Reservoir turns purple overnight in Vietnam – Residents frightened about fish dying en masse

Article By: Strange Sounds

The water in a reservoir in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau, Vietnam has turned purple & stinky overnight. Residents are concerned about pollution, or could it be a rapid growth of algae?

The 10-hectare (25-acre) reservoir, which stands next to a group of seafood processing factories, is linked to ditches & the downstream of the Cha Va River, home to 100s of fish farms. In recent years, Vietnamese people have become increasingly wary of pollutions driven by production expansion as the seafood industry seeks to catch up w/overseas fast-growing demand for shrimp & fish.

The reservoir turns purple anytime the processors discharge wastewater. And according to residents, it’s been like that for many years & the authorities have not really done anything to stop it. The concerns of the locals are compounded as children in the area also fall sick regularly. Officials know the problem w/the waste discharge but are not handling. They now have to close the reservoir to treat the water & sediment.

Last December, a court in Ba Ria-Vung Tau ordered 11 seafood companies to recompense local fish farmers VND13 billion ($570,800) as their waste discharge was accused of killing tons of fish on the Cha Va River in 2015.

Pollution, mass die-off… we are killing our Earth!

View full article at: http://strangesounds.org/2017/03/reservoir-turns-purple-overnight-vietnam-video-pictures-residents-frightened-about-dying-fish.html

Cyclone Debbie Strikes Queensland in Australia With Full Fury

Article By: Jacqueline Williams

SYDNEY, Australia — A powerful cyclone packing wind gusts as high as 160 miles per hour struck the northeastern coast of Australia on Tuesday, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee, leaving 48,000 homes without power and drenching Queensland with heavy rains.The Category 4 storm, named Cyclone Debbie, battered the tourist islands off the coast before hitting the mainland with its full fury, gathering enough force that officials feared the potential for widespread damage. Aggravating the situation was the storm’s slow, potent march onto the coastline.

“Debbie is a very large, slow-moving system,” said John Fowler, a spokesman for Ergon Energy, noting that 48,000 customers were without power in the Bowen, Whitsunday and Mackay areas. “This one is actually taking its time, so the longer it takes, the more damage it will do — not just to our network but obviously to property as well.”

Officials said at least one death had been linked to the worsening weather. Among the concerns was further damage to the Great Barrier Reef, which has already been seriously degraded by warming waters.

“There’s probably quite a lot of reef area in the footprint of Cyclone Debbie that’s at risk from damage from the wind and the waves,” said David Wachenfeld, director of reef recovery at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. “So it’s a double whammy for the reef with bleaching.”

Early Tuesday, Annastacia Palaszczuk, Queensland’s premier, said she was particularly concerned about the damage from winds.

“There is a very destructive core as part of Cyclone Debbie, and we are monitoring that on an hourly basis,” she added. “We had to take the unprecedented step yesterday afternoon of seeking to evacuate some 25,000 people. This was the right step to do because we’re very concerned about the expected tidal surge that was going to happen around the Mackay region,” Ms. Palaszczuk said.

Strong wind and heavy rain lashed Airlie Beach on Monday as the cyclone approached. Officials warned residents earlier on Monday to leave the area before it was too late, as dangerous storm tides, powerful wind and heavy rain were expected to batter the region.

“People living in coastal or low-lying areas prone to flooding should follow the advice of local emergency services and relocate while there is time,” said Bruce Gunn, the regional director of Queensland’s Bureau of Meteorology. “Cyclone Debbie is likely to maintain cyclone strength for some distance inland,” with “damaging to destructive winds delivering significant rainfall.”

Mr. Gunn said the cyclone was of a size that had not been seen in the state since Cyclone Yasi, a severe tropical storm, hit in 2011. That storm, which caused billions of dollars in damage, was one of the most powerful cyclones to have affected Queensland since record-keeping began, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.The weather bureau said wind caused by the storm this week could be strong enough to blow away cars. Queensland’s police commissioner, Ian Stewart, said one tourist had died in a crash on Monday in an accident that was believed to be associated with the already severe weather.

Evacuation centers have been set up in areas like Proserpine and the Whitsundays, and buses were taking people to Cairns, a city in far north Queensland. All commercial flights to and from Townsville Airport were canceled.

State officials said they had deployed scores of additional emergency workers to the region.

“I know every member of Parliament and the Labor team is thinking of Queensland and north Queensland in particular today,” said Bill Shorten, the leader of the opposition Labor Party. “We just hope everyone comes through this safely in the next coming hours and days.”

View full article at: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/world/australia/cyclone-debbie-queensland-evacuation.html?referer=http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%3Fei%3DUTF-8&fr=crmas&p=hurricane+in+australia

Yellow fever is killing howler monkeys in Brazil

Article By: Shreya Dasgupta

The deadly yellow fever — an infectious disease caused by a mosquito-borne virus — has spread rapidly throughout Brazil, wiping out populations of the brown howler monkey (Alouatta guariba). Thousands of monkeys are believed to have died across the states of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo in Brazil.

One of the worst affected areas is a private, federally protected reserve called RPPN Feliciana Miguel Abdala (RPPN-FMA), located in Caratinga, Minas Gerais. Once home to hundreds of howler monkeys, the forest no longer reverberates with the animals’ guttural roars.

Karen Strier, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an associate conservation scientist at the Global Wildlife Conservation, has been studying the monkeys of RPPN-FMA since 1983. When she returned to the reserve in January 2017, she found that howler monkeys had disappeared from large parts of the forest.

“It was apparent very quickly that the howler monkeys were scarce, because some groups that frequent parts of the forest we would normally see while driving the two kilometers [1.24 miles] from the main road into the Reserve and the research house were silent,” Strier said in an email. “We had heard about the yellow fever outbreak, so we were paying attention and anxious. But I think it is fair to say that none of us were fully prepared for the silence that we found.”

Brown howler monkeys are extremely susceptible to yellow fever, researchers say. An outbreak can even cause local extinctions, especially if the surviving populations of the monkeys are too small to recover. In 2008, for example, an outbreak of yellow fever killed most individuals of a small population of brown howler monkeys in Argentina.

The RPPN-FMA reserve could suffer a similar fate. The last census in 2003 estimated about 500 brown howler monkeys in the forest. Now, only a small fraction of these survive, the researchers say. Strier and her colleagues will have a more accurate estimate once they complete their surveys in a few weeks.

The speed with which the virus is spreading is very surprising, said Sergio Mendes, a professor of animal biology at the Federal University of Espírito Santo.

“I am very surprised at the speed with which the outbreak is advancing through the landscape and by how the virus can jump from one patch of forest to another, even if they are hundreds of meters apart,” Mendes said. “It is also surprising that it is spreading across such a large geographic region.”

But the monkeys are most likely not the culprits.

“We don’t have definitive answers, but we believe that contaminated mosquitoes can be carried from one forest to another by wind,” Mendes said. “Another hypothesis is the role of humans carrying the virus between more distant forests. Most humans are asymptomatic for yellow fever, but may have viruses circulating in their blood for a few days. For example, if people who has been contaminated travels from one forest to another, they may carry the virus in their blood and, if bitten by a mosquito from the forest, may introduce the virus into a new area. In addition, we can transport contaminated mosquitoes from one forest to another involuntarily in our cars and luggage. It is very important that people understand that the monkeys are not responsible for yellow fever,” Strier added. “Many of my colleagues are working hard to make sure this message is communicated to the public.”

Researchers like Strier and Mendes are also worried about another species of primate in the reserve: the muriqui (Brachyteles hypoxanthus), sometimes referred to as the “hippie” monkey for its easygoing lifestyle. Listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, the monkey is one of the most threatened primates in the world. The RPPN-FMS reserve has about 340 northern muriqui, representing one-third of the species’ total population.

Fortunately, the muriquis seem less susceptible to yellow fever than the howler monkeys. And with the howler monkeys disappearing from the reserve, the muriquis now occupy a forest devoid of their main competitors.

“We don’t know what this means yet for the muriquis,” Strier said. “It may give them more opportunities if there is more food available to them. Or it may be problematic because the forest could undergo changes without a major seed dispersing species. These are important questions that we are pursuing in new research.”

The current outbreak is also being touted as one of Brazil’s worst outbreak among humans in decades. As of March, officials have recorded more than 320 human cases of yellow fever, including 220 deaths, the Washington Post reported. Several additional cases are under investigation.

“The most effective way to prevent human deaths due to yellow fever is vaccination,” Strier said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a way to vaccinate the nonhuman primates.”

View full article at: https://news.mongabay.com/2017/03/yellow-fever-is-killing-howler-monkeys-in-brazil/

Kambalny volcano erupts

Video By: Liana Varavskaya, Pavel Postovoy & Konstantin Lepsky

Kambalny volcano erupts for 1st time since reign of Catherine the Great:

View full video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAC-Dv2nIE8&app=desktop

Another Tornado Record’s in Sight for U.S. as Thunderstorms Boom

Article By: Brian Sullivan

Another wave of tornado-spawning thunderstorms is set to rip across the Great Plains and South this week, putting the U.S. within reach of a record year for life-threatening twisters.

Severe storms will drench a swath of the country from Texas to Mississippi over the next five days, according to the U.S. Storm Prediction Center. Through Thursday, 369 tornadoes have been reported across the country, the most in five years and more than double the normal number of sightings.

An active jet stream and unusually balmy weather are to blame for the burst of deadly tornado activity, the storm prediction center said. Strong winds have dragged storms into the warm, humid air that’s blanketed the eastern half of the nation, creating conditions ripe for a weather phenomenon that leads to at least $400 million in damage a year in the U.S.

“We have a severe threat starting today and continuing for each of the next five days through at least Monday,” said Patrick Marsh, warning coordination meteorologist at the storm prediction center in Norman, Oklahoma. “Through mid-March, we are on a record or near-record pace.”

The atmospheric moisture across the southern U.S. in January was more typical of April, Marsh said. A confirmed tornado touched down in central Massachusetts in February, a first, while there was still snow on the ground. The peak of tornado season varies across the country. Activity is concentrated in the Southeast early in the year, drifting into the Great Plains’ “Tornado Alley” in May and June before heading into the Northeast by early summer.

The U.S. has more tornadoes than any other country, according to a report by Lloyd’s of London. The nation averages about 1,200 tornadoes a year, with the storms killing as many as 60 people and injuring 1,500, Lloyd’s said.

Tornado “outbreaks,” or storm systems that spin out multiple funnels in a limited time and area, are becoming more frequent in the U.S., according to study published in the journal Science in December. Still, the trend isn’t consistent from what some models predicted would result from global warming, the study found.

This could mean climate change isn’t having an impact on tornado numbers, or it may be because scientists just haven’t figured out what effect it’s having, lead author Michael Tippett, a senior research scientist at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society in Palisades, New York, said in the report.

Rising Costs
One thing’s for certain: Costs associated with tornado damages are rising as the number of people living in the path of twister-producing storms rises.

“Since 1980, losses due to severe thunderstorm events in the U.S., which includes tornadoes, hail and straight-line winds, have increased dramatically largely due to socioeconomic effects,” Mark Bove, a senior research meteorologist for Munich Reinsurance America Inc, said in an email.

The system pushing into the central U.S. may create more severe weather as it pushes east, said Bob Oravec, senior branch forecaster with the Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

“It definitely is going to have the potential for a multi-day event,” Oravec said.

And it could just be the first of several such systems, he said. Long-range models show the potential for a train of storms through the central U.S. for the next few weeks.

View full article at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-23/another-tornado-record-s-in-sight-for-u-s-as-thunderstorms-boom

Hackers threaten to wipe millions of iCloud accounts if Apple doesn’t pay up by 7 April – report

End Game is Revelation 13:16-18 (the mark)

Article By: Hyacinth Mascarenhas

Hackers are reportedly demanding $750,000 (£601,800) in ransom from Apple claiming they have access to over 300 million Apple email accounts. Going by the name “Turkish Crime Family,” the group of hackers have threatened to wipe the data of millions of users if Apple fails to pay up by 7 April.Motherboard reports the group has demanded a $750,000 ransom in either Bitcoin or Ethereum. They are also reportedly willing to accept $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards as payment.

“I just want my money and thought this would be an interesting report that a lot of Apple customers would be interested in reading and hearing,” one of the hackers told the site.

To prove their claims, members of the hacking group reportedly provided Motherboard with screenshots of alleged emails between the group and Apple’s security team and access to an email account reportedly used to communicate with the Cupertino company. The group is also said to have given the site a video, uploaded to YouTube, allegedly showing them browsing through a number of stolen iCloud accounts.

According to the emails allegedly exchanged between Turkish Crime Family and Apple, a member of the company’s security team asked them to take down the YouTube video:

“as it’s seeking unwanted attention” and said they “do not reward cyber criminals for breaking the law”.

The team member also warned that archived communications with the group would be sent to the authorities. However, the hacker group did not provide any proof of the cache’s existence or explain how they gained access to the stolen accounts, which allegedly includes iCloud and @me domains as well. Apple declined Motherboard’s request for comment.

Members of the group were also reportedly inconsistent about their claim with one of the hackers claiming they had 559 million accounts. The Turkish Crime Family Twitter account, however, claims 200 million iCloud accounts will be affected in the April cyberattack.

“We are a new organization,” the group wrote from a newly created Twitter account under the handle @turkcrimefamily. “The 7 April 2017 attack isn’t going to be our only one. This is just the start.”

IBTimes UK has reached out to the hacking group for comment.

“What we don’t know is whether the email exchanges between the hackers and Apple are real or faked, and – indeed – whether the so-called “Turkish Crime Gang” really has access to a large number of Apple users’ credentials,” security expert Graham Cluley wrote on Bitdefender’s Hot for security blog. However, if it’s true that the hackers are attempting to engage with the media in an attempt to increase their chances of a substantial payout then that would be in line with an increasingly common technique deployed by extortionists.”

View full article at: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/hackers-threaten-wipe-millions-icloud-101801427.html

Yahoo Says 1 Billion User Accounts Were Hacked

Article By: Vindu Goel & Nicole Perlroth

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo, already reeling from its September disclosure that 500 million user accounts had been hacked in 2014, disclosed Wednesday that a different attack in 2013 compromised more than 1 billion accounts. The two attacks are the largest known security breaches of one company’s computer network.

The newly disclosed 2013 attack involved sensitive user information, including names, telephone numbers, dates of birth, encrypted passwords and unencrypted security questions that could be used to reset a password. Yahoo said it is forcing all of the affected users to change their passwords and it is invalidating unencrypted security questions — steps that it declined to take in September.

It is unclear how many Yahoo users were affected by both attacks. The internet company has more than 1 billion active users, but it is not clear how many inactive accounts were hacked.

Yahoo said it discovered the larger hacking after analyzing data files, provided by law enforcement, that an unnamed third party had claimed contained Yahoo information. Security has taken a back seat at Yahoo in recent years, compared to Silicon Valley competitors like Google and Facebook. Yahoo’s security team clashed with top executives, including the chief executive, Marissa Mayer, over the cost and customer inconvenience of proposed security measures.

And critics say the company was slow to adopt aggressive security measures, even after a breach of over 450,000 accounts in 2012 and series of spam attacks — a mass mailing of unwanted messages — the following year.

“What’s most troubling is that this occurred so long ago, in August 2013, and no one saw any indication of a breach occurring until law enforcement came forward,” said Jay Kaplan, the chief executive of Synack, a security company. “Yahoo has a long way to go to catch up to these threats.”

Yahoo has made a steady trickle of disclosures about the 2014 hacking, which it has been investigating with the help of federal authorities. The company said Wednesday that it now believes the attacker in that breach, which it says was sponsored by a government, found a way to forge credentials to log into some users’ accounts without a password.

Bob Lord, Yahoo’s chief information security officer, said in a statement that the state-sponsored actor in the 2014 attack had stolen Yahoo’s proprietary source code. Outside forensics experts working with Yahoo believe that the state-sponsored hackers used Yahoo’s code to access user accounts without their passwords by creating forged “cookies,” short bits of text that a website can store on a user’s machine. By forging these cookies, attackers were able to impersonate valid users, gaining information and performing actions on behalf of their victims. The company has not disclosed who it believes was behind the attack.

In July, Yahoo agreed to sell its core businesses to Verizon Communications for $4.8 billion. Verizon said in October that it might seek to renegotiate the terms of the transaction because of the hacking, which had not been disclosed to Verizon during the original deal talks. After the latest disclosure Wednesday, a Verizon spokesman, Bob Varettoni, essentially repeated that position.

“As we’ve said all along, we will evaluate the situation as Yahoo continues its investigation,” he said. “We will review the impact of this new development before reaching any final conclusions.”

Mr. Lord said Yahoo had taken steps to strengthen Yahoo’s systems after the attacks. The company encouraged its users to change passwords associated with their Yahoo account and any other digital accounts tied to their Yahoo email and account.

In the hacking disclosed Wednesday, Mr. Lord said Yahoo believed an “unauthorized third party” managed to steal data from one billion Yahoo user accounts. Mr. Lord said that Yahoo had not been able to identify how the hackers breached Yahoo’s systems, but that the company believed the attack occurred in August 2013.

Changing Yahoo passwords will be just the start for many users. They will also have to comb through other services to make sure passwords used on those sites are not too similar to what they were using on Yahoo. And if they were not doing so already, they will have to treat everything they receive online, such as email, with an abundance of suspicion, in case hackers are trying to trick them out of even more information.

Yahoo recommended that its customers use Yahoo Account Key, an authentication tool that verifies a user’s identity using a mobile phone and eliminates the need to use a password on Yahoo altogether.

Security experts say the latest discovery of a breach that happened so long ago is another black mark for the company. “It’s not just one sophisticated adversary that gets in,” said Ben Johnson, co-founder and chief security strategist at Carbon Black, a security company.

“Typically companies get compromised multiple times due to the same vulnerability or employee culture.”

Mr. Johnson added that the scale of the breaches is only increasing as companies store more and more troves of information in similar databases. “When you have these huge databases of information, it’s millions — and now billions — of accounts lost,” he said.

View full article at: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/technology/yahoo-hack.html?_r=0&referer

Southwest Airlines doing away w/paper tickets in $800 million upgrade

Commentary By: Albert Mascheroni

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. – Revelation 13:16-17

View full post at: https://www.facebook.com/al.masch.50/posts/683703488476001

Commentary In Response to Article By: FoxNews.com

Southwest Airlines is going electronic. Starting in May a new reservation system will replace the paper tickets currently issued by the airline. Instead, Southwest will hand out electronic versions to those passengers traveling on employee guest passes. Changes won’t just be limited to inside the terminal. Outside on the tarmac, workers will soon receive tablets with real-time information which the company claims will allow employees to adequately address and potentially correct issues within minutes after an aircraft lands.

It’s all part of a new plan by the Dallas-based carrier to improve technology both on the airport ramp and throughout the flying experience. Southwest will be spending around $300 million to accommodate the new changes. That’s in addition to the $500 million the airline has already allocated to a new reservation system.

The investment marks the biggest technological update ever for the airline.

“We’re looking for minutes,” Mike Van de Ven, Southwest’s chief operating officer, told Bloomberg. “How do I save a minute here, a minute there? In 2017, we are more deliberate in our continuous improvement efforts.”

And save minutes, they will, if the new domestic reservation system the airline is planning to use works out as planned.

Following three decades of using the current system, the replacement equipment will allow Southwest to modify prices and schedules in a simpler way. It will also give the airline the same capability as other major U.S. airlines to both accept foreign dollars and recuperate quicker from storms. And, perhaps best of all for passengers in between flights, the technology will be able to improve the timing of flights for connecting passengers. The volume of which jumped 11 percent in the last five years.

Southwest anticipates recouping its investments by 2020.

View full article at: http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2017/03/21/southwest-airlines-doing-away-with-paper-tickets-in-800-million-upgrade.html?ref=yfp

People Are Panicking Over This Footage of a Woman Disappearing on Live TV

Article By: Cosmopolitan

Yesterday, you and I answered the question of how many girls are in this viral Instagram photo. Today, we are tasked with figuring out where a woman who seemingly disappeared on live television went. Though this one is slightly more challenging, I have faith in us. Let’s do this.

The video you see above is from the Danish version of Sports Center. As a man is being interviewed at the baggage claim of an airport, you can see a blonde woman in the back left corner speaking with another woman pushing a trolley. As the trolley woman walks away, the blonde woman vanishes. Go ahead, watch it a few times, let it marinate for a bit.

View full article & video at: https://www.yahoo.com/news/people-panicking-over-footage-woman-134955556.html

Iran hit by ‘divine retribution’ tsunami predicted by Mystic Rabbi

Luke 21:25

Post By: Israel News Online‏ @IsraelNewsOrg

View full post at: https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=tsunami+iran&src=typd