It took 200 firefighters working for several hours to douse the fires on the Atlantic Cartier. The ship’s most visible cargo was some 70 cars, 30 of which were damaged in the incident. But now it was revealed that the vessel also had highly dangerous substances on board as well, which posed the threat of radioactive contamination to the area.Fire broke out the ship several hours after it arrived in the port of Hamburg. Three tugs and two fireboats were involved in fighting with the blaze, as firefighters unloaded shipping containers while cooling down the hull of the vessel with water. The ship was seriously damaged by the fire and remains in Hamburg.The Atlantic Cartier was transporting around 9 tons of uranium hexafluoride, a radioactive highly violate and toxic compound most commonly used as an intermediate material in the production of nuclear fuel. The vessel also had 180 tons of flammable ethanol and 4 tons of explosives at the time the fire broke out.The news of the averted disaster in Hamburg was broken by the opposition Green Party. It criticized the city authorities for not reporting the full details of the incident on its own initiative.”It is an outrage that the Senate has not informed the public about this near catastrophe,” Greens’ member of the Hamburg parliament Anjes Tjarks said. “Here one must speak of a cover-up.”The city responded by saying that the firefighters were informed of the dangerous nature of the cargo promptly, which is the reason why the containers in question were quickly removed from the ship.”Thanks to the quick intervention, the harbor and the people in the area suffered from no hazard,” said city spokesman Frank Reschreiter. “There was no leak of the dangerous material.”Hamburg regularly receives shipments of radioactive material, German media report. It is a convenient transit point to deliver them to the uranium-enriching facility in Lingen, Lower Saxony. … Read More
Nokia’s Lumia 925 gets official with lighter aluminum body
Nokia’s Lumia 925 smartphone is now official. As most expected, the device is basically a revised version of the Lumia 920 with improvements in several categories. Most notably, Nokia ditched the polycarbonate shell and replaced it with a more durable (and more attractive) material – aluminum. This is Nokia’s first… … Read More
Ancient Mayan pyramid destroyed by construction company in Belize
The authorities reported on Monday that the company was using bulldozers and backhoes to carry out the works, chipping away at the pyramid’s sides until barely anything was left. Jaime Awe, the head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, said the construction had been detected the previous week.The ceremonial center at what is known as the Nohmul complex is estimated to be at least 2,300 years old and is considered to be the most important historical site in northern Belize, on the border with Mexico.”It’s a feeling of Incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity … they were using this for road fill,” Awe told AP. “It’s like being punched in the stomach, it’s just so horrendous.”Nohmul is located in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane field and its structures lacked the tell-tale signs of a restored cultural site – like the evenly trimmed stone borders at the sides. Yet, Awe said this could not possibly have been an explanation for how the workers had managed not to take note of what they were doing. The pyramid is 100 feet (30 meters) tall, while the land around it is flat, so making that kind of mistake is difficult to imagine. ”These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It’s just bloody laziness”, Awe continued. “Just to realize that the ancient Maya acquired all this building material to erect these buildings, using nothing more than stone tools and quarried the stone, and carried this material on their heads, using tump lines,” he said. “To think that today we have modern equipment, that you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroyed this building. Why can’t these people just go and quarry somewhere that has no cultural significance? It’s mind-boggling.”An investigation is underway by Belizean police, with criminal charges looking like a possibility. Although the Nohmul complex is situated on private land, the law says that any ruins or monuments of pre-Hispanic origin are exempt from it and are under government protection.A community organization calling itself the Citizens Organized for Liberty through Action has condemned the demolition of the site as “an obscene example of disrespect for the environment and history.”Hundreds of Mayan ruins remain in Belize, which is largely covered with jungles and counts around 350,000 people among its population. Although this is not the first case that such lack of regard was employed in Belize, Nohmul is among the largest pyramids ruined by such activities.Many scientists spoke out against what happened. Arlen Chase, chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida, told AP that “Archaeologists are disturbed when such things occur, but there is only a very limited infrastructure in Belize that can be applied to cultural heritage management.”The 70’s and 80’s saw much exploration take place around the Nohmul area, but it is important to understand that more knowledge could still be gained, as scientists say. And such instances of lazy negligence and destruction of Mayan cultural heritage aren’t limited only to Belize. The remnants of the great Mayan nation are under threat in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras as well. Francisco Estrada-Belli, a professor of anthropology at Tulane University, said “I don’t think I am exaggerating if I say that every day a Maya mound is being destroyed for construction in one of the countries where the Maya lived.” … Read More
New Study Proves Bt Toxins in GMOs Toxic to Mammalian Blood
According to a new study, the ‘Cry’ toxins that Monsanto’s GMO crops have been genetically modified to produce are a lot more toxic to mammals than previously thought, primarily to the blood. … Read More
BREAKING: European Commission to criminalize nearly all seeds and plants not registered with government
Categories: Controlling the Herd, Depopulation and Eugenics, Editor’s Choice, New World OrderTags: EU, seed registrationA new law proposed by the European Commission would make it illegal to “grow, reproduce or trade” any vegetable seeds that have not been “tested, approved and accepted” by a new EU bureaucracy named the “EU Plant Variety Agency.”(Read more…) … Read More
SOPA reincarnated? Norway readying draconian anti-piracy internet law
The proposed amendments make it easier to locate both website owners and end-users of unauthorized material online.Thus, the new legislation would allow rights-holders to take to court site owners involved in illegal content sharing and order the internet service providers (ISPs) to “prevent or impede access” to sites that have “extensively made available material that clearly violates copyrights”, Torrenfreak quotes the amendments. And if the website owner is unknown or cannot be located “the case can be decided without the person concerned being given an opportunity to comment.” This would make it very easy to block off sites whose owners wish to remain anonymous.Also, the introduced amendments exempt pursued individuals in question from the protection of Electronic Communications Act when a legal claim is underway.“If it is likely that copyright or other rights under this law have been violated, the court may, notwithstanding the confidentiality provided by the Electronic Communications Act, at the request of the licensee, require a provider of electronic communications to disclose information that identifies the owner of the subscription used for the violation,” according to the amendments.In order to waive confidentiality the court “must find that the arguments in favor of disclosure outweigh the interest of confidentiality.” Experts are saying that the bill will most certainly be passed.Even though the amendments need to go through a second parliamentary hearing before being formally adopted, it is unlikely that the outcome would be any different from the first hearing, Jens Christian Koller of the Parliamentary Information Service told Teknofil.no.“In practice therefore these amendments to the Copyright Act have been adopted, but it is still not correct to say that it has already been formally adopted by the parliament. What you can say is that it is now very difficult to stop this law,” he stated.This issue of piracy versus privacy is not new in Norway and has partly been trigged by The Pirate Bay website case, according to Torrentfreak. In March 2009, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and other local movie studios asked Norway’s largest ISP Telenor to block subscribers’ access to The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest file-sharing site. Telonor refused to proceed with the request, citing no legal precedent.Telenor was taken to court, where a ruling confirmed that ISP is not obligated to block access to sites such as The Pirate Bay.Then the Ministry of Culture in May 2011 announced new proposals to amend the existing Copyright Act. In January the amendments were presented and on this past Monday the parliament voted on them for the first time. The ruling parties were in favor of the bill, while only the opposition voted against it.The Pirate Bay website, which was the force behind the new amendments, was created in Sweden in 2003.In 2009 the website’s founders were charged with facilitating illegal downloading of copyrighted material and sentenced to a year in a prison and a US$3.5 million fine. Since then in order to stay online the site’s domain keeps moving to different countries, with the latest relocation to Iceland.Internet users are equating the Norwegian amendments to the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was introduced in October 2011 and proposed to broaden law enforcement’s rights to fight online copyright infringement and trade of counterfeit good. Proposal included introduction of court orders to ban advertising networks and payment facilities from doing business with infringing websites, prohibiting search engines from linking to the websites, and requesting ISPs to block access to the websites.Many internet users and organizations heavily criticized the plan. On January 18, 2012, the internet blackout was used by more than 7,000 websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit and Google, marking the WWW-wide protest against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), which was then shelved indefinitely just days after the action. … Read More
GMO Labeling Bill Introduced by Boxer, DeFazio – Right to Know Act
Last week, Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Peter DeFazio (D-OR) introduced the Genetically Engineered Food Right-to-Know Act, a bipartisan legislation that would require the FDA to clearly label all genetically engineered foods to better help consumers make informed decisions. … Read More
