Sudan deadly floods affect 300,000 people

More than 300,000 people across Sudan have been affected by floods that have killed nearly 50 people in August, the World Health Organization has said.

It said the region around the capital Khartoum had been particularly badly hit and was experiencing the worst floods in 25 years.

One of the major risks to health was the collapse of more than 53,000 latrines, the WHO added.

A UN official in Sudan described the situation as "a huge disaster".

In a report, the WHO said that 48 people had been killed and 70 injured in the floods. It warned of increasing trends of malaria cases in the past two weeks.

Meanwhile, Sudan Interior Minister Mahmoud Hamed put the confirmed death toll at 53, according to the AFP news agency.

The WHO also said property had been damaged in 14 of Sudan's 18 states.

Mark Cutts, the head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Sudan, told AFP last week the world body was ready to help those affected by the disaster.

He added that this was despite the fact that UN humanitarian operations "have been severely underfunded" this year.

BBC

Russians Inspect Missile Defense Base in California

Russian officials this week carried out a secret inspection of the U.S. strategic missile defense base in California as part of the New START arms treaty, according to Obama administration officials.

The inspection of five missile defense interceptors is allowed under the 2010 arms accord. The treaty requires cuts of U.S. and Russian deployed strategic warheads to 1,550.

A defense official said the visit was a treaty verification visit hosted by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

A State Department official declined to comment on the inspection but confirmed it was related to New START. “Implementation activities under New START are confidential,” the official said.

However, Thomas Moore, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee professional staff member, said the inspection of the base was a controversial part of U.S. and Russian arms talks leading up to New START that was ratified by the Senate in December 2010.

The United States had opposed including the five Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI) silos in the treaty inspection terms, said Moore, a specialist on arms control issues.

The Russians refused, and because the five silos had been converted from offensive intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos, negotiators settled on a single inspection, Moore said, adding that he believed this week’s Russian review was that inspection.

Russia had demanded including the five silos in New START inspection provisions to monitor the conversion of long-range launch tubes into missile defense shooters.

“Russia gets one exhibition visit in the first three years of New START and one more if it ever wants to look at them again, for a total of two inspections,” Moore said. ”But this first one has to be the only one where they get to confirm the distinguishing features that set these five silos apart from a launcher of an ICBM.”


Ground Based Interceptors at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Russian officials carried out a secret inspection of the base this week / Boeing

The treaty prohibits converting any additional ICBM silos at Vandenberg to missile defense silos, and the five current GBI silos, built prior to the treaty, were “grandfathered” into the accord.

“The administration agreed with Russia to provide assurances to Russia that the converted ICBM silos ‘remain incapable’ of launching strategic offensive arms [and] record the distinguishing features that set a GBI-converted intercontinental silo apart from a pure intercontinental silo,” Moore said.

The Russian visit from Aug. 18 to Aug. 23 is the only time the Russians will be allowed to look at the GBI silos to confirm that they have not been converted back into ICBMs.

Moore said the visit does not appear to be part of the Obama administration’s effort to show more transparency toward Moscow as a way to placate Russian opposition to missile defenses, especially in Europe.

“Even if this administration was contemplating some more transparency measures for our missile defenses, these five silos at Vandenberg are a settled matter,” he said. “Moscow gets to confirm what we think makes these silos distinct launchers of GBIs, nothing more, nothing less, and only one time.”

Russia issued a unilateral statement in April 2010 saying that its adherence to the New START treaty would be based on “no qualitative or quantitative buildup in the missile defense system capabilities of the United States.

The Senate conditioned its approval of New START in a resolution that specifically rejected the Russian statement on missile defense. It also said the treaty would not impose limits on missile defense deployments beyond the curb on converting additional ICBM or submarine-launched missiles into missile defense launchers, not including the five at Vandenberg.

The Pentagon currently operates two long-range missile defense interceptor bases at Vandenberg and Fort Greely, Alaska. A third base, for the East Coast, is being studied in response to intelligence assessments that Iran will have a missile capable of hitting the United States by 2015.

The missile defense system, which includes satellite and ground- and sea-based radar and sensors, has been activated several times in recent years in response to North Korean long-range missile tests.

The two western-oriented missile defense bases are focused on countering long-range missiles from North Korea.

The Pentagon in March announced that it will add 14 additional long-range interceptors in Alaska following reports that North Korea has fielded at least six road-mobile ICBMs that can hit the United States.

The 14 new interceptors would be added to the 26 currently deployed in Alaska.

The visit by the Russians is likely to prompt concerns on Capitol Hill from Republicans opposed to the administration’s efforts to share missile defense technology with the Russians.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R., Ala.) revealed in May during congressional testimony from Vice Adm. James D. Syring, director of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, that the administration has sought to declassify sensitive missile defense technology that could be shared with Moscow.

As a result, Brooks drafted legislation that would prohibit the Pentagon from releasing classified missile defense know-how to the Russians, specifically advanced hit-to-kill missile defense interceptor technology.

Brooks said at the time that the admiral’s comments were “confirmation that the administration is actively discussing the declassification of our life-saving missile defense technology [and] further affirms the importance of enacting legislation to prevent our critical weapons technology from falling into unreliable hands.”

Washington Free Beacon

ECONOMIC CRASH WORLDWIDE STARTING

Identity management heads for the cloud

Traditionally, the task of managing users' digital identities has involved maintaining an on-premise identity management system. The system enrolls users, manages information about their identities and keeps track of what resources they are authorized to access. It authenticates users by prompting them to provide credentials, such as a username and password or smart card.

Once that information is verified, the system authorizes the user to access certain resources in accordance with the user's identity and role in the organization.

Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, which established the personal identity verification (PIV) card as a standard federal employee credential, has spawned numerous identity management systems at federal agencies.

Although in-house systems are still the norm, agencies have begun to explore cloud-based identity management. The Federal Cloud Credential Exchange, the first major test of the cloud approach, focuses on citizen access to agency resources and aims to provide an authentication service that spans all agencies. It will let people use third-party credentials to access multiple federal resources online, thereby freeing agencies from maintaining their own systems for authenticating users.

Naomi Lefkovitz, senior privacy policy adviser at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said FCCX will help agencies avoid the expense of credentialing the same person multiple times, which also makes life easier for the user.

"Those are really the efficiencies — and the good customer experience — we are looking for," said Lefkovitz, who co-led the FCCX Tiger Team that identified the cloud system's requirements and technical architecture.

Cloud-based identity management could also be a boon for agencies that operate shared services and need to authenticate employees from multiple government organizations. The Interior Department, for example, issued a request for information earlier this year regarding a software-as-a-service (SaaS) identity management solution. The department's Interior Business Center, which provides human resources applications to some 40 agencies, would use the system to help its customers access those applications.

FCW

New radiation hotspots found near Fukushima tanks

The operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant said Thursday it had found new radiation hotspots near tanks storing radioactive water, but no new leaks.

Around 300 tons of toxic liquid is believed to have escaped from one of the tanks that hold polluted water, some of which was used to cool the broken reactors. During inspections Thursday of around 300 other tanks of a similar design, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said while no more holes had been found, two areas were a cause for concern.

“We have confirmed two spots where radiation doses are high” near two other tanks, a company statement said.

But the levels of water in these two tanks have not changed since they were pressed into service to store contaminated water and the ground around them was dry, it added.

The inspections were prompted by the discovery of a leak that the company said may have carried radioactive materials out to sea, with the country’s nuclear watchdog voicing concerns that there could be similar leaks from other containers.

On Wednesday, nuclear regulators said the leak represented a level-three “serious incident” on the UN’s seven-point International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), raising the alert from level one, an “anomaly”.

The quake and tsunami-sparked meltdowns at the plant in March 2011 were ultimately categorised as level seven on the INES scale. The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 is the only other incident to have been given the most serious ranking.

TEPCO has said puddles of water near the holed tank were so toxic that anyone exposed to them would receive the same amount of radiation in an hour that a nuclear plant worker in Japan is allowed to receive in five years.

The absence of a volume gauge on the 1,000-ton tank made detecting the problem more difficult, experts say.

Scientists say levels of radiation in the ocean in several spots along the Fukushima coast had been recovering.
“It is too early to estimate the impact of the latest leak,” said Masashi Kusakabe, researcher at Marine Ecology research Institute.

“All we can do is to continue monitoring levels of marine radiation very carefully,” Kusakabe said.

Jota Kanda, an oceanographer and professor at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, said: “It is inevitable that some water has reached the sea. So far its impact on the marine environment is limited, but it will be a different story if more leaks happen.”

TEPCO—which faces huge clean-up and compensation costs—has struggled to cope with the after-effects of the disaster.

More than two years after the meltdowns, it continues to be beset by difficulties, chief among which is how it should handle the vast amounts of water used to cool the broken reactors.

Around 1,000 tanks of varying sizes have been installed at the site to contain it, but experts warn this can only be a temporary fix.

A series of problems, and delays in announcing them to the public, have added to the impression that the huge utility is not on top of the clean-up.

TEPCO in July admitted for the first time that radioactive groundwater had been leaking outside the plant.

This month it started pumping it out to reduce leakage into the Pacific and this week said 30 trillion becquerels of strontium and caesium, possibly cancer-causing substances, could have entered the ocean since May 2011 from this leak.

On Thursday, fishermen based in the north of Fukushima decided to suspend 15-month-old trial operations because of pollution fears, Kyodo news agency said.

From Japan Today

28 ACRE BAYOU CORNE, LOUISIANA SINKHOLE SWALLOWS 40 FT TREES WITHIN SECONDS

DELTA BRACING EMPLOYEES FOR OBAMACARE SHOCK?

Erick Erickson of RedState has a radio show in Atlanta, which is also the hub for Delta Airlines.  Erick says he’s been getting calls from Delta employees about a memo, originally sent from Delta management to the Obama Administration in June, which the company is now beginning to circulate among employees.  Coupled with warnings that “their healthcare will be radically changed because of ObamaCare,” this might be the first step in dropping the kind of Affordable Care Act bomb that so many other companies have been forced to detonate on their employees, most recently United Parcel Service.

Erickson calls the letter “stunning:”

According to Delta, in 2014 Obamacare will cost the company at least $38 million in direct costs and that is only the beginning. With added medical inflation, Delta claims “the cost of providing health care to our employees will increase by nearly $100,000,000 next year.” A $100 million increase thanks in large part to Obamacare and ancillary cost increases derived therefrom.

He included an excerpt from the letter:

The ACA requires large employers to pay an annual fee of $63 per covered participant in 2014. For Delta’s roughly 160,000 enrolled active and retired employees and their family members, this represents more than $10 million added to the cost of providing health care next year. As we discussed, this fee, which is meant to help stabilize the state exchanges as they get started, provides absolutely zero direct benefit to our participants. It is, essentially, a direct subsidy from us and our employees to those who participate in the exchanges.

Between ObamaCare’s mandated coverage for “children” of advanced age, and the individual mandate that will compel people to seek insurance who might otherwise have chosen to decline coverage, you can pour another $28 million worth of red ink on Delta’s books.  And the “Cadillac tax” is probably going to wipe out their pilots’ insurance plans in a couple of years.  This is all hitting a vital industry with notoriously thin (some would argue non-existent) net profit margins.  To politicians like Barack Obama, $100 million is pocket lint, but of course they’re spending other people’s money.

Meanwhile, the Nevada State AFL-CIO became the latest labor union to rebel against ObamaCare.  Having apparently grown tired of listening to whatever Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) uses for telephone hold music, the union passed a resolution on Wednesday “urging the President and Congress to uphold their promise for unions to keep their current healthcare plans under the Affordable Care Act.”  In other words, they want Obama to use his new dictatorial powers to rewrite the law, just like he did for Congress, and let the AFL-CIO bail out of the health-care horror that is consuming the rest of America.

The Nevada AFL-CIO also decried the “unintended consequences of the Affordable Care Act,” including “the destruction of the 40-hour work week, higher taxes,” and higher insurance premiums.  I hate to break to you, guys, but those weren’t “unintended” consequences.  The authors of ObamaCare lied to you about this stuff, but that doesn’t mean it’s coming as a complete surprise to them.

Like all the other unions pestering their pet Democrats about ObamaCare, they foolishly believed Obama’s promise about keeping your plan if you liked your plan.  Perhaps they’ll realize that talking to Democrats is a waste of time, and passing resolutions amounts to hugging each other and sobbing.  The only people who can save you from ObamaCare are the Republicans who want to defund it, union workers.  And they could really use your vocal support right now, because not all of them have stiff spines.

Update: More ObamaCare fallout, courtesy of the Washington Times:  ”An influential Charlottesville, Va., money management team claims that Obamacare has forced many firms in Thomas Jefferson’s hometown to switch to part-time workers, and that one manager was told he’d be fired if he hired a 50th full-time worker, the number that triggers the costly health care system.”

The list of firms practicing this “economic self-defense” is said to include “almost all major franchises.”  The employers in question are keeping their plans quiet to avoid “backlash and boycotts.”

Update: The hits keep coming, as the University of Virginia announces it will drop coverage for spouses because of ObamaCare, much as UPS did yesterday.  Warnings about further benefit cuts due to the impending “Cadillac tax” were also given.

FROM WND