Iran pumps large Bassij militia forces into Tehran as riots flare

The Iranian government Wednesday, Oct. 3, invoked the emergency measures drawn up for the 2009 protests to deploy large-scale Bassij militia forces in the capital and put down the first angry protests against mounting economic hardship and the plummeting rial. 

DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources report two waves of riots swept through Tehran’s trading centers Wednesday:

the stores trading gold coins and foreign currency on Fereowsi, Estanbol and Manoucheri Streets, and the celebrated gold jewelry market in the Tehran Bazaar.

Money changers and gold traders attacked police forces and torched their vehicles, playing cat and mouse with the officers after they arrested some of the money changers and accused them of black market dealings.
This was part of the regime’s effort to curtail the steep plunge of the Iranian currency against the dollar. Wednesday, a dollar went for 40,000 rials compared with 37,500 rials Tuesday and 24,000 only a week ago.

Fearing that the troubles Wednesday presaged a general strike shutting down the bazaar for an indefinite period, the authorities decided to draw the line before the unrest spread to the rest of the capital and other cities.
Two teams are now at work to deal with the crisis before it gets out of hand: One is meeting at the office of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; the second, including Interior Minister Mostafa Mohamnmad-Najjar and Revolutionary commander of the Tehran district, is working on ways to rein in the crisis in the presidential bureau of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Both have received intelligence briefings, according to which there was a real risk of the Tehran merchants’ revolt igniting a popular uprising in Tehran that may well encompass the entire country.
The brutal Bassij militia were accordingly sent into Tehran. They were told to spread out early Thursday and force the merchants to open their shops. They were directed to act firmly but cautiously and avoid loss of life. Iran’s rulers are fully aware the any blood spilt at this stage would quickly inflame the masses.




Debkafile

Russian General: “The USSR Collapsed and the Same Fate Has Been Prepared for the USA”

In the following video commentary Russian General Konstantin P. Petrov (Ret.) asks some interesting questions and includes his own thoughts (perhaps the non-official Russian position) about a variety of topics that include the end of US dollar hegemony, the orchestration of the 9-11 attacks to engage America in a mid-east war, the puppeteers behind the politicians and the coming premeditated collapse of the United States of America as we know it.

While here in the United States we remain enclosed in a propaganda bubble controlled by western multi-billion dollar media conglomerates, business interests and political alliances, there can be no doubt that other schools of thought exist throughout the world. What may seem like reality to our populace is perhaps nothing more than illusion.

The United States does not exist in a vacuum. As such, we simply cannot ignore the assessments, outlook and opinions of foreign leadership as they pertain to the global implications of current events.

How did they ruin the USSR? They called the Soviet Union a ‘prison for people’ and an ‘evil empire’.

The same thing is being done to the United States.

We also intervened in Afghanistan and do you remember how that ended? It’s the same thing with the United States, and the American can’t do anything there. Now the entire muslim world hates the United States.

And when the global mafia dumps the dollar the entire world will think that the Americans deserved this. But this won’t benefit people in our country, especially those who’ve been saving up dollars.

There’s another thing that we should take into account.

In the United States lives 5% of the world’s population, but Americans consume 50% of the world’s energy resources. The global mafia sees this as a problem.

…Some of our people who fled to the US, and now live there on welfare, live better there unemployed than they would have lived in Russia even if they were employed.

The slave masters think that this situation in the US is unacceptable because even the slaves live relatively well there. so the United States is doomed too in this sense.

Even if you’re the head of a mighty state and you don’t understand global politics and don’t understand the methods of global politics you’re still a hostage of the global mafia. The leadership of the USSR and the leadership of the USA carried out internal and external politics, but the global mafia carries out global politics.

The USSR collapsed and the same fate has been prepared for the USA.

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Earth is undergoing true polar wander, scientists say

Scientists based in Germany and Norway today published new results about a geophysical theory known as true polar wander. That is a drifting of Earth’s solid exterior – an actual change in latitude for some land masses – relative to our planet’s rotation axis. These scientists used hotspots in Earth’s mantle as part of a computer model, which they say is accurate for the past 120 million years, to identify four possible instances of true polar wander in the past. And, they say, true polar wander is happening now. These scientists published their results in the Journal for Geophysical Research today (October 1, 2012).

The scientists – including Pavel V. Doubrovine and Trond H. Torsvik of the University of Oslo, and Bernhard Steinberger of the Helmholtz Center in Potsdam, Germany – established what they believe is a stable reference frame for tracking true polar wander. Based on this reference frame, they say that twice – from 90 to 40 million years ago – the solid Earth traveled back and forth by nearly 9 degrees with respect to our planet’s axis of rotation. What’s more, for the past 40 million years, the Earth’s solid outer layers have been slowly rotating at a rate of 0.2 degrees every million years, according to these scientists.

Diagram showing solid-body rotation of the Earth with respect to a stationary spin axis due to true polar wander. This diagram is greatly exaggerated. According to Doubrovine and his team, Earth’s solid outer layers have been slowly rotating at a rate of 0.2 degrees every million years. Diagram via Wikimedia Commons.

True polar wander is not:

• A geomagnetic reversal, or reversal of Earth’s magnetic field, known to have happened before in Earth history.
• Plate tectonics, which describes the large-scale motions of great land plates on Earth and is thought to be driven by the circulation of Earth’s mantle.
• Precession of the Earth, whereby our world’s axis of rotation slowly moves, tracing out a circle among the stars, causing the identity of our North Star changes over time.

True polar wander is a geophysical theory, a way of thinking about Earth processes that might happen and that these scientists believe do happen. The theory suggests that if an object of sufficient weight on Earth – for example, a supersized volcano or other weighty land mass – formed far from Earth’s equator, the force of Earth’s rotation would gradually pull the object away from the axis around which Earth spins. A supersized volcano far from Earth’s equator would create an imbalance, in other words. As explained at Princeton.edu:

If the volcanoes, land and other masses that exist within the spinning Earth ever became sufficiently imbalanced, the planet would tilt and rotate itself until this extra weight was relocated to a point along the equator.

That’s the theory of true polar wander. It would cause a movement of Earth’s land masses, but for a different reason than the reason the continents drift in the theory of plate tectonics (formerly called “continental drift”). In the theory of plate tectonics, the continents drift because Earth’s the layer of Earth underlying our planet’s crust, called the mantle, is convective. That is, it circulates, slowly – like water about to boil. In true polar wander, on the other hand, a similar-seeming movement of land masses on Earth’s crust happens in order to correct an imbalance of weight with respect to Earth’s spin.

Scientists’ understanding of true polar wander overlaps with their understanding of plate tectonics in various ways. That’s understandable, since it’s all the same Earth.

Scientists delving into true polar wander want to know when, in which direction, and at what rate the Earth’s solid exterior might be rotating due to true polar wander. To sort it out, they say, you would need a stable frame of reference to which observations of relative motion might be compared. Doubrovine and his team say they found one: volcanic hotspots.

Hotspot forming an island chain. As land plates drift, a successive of volcanoes form over the hotspot. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In geology, hotspots are volcanic regions fed by Earth’s underlying mantle. For example, the Hawaiian islands are believed to have formed over a hotspot in the mantle. The hotspot created a volcano, but then – as that land plate drifted over time, as described by the theory of plate tectonics – the volcano drifted, too, and was eventually cut off from the hotspot. Gradually, another volcano begins to form over the hotspot, right next to the first one. And then it moves on … and another one forms … and so on … and so on. Earth’s crust produces first one, then another volcano over the hotspot until a long chain of volcanoes forms, such as in Hawaii. Hotspots have long been used to understand the motion of tectonic plates.

Doubrovine and colleagues went a step further in order to understand true polar wander. Instead of treating the hot spots as static – frozen in place at one spot above Earth’s mantle – their computer model let the hotspots’ positions drift slowly. According to these scientists, this drifting is what produced a model of a stable reference frame, which in turn let them draw conclusions about true polar wander.

They say their model does a good job of matching observations of real hotspot tracks on Earth – the path drawn by each hotspot’s island chain – which gives them confidence their results about true polar wander are accurate.

The Hawaiian islands are believed to have formed over a hotspot – a particularly hot place in Earth’s underlying mantle. Scientists expanded on previous thinking about hotspots to suggest that Earth’s solid surface is drifting, minutely, with respect to our planet’s rotation axis.

Bottom line: German and Norwegian scientists have incorporated hotspots in Earth’s mantle into a computer model being used to study true polar wander. They say their work established a stable reference frame for this study that lets them conclude Earth is undergoing true polar wander today.

EarthSky

Iranian source: Nuclear program hiring ‘non-stop,’ ramping up enrichment

Iran is recruiting staff relentlessly to work on its nuclear program, is making steady progress in its uranium enrichment, and has constructed several facilities for nuclear testing outside Tehran whose precise location is known only to high-ranking officials, according to an Iranian source who said he was hired recently as a researcher at one of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In a telephone interview with this reporter, who has made several reporting trips to Iran in recent years, the source — who spoke on condition of anonymity — said it had been “very hectic” of late at the facility where he is employed. “More and more young graduates and people are brought in every day,” he said. “We have been working non-stop.”

The information provided by the source could not be independently verified. The contact would not specify where he is employed.

The Iranian researcher said he was speaking because he wanted the outside world to know that, despite attacks on Iran’s top scientists and other pressures aimed at halting the nuclear program, “we are not afraid and we have continued to progress.”

Without detailing the quantities involved, the source said that Iran had already enriched uranium to 30 percent, and “by next year, we hope to reach up to 50 or even 60 percent. The experience and knowledge is there, but getting the right parts at times has been difficult.” He said some equipment being received was “not reliable and sometimes defective.”

An Iranian member of parliament spoke earlier this summer about a need for 50-60% enriched uranium, ostensibly for nuclear propulsion for ships.

Iran has received assistance for its nuclear program from various countries, including Russia, Pakistan and North Korea, Western diplomats say. Some centrifuges and centrifuge components wereobtained in the 1990s from a procurement network run by the Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, and some subsequent Iranian centrifuge design has reportedly been based on the Pakistani designs.


Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sets out his ‘red line’ for Iran on a cartoon bomb drawing during a September 27 speech to the General Assembly (photo credit: Avi Ohayun, GPO)

The Iranian researcher’s comments came soon after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted in TV interviews that Iran’s nuclear drive had to be halted “at the enrichment stage.” In a speech to the UN last Thursday, Netanyahu said Iran was “well into the second stage” — of “medium enrichment” of uranium for a bomb. “By next spring, at most by next summer at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.”

The researcher said “many of our laboratories and testing facilities” have been constructed underground, and spoke of “other non-official test facilities outside of Tehran.” Only high-ranking officials had information on these, he said.


Professor Uzi Even at his Tel Aviv University office (Photo credit: Mitch Ginsburg/ Times of Israel)

Professor Uzi Even, one of the founders of Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona, told The Times of Israel a month ago that he believes the regime in Iran has already covertly created the 20-25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium necessary to conduct a successful underground test.

In response to the Iranian contact’s comments, Even elaborated on Iran’s progress. He said there was “no reason or need for Iran to enrich uranium” unless it was aiming to build a nuclear arsenal,” and then described how Iran has gone about doing so.


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visits the Natanz enrichment facility in 2008 (photo credit: www.president.ir)

Even said the “amount of material flow required for the first enrichment stage — to 3% from natural abundance of 0.7% — is highest, and thus requires many thousands of centrifuges.” This had been going on at Iran’s Natanz facility for five years.

The second stage of enrichment — to 20% — “requires a much smaller effort,” he said, involving 2,000 centrifuges — a fifth of the centrifuges used in stage one. This has been carried out at Iran’s Fordo underground plant, near Qom, for the past two years, Even said, stressing that he was basing himself solely on publicly available information and had no access to classified material.

Finally, the third stage of enrichment — from 20% to 90%, or weapon-grade — “requires even fewer centrifuges, 500 units, and can be easily hidden in a small underground unit, not much bigger than 1,000 square meters, that is almost impossible to detect from a satellite and can be easily hidden anywhere in Iran.”

“At this concentration,” Even went on, “turning the gaseous compound used in enrichment into a solid core required for weapon is tricky, because it can become ‘critical’ and cause a radiation accident.” He stressed that such an accident would not be akin to a bomb exploding, but would “release enough radiation to kill the people handling the device.”

There have been various reports of mysterious explosions at Iranian nuclear facilities in recent years, including one at the uranium enrichment facility at Isfahan last November. The IAEA has also repeatedly sought access to the Parchin facility, where it suspects Iran has carried out tests relating to its nuclear program and has then sought to cover up evidence of such testing.

Even estimated that the Iranians have already accumulated enough weapons-grade fissile material to try to design a nuclear warhead. “They could test it underground tomorrow,” he said, “but it is still several years before such a design could be made to fit the missiles they have. For two or three years,” he concluded, “Iran cannot be considered a nuclear threat to anyone.”
Times of Israel