RARE "HYBRID" SOLAR ECLIPSE TO OCCUR OVER EASTERN US. SUNDAY MORNING

Israel ‘furious’ with White House for leak on Syria strike

Israel is fuming with the White House for confirming that it was the Israeli Air Force that struck a military base near the Syrian port city of Latakia on Wednesday, hitting weaponry that was set to be transferred to Hezbollah.

Israel has not acknowledged carrying out the strike, one of half a dozen such attacks widely ascribed to Israel in recent months, but an Obama administration official told CNN on Thursday that Israeli warplanes had indeed attacked the Syrian base, and that the target was “missiles and related equipment” set for delivery to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Israel’s Channel 10 TV on Friday night quoted Israeli officials branding the American leak as “scandalous.” For Israel’s ally to be acting in this way was “unthinkable,” the officials were quoted as saying.

A second TV report, on Israel’s Channel 2, said the leak “came directly from the White House,” and noted that “this is not the first time” that the administration has compromised Israel by leaking information on such Israeli Air Force raids on Syrian targets.

It said some previous leaks were believed to have come from the Pentagon, and that consideration had been given at one point to establishing a panel to investigate the sources.

Channel 2′s military analyst, Roni Daniel, said the Obama administration’s behavior in leaking the information was unfathomable.

Daniel noted that by keeping silent on whether it carried out such attacks, Israel was maintaining plausible deniability, so that Syria’s President Bashar Assad did not feel pressured to respond to the attacks.

But the US leaks “are pushing Assad closer to the point where he can’t swallow these attacks, and will respond.” This in turn would inevitably draw further Israeli action, Daniel posited, and added bitterly: “Then perhaps the US will clap its hands because it will have started a very major flare-up.”

Satellite footage of alleged missile base in Latakia, Syria (photo credit: Wikimapia)

Channel 2 speculated that the US might have leaked word of Israel’s attack as a warning to Israel to desist from such actions. Alternately, it might be seeking to signal that it was part of the tough policy designed to prevent a flow of sophisticated weaponry to Assad. But these and other possible explanations simply didn’t justify the leak, which the TV report described as “illogical” and “foolish.”

Jerusalem’s reported anger with the White House over the leak coincided with efforts by the Administration to assure Israel that it is holding to a tough line on Syria and in the effort to thwart Iran’s nuclear program, and is maintaining its robust military partnership with Israel.

On Thursday, the US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, reiterated America’s commitment to thwarting Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions. “Let me be absolutely clear: President Obama is determined to ensure that the Islamic Republic does not acquire a nuclear weapon,” Power said at the Anti-Defamation League’s centennial conference held Thursday in a Manhattan hotel. Addressing the subject of nuclear negotiations with Iran, she said the Obama administration considers a bad deal worse than no deal and that the administration will not accept a bad deal.

Later Thursday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel told the same gathering that the US is testing Iran’s diplomatic intentions but remains “clear-eyed” on Iran’s role as a state-sponsor of terror and exporter of extremism.

Hagel also announced that the US will fast-track delivery of six advanced Osprey helicopter-airplanes to Israel. “Israel will get six V-22s out of the next order to go on the assembly line, and they will be compatible with other [Israeli defense] capabilities,” Hagel said, anticipating delivery in two years time. NBC News said Israel requested that the delivery of the Ospreys be expedited because of threats from Iran and Syria.

Hagel added that “the Israeli and American defense relationship is stronger than ever, and it will continue to strengthen.”

Nonetheless, the ADL’s national director Abraham Foxman, who has close ties to the Israeli leadership, told the conference that American wariness of foreign military involvement is making it seem “weak and retreating.” In unusually bitter comments, Foxman declared that, “The combination of America’s unsatisfactory involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, together with the financial crisis at home, have generated a broader opposition to American military involvement overseas.”

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. (photo credit: Miriam Alster/Flash90)

Citing among other things the recent congressional resistance to authorizing a strike on Syria, Foxman said: “America is being seen as weak and etreating… The world looks at our choices, looks at our public opinion polls, looks at congressional reactions, looks at the paralysis in Washington on budgeting matters and wonders.”

The perception of weakness could harm US efforts to get Iran to end its nuclear push, Foxman warned. “I hope that we get our act together.”

Israel has been accused of striking Syrian sites several times in the recent past, including in January and May of this year.

Credit To The Times of Israel

14,000 Christians Martyred Annually

As Christians prepare to participate in the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church on Sunday (or any Sunday in November), Gospel for Asia (GFA) reports that more than 14,000 people around the world annually are martyred for their faith. This number includes only reported cases.

This week’s Road to Reality, the GFA-sponsored radio program, features a passionate and informative message about the reality of the persecuted churchby Dr. K.P. Yohannan, GFA founder and international president. The 25-minute presentation on the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church is available online.

“Jesus promised His church that there would be persecution and tribulations,” Yohannan says. “Tens of thousands of believers, missionaries and pastors are experiencing the reality of persecution on a daily basis. Yet they recognize the honor it is to suffer for His sake. May the Lord lead us with His burden to intercede for these brothers and sisters.”

The persecution of Christians takes both physical and mental forms. Many are beaten or deprived of food to the point of starvation. Others suffer misunderstanding or mental torture. Parents have turned children out of their homes, and schools have refused to allow students to return, all because of claiming the name of Jesus. Houses are burned, clothes are destroyed and many are ultimately killed.

Earlier this month, the elder of a GFA-sponsored church in Nepal was murdered while praying for the sick. In September, innocent worshippers at a historic church in Pakistan scrambled for safety as two suicide bombers left 81 dead and 140 injured.

In the India state of Odisha in 2008, more than 500 Christians were killed, and some 50,000 were driven into the jungles. More than 4,000 Christian homes were destroyed, and dozens of churches were ransacked or burned out. These believers faced these attacks all because they had turned to Christ. Many lost everything they owned.

“Sometimes, even as we pray for the persecuted, the Holy Spirit reveals to us that we can be part of the answer to our own prayers,” Yohannan says. “Many who heard of the persecution in Odisha and prayed for the victims also sent donations to furnish lost clothing, replace burned Bibles, construct a house of worship for them and rebuild their simple homes.”

Churches are urged to emphasize the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church during a Sunday service this Sunday (or anytime in the month). Individuals, small groups and congregations around the world will make the entire month of November a special time of prayer.

Free resources for churches and individuals at gfa.org/info/idop include practical ways Christians can pray for the persecuted, church bulletin inserts and a three-minute video designed to be shown in a church service. Yohannan also has a special message on the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church.

Road to Reality offers a 2014 calendar, “A Year of Intercession,” at roadtoreality.org, with proceeds going to the persecution fund. The weekly broadcast airs on more than 800 radio stations in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

“To understand what it means to take up our cross and follow Christ, we must walk in His footsteps,” Yohannan says. “Join Christians around the world in spending time praying and fasting in tears over a map of the world where our fellow believers are suffering for their faith.”

Credit to Charisma News

LAX Shooting: Get Ready for More Anti-Second Amendment Propaganda

The liberal press has wasted precious little time demonizing the Second Amendment in the wake of the shooting by an off-duty TSA worker at LAX.

Mother Jones tweeted the following a few minutes ago:

Note the push-button word: “assault rifle,” a favorite emotional phrase adopted by the gun-grabber crowd. Every weapon, of course, is an “assault weapon,” but what the libs never tell you is that firearms are primarily defense weapons.

“Guns used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense,” Gun Owners of America noted in 2008. “Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year — or about 6,850 times a day. This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.”

Credit to Infowars

Germany allows 'indeterminate' gender at birth

Germany has become Europe's first country to allow babies with characteristics of both sexes to be registered as neither male nor female.

Parents are now allowed to leave the gender blank on birth certificates, in effect creating a new category of "indeterminate sex".

The move is aimed at removing pressure on parents to make quick decisions on sex assignment surgery for newborns.

However, some campaigners say the new law does not go far enough.

As many as one in 2,000 people have characteristics of both sexes.'Bruised and scarred'

They are known as "intersex" people because they have a mixture of male and female chromosomes or even genitalia which have characteristics of both genders.

The intense difficulty for parents is often that a gender has to be chosen very quickly so that the new child can be registered with the authorities, the BBC's Steve Evans in Berlin reports.

Sometimes surgery is done on the baby to turn its physical characteristics as far as possible in one direction or the other, our correspondent says.

The law in Germany has been changed following a review of cases which revealed great unhappiness.

In one case, a person with no clear gender-defining genitalia was subjected to surgery. The person said many years later: "I am neither a man nor a woman. I will remain the patchwork created by doctors, bruised and scarred."

German passports, which currently list the holder's sex as M for male or F for female, will have a third designation, X, for intersex holders, according to the interior ministry.

It remains unclear what impact the change will have on marriage and partnership laws in Germany.

Current laws define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and civil partnerships are reserved for same-sex couples.

Silvan Agius of IGLA-Europe, which campaigns for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex people, said the law needed to go further.

"While on the one hand it has provided a lot of visibility about intersex issues... it does not address the surgeries and the medicalisation of intersex people and that's not good - that has to change," he told the BBC.

While Germany is the first country in Europe to legally recognise a third gender, several other nations have already taken similar steps.

Australians have had the option of selecting "x" as their gender - meaning indeterminate, unspecified or intersex - on passport applications since 2011. A similar option was introduced for New Zealanders in 2012.

In South Asia, Bangladesh has offered an "other" gender category on passport applications since 2011.

Nepal began recognising a third gender on its census forms in 2007 while Pakistan made it an option on national identity cards in 2011.

India added a third gender category to voter lists in 2009.

While transgender or intersex people have long been accepted in Thailand and are officially recognised by the country's military, they do not have any separate legal status.

Credit to BBC

28 solar flares in the last seven days

The sun has erupted more than two dozen times over the last week, sending radiation and solar material hurtling through space - and scientists say more eruptions may be coming.

This shouldn't be unusual. After all, we are technically at solar maximum, the peak of the 11-year cycle of the sun's activity. But this has been a noticeably mellow solar maximum, with the sun staying fairly quiet throughout the summer. So when our life-giving star suddenly let loose with 24 medium strength M-class solar flares and four significantly stronger X-class flares between Oct. 23 and Oct. 30, it felt like a surprise.

Many of the flares originated from sunspot AR1884, a particularly active region of the sun that is currently facing Earth, almost at the center of the star. If this region stays active, it will continue to hurl radiation and solar material our way for about another week until it rotates out of sight.




A sunspot is an area of the sun where the magnetic fields have gotten all twisted up. "You get a tangled bunch of magnetic fields, and they get too tangled and too stressed, they end up erupting," said Holly Gilbert, a solar physicist at NASAGoddard Space Flight Center.

The good news is that none of the rapid-fire solar flares of the last week have had much effect on life on Earth. Our atmosphere protects us from the sun's occasional powerful bursts of light and radiation, but solar flares do occasionally interact with our communications systems. The radiation can mess with an upper layer in our atmosphere called the ionosphere and cause radio signals to act funky.

Gilbert said the solar physicists at Goddard were glad to see more activity from the sun after such a quiet summer.

"It hadn't been active in months, so it's like it finally woke up," she said. "For those of us who study the dynamics of the sun, it is exciting because it gives us more events to study."

And for the rest of us it gives us the opportunity to watch cool videos, like the one above, of the sun erupting.

Credit to Science Now

China unveils strategic map for a nuclear submarine attack on U.S. cities

Chinese state-run media revealed for the first time this week that Beijing’s nuclear submarines can attack American cities as a means to counterbalance U.S. nuclear deterrence in the Pacific. On Monday, leading media outlets including China Central TV, the People’s Daily, the Global Times, the PLA Daily, the China Youth Daily and the Guangmin Daily ran identical, top-headlined reports about the “awesomeness” of the People’s Liberation Army navy’s strategic submarine force. “This is the first time in 42 years since the establishment of our navy’s strategic submarine force that we reveal on such a large scale the secrets of our first-generation underwater nuclear force,” the Global Times said in a lengthy article titled “China for the First Time Possesses Effective Underwater Nuclear Deterrence against the United States.” The article features 30 photos and graphics detailing, among other things, damage projections for Seattle and Los Angeles after being hit by Chinese nuclear warheads and the deadly radiation that would spread all the way to Chicago. China’s sub fleet is reportedly the world’s second-largest, with about 70 vessels. About 10 are nuclear-powered, and four or more of those are nuclear ballistic submarines capable of launching missiles.

Heavily influenced by Soviet naval models that stressed underwater forces, China’s nuclear submarine development began with the reverse-engineering of a Soviet Golf-class conventional-powered sub in the 1950s. In the 1980s, China developed its first ballistic missile sub, the Type 092 Xia-class, which has 12 launch tubes for the Julang (Giant Wave)-1 missiles. The JL-1 had a limited range and failed multiple test launches. In 2010, a new class of missile sub, the Type 094 Jin class, entered the service. It is capable of launching 12 to 16 JL-2 missiles with a range of about 8,700 miles, covering much of the continental U.S. with single or multiple, independently targetable re-entry vehicle warheads. Chinese calculations for nuclear attacks on the U.S. are chillingly macabre. “Because the Midwest states of the U.S. are sparsely populated, in order to increase the lethality, [our] nuclear attacks should mainly target the key cities on the West Coast of the United States, such as Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego,” the Global Times said.

“The 12 JL-2 nuclear warheads carried by one single Type 094 SSBN can kill and wound 5 million to 12 million Americans,” the Global Times reported. China also has developed land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles — notably the DF-31A, which has a range of 7,000 to 7,500 miles. “If we launch our DF 31A ICBMs over the North Pole, we can easily destroy a whole list of metropolises on the East Coast and the New England region of the U.S., including Annapolis, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Portland, Baltimore and Norfolk, whose population accounts for about one-eighth of America’s total residents,” the Global Times said. All the state-run press reports stressed the point that the PLA’s missile submarines are now on routine strategic patrol, “which means that China for the first time has acquired the strategic deterrence and second strike capability against the United States.” “Our JL-2 SLBMs have become the fourth type of Chinese nuclear missiles that threaten the continental United States, after our DF-31A, DF-5A and DF-5B ICBMs,” said the Global Times. –The Washington Post

Chinese unveil nuclear sub fleet: China has displayed its nuclear submarines for the first time in over four decades to showcase their “excellent safety” record as part of a naval drill. The submarines were shown as taking part in exercises along with naval ships and helicopters. The drill is the first open-sea drill in which maritime and air forces from all three of China’s fleets have taken part, state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Monday. “We are China’s first nuclear submarine force, and the 42 years since our establishment have witnessed our success in avoiding nuclear accidents,” Rear Admiral Gao Feng, commander of one of the People’s Liberation Army navy’s submarine bases, told reporters in Qingdao port. While state television has shown the footage of the submarines taking part in the exercises, which according to the official media is the first time in 42 years ever since it began inducting nuclear submarines in the fleet, the print media highlighted its safety track with no accident record. The exercises in the west Pacific went on “despite foreign disturbance,” the People’s Liberation Army said. Foreign military vessels and reconnaissance aircraft, reportedly from Japan and US remained in the exercise area for an undue time monitoring Chinese activity in the close distance and seriously disturbing the naval drill, reports said.

Credit to Extinction Protocol