Asteroid buzzes, misses Earth _ unlike meteor

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A 150-foot asteroid hurtled through Earth's backyard Friday, coming within an incredible 17,150 miles and making the closest known flyby for a rock of its size. In a chilling coincidence, a meteor exploded above Russia just hours before the asteroid zoomed past the planet.

Scientists the world over, along with NASA, insisted the meteor had nothing to do with the asteroid since they appeared to be traveling in opposite directions. The asteroid is a much more immense object and delighted astronomers in Australia and elsewhere who watched it zip harmlessly through a clear night sky.

"It's on its way out," reported Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object program at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Asteroid 2012 DA14, as it's called, came closer to Earth than many communication and weather satellites orbiting 22,300 miles up. Scientists insisted these, too, would be spared, and they were right.

The asteroid was too small to see with the naked eye even at its closest approach around 2:25 p.m. EST, over the Indian Ocean near Sumatra.

The best viewing locations, with binoculars and telescopes, were in Asia, Australia and eastern Europe. Even there, all anyone could see was a pinpoint of light as the asteroid buzzed by at 17,400 mph.

As asteroids go, this one is a shrimp. The one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was 6 miles across. But this rock could still do immense damage if it ever struck given its 143,000-ton heft, releasing the energy equivalent of 2.4 million tons of TNT and wiping out 750 square miles.

By comparison, NASA estimated that the meteor that exploded over Russia was tiny — about 49 feet wide and 7,000 tons before it hit the atmosphere, or one-third the size of the passing asteroid.

As for the back-to-back events, "this is indeed very rare and it is historic," said Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science. While the asteroid is about half the length of a football field, the exploding meteor "is probably about on the 15-yard line," he said.

"Now that's pretty big. That's typically a couple times bigger than the normal influx of meteorites that create these fireballs," he said in an interview on NASA TV.

"These fireballs happen about once a day or so, but we just don't see them because many of them fall over the ocean or in remote areas. This one was an exception."

As the countdown for the asteroid's close approach entered the final hours, NASA noted that the path of the meteor appeared to be quite different than that of the asteroid, making the two objects "completely unrelated." The meteor seemed to be traveling from north to south, while the asteroid passed from south to north — in the opposite direction.

Most of the solar system's asteroids are situated in a belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and remain stable there for billions of years. Some occasionally pop out, though, into Earth's neighborhood.

NASA scientists estimate that an object of this size makes a close approach like this every 40 years. The likelihood of a strike is every 1,200 years.

The flyby provides a rare learning opportunity for scientists eager to keep future asteroids at bay — and a prime-time advertisement for those anxious to step up preventive measures.

Friday's meteor further strengthened the asteroid-alert message.

"We are in a shooting gallery and this is graphic evidence of it," said former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, chairman emeritus of the B612 Foundation, committed to protecting Earth from dangerous asteroids.

Schweickart noted that 500,000 to 1 million sizable near-Earth objects — asteroids or comets — are out there. Yet less than 1 percent — fewer than 10,000 — have been inventoried.

Humanity has to do better, he said. The foundation is working to build and launch an infrared space telescope to find and track threatening asteroids.

If a killer asteroid was, indeed, incoming, a spacecraft could, in theory, be launched to nudge the asteroid out of Earth's way, changing its speed and the point of intersection. A second spacecraft would make a slight alteration in the path of the asteroid and ensure it never intersects with the planet again, Schweickart said.

Asteroid DA14 — discovered by Spanish astronomers only last February — is "such a close call" that it is a "celestial torpedo across the bow of spaceship Earth," Schweickart said in a phone interview Thursday.

NASA's deep-space antenna in California's Mojave Desert was ready to collect radar images, but not until eight hours after the closest approach given the United States' poor positioning for the big event.

____

Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/asteroidflyby.html

B612 Foundation: http://b612foundation.org/

UK Horse Meat Scandal Opens Bigger Can of Worms

Technicians working on a production line at Spanghero Castelnaudary in France. Photograph: Abaca/Barcroft Media

UK Horse Meat Scandal Opens Bigger Can of Worms

Stephen: You mightn’t have read about the horse-meat scandal that has been making the news across the UK and in Europe – but it has been creating major headlines for days.

Essentially, a scandal has erupted across Europe because products labeled as beef—including Burger King hamburgers and frozen lasagne – have recently been found to contain various amounts of horse meat. In fact, some of what was sold as beef was entirely horse meat.

But you know what happens when one can of worms is opened? It always leads to another. In this case, the underworld trade in horse meat is leading investigators into another network of undercover operations and organised crime networks that includes arms dealing and more… And I doubt it ends there.

Horsemeat Scandal Linked to Secret Network of Firms

By Jamie Doward, The Observer – February 16, 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/feb/16/horsemeat-scandal-victor-bout-firms

Europe’s unfolding horsemeat scandal took a new twist on Saturday when it emerged that key intermediaries involved in the trade appeared to be using a similar secretive network of companies to the convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout.

The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) identified an intermediary firm, Draap Trading, based in Limassol, Cyprus, as playing a pivotal role in shipping horsemeat across Europe.

Draap has confirmed that it bought horsemeat from two Romanian abattoirs. The company sold the meat to French food processors including Spanghero, which supplied another French company, Comigel, that turned it into frozen meals for the likes of food firm Findus, some of which had a meat content that was almost 100% horse.

Draap, which is owned by a trust in the British Virgin Islands tax haven, insists the meat it sold into France was labelled as horse. Spanghero says the meat arrived labelled “beef”. Jan Fasen, who runs Draap and has denied any wrongdoing, was convicted last year of selling South American horsemeat as German and Dutch beef.

In a development that sheds light on the mysterious networks operating in the European food chain, it has emerged that Draap’s sole director is an anonymous corporate services company called Guardstand, set up in 1996 and based in Limassol.

A 2011 joint report by the International Peace Information Service and TransArms, an organisation which researches arms shipments, produced evidence that Guardstand also owned a share in a business called Ilex Ventures, a connection that links the company to the global arms trade and Viktor Bout.

Documents filed in a New York court by US prosecutors allege that in 2007 Bout and an associate transferred almost $750,000 (£483,000) to Ilex for the purchase of aircraft to fly arms and ammunition around Africa’s trouble spots in breach of embargos.

The prosecutors said Ilex was owned and controlled by Bout, an international weapons dealer known as the “merchant of death”, who last April was sentenced to 25 years in jail for arms smuggling.

But who owns Guardstand and why Draap employs it as a director is a mystery that is likely to be studied closely by fraud investigators. Guardstand’s sole shareholder is Trident Trust, a business based in Cyprus that specialises in establishing companies in tax havens chiefly for Russian and Ukrainian clients and which helped set up Ilex.

Petros Livanios, who runs Trident and was once a director of Ilex, declined the Observer’s requests for an interview.

While there is no suggestion anyone at Trident was aware Guardstand may have been exploited by criminal networks, the opaque nature of its ownership will be a concern for investigators trying to unpick the web of interests that facilitate Europe’s meat trade.

“This illustrates why hidden company ownership is such a problem,” said Rosie Sharpe, of the campaign group Global Witness. “It could be all too easy for crooks passing horsemeat off as beef, arms dealers fuelling wars or corrupt dictators nicking their country’s wealth to set up a company if they so wished. The ownership or control of European companies can be hidden perfectly legally by using nominees or companies incorporated in secrecy jurisdictions.”

Cyprus has been a favourite place through which former Soviet bloc oligarchs and military chiefs have laundered cash plundered from the privatisation programme of state assets that followed the end of the cold war. The island is seeking an EU bailout, but Germany is known to be balking at the prospect unless it reforms its offshore services industry.

“Cypriot companies frequently turn up in criminal investigations,” Sharpe said. “They have been used by the Iranian government to evade sanctions, by Slobodan Milosevic to provide arms for the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, and by Russian officials who used them to steal hundreds of millions of pounds.” Last week the French authorities claimed the scandal had spread to 13 countries and 28 companies. Sorin Minea, head of Romalimenta, the Romanian food industry federation, blamed the crisis on “an international mafia ring”.

Christos Christou, Cyprus’s public health services deputy director, said investigators had seized a “variety of documents” from Draap’s Limassol office which it would share with the European commission.

The scandal, which started in January when authorities in the UK and Ireland found traces of equine DNA in supermarket burgers, has raised concerns that criminal networks may be playing a role in the food chain. What seemed a UK and Ireland problem is becoming a major concern for many EU member states as they conduct tests to establish the security of their food chains.

Several slaughtermen in the UK have been arrested in connection with the UK arm of the scandal. On Thursday the Food Standards Agency raided three more meat processing plants and removed samples for testing, computers and documents.

The FSA said it had passed on evidence to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, as well as authorities in dozens of countries, suggesting at least part of the fraud has an international dimension.

As the scandal spread to school dinners and some of the UK’s largest catering firms and restaurants, Catherine Brown, chief executive of the FSA, said it was unlikely that the exact number of people in the UK who had unwittingly eaten horsemeat would ever be known.

Her comments came as the FSA released test results for possible horsemeat contamination.

The watchdog said 2,501 tests were conducted on beef products, with 29 results positive for undeclared horsemeat at or above 1%. The results related to seven different products, which have been withdrawn from sale. The products linked to the positive results were confirmed as Aldi’s special frozen beef lasagne and special frozen spaghetti bolognese, the Co-op’s frozen quarter-pounder burgers, Findus beef lasagne, Rangeland’s catering burger products, and Tesco value frozen burgers and value spaghetti bolognese.

Pub and hotel group Whitbread said its meat lasagnes and beefburgers had been affected. The firm, which owns Premier Inn, Beefeater Grill and Brewers Fayre, said the products had been removed from menus and would not be replaced until after further testing.

Tesco chief executive Philip Clarke yesterday emailed customers to tell them the supermarket was introducing “a new benchmark for the testing of products, to give you confidence that if it isn’t on the label, it isn’t in the product.”Figures released today by market analysts, Nielsen, show retail sales of frozen burgers are down 40% year-on-year in the wake of the horsemeat revelations.

For more info head to this National Geographic story:http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130212-horse-meat-beef-scandal-food-france-england-europe-science-taboo-horsemeat/

Meat products withdrawn from various supermarket chains so far in Britain. How many of these outlets may know about the content of the meat products they have been selling is not yet known.

Tesco
Tesco Everyday Value frozen burgers
Tesco quarter-pounders
Tesco Everyday Value bolognese
Findus lasagne

Sainsbury’s
Own-brand frozen burgers

Asda
Freeza frozen beefburgers
Asda bolognese sauce, 500g

Waitrose
Dalepak frozen burgers
Own-brand 16 frozen British beef meatballs

The Co-operative
Four beef quarter-pounders
Eight frozen beefburgers with onion

Lidl
Moordale frozen beef quarter-pounders

Iceland
Four-pack of quarter-pounders
Four-pack 100% beef quarter-pounders

Aldi
Frozen Oakhurst 100% beef quarter-pounders
Frozen specially selected Aberdeen Angus quarter-pounders
Frozen Oakhurst beefburgers
Today’s special frozen beef lasagne and spaghetti bolognese

Morrisons
Ross four beef quarter-pounders
Dalepak four beef quarter-pounders
Adams beefburger eights
Findus lasagne