testing partners.


(Yahoo News)





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

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/26/2016 2:13:43 PM

The Federal Observer

Bankers, Doctors, and Dozens of Scientists Have Been Dying Mysteriously

Oh my!

Crime scene illustration, vector

Crime scene illustration, vector

You may remember a while back there was a spate of news articles about high-level bankers and bank employees committing suicide. Conspiracy theories were coming left and right and then as suddenly as the reports started they stopped – just like that. Here is a list of more than 50 of these bankers, in date order, with a brief overview on each of them.

You probably also remember that last year, a dozen holistic doctors either died or went missing over a course of only 90 days. How oddly coincidental.

But the deaths of these bankers and doctors are just the tip of the iceberg.

Did you hear about all of the dead scientists? Probably not.

What if I told you that dozens and dozens and dozens of scientists have been killed died in mysterious circumstances and few reports have filtered out via the mainstream media?

What if I told you that they were involved in researching or working with bio-level 4 pathogens, nuclear research and the like? And that many had government links…by grants issued, research on behalf of or directly by working in government facilities.

The current spate of deaths began not long after 9/11, on November 12, 2001, to be precise. On Nov. 12, Benito Que, 52, was found comatose in the street near the laboratory where he worked at the University of Miami Medical School. He died on Dec. 6.

On November 16, 2001, professor don Wiley apparently killed himself – yet there was, and never has been any evidence of that.

On November 15th, Harvard Professor Don Wiley left a gathering of friends and colleagues some time after 10:30 PM. The next morning, Memphis police found his rental car stopped on a bridge, with a full tank of gas and keys still in the ignition. There was no financial or family trouble. Indeed Wiley was supposed to meet his family at the Memphis airport to continue on to an Icelandic vacation. Neither was there any history of depression or mental illness.

In the report printed in the New York Times on November 27th, the FBI’s Memphis office distanced itself from the case saying that the available facts did not add up to a suspicion of foul play. I guess at the FBI it’s a perfectly everyday occurrence for a Harvard Professor to stop his rental car on a bridge in the middle of the night before he is supposed to leave for Iceland and just walk away into the Tennessee dark.

Move along citizen, nothing to see.

The professor’s colleagues expressed doubts about the official “suicide” explanation for his disappearance.

His body was found on Dec. 20.

Next came Vladimir Pasechnik who died on November 23, 2001. No cause of death was ever given. A Russian he defected to Britain in 1989 aged 64.

He described a network of secret laboratories, disguised as a commercial organisation called Biopreparat, which employed several thousand scientists and technicians to develop potential biological weapons that could spread diseases like anthrax, ebola, Marburg virus, plague, Q fever, and smallpox. (source)

On December 10, 2001, Robert Schwartz, 57, was found murdered in his rural home in Loudoun County, Va. His daughter was ultimately convicted of his murder.

On December 11, 2001, Set Van Nguyen, 44, was found dead in the airlock entrance to a walk-in refrigerator in the laboratory where he worked in Victoria State, Australia. According to reports, he was a “conscientious, diligent and careful employee.”

On February 8, 2002, Vladimir Korshunov, 56, was found dead on a Moscow street. outside his home. He died from blunt force trauma to his head and there is no record of his killer being caught – or even being sought!

On February 11, 2002, Ian Langford, 40, was found dead in his home in Norwich, England. He was half naked and wedged under a chair. His specialty was environmental risk. Police and post-mortem results declared the wounds found on his body were self-inflicted or sustained accidentally.

The list goes on and on:

  • Alexi Brushlinski
  • Robert Leslie Burghoff
  • Dr. Tanya Holzmayer
  • Eugene Mallove
  • John Mullen
  • Dr. Jeong Im

Source for the following list:

  • Alberto Behar
  • Martin John Rogers
  • Glenn Thomas
  • Mark Ferri
  • Professor Carol Ambruster
  • Anne Szarewski
  • Shane Todd
  • Dr. Richard Holmes
  • Melissa Ketunuti
  • Professor Dr. Richard Crowe
  • James S. Miller
  • Zachary Greene Warfield
  • Jonathan Widom
  • Fanjun Meng and Chunyang Zhang
  • Andrei Tropinov, Sergei Rizhov, Gennadi Benyok, Nicolai Tronov and Valery Lyalin, in a Russian plane crash.
  • Rodger Lynn Dickey
  • Gregory Stone
  • Bradley C. Livezey
  • Dr. Massoud Ali Mohammadi
  • John (Jack) P. Wheeler II
  • Mark A. Smith
  • Chitra Chauhan
  • Franco Cerrina
  • Maria Ragland Davis
  • Gopi K. Podila
  • Adriel D. Johnson Sr.
  • Amy Bishop, 45
  • Keith Fagnou
  • Stephen Lagakos
  • Malcolm Casadaban
  • Wallace L. Pannier
  • August “Gus” Watanabe.
  • Caroline Coffe
  • Nasser Talebzadeh Ordoubadi
  • Bruce Edwards Ivins
  • Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez. Died after being bound, gagged, stabbed and set alight
  • Yongsheng Li
  • Dr. Mario Alberto Vargas Olvera
  • Yoram Kaufmanich

This is an incomplete list. There are many, many more. Quite a number of these scientists were young and in the prime of their lives. Most of the deaths were attributed to accidents and homicides, with a few suicides thrown in for good measure.

Are their deaths linked? Who knows.

Are governments silencing scientists? Who knows.

What I can say for sure is that a huge amount of scientific genius has been wiped out with the deaths of these people…and possibly many more we don’t know about.

What I would really like to know is, why?

Written by Daisy Luther for DaisyLuther.com ~ September 29, 2016.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml


(federalobserver.com)
This entry was posted in Touch of Evil on .

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

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/26/2016 4:29:14 PM

Who runs the US? George Soros mentioned over 50 times in leaked Hillary campaign emails

Date:


If you were one of the many people that decided to expose yourself to the truth and read through the Clinton campaign emails released by Wikileaks, then you’re probably all too familiar with the name George Soros. After all, it is mentioned over 50 times in the leaked emails…

So what makes George Soros such an important figure that he is referred to so often in these conversations? Well, Soros appears to be one of the puppet masters pulling the strings of the politicians in America. A globalist madman, Soros is an enemy of freedom and democracy — and he is someone that we should be be extremely weary of supporting in any way.

Joel B. Pollack of Breitbart writes, “The Democracy Alliance, a George Soros-backed umbrella group of wealthy left-wing political donors, paid activists to disrupt at least one event for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, according to a document from the group’s conference in Santa Monica in April 2016.” It’s clear that Soros and his goons are trying to rig the election in their favor so that they can continue to control the president and keep the establishment in control. It’s a scary thought, but this is reality. This is why we cannot allow Hillary Clinton to be elected as the next president of the United States.His corruption runs deep and seems to know no bounds.

This is the election when the American people have the strongest opportunity to reject the establishment and receive the leader that we deserve — a leader that will bring freedom back to our country by rejecting the big business “ethics” pushed onto all of us by liberal lunatics like Soros. These leftists have proven that they will stop at nothing to push their money-hungry agendas that inspire Regressive Left rhetoric and political correctness, so we have to take them as a serious threat.

There’s no more denying that the entire Democrat Party is completely corrupt. On a federal level, it has been proven that they are all controlled by big businesses like the Soros groups. They don’t have the best interests of the American people in mind. No, they have their own financial interests at the forefront. That is what they really care about…

Nothing will make George Soros more upset than if we reject Hillary Clinton on a national level and he and his cronies are left powerless. That sounds like a good resolution to this story, so let’s consider doing just that on election day…

Sources:

TheGatewayPundit.com

Breitbart.com

Inquisitr.com

(newstarget.com)


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

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