A severe storm has generated baseball-sized hail, high winds and at least 28 tornadoes in the Midwest, including Oklahoma, Kansas and Iowa. Residents remain in hiding as meteorologists forecast that the severe weather conditions will continue to generate destructive twisters.Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin declared 16 counties as disaster areas. Power companies reported that more than 57,000 outages left people in the dark. In Shawnee, Oklahoma, the body of a 79-year-old man was found lying in an open area of a mobile home community.“You could be killed if not underground or in a tornado shelter,” read a National Weather Service alert posted Sunday. “Complete destruction of neighborhoods, businesses and vehicles will occur. Flying debris will be deadly to people and animals.”In some regions, homes were destroyed, cars and trucks were flipped from highways, downed power lines were sprawled across neighborhoods, and trees were uprooted. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol shut down Interstate 40 after semi-tractor trailer trucks and several other vehicles were flipped by wind gusts, Newsok.com reported.“It’s tearing up everything. Just ripping everything up in its sight,” a helicopter pilot told CNN affiliate KFOR, referencing a tornado near Wellston, Okla. “…Everything was just gone. Like you took the house, you put it in a gigantic blender, you turned it on pulse for a couple minutes and then you just dumped it out.”The state was littered with debris from damaged houses, trailers, and vehicles. About 300 homes were in ruins and at least 23 people were injured, according to Fallin and Red Cross spokesman Ken Garcia.Ethan Mignard, a staffer at a local newspaper, told CNN’s iReport that the damage looked like something he had only ever seen on TV. In some areas, patches of dirt remained where mobile homes once stood, and children’s toys were littered across the ground and hanging from trees. Mignard even came across a plot of land with nothing remaining but the front steps to a house that is now gone.“It looks so out of place… To think that you would have taken these stairs to enter a home, but instead, you look around from up there and you see total destruction everywhere,” he said.Counties across Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Missouri were all placed under tornado watches late Sunday, and are expected to experience more damage.“After over 300 reports of severe weather on Sunday, another round of dangerous severe weather is expected Monday with the greatest threat once again in the southern Plains targeting Oklahoma and parts of Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas,” the National Weather Service reported. “However, severe weather is possible much further north towards Chicago and Madison as well.” … Read More
Building Self-Reliance in Children Through Free Play
Our perceived fears of all the possible dangers to our children handicaps them in the playground of life. The anxiety is crippling. It’s hard not to buy into the myth of safety being peddled in mainstream media, schools, and even churches. … Read More
US military secrets leaked to Chinese hackers for three years
QinetiQ North America was attacked by a Shanghai-based hacker group from 2007 to 2010, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. The hacking collective has been coined the “Comment Crew” by security experts. The company is known for its contributions to national security – including software used by US forces in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Comment Crew’s continuous spying reportedly provided China with a wealth of secret information on QinetiQ’s drones, satellites, military robotics, and the US Army’s combat helicopter fleet. The spies also stole several terabytes – equivalent to hundreds of millions of pages – of documents and data on weapons programs. China’s military may have also stolen programming code and design details that it could use to disable some of the most sophisticated US weaponry. The situation could have a crippling effect on America’s defense capabilities.“God forbid we get into a conflict with China but if we did we could face a major embarrassment, where we try out all these sophisticated weapons systems and they don’t work,” said Richard Clarke, former special adviser to President George W. Bush on cyber security. But the hacking could have been easily prevented, if QinetiQ would have picked up on one of the many warnings it received along the way.Failing to connect the dotsQinetiQ ignored the first sign of spying in 2007, when an agent from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service notified the company that two people were apparently losing classified information on their laptops. QinetiQ failed to act with caution, according to Brian Dykstra, a forensics expert hired to conduct the investigation into the lost data.“They just felt like it was this limited little thing, like they’d picked up some virus,” he said. Dykstra was given only four days to complete the investigation. He said the company didn’t give him the time or data necessary to determine whether more employees had been successfully targeted. In his report, Dykstra warned that QinetiQ is “likely not seeing the full extent” of the intrusion. His assumptions were soon proved correct. In 2008, NASA alerted the company that hackers had tried to enter its system from one of QinetiQ’s computers. But QinetiQ still failed to connect the dots, treating each series of attacks over the next several months as unrelated incidents. The company’s ignorance was welcomed by Comment Crew, who continued to raid servers and gather more than 13,000 internal passwords in the first 2 ½ years.An easy hack?In 2010, the hackers logged onto QinetiQ’s system with incredible ease – through the company’s remote access system, just like an ordinary employee. The hack was made easy because of QinetiQ’s failure to use a two-factor authentication, allowing Comment Crew to use the stolen password of a network administrator. But it gets even worse – the company had discovered its own vulnerability months before, but failed to fix it the problem. Over the course of four days, the hackers attacked at least 14 servers, eventually hitting the jackpot when they discovered an inventory of weapons-systems technology and source code throughout the company. When QinetiQ finally caught on in 2010 and hired two outside firms to help combat the hackers. It was soon revealed that Comment Crew had established near permanent residence in the company’s computers. The firms also discovered that the hackers had walked away with information on microchips that control the company’s robots. The chip architecture could help China test ways to take over or defeat US robots or aerial drones, said Noel Sharkey, a drones and robotics expert at Britain’s Sheffield University. The hackers also targeted at least 17 employees working on the Condition Based Maintenance program, which collects data on Apache and Blackhawk helicopters deployed around the world. Thus far, there has been no word from the State Department regarding Comment Crew’s hacks into QinetiQ systems. Washington has the power to revoke the company’s charter to handle military technology if it finds negligence. However, it appears the US government is doing just the opposite. In May 2012, QinetiQ received a $4.7 million cybersecurity contract from the US Transportation Department. … Read More
3 sea snail divers killed over the weekend
SANTA ROSA, Calif. — Three recreational abalone divers died in separate incidents over the weekend in Northern California, where powerful rip currents were reported.A low tide drew the divers to the beaches looking for the mollusks that are prized delicacies by seafood lovers, the Press Democrat reported on Sunday. The body of a 66-year-old retired Pacifica firefighter was found on Saturday afternoon off Shell Beach in Sonoma County.Cedric Collett, a strong swimmer in good physical shape, had been diving with a friend but didn’t resurface, the newspaper said. His body was found still in his weight belt, which is used to help a diver stay submerged while prying abalone loose from rocks. On Sunday morning, several divers helped pull 36-year-old Kenneth Liu of San Francisco to shore after he got caught in a rip tide off nearby Salt Point State Park, but he couldn’t be revived, the newspaper said. Several hours later, an unidentified diver was found dead north of Fort Bragg. A Sonoma County sheriff’s sergeant said the man was found about 15 feet below the water and might have been snagged in rocks. The surf was pounding on rescue crews who responded to all three distress calls, Sonoma County sheriff’s Deputy Henri Boustany said. Deaths from abalone diving are common during the recreational harvesting season. However, three in a single weekend was a shock, even to authorities. “It’s the busiest we’ve been in that short amount of time with that many horrible outcomes,” said Paul Bradley, a veteran helicopter pilot for the sheriff’s department. Abalone season for recreational divers opened April 1 and runs through the end of June. Since the early 1990s, dozens of people have died in their quest to collect the prized sea snails. One diver was decapitated by a shark in Mendocino County in 2004. Tim Murphy, a state parks lifeguard, said abalone divers should spend time studying the water before deciding to dive. Rip currents and fast-changing sea conditions make for a dangerous environment. Murphy said it is also important to have a dive buddy and to stay close together and have a game plan if trouble arises. ___ Information from: The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, http://www.pressdemocrat.com Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Continue Reading… … Read More
“Unclaimed” charts search for forgotten Vietman vet
Filmmaker Michael Jorgensen has charted a remarkable journey with Vietnam vet Tom Faunce in documentary “Unclaimed,” which aims to reconnect a U.S. Vietnam war vet, reported dead in 1968, with his American family.The man, whom Faunce believes to be Special Forces Green Beret Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson, remembers only that his helicopter was shot down in Laos in 1968 and that he had a wife and children in Alabama. Though presumed dead by Americans, the man says that he survived a year of torture in Vietnam and then married the nurse who cared for him.From the Toronto Star:Continue Reading… … Read More
A George W. Bush comeback?
Americans are a forgiving and forgetting people. That’s all that can explain the rise in George W. Bush’s approval ratings since he left office in 2009. Back then, he had the lowest approval rating of any departing president since Richard Nixon (who departed in a helicopter after resigning in disgrace) with a 33 percent overall approval rating. Only 24 percent of Americans approved of his handling of the recession-bound economy. As recently as last November’s election, more voters blamed Bush than President Obama for the country’s ongoing economic woes.Now, on the eve of the opening of his presidential library and an apparent Bush-rehabilitation tour, starting with a Diane Sawyer interview Wednesday night, Bush faces a kinder, gentler American public. According to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, Americans are now split on the former president, with 47 percent approving of his performance and 50 percent disapproving. He’s still underwater, as the pollsters say, but that’s not a bad jump in four years. He’s even climbed on the economy, with 43 percent now approving of the job he did, while 57 percent stayed tethered to the reality-based community, and still disapprove.Continue Reading… … Read More
Mass. police release thermal video
Massachusetts State Police released footage of the thermal camera footage authorities used to locate Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in a boat in suburban Watertown, Mass.:Watch:Continue Reading… … Read More
