HAARP Being Blamed For Heatwave and Wheat Crop Failure by Russian Conspiracy Theoristsnewsminer - The HAARP project in Alaska, the subject of many conspiracy theories, is getting blamed by some in Moscow for the failure of the wheat crop and the smoke that has been choking the city in recent weeks.
The Russian government said it will suspend wheat exports until December because of the severe drought that has hit much of the country.
“Moscow’s tabloid press has even speculated that the United States orchestrated the heatwave in order to favor its own grain exporters by blasting Russia with harmful rays from a research station in Alaska,” the Guardian newspaper of London reports.
But the paranoia goes beyond the comments of some newspaper editors.
Andrei Areshev, the deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, said the real purpose of the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project in Alaska is to build a weapon “in order to destabilize environmental and agricultural systems in local countries.”
“At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries,” he wrote in an article published throughout Russia, according to a news report on the Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty website.
“The article has been carried by publications throughout Russia, including International Affairs, a journal published by the Foreign Ministry and by the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti,” the RFE/RL news story stated.
It went on to state that Areshev told the reporter in a phone interview he was merely stating a hypothesis.
The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program is in Gakona, about 15 miles northeast of Glennallen.
Conspiracy buffs have provided no credible evidence to back up their assertions, but they have blamed HAARP across the years for creating hurricanes and snowstorms thousands of miles away and have said it has been used for mind control.
All of the theories seem to be extrapolations of statements made in some of the original patent applications as to what might be possible with much more powerful equipment than is found at the site.
HAARP also has been blamed for the earthquake in Haiti and others around the world, the floods in Pakistan and the landslides in China.
Anytime there is strange weather or a natural disaster, someone can be counted upon to conclude it was caused by HAARP.
The operators of the site say ionospheric research is the purpose of the site and that it is not a military project.
However, there is little doubt a greater understanding of the physics of the ionosphere has important military and civilian implications for communication and transportation.
“The goal of this program is to further advance our knowledge of the physical and electrical properties of the Earth’s ionosphere which can affect our military and civilian communication and navigation systems,” the HAARP website states.
The most recent open house at the facility was July 17, events that are held in large part to counter critics who say the public is never able to get past the gate.
You might recall Jesse Ventura huffing and puffing on camera for his TV show “Conspiracy Theory,” when he was not allowed entry last year.
As far as weather control goes, HAARP states on its website that its transmitter and array of 180 antennas has no impact on that part of the atmosphere.
“Transmitted energy in the frequency ranges that will be used by HAARP is not absorbed in either the troposphere or the stratosphere — the two levels of the atmosphere that produce the Earth’s weather,” HAARP states. “Electromagnetic interactions only occur in the near-vacuum of the rarefied region above about 70 km known as the ionosphere.”
The HAARP operators will never persuade everyone the site is not a sophisticated death ray, capable of warping minds or weather patterns.
Just as there always will be people who believe a giant concentration camp, capable of holding 2 million people, has been built by the government outside Fairbanks and is ready for use.
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New Robot Developed In Order To Probe The Great Pyramid
msnbc - Following in the footsteps of Howard Carter and Abbot and Costello, a specialized robot will penetrate deeper into the Great Pyramid of Giza than ever before. The robot, part of a years long exploration called the Djedi Project, will explore a shaft inaccessible to a previous robot, unlocking a room that has remain sealed for 4,500 years.The robot explorer, built by researchers at the Leeds University, England, in collaboration with French aviation company Dessault and British robotics company Scoutek, will incorporate a small fiber optic camera for looking around corners, an ultrasonic probe for testing the quality of the rock and a releasable mini-robot that can fit through spaces as small as 0.7 inches in diameter. Additionally, the robot uses special nylon and carbon fiber wheels that won't deface the pyramid's sensitive rock.
"All the robots were designed from scratch to do as little damage to the shafts as possible," Shaun Whitehead, Systems engineer and mission manager, told TechNewsDaily. "The previous robots both used tracks that scrubbed away at the floor and ceiling as they moved. We use soft brace pads to grip the walls, like an inchworm or the technique that rock climbers use for ascending 'chimneys.' The wheels don't need to grip, they need to slip as much as possible.'"
Whitehead designed the robot so that the team could easily swap out different components, depending on what they find down the shaft. To create the different components, Whitehead and his team used 3-D software provided by Dessault, and then "printed" out the parts on a 3-D fabricator at Leeds University.
The robot will travel down a shaft located in the tomb of the Queen. Unlike the King's tomb, where shafts lead to the outside of the Great Pyramid so his soul could escape into the afterlife, the shafts leading from the Queen's tomb borrow deeper into the pyramid.
This is the third time a robot has tried to find the end of the Queen's tomb shaft. The first expedition found that a giant stone door blocked the tunnel, and the second robot discovered another door behind that one. With it's microbot and drill, the Leeds University researchers designed this new robot specifically to breach those obstacles.
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Elderly Man With Walker Robs B.C. Bank
montrealgazette - A speedy getaway is usually critical for bank robbers, but perhaps not for an elderly B.C. man who this week held up a bank - and while using a black walker.
While no weapon was produced, the 75-year-old told staff at a Prince George Bank of Nova Scotia that he was armed. Staff surrendered a small amount of cash and the robber made his getaway as RCMP were called around 11:45 a.m. Friday.
The suspect was described as a Caucasian male weighing about 230 pounds. He was wearing a straw hat, white T-shirt, grey jogging pants and dark glasses - and he was using a walker that many rely on for mobility.
Prince George RCMP spokesman Gary Godwin said the man was apprehended approximately 45 minutes later in the same suburban strip mall where the bank is located.
The man is in custody while police investigate the decidedly unusual case.
“It’s not every day you get a 75-year-old male on a walker holding up a bank,” Godwin said. “We’re looking at all the circumstances that are involved.” He said the man is known to police.
Godwin, who has just retired from the RCMP after 25 years and has 36 years of policing experience, has never seen as elderly a bank robber as in this case.
But he said staff did the right thing in allowing the man to leave the bank even though they never saw a weapon.
“You never know what you have on the other side of the counter,” Godwin said. “If he says he has a weapon, the best thing is to give him what we wants. Err on the side of caution is what we teach.”
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Woman Accused Of Practicing Withcraft Tossed Into Well
deccanherald - A 65-year-old woman, who was accused of practicing witchcraft, was thrashed and then thrown into a well by members of a family in Uttar Pradesh’s tribal and Naxal-affected Sonbhadra district, about 450 km from here.
The woman, identified as Kaushalya Devi was fished out of the well by the villagers but she had died by then, police sources here said. According to reports, some people, all members of a family, suspected that Kaushalya Devi practised “withcraft.” They also suspected that she was behind the death of a little girl in the village a few days back.
On Saturday evening, one Dallu, his wife and another person allegedly caught hold of Kaushalya Devi and started thrashing her with lathis (sticks) and bricks. They later threw a profusely bleeding Kaushalya Devi into the village well.
Kaushalya Devi’s grandson, who was there, shouted for help following which some labourers working in the nearby fields reached there. A police team was immediately rushed to the spot, who arrested three people, including the two main accused.
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Real-Life Quasimodo Uncovered
telegraph - With his hunched back and deformed face, Quasimodo, the tragic hero of Victor Hugo's novel The Hunch Back of Notre Dame, has always been considered a mythical creation drawn from the depths of the author's imagination.
But a new discovery appears to reveal the real-life inspiration behind the character from Hugo's seminal novel, which tells the story of the deaf bell-ringer of Notre Dame and his unrequited love for the gypsy girl Esmeralda.
Clues suggesting that Quasimodo is based on a historical figure have been uncovered in the memoirs of Henry Sibson, a 19th-century British sculptor who was employed at the cathedral at around the time the book was written and who describes a hunched back stonemason also working there.
The documents were acquired by the Tate Archive in 1999 after they were discovered in the attic of a house in Penzance, Cornwall, as the owner prepared to move out.
However, the references to a "hunchback sculptor" working at Notre Dame have only just been discovered, as the memoirs are catalogued ahead of the archive's 40th anniversary this year.
The seven-volume memoirs document Sibson's time in Paris during the 1820s, when he was employed by contractors to work on repairs to Notre Dame Cathedral.
In one entry, he writes: "the [French] government had given orders for the repairing of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and it was now in progress ... I applied at the Government studios, where they were executing the large figures [for Notre Dame] and here I met with a Mons. Trajan, a most worthy, fatherly and amiable man as ever existed – he was the carver under the Government sculptor whose name I forget as I had no intercourse with him, all that I know is that he was humpbacked and he did not like to mix with carvers."
In a later entry, Sibson writes about working with the same group of sculptors on another project outside Paris, where he again mentions the reclusive government sculptor, this time recalling his name as "Mon. Le Bossu". Le Bossu is French for "the hunchback".
He writes: "Mon Le Bossu (the Hunchback) a nickname given to him and I scarcely ever heard any other ... the Chief of the gang for there were a number of us, M. Le Bossu was pleased to tell Mon Trajan that he must be sure to take the little Englishman."
Adrian Glew, the Tate archivist, who made the discovery, said: "When I saw the references to the humpbacked sculptor at Notre Dame, and saw that the dates matched the time of Hugo's interest in the Cathedral, the hairs on the back of my neck rose and I thought I should look into it."
Hugo began writing The Hunch Back of Notre Dame in 1828 and the book was published three years later. He had a strong interest in the restoration of the cathedral, with architecture featuring as a major theme in the book.
Hugo publicly opposed the original neoclassical scheme for Notre Dame's restoration led by the architect Etienne-Hippolyte Godde – the same scheme which Sibson describes Le Bossu and Trajan working on – favouring a more Gothic style for the cathedral.
The publication of The Hunch Back of Notre Dame in 1831, which made Hugo one of France's most acclaimed authors, is widely credited with prompting the Gothic restoration of the cathedral in 1844, designed by the architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, which Hugo had championed.
His close links with the cathedral make it likely that he would have known Le Bossu and Trajan, and further research undertaken by Mr Glew in the national archives of France has uncovered additional links between Hugo and the characters described by Sibson.
The Almanach de Paris from 1833 – which gives a list of all professionals working in the city – names a sculptor "Trajin" as living in Saint Germain-des-Pres, where Hugo also lived at the time.
An early draft of Les Misérables, another of Hugo's acclaimed novels, holds another clue indicating that Hugo drew on the Government sculptors described by Sibson for inspiration.
The lead character in an early version of the novel is named as "Jean Trejean" which Hugo later changed to "Jean Valjean".
Professor Sean Hand, the head of the Department of French Studies at the University of Warwick, and an expert on Hugo, said: "It is a fascinating discovery. Many scholars have tried to link Quasimodo's deformities with certain medical conditions, but I have never seen any reference to a historical character that he may have been based upon.
"It sounds entirely plausible, and if Hugo was indeed inspired by this deformed stonemason at Notre Dame, it further renews our appreciation of his amazing imaginative powers to take details from real life and weave them into magical literature."
Gerry Croydon, a distant relative of Sibson's, said: "Henry's diaries are fascinating, as he travelled the length and breadth of Europe and came across some amazing characters. The discovery that his diary may reveal the inspiration behind one of literature's great characters, is quite amazing."
Sibson's memoirs will be on display outside the Hyman Kreitman Reading Room at Tate Britain until the end of August.
NOTE: Hopefully, the memoirs will be transcribed. Sounds like a remarkable discovery...Lon
Fortean / Oddball News - 8/16/2010
