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Monday, September 30, 2013

Obamacare’s Latino Push May Give Democrats Political Edge




California Targets Latinos for Obamacare Enrollment
The battle over Obamacare is taking on political importance as Democrats hope a successful roll-out among Hispanics will further bind those voters to the Democratic Party and undermine Republican efforts to build more support before the 2016 presidential election.
Nayeli Cruz, a 21-year-old part-time college student from Oakland, left, said she can’t afford to see a doctor on her annual salary of about $20,000 since getting cut off from Medi-Cal a couple of months ago. She plans to sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Miguel Cajas, 55, a U.S. citizen who last year was diagnosed with a cancer of the blood cells, said while he’s considering enrolling in Obamacare coverage, he wants to make sure he’d get comparable benefits before dropping his current plan. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Attendees wait in line to speak with health care volunteers about affordable health care during the WeConnect Health Enrollment Information & Wellness Event in Oakland, California. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
In California, where Hispanics will outnumber whites within a year, backers of the Affordable Care Act are ramping up outreach in places like Richmond, a San Francisco Bay Area city whose population is almost 40 percent Hispanic and where about 18 percent of residents live below the poverty line.
“A lot of the long-term implications, partisanship-wise and electorally, are going to depend on how well the outreach does,” said Gabriel Sanchez, an associate professor of political science at the University of New Mexico.
Getting Latinos to enroll in Obamacare won’t be an easy task, said Dulce Delgadillo, 28, a research assistant at Harder+Company, a San Francisco-based community research firm.
“There is a general fear of government by that population,” Delgadillo said in an interview at an Oakland health fair. “And there is a huge gap in knowledge” about the law’s benefits.
Miguel Cajas, 55, a Peruvian-born truck driver from Richmond who is a U.S. citizen, pays $800 monthly for health coverage, making it tough to support his family of five on an income of $22,000 a year, he said.
Cajas last year was diagnosed with a cancer of the blood cells. While he’s pretty sure he’ll reduce his costs through Obamacare, he’s not so certain he’ll get the same level of care he receives now, he said.
Without the same benefits, and if the cancer comes back, “I’ll be in big trouble,” he said.

Texas, Florida

Hispanic voters backed Barack Obama over Republican challenger Mitt Romney 71 percent to 27 percent in 2012.
About 61 percent of Hispanics approve of the health-care law, compared with 29 percent of whites and 91 percent of blacks, according to a Pew Research Center and USA Today survey conducted Sept. 4-8. Hispanics will outnumber whites in California next year for the first time and will represent almost half of residents by 2060, the state’s Finance Department said in January.
Lack of knowledge about Obamacare continues to be a big issue among Hispanics, said Sanchez. They see the law as “complicated and confusing,” he said in a telephone interview.

Government Shutdown

A threatened U.S. government shutdown and a growing list of delays involving new exchanges may not make potential enrollees more confident. While the shutdown won’t stop the exchange roll-out, which is largely funded through mandatory appropriations that can’t be curtailed by congressional inaction, it’s an open question whether it will lessen public enthusiasm to enroll. In the meantime, technical glitches are beginning to surface.
People in Oregon, for example, won’t be able to enroll in a plan for the first few weeks unless they go through a broker or designated nonprofit groups, and the exchange in the nation’s capital won’t include premium prices until mid-November.
Nonetheless, such complications haven’t surfaced in California and Latinos “remain much more enthusiastic about the law than the general population,” Sanchez said.
“Ultimately, a large number of Latinos will enroll and they’ll overwhelmingly like it,” Gary Segura, a political science professor at Stanford University, said in an interview.
Mario H. Lopez, president of the Hispanic Leadership Fund, a Washington-based group advocating limited government, disagreed.

Opposing View

“There’s no question that Obamacare is a disastrous health-care policy for the entire country, including the Latino population,” Lopez said in a telephone interview. “The more you explain, the more people get it.”
The $1.4 trillion Affordable Care Act seeks to extend coverage to most of the nation’s 50 million uninsured. Coverage begins in January, and most people will be required to have public or private health coverage or pay the higher of 1 percent of their annual income or $95, a penalty that grows to 2.5 percent of income or $695 by 2016. A network of insurance exchanges where consumers can buy subsidized plans, the core part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, opens tomorrow.
Latinos represent 46 percent of the 2.6 million California residents eligible for subsidized coverage, said Santiago Lucero, a spokesman for Covered California, which runs the state insurance exchange.

Fanning Out

Community group representatives have been fanning out for weeks to farmers’ markets, job fairs and grocery stores across California to inform the public about the law as state insurance exchanges are scheduled to begin enrolling people tomorrow.
Shanti Jensen, a health educator who works for the Fresno-based California Health Collaborative, said she’s visited about two dozen events and talked to about 400 people after completing two days of training last month.
Her organization got a $940,000 grant from Covered California to get the word out to uninsured women.
Standing next to her booth at a farmer’s market in Richmond on Sept. 20, she asked passersby if they know of anyone who needs health insurance. She offered brochures in English and Spanish with a sign overhead that read “Informacion, coveredca.com.”
At the Oakland health fair, Nayeli Cruz, a 21-year-old part-time college student, said she can’t afford to see a doctor on her annual salary of about $20,000 since getting cut off from Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, a couple of months ago. She plans to sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

‘Constant Comfort’

“Mainly, for me it’s the constant comfort that in case I do get sick or my asthma acts up, I’ll be fine,” Cruz, who voted for Obama in 2012, said in an interview.
Genoveva Garcia Calloway is the mayor of San Pablo, a city about 20 miles from San Francisco whose population is 57 percent Hispanic. She said Obamacare in California will succeed.
“It might have its kinks to work out, but it’s not going to fail,” Garcia Calloway, 63, said in an interview at the Richmond farmer’s market. “There are just too many people who need this.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Alison Vekshin in San Francisco at avekshin@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Merelman at smerelman@bloomberg.net

Sunday, September 29, 2013

The Alien-Life Summit

The 1961 conference where brilliant scientists came together to discuss the search for ETs.


Recent headlines about alien life in our planet’s atmosphere have been shot down to earth. But scientists are still looking for messages from and signs of other civilizations among faraway stars—carrying on the tradition that started more than 50 years ago, when some of the era’s most brilliant scientific minds got together to discuss the astronomical possibilities.
In 1961, J.P.T. Pearman of the National Academy of Sciences approached astronomer Frank Drake to help convene a small, informal SETI conference at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Green Bank observatory. The core purpose of the meeting, Pearman explained, was to quantify whether SETI had any reasonable chance of successfully detecting civilizations around other stars.
Besides Drake and Pearman, three Nobel laureates attended. The other attendees were only slightly less celebrated. They included physicist Philip Morrison, who had co-authored a 1959 paper advocating a SETI program just like the one Drake undertook in 1960. A dark-haired and brilliant 27-year-old astronomy postdoc named Carl Sagan was, at the time, the youngest and arguably least distinguished name on the guest list.
A few days before the conference began, Drake tried to categorize the key pieces of information needed to estimate the number, N, of detectable advanced civilizations that might currently exist in our galaxy. Drake reasoned that the average rate of star formation in the Milky Way, R, placed a rough upper limit on the creation of new cradles for cosmic civilizations. Some fraction of those stars, fp, would actually form planets, and some number of those planets, ne, would be suitable for life. Some fraction of those habitable planets, fl, would actually blossom into living worlds, and some fraction of those living worlds, fi, would give birth to intelligent, conscious beings. The fraction of intelligent extraterrestrials that developed technologies that could communicate their existence across interstellar distances was fc, and the average longevity of a technological society was L.
When the conference opened on the morning of Nov. 1, 1961, after the guests were seated and sipping coffee, Drake wrote on a chalkboard: N = R fp ne fl fi fc L
That string of letters has come to be known as the “Drake equation.” Though Drake had intended it only to guide the next three days of the Green Bank meeting, the equation and its plausible values would come to dominate all subsequent SETI discussions and searches. At the meeting, it was the two final and most nebulous terms of Drake’s equation: fc, the fraction of intelligent creatures who would develop societies and technologies capable of interstellar communication, and L, the average longevity of an advanced technological civilization, that caused the most vigorous philosophical debate.
According to Morrison, history suggested that the emergence of technological societies might be a convergent phenomenon. The early civilizations of China, the Middle East, and the Americas all arose independently and generally followed similar lines of development. And yet their paths had ultimately diverged—the drivers of social change and technological progress were not at all clear. Despite China’s development of technologies such as gunpowder, compasses, paper, and the printing press hundreds of years before Europeans did, China experienced nothing equivalent to the colonization of the New World, the European Renaissance, and the successive scientific and industrial revolutions. Whether sending ships across oceans or messages among the stars, a society's ability to explore and expand appeared to be a matter not only of technological prowess, but also of choice. Whether any particular technological culture would ever attempt something as wild as interstellar communication seemed unpredictable.
The Green Bank attendees eventually guessed that between one-fifth and one-tenth of intelligent species would develop the capabilities and intentions to search for and signal other cosmic civilizations. That left only L, the typical lifetime of technological civilizations, for the group to consider.
Drake suspected that what really controlled the number of technological civilizations living in the cosmos was almost solely their longevity. The thought made Morrison shudder. He had worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II and had witnessed the detonation of the first atomic bomb. Humans had developed a global society, radio telescopes, and interplanetary rockets at roughly the same time as weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps all societies would proceed on similar trajectories, becoming visible to the wider cosmos at roughly the same moment they gained an ability to destroy themselves. In fact, Morrison estimated, if the average civilization endured only a decade before passing into oblivion, at any time there would most likely be only one communicative planetary system throughout the galaxy. One of the most compelling reasons to search for evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations, Morrison thought, would be to learn whether our own had a prayer of surviving its current technological adolescence.
Sagan attempted to counter the doomsaying, noting that we could not rule out some technological civilizations achieving global stability and prosperity either before or even after developing weapons of mass destruction. They might master their planetary environment and move on to exploit resources in the rest of their planetary system. Such a society could, in theory, persist for geological timescales of hundreds of millions or even billions of years, potentially lasting as long as its host star continued to shine. And if, somehow, that civilization managed to escape its dying sun and colonize other planetary systems ... well, perhaps then it would endure practically forever. Of all the attendees, Sagan was by far the most optimistic that technological civilizations could solve not only their many planetary problems, but also the manifold difficulties associated with interstellar travel. Somewhere out there, Sagan suggested, immortals passed their unending days amid the stars.
Drake’s best guess in 1961 walked the line between Morrison and Sagan: He speculated that L might be about 10,000 years, and that consequently perhaps 10,000 technological civilizations were scattered throughout the Milky Way along with our own. It was probably not coincidental that Drake’s personal estimate rendered the successful detection of alien civilizations still quite difficult but not entirely beyond our capabilities: By his reckoning, only 10 million stars would need to be monitored to obtain an eventual detection, though the search could take decades, even centuries.
At the conference’s end, as the guests drank Champagne, Otto Struve, the director of Green Bank observatory, offered up a toast: “To the value of L. May it prove to be a very large number.”
Adapted from Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings with permission of Current, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Lee Billings, 2013. Five Billion Years of Solitude is available Oct. 3.

What Undercover Boss and The Jetsons Tell Us About the Future of Jobs

By

 http://www.slate.com

In the early days of artificial intelligence research, it was commonplace for the well-educated academics in the field to (mistakenly) think that being “intelligent” meant being good at things that other well-educated academic researchers struggled at, like playing chess. We now know, however, that it's far harder to get robots to do things that come naturally to us (like identify objects and pick them up) than it is to get them to prove logical theorems or find patterns in huge volumes of data—things we humans struggle at. This and other counter-intuitive trends in AI and research on the nature of human intelligence have discouraged researchers from trying to predict which jobs will be automated, but a provocative new study by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne at Oxford University tries to do just that, and their findings are alarming.
In “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?,” Frey and Osborne estimate that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are “at risk” of being automated in the next 20 years. This does not mean that they necessarily will be automated (despite the way the study has been portrayed in some media outlets)—rather, the authors argue, it is plausible over the next two decades that existing and foreseeable AI technologies could be used to cost-effectively automate those jobs out of existence. Machines may not (and probably won't) do the jobs the same way as people, however—just remember the last time you used an automated check-out system at a grocery store. There’s a difference between machines doing something cheaply and doing it well. Frey and Osborne took into account the possibility of such “task simplification” in their analysis.
Which jobs are most at risk? According to The Jetsons, we should expect robots to clean our houses and do other working-class occupations that educated elites have historically looked down upon as “unskilled.” But anyone who has done such a job, or has watched an episode of Undercover Boss and seen highly-paid CEOs fumble while trying to carry out the demanding minimum wage jobs usually performed by their underlings, knows that there is no such thing as unskilled labor anymore (if there ever was), especially if you are comparing humans and machines in the same breath. The gap between humans and current AI is vastly greater than the differences between humans.
Frey and Osborne focus on “engineering bottlenecks” in AI and robotics, and compare these stumbling points with the requirements of jobs in order to determine which are most and least likely to be vulnerable to automation. The biggest bottlenecks are perception and manipulation, creative intelligence, and social intelligence, all of which computers struggle mightily at (but Rosie the Robot excelled at, by the way). While the trend in recent decades has been towards a hollowing out of “middle-skill” jobs and an increase in low-paying service sector jobs and high-paying, highly educated jobs, Frey and Osborne expect that automation in the future will mainly substitute for “low-skill and low-wage” jobs.
So who, specifically, should be worried? They write:
Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are at risk. These findings are consistent with recent technological developments documented in the literature. More surprisingly, we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations, where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades (Autor and Dorn, 2013), are highly susceptible to computerisation.
This may turn out to be correct, though I'd note two reservations I have. First, the model uses (in part) the notoriously unreliable subjective estimates of AI researchers to assign values to whether tasks can be automated or not, and second, it uses lists of job requirements, that the authors acknowledge are not written to assess whether a job can be easily automated. Indeed, job ads don't list things that are universal (or nearly so) across humans, such as rudimentary social intelligence, language understanding, and commonsense. As AI researcher Ernest Davis points out, there has been “only very limited progress” in equipping robots with commonsense reasoning skills.
What do the authors predict will happen to those whose jobs are automated out of existence? “Our findings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerisation–i.e., tasks requiring creative and social intelligence. For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills.” Besides Undercover Boss, one could also consult Mike Rose's excellent book The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker in order to lay to rest the notion that low wageworkers lack creative and social skills.
Still, Frey and Osborne are pointing toward a quite urgent and important issue: how we can best structure our education system and ensure ready access to retraining services so that everyone has a fair shot at thriving in the labor market of the future. And as Matthew Yglesias of Slate notes in his overview of Tyler Cowen's latest book on related issues, Average Is Over, various policy changes could enable more equitable social outcomes from the spread of intelligent machines we can expect this century.
However, let's keep in mind that technology does not proceed autonomously, detached from any human influence. It is our tax dollars that fund most of the basic research underlying automation technologies, humans are designing these systems, and consumers have at least some say in how well automated service technologies fare in the market. I can imagine, for example, that “made (or served) by humans” could be the “organic” or “fair trade” of the future. If we as a society collectively vote with our wallets for good customer service by real people, the future may just look different from the often gloomy predictions of science fiction. After all, if there's one thing humans will always be better at than machines, it's being human.

 Miles Brundage is a Ph.D. student in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology at Arizona State University.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

No. 2 US nuke commander suspended amid probe


Associated Press
This image provided by the U.S. Navy shows Navy Vice Adm. Tim Giardina in a Nov. 11, 2011, photo. The U.S. strategic Command, the military command in charge of all U.S. nuclear warfighting forces says it has suspended its No. 2 commander, Giardina, for unspecific reasons, and he is under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. (AP Photo/U.S. Navy)
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This image provided by the U.S. Navy shows Navy Vice Adm. Tim Giardina in a Nov. 11, 2011, photo. The …
WASHINGTON (AP) — The No. 2 officer at the military command in charge of all U.S. nuclear war-fighting forces has been suspended and is under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service for issues related to gambling, officials said Saturday.
The highly unusual action against a high-ranking officer at U.S. Strategic Command was made more than three weeks ago but not publicly announced.
Air Force Gen. Robert Kehler, who heads Strategic Command, suspended the deputy commander, Navy Vice Adm. Tim Giardina, from his duties on Sept. 3, according to the command's top spokeswoman, Navy Capt. Pamela Kunze. Giardina is still assigned to the command but is prohibited from performing duties related to nuclear weapons and other issues requiring a security clearance, she said.
Kehler has recommended to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that Giardina be reassigned, Kunze said. Giardina has been the deputy commander of Strategic Command since December 2011. He is a career submarine officer and prior to starting his assignment there was the deputy commander and chief of staff at U.S. Pacific Fleet.
Two senior U.S. officials familiar with the investigation said it is related to gambling issues. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the probe in incomplete.
Strategic Command oversees the military's nuclear fighter units, including the Navy's nuclear-armed submarines and the Air Force's nuclear bombers and nuclear land-based missiles. It is located near Omaha, Neb.
Kunze said Strategic Command did not announce the Sept. 3 suspension because Giardina remains under investigation and action on Kehler's recommendation that Giardina be reassigned is pending. The suspension was first reported by the Omaha World-Herald.
The spokeswoman said a law enforcement agency, which she would not identify, began an investigation of Giardina on June 16. Kehler became aware of this on July 16, and the following day he asked the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to begin a probe.
The suspension is yet another blow to the military's nuclear establishment. Last spring the nuclear missile unit at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., pulled 17 launch control officers off duty after a problematic inspection and later relieved of duty the officer in charge of training and proficiency. In August a nuclear missile unit at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., failed a nuclear safety and security inspection; nine days later an officer in charge of the unit's security forces was relieved of duty.

Friday, September 27, 2013

Mao's 'Little Red Book' to Be Reprinted



Communist dictator Mao Tse-tung's infamous Little Red Book--also known as Quotations from Chairman Mao--is the second most published book in history, second only to the Bible. Now, just in time for Christmas, Chinese readers will be able to purchase a new version in November to mark the 120th anniversary of Mao's birth. 

Scholars say the reintroduction of Mao's manifesto echoes China's leader Xi Jinping's embrace of Maoism.
"Xi believes in Maoism," political scientist Zhang Ming told The Guardian. "He wants to completely revive Mao's policy and he has already started it."
Mao's American fans also include former Obama White House communications chief Anita Dunn. In 2009, Dunn told an audience of high school students that Mao and Mother Theresa were "two of my favorite political philosophers" and were "the two people that I turn to most."
According to Mao scholars Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, "Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader."

Detroit eyes freezing pensions amid probe as evidence of possible fraud come to light


A group opposed to the appointment of an Emergency Manager for Detroit, as well as to his plans for the city, protest a public meeting held by Kevyn Orr, Detroit's Emergency Manager, in June. Detroit’s two retirement funds are underfunded by US$3.5-billion.
Bill Pugliano/Getty ImagesA group opposed to the appointment of an Emergency Manager for Detroit, as well as to his plans for the city, protest a public meeting held by Kevyn Orr, Detroit's Emergency Manager, in June. Detroit’s two retirement funds are underfunded by US$3.5-billion.


DETROIT — Detroit’s emergency manager proposed freezing pension benefits for some current city workers starting in 2014 and will launch a two-month probe into the city’s dysfunctional and error-prone handling of employee benefits.
A copy of Kevyn Orr’s proposal was released by one of Detroit’s two pension boards on Thursday, the same day the city’s auditors posted a report that shed light on how Detroit overpaid benefits, including unemployment compensation for almost two years to 58 people who never worked for the city.
The report also raised the question of whether there was fraud in doling out some unemployment claims. The auditors’ review of nearly two years of unemployment compensation claims found that 13% were likely fraudulent and another 36% were highly questionable and required investigation.
In his pension proposal, Orr, who was tapped by the state of Michigan in March to run its biggest city, would close the general retirement fund, which represents non-uniform city workers, to all future city workers and freeze it for current workers as of Dec. 31. The city would replace the pensions with 401(a) and 457(b) retirement plans.
Tackling the city’s pension overhang is a critical task for Orr, who is trying to restructure Detroit’s US$18.5-billion in debt and long-term liabilities after the city filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history on July 18.
The city’s financial problems have eroded residents’ quality of life. In a court order Thursday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes wrote that he has heard “truly disturbing accounts of the consequences of the City’s inability to provide basic services.”
Detroit’s two retirement funds are underfunded by US$3.5-billion, with US$2-billion of the liabilities coming from the General Retirement System, according to the actuarial firm Milliman, which has been hired by Orr.
The fund, which disagrees with Milliman’s calculations, was not consulted on the proposed changes to retirement benefits. Fund spokeswoman Tina Bassett said in a statement,
“We believe it is unseemly and disingenuous to present a proposal involving a new benefit structure that will affect the pensions of our members, beneficiaries and city employees not yet vested, without seeking our input, suggestions, knowledge and expertise,” Bassett said.
The two retirement funds are the city’s largest creditors and have filed objections to Detroit’s bankruptcy filing. The city is still in the process of proving it is eligible to file the Chapter 9 bankruptcy petition, and Rhodes will begin hearings on the issue next month.
Part of Orr’s strategy to address the city’s problems is to overhaul the outdated method by which Detroit tracks and manages unemployment, pension and medical payments. Thursday’s auditors’ report offered an early look at those missteps, which will be examined further in the second report.
The initial probe found that the pension plans were overly invested in real estate while policies on what constituted overtime varied department by department. Managing healthcare benefits involved keeping track of more than 10,000 deduction codes.
The seven-person budget office was overwhelmed by the task of administering healthcare benefits for more than 30,000 active and retired city workers.
“It was found to be an extremely labour intensive process that lacks good documentation, uniformity of processes and it is prone to errors,” the report said.
© Thomson Reuters 2013

White House to announce $300M in aid Friday to make Detroit safer, erase blight

8:40 PM, September 26, 2013   |  
Gene Sperling
Gene Sperling / Associated Press/Charles Dharapak
By Todd Spangler

Detroit Free Press Washington Staff

Other funding for Detroit expected to be unveiled at the summit

■ $150 million for blight removal and redevelopment, including $65 million in Community Development Block Grant money and a $25 million public-private partnership to demolish unused commercial structures.
■ $100 million in federal transit grants, including the immediate release of $24 million for bus repairs and security cameras.
■ $10 million for affordable housing funds.
■ $25 million to hire firefighters and purchase firefighting equipment.
WASHINGTON — Nearly $300 million in aid for Detroit — from federal and state coffers, private businesses and charitable foundations — will be announced Friday as Obama administration officials visit the city to discuss what can be done to help eradicate blight, improve transportation, encourage new business and make residents safer.
The funding will include $150 million in blight eradication and community redevelopment, including $65 million in Community Development Block Grant funding — which had already been awarded over two years but could not be accessed by the city. An additional $25 million could help hire as many as 150 firefighters in the city.
Some $24 million in federal resources that had been tied up will go to repairing buses and installing security cameras, part of an overall $140-million investment in transit systems. And several charitable groups — the Ford Foundation, Kresge Foundation and Knight Foundation — will put millions into spurring entrepreneurship and creating jobs.
Gene Sperling, the head of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council and an Ann Arbor native, briefed reporters on some the plans Thursday evening, saying Friday’s meeting at Wayne State University is “the first of many efforts that the administration will engage in with the city of Detroit.”
Many details were still to come out Friday.
“We’ve found significant resources that we believe can be unlocked and expedited and leveraged to have significant impact on the economy of Detroit,” Sperling said.
Gov. Rick Snyder, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and emergency manager Kevyn Orr — who on Detroit’s behalf filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in history in July — will be part of the talks with Sperling, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and Attorney General Eric Holder.
Representatives of local foundations and business leaders were expected to be present as well. Members of Michigan’s congressional delegation were expected to attend if they could break away from votes with a federal shutdown looming at midnight Monday without a funding resolution.
“If we’re not there we’ll teleconference,” said U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. “I think what is really important is there is an ongoing commitment from the administration.”
Sperling wasn’t immediately able to break down just how much of the $300 million represents new funding and how much had already been awarded to Detroit but, for whatever reason, hadn’t reached the city before. But he said much of it represented an effort by adminisitration officials to scour their departments for funding that Detroit could access.
For instance, in the case of $25 million to be used for firefighters, the funding, Sperling said, had “been accumulating for years” but could not be accessed. The $65 million in CDBG funding includes $33 million that had been withheld from the last fiscal year because the city did not meet required obligations to access it.
In recent weeks and months, local leaders — from former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer to UAW President Bob King — had visited the White House to talk about what could be done for Detroit, with a federal bailout out of the question.
Sperling said all of the parties have been working to find ways not only to make funds more flexible so they can be used where most needed, such as for demolition, but to figure out ways to ensure that the city has the proper planning and accounting systems to get the funding out to needed projects.
In the months to come, for instance, the White House’s chief technology officer is expected to lead a team of experts to Detroit to make recommendations on how to improve city systems, Sperling said.
“Detroit historically had some major problems deploying grants and other resources, and so there could be a fair amount sort of stuck in the pipeline,” said Snyder, who was in Washington on Thursday. “Financial systems, accounting systems for the city of Detroit? They are a disaster.”

Why are Americans giving up their citizenship?



US passports
The number of Americans giving up their citizenship has rocketed this year - partly, it's thought, because of a new tax law that is frustrating many expats.
Goodbye, US passport.
That's not a concept that Americans contemplate lightly. But it's one that many of them seem to be considering - and acting on.
The number of expatriates renouncing their US citizenship surged in the second quarter of 2013, compared with the same period the year before - 1,131 cases to 189 in 2012. It's still a small proportion of the estimated six million Americans abroad, but it's a significant rise.
The list is compiled by the Federal Register and while no reasons are given, the big looming factor seems to be tax.
A new law called the Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act (Fatca) will, from 1 July next year, require all financial institutions around the world to report directly to the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) all the assets and incomes of any US citizens with $50,000 (£31,000) on their books. The US could withhold 30% of dividends and interest payments due to the banks that don't comply.

Are you an ex?

  • Have you given up the citizenship of any country?
  • Tell us why, using the form at the bottom of the story
  • We will publish a selection
It's an attempt by the US authorities to recover an estimated $100bn a year in unpaid taxes on US citizens' assets overseas. Unlike other countries, Americans are taxed not only as residents of the US but also as citizens, wherever they live.
Suddenly, some expats are waking up in a cold sweat. They have always had to file tax returns and disclose foreign accounts on a form called the FBAR, although in practice many didn't. But now Fatca means they have to be more rigorous or face huge fines, in the knowledge that the US authorities could know a lot more than they have in the past.
Many would say the IRS is only trying to get what it is owed, but critics say that in trying to track down the wealthy tax-dodgers, ordinary people are being dragged into an expensive and time-consuming form-filling nightmare. And for some, it's become too much.

“Start Quote

Genevieve Besser
I used to be a flag-waving, patriotic citizen”
Genevieve Besser American in Germany
Bridget, who asked the BBC not to use her real name, gave up her US citizenship in 2011, 32 years after leaving for a new life in Scandinavia.
"This has nothing to do with avoiding taxes. I was never in danger of having to pay taxes in the US since I pay more here. The issue for me was that it was becoming harder and harder to follow the tax code and comply. It was difficult already but when I knew Fatca was coming, I thought, 'Do I want to go through with it anymore?'"
She felt threatened even if she did everything to fulfil her responsibilities, she says. A simple loyalty card at the local grocery store caused her anxiety when she realised it was linked to a bank account she never knew she had.
It became so complicated to do her tax return that she turned to professionals, at an annual cost of nearly $2,000 (£1,250), with the prospect of Fatca raising the price to $5,000. Also, fewer tax lawyers were taking on American clients, she says, and some banks were even turning away American money.
"In the end, I sleep better now knowing that I no longer have to worry about the US requirements. I will never be able to live or own property in the US but I can visit and that's enough for me."

Notable ex-Americans

  • Novelist Henry James
  • Director Terry Gilliam
  • Violinist Yehudi Menuhin
  • Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin
  • Socialite Denise Rich
Bridget, who runs an editing and translation company, says her strong emotional bond with the US has been frayed.
"I've enjoyed being an American even though I haven't lived there since I was young. I identified with America so I felt angry that I had to get to this point where it wasn't viable to keep my citizenship anymore.
"When you're an American living in America, it's one thing but when you live abroad in another country, in certain ways that feeling becomes even stronger because you realise that things that you think are individual characteristics are actually national ones so you identify even more strongly with your nationality.
"I used to always introduce myself as American but not now, although I will always be American in my heart even though I won't carry the passport. I will still celebrate Thanksgiving and 4 July."
She says the tax issue is the biggest topic of conversation among the expat Americans she knows. And tax lawyers in the US who deal with people living abroad say it has become a huge issue.

'I'm thinking about it'

  • "I used to be a flag-waving patriot who tried to be an informal ambassador of goodwill to her country," says Genevieve Besser, who has lived in Germany for 25 years and owes no US tax. "No longer. Thanks to Fatca, I'm wondering if I should renounce my US citizenship. The US must repeal Fatca and join the rest of the civilised world by switching to residence-based taxation."
  • Besser, who is self-employed, says her investment options are restricted, because most German banks will no longer open brokerage accounts for US citizens. She can't be joint owner of the house she shares with her German husband. Nor can she have signature authority over their retirement savings account because, she says, the bank would close the account.
  • "A property that was bought and sold at the same euro price during a period when the euro strengthened relative to the dollar would generate a 'phantom' profit - and a tax liability to the US government, even though I would have no benefit from it," she says. "Fatca is an arrogant piece of legislation that penalises US citizens for living abroad and violates the two principles of law: 'innocent until proven guilty' and 'the punishment should fit the crime'."
"I'm all for people paying their taxes, but it's very expensive to follow the letter of the law," says David Kuenzi, founder of Thun Financial Advisors, which specialises in helping Americans abroad with tax issues.
"Some people are spending $4,000-$5,000 a year to do their tax return only to find out they don't owe anything to the US."
Fatca has only created a little additional reporting for individuals, says Kuenzi, but it has generated a fear that the IRS will have full knowledge of people's assets. So reporting suddenly has to be assiduous, accurate and complete for every passport-holding American.
"You have very wealthy people hiding their assets and not paying their taxes and that's an outrage. Something should be done about it, but this reaction has created a terrible imposition on every American living abroad and it's way over the top," he says.
Foreign banks do not seem happy about it either, and Senator Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican, has introduced a bill seeking to remove aspects of the law related to data-sharing.

“Start Quote

Victoria Ferauge
I don't know any Americans abroad who aren't thinking about giving it up”
Victoria Ferauge American in France
But the US Treasury is standing firmly behind the new law. In a statement on its website, Robert Stack, deputy assistant secretary for international tax affairs, rebuts certain "myths".
"Fatca provisions impose no new obligations on US citizens living abroad... US taxpayers, including US citizens living abroad, are required to comply with US tax laws," he says​.
"Individuals that have used offshore accounts to evade tax obligations may rightly fear that Fatca will identify their illicit activities. Yet a decision to renounce US citizenship would not relieve these individuals of prior US tax obligations."
Those who have joined the ex-American club, or are thinking about it, say this is not about tax evasion.
Victoria Ferauge, 47, is married to a Frenchman and has lived abroad for nearly 20 years, primarily in France. If her adopted country finally agrees to Fatca then she wonders what the implications will be.
"Are my bank accounts going to be closed? Is my husband going to be forced to take my name off the accounts?"
Ferauge is unemployed and recovering from breast cancer so she doesn't have any income. She has paid nearly $1,000 to accountants this year but will have to get more expensive help next year.
With strong ties to the Pacific Northwest, and two parents to visit there, the Seattle-born 47-year-old would rather not renounce her citizenship.
"I don't know any Americans abroad who aren't thinking about giving it up but what I say to myself is that I will fight as long and as hard as I can.
"And it's only when I've exhausted all options that I will make that appointment with the US embassy."
But others said no matter what the tax hardship, they would never switch nationalities. Being an American, said one, was more important.
Have you given up the citizenship of any country? Tell us why, using the form below. We will publish a selection.

Russia, China Hold Large-Scale War Games

NATO to counter with E. European war games in November
Russian Army Engineering tanks drive near the Baikal Lake on July 17 / AP
Russian Army Engineering tanks drive near the Baikal Lake on July 17 / AP
BY:

Pentagon intelligence agencies are closely watching Russian and Chinese war games now taking place in Europe and Asia involving tens of thousands of troops.
Meanwhile, NATO military forces are set to conduct large-scale maneuvers in November that will be designed to counter growing concerns of a westward Russian military encroachment, according to U.S. officials.
“The Russians are moving forces closer to Europe, and that is troubling,” said a military official.
Russia’s Zapad-13 military exercises in Belarus are scheduled to end Thursday. They included practice attacks on a western state, said one official familiar with reports of the maneuvers.
Some 13,000 Russian and Belarusian troops took part with over 60 aircraft and helicopters and up to 250 vehicles.
The forces practiced “rapid reaction” drills.
Russian officials recently denied Polish press reports that the Zapad-13 would include a notional nuclear attack on Warsaw. However, Russian officials have said the war games will involve practicing precision air and missile strikes.
On the Russian air base, Russian air force chief Lt. Gen. Vladimir Bondarev announced in June that the air base for Su-27 jets in Belarus would be opened near the city of Lida, near the border with Poland and Lithuania.
Bondarev said the warplanes would bolster a 1997 defense agreement between the two countries in response to NATO expansion.
It will be Russia’s first military base in Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and along with it the Warsaw Pact, in 1991. Moscow currently has military bases in Armenia, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has moved away from democracy and shifted the former Soviet republic away from Europe and toward Russia, restoring many symbols from Soviet Belarus.
In response to Polish press reports on the simulated nuclear strike on Poland’s capital, state-run Interfax news agency in April denied the reports. “Claims that West 2013 will allegedly practice a preventive nuclear strike on Warsaw are nothing but imagination of Polish journalists,” a high-ranking officer was quoted as saying.
Belarusian Deputy Defense Minister Maj. Gen. Pyotr Tsikhanowski said in June, “The theme of the exercise is the training and the engagement of troops in order to ensure the military security of the Union State [of Belarus and Russia].” New weapons and military equipment will be tested during the exercises, he added.
War game scenarios include an “escalation of relations with countries based on interethnic, interreligious differences, and territorial claims,” he said.
“At the same time, the conflicting states are hypothetically located within the actual borders of Belarus and the three western and northwestern regions of Russia,” Tsikhanowski said.
U.S. military officials said the war games are part of a larger Russian effort to use military power to bolster its position in the former Soviet republics with a larger military presence.
Russia also has a ballistic missile warning radar at Baranovichi, Belarus, and a Navy communications facility used to communicate with Russian submarines. Moscow also supplied Belarus with advanced S-300 missile defenses and Tor-M2 surface-to-air missiles.
The exercises drew criticism from Eastern European NATO governments.
“Russia has officially stated that these are anti-terrorism exercises,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Juozas Olekas told AFP. “But the number of participants and amount of military equipment indicates that that this is not their agenda.”
Senior Estonian military official Lt. Col. Eero Rebo said: “The Kremlin claims that the exercise is about fighting terrorism, but based on the information we have on Zapad 2013, the exercise has an anti-West agenda.”
“If you look at the Baltic sea region, the strategic balance has been changing quite drastically in the last decade, and not in our favor,” Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks said Friday.
“We are concerned because we see such large-scale exercises in context,” he added. NATO approved special defense plans for Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which have a combined population of just over six million, in 2010.
NATO will hold an Eastern European exercise in November called Steadfast Jazz in the Baltic region and Poland with around 6,000 NATO troops.
The alliance claims the exercises from Nov. 2 to Nov. 9 are not aimed at Russia.
“For the past 10 to 12 years we have become incredibly proficient at the counter-insurgency mission that we have been fighting in Afghanistan,” NATO’s military commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, told reporters in Brussels Sept. 18.
To defend an alliance state, “we have to be prepared for the more high end of military operations,” he said, according to Reuters.
The exercise scenario will involve NATO forces ousting a foreign invader that Breedlove denied was a hypothetical counterstrike to a Russian invasion.
Meanwhile in China, Chinese military forces are engaged in large-scale exercises involving some 40,000 troops.
The People’s Liberation Army announced its “Mission Action 2013” began Tuesday.
Troops from the Nanjing and Guangzhou military regions and air forces were set to take part.
The PLA troops will conduct maneuvers over large areas using military ground vehicles, trains, ships, and aircraft to test forces for “real war” conditions.
The exercises will include coordination between military and civilian assets, including civilian jets and trains to transport forces, according to state-run Chinese press reports.
Chinese aircraft taking part in the war games include jet fighters, bombers, and other aircraft.
The exercise also will seek to boost Chinese combined arms warfare capabilities that integrate air, naval, and ground forces for long-distance fighting, joint air defense, and joint warfighting on unfamiliar terrain.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

flying saucer pictures











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Flying saucer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Flying saucer (disambiguation).

An alleged flying saucer seen over Passaic, New Jersey in 1952
A flying saucer (also referred to as a flying disc) is a type of described flying craft with a disc or saucer-shaped body, commonly used generically to refer to any anomalous flying object. In 1947 the term was coined but was later officially supplanted by the United States Air Force in 1952 with the broader term unidentified flying objects or UFO's . Early reported sightings of unknown "flying saucers" usually described them as silver or metallic, sometimes reported as covered with navigation lights or surrounded with a glowing light, hovering or moving rapidly, either alone or in tight formations with other similar craft, and exhibiting high maneuverability.
While disc-shaped flying objects have been interpreted as being sporadically recorded since the Middle Ages, the first highly publicized sighting by Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947, resulted in the creation of the exact term by U.S. newspapers. Although Arnold never specifically used the term "flying saucer", he was quoted at the time saying the shape of the objects he saw was like a "saucer", "disc", or "pie-plate", and several years later added he had also said "the objects moved like saucers skipping across the water." Both the terms flying saucer and flying disc were used commonly and interchangeably in the media until the early 1950s.
Arnold's sighting was followed by thousands of similar sightings across the world. Such sightings were once very common, to such an extent that "flying saucer" was a synonym for UFO through the 1960s before it began to fall out of favor. More recently, the flying saucer has been largely supplanted by other alleged UFO-related vehicles, such as the black triangle.[citation needed] The term UFO was, in fact, invented in 1952, to try to reflect the wider diversity of shapes being seen. However, unknown saucer-like objects are still reported, such as in the widely publicized 2006 sighting over Chicago-O'Hare airport.
Many of the alleged flying saucer photographs of the era are now believed to be hoaxes. The flying saucer is now considered largely an icon of the 1950s and of B-movies in particular, and is a popular subject in comic science fiction.[1]
Beyond the common usage of the phrase, there have also been man-made saucer-like craft. The first flying disc craft was called the Discopter and was patented by Alexander Weygers in 1944. Other designs have followed, such as the American Vought V-173 / XF5U "Flying Flapjack", the British GFS Projects flying saucer, or the British "S.A.U.C.E.R." ("Saucer Aircraft Utilising Coanda Effect Reactions") flying saucer, by inventor Alf Beharie.

Sightings


News notice printed in Nuremberg, describing the 4th April 1561 Nuremberg mass sighting. Discs and spheres were said to emerge from large cylinders. From Wickiana collection in Zurich.
A manuscript illustration of the 10th-century Japanese narrative, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, depicts a round flying machine similar to a flying saucer.[2][3]
A record of a saucer-shaped object is from 1290 of a silver disc flying over a village in Yorkshire.[4] Disc-like flying objects were occasionally reported throughout the millennium. For example, in a mass sighting over Nuremberg in 1561, discs and spheres were reported emerging from large cylinders. (woodcut at left) They are also claimed by ufologists to frequently show up in religious artwork.[5][6]
Possibly the first well-documented instance to specifically compare the objects to saucers, and the first to be widely reported, was the Kenneth Arnold sighting on June 24, 1947, while Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier.[4] He reported seeing 9 brightly reflecting vehicles, one shaped like a crescent but the others more disc- or saucer-shaped, flying in an echelon formation, weaving like the tail of a kite, flipping and flashing in the sun, and traveling with a speed of at least 1,200 miles per hour (1,900 km/h).[7] In addition to the saucer or disc shape (Arnold also used the terms "pie plate" and half-moon shaped), he also later said he described the motion of the craft as "like a saucer if you skip it across water", leading to the term "flying saucer" and also "flying disc" (which were synonymous for a number of years).
Immediately following the report of, hundreds of sightings of usually saucer-like objects were reported across the United States and also in some other countries. The most widely publicized of these was the sighting by a United Airlines crew on July 4 of nine more disc-like objects pacing their plane over Idaho, not far from Arnold's initial sighting. On July 8, the Army Air Force base at Roswell, New Mexico issued a press release saying that they had recovered a "flying disc" from a nearby ranch, the so-called Roswell UFO incident, which was front-page news until the military issued a retraction saying that it was a weather balloon.
On July 9, the Army Air Force Directorate of Intelligence, assisted by the FBI, began a secret study of the best of the flying saucer reports, including Arnold's and the United Airlines' crew. Three weeks later they issued an intelligence estimate describing the typical characteristics reported (including that they were often reported as disc-like and metallic) and concluded that something was really flying around. A follow-up investigation by the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, Ohio arrived at the same conclusion. A widespread official government study of the saucers was urged by General Nathan Twining. This led to the formation of Project Sign (also known as Project Saucer) at the end of 1947, the first public Air Force UFO study. This evolved into Project Grudge (1949–1951) and then Project Blue Book (1952–1970).
The term "flying saucer" quickly became deeply ingrained in the English vernacular. A Gallup poll from August 1947 found that 90% had heard about the mysterious flying saucers or flying discs, and a 1950 Gallup poll found that 94% of those polled had heard the term, easily beating out all other mentioned commonly used terms in the news such as "Cold War", "universal military training", and "bookie."
Air Force statistics indicated that the basic saucer-shape continued to be the most commonly reported one through the 1950s and 1960s until Project Blue Book ended in 1970. There have been some claims, still undocumented by scientific study, that reports of saucers began to decline in the 1970s, being supplanted by other craft such as black triangles, cylinders, and amorphous shapes. It has also been asserted that despite the increase in portable cameras, photographs dwindled as Cold War and Space Race interest decreased and a number of notable images were exposed as fakes.[citation needed]

Explanations


A lenticular cloud. Studies show such clouds account for less than 1% of flying saucer reports.
In addition to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, a variety of possible explanations for flying saucers have been put forward. One of the most common states that most photos of saucers were hoaxes; cylindrical metal objects such as pie tins, hubcaps and dustbin lids were easy to obtain, and the poor focus seen in UFO images makes the true scale of the object difficult to ascertain.[citation needed] However, some photos and movies were deemed authentic after intensive study. An example was the saucer-like object photographed by farmer Paul Trent near Portland, Oregon in 1950, which passed all tests when studied by the Condon Committee in the 1960s.[8]
Another theory states that most are natural phenomena such as lenticular clouds and balloons, which appear disc-like in some lighting conditions.[9]
A third theory puts all saucer sightings down to a form of mass hysteria. Arnold described the craft he saw as saucer-like but not perfectly round (he described them as thin, flat, rounded in front but chopped in back and coming to a point), but the image of the circular saucer was fixed in the public consciousness. The theory posits that as the use of the term flying saucer in popular culture decreased, so too did sightings.[10]
However, one Air Force commissioned study contradicted some of these contentions. A scientific and statistical analysis of 3200 Air Force cases by the Battelle Memorial Institute from 1952 to 1954 found that most were indeed due to natural phenomena, about 2% were due to hoaxes or psychological effects and only 0.4% were thought due to clouds. Other very minor contributors were birds, light phenomena such as mirages or searchlights, and various miscellany such as flares or kites. The vast majority of identified objects (about 84%) were explained as balloons, aircraft, or astronomical objects. However, about 22% of all sightings still defied any plausible explanation by the team of scientists, and percentage of unidentifieds rose to 33% for the best witnesses and cases. Thus when carefully studied, a substantial fraction of reports (given the available data) is currently not understood.

Fata Morgana (mirages) and flying saucers

Main article: Fata Morgana (mirage)

Fata Morgana of distant islands distorted images beyond recognition
Fata Morgana, a type of mirage, may be responsible for some flying saucers sightings, by displaying objects located below the astronomical horizon hovering in the sky, and magnifying and distorting them.
Similarly some unidentifieds seen on radar might also be due to Fata Morgana-type atmospheric phenomena, though more technically known as "anomalous propagation" and more commonly as "radar ghosts". Official UFO investigations in France suggest:
As is well known, atmospheric ducting is the explanation for certain optical mirages, and in particular the arctic illusion called "fata morgana" where distant ocean or surface ice, which is essentially flat, appears to the viewer in the form of vertical columns and spires, or "castles in the air."
People often assume that mirages occur only rarely. This may be true of optical mirages, but conditions for radar mirages are more common, due to the role played by water vapor which strongly affects the atmospheric refractivity in relation to radio waves. Since clouds are closely associated with high levels of water vapor, optical mirages due to water vapor are often rendered undetectable by the accompanying opaque cloud. On the other hand, radar propagation is essentially unaffected by the water droplets of the cloud so that changes in water vapor content with altitude are very effective in producing atmospheric ducting and radar mirages.
Fata Morgana was named as a hypothesis for the mysterious Australian phenomenon Min Min light[11]

Earth-based examples


The Avrocar, a one-man flying saucer style aircraft
The first documented patent for a lenticular flying machine was submitted by Romanian inventor Henri Coanda.[citation needed] He made a functional small scale model which was flown in 1932 and a patent was granted in 1935 [12] At a Symposionum organized by the Romanian Academy in 1967 Coanda said:
"These airplanes we have today are no more than a perfection of a toy made of paper children use to play with. My opinion is we should search for a completely different flying machine, based on other flying principles. I consider the aircraft of the future, that which will take off vertically, fly as usual and land vertically. This flying machine should have no parts in movement. The idea came from the huge power of the cyclons" [13]
Other attempts have been made, with limited success, to produce manned vehicles based on the flying saucer design. While some, such as the Avrocar and M200G Volantor have been produced in limited numbers, most fail to leave the drawing board. The Avrocar, with vertical takeoff and landing, was originally intended to replace both the Jeep and the helicopter in combat situations, but proved to be inadequate for both. In spite of a powerful turbojet, it could not rise more than four or five feet off the ground, i.e., out of ground effect.[14] Thus, the Avrocar could be seen as a prototype for the early generations of hovercraft, lacking only a 'skirt' to make it a truly effective example of the type. Unmanned saucers have had more success; the Sikorsky Cypher is a saucer-like UAV which uses the disc-shaped shroud to protect rotor blades.
Some more advanced flying saucers capable of spaceflight have been proposed, often as black projects by aeronautics companies. The Lenticular Reentry Vehicle was a secret project run by Convair for a saucer device which could carry both astronauts and nuclear weapons into orbit; the nuclear-powered system was planned in depth, but is not believed to have ever flown. More exotically, British Rail worked on plans for the British Rail "Space Vehicle" a proposed, saucer-shaped craft based on so far undiscovered technologies such as nuclear fusion and superconductivity, which was supposed to have been able to transport multiple passenger between planets, but never went beyond the patent stage.[1]
There is at least one design that received a US patent in 2005: U.S. Patent 6,960,975 It claims to be "propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state".
Additionally, a professor at the University of Florida has begun work on a Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle (WEAV) for NASA which has received public interest because of its coincidental resemblance to a flying saucer.[15][16][17]

In popular culture


A small flying saucer leaves its larger mothership in Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Long before the Kenneth Arnold sighting of 1947 and the adoption of the term "flying saucer" by the press, spacecraft of human or alien origin were often illustrated as classic flying saucers in the popular press, dating back to at least 1911.[18]
After 1947, the flying saucer quickly became a stereotypical symbol of both extraterrestrials and science fiction, and features in many films of mid-20th century science fiction, including The Atomic Submarine, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, as well as the television series The Invaders. As the flying saucer was surpassed by other designs and concepts, it fell out of favor with straight science-fiction movie makers, but continued to be used ironically in comedy movies, especially in reference to the low-budget B movies which often featured saucer-shaped alien craft.
MGM, however, gave its high production value 1956 film Forbidden Planet a flying saucer called the United Planets Cruiser C-57D, presenting a plausible human exploration, faster-than-light starship of the 23rd century.
In the TV show Lost in Space, the Robinson family had a disc-shaped space ship.
The saucer design did, however, make a temporary comeback on the television series Babylon 5 as the standard ship design used by a race called the Vree, described in the series as one of Earth's long-standing allies who had visited Earth in the distant past, and who bore a strong resemblance to the "Greys".
Aliens in the film Independence Day attacked humanity in giant city-sized saucer-shaped space ships.
The sleek, silver flying saucer in particular is seen as a symbol of 1950s culture; the motif is common in Googie architecture and in Atomic Age décor.[19] The image is often invoked retrofuturistically to produce a nostalgic feel in period works, especially in comic science fiction; both Mars Attacks![20] and Destroy All Humans![21] draw on the flying saucer as part of the larger satire of 1950s B movie tropes.
The Twilight Zone episodes "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", "Third from the Sun", "Death Ship", "To Serve Man", "The Invaders" and "On Thursday We Leave for Home" all make use of Forbidden Planet's iconic saucer.

McMinnville UFO photographs

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One of the McMinnville UFO photographs
The McMinnville UFO photographs were taken on a farm near McMinnville, Oregon, in 1950. The photos were reprinted in Life magazine and in newspapers across the nation, and are often considered to be among the most famous ever taken of a UFO. The photos remain controversial, with many ufologists claiming they show a genuine, unidentified object in the sky, while many UFO skeptics claim that the photos are a hoax.

The incident

At 7:30 p.m. on May 11, 1950, Evelyn Trent was walking back to her farmhouse after feeding rabbits on her farm. Mrs. Trent and her husband Paul lived on a farm approximately nine miles from McMinnville (closer to Sheridan, Oregon).[1] Before reaching the house she claimed to see a "slow-moving, metallic disk-shaped object heading in her direction from the northeast."[1] She yelled for her husband, who was inside the house; upon leaving the house he claimed he also saw the object. After a short time he went back inside their home to obtain a camera; he managed to take two photos of the object before it sped away to the west. Paul Trent's father claimed he briefly viewed the object before it flew away.[1]

Publicity and investigation

It took some time for Paul Trent to have the film developed, and he apparently sought no publicity immediately following the incident. When he mentioned the incident to his banker, Frank Wortmann, the banker was intrigued enough to display the photos from his bank window in McMinnville.[2] Shortly afterwards Bill Powell, a local reporter, convinced Mr. Trent to loan him the negatives. Powell examined the negatives and found no evidence that they were tampered with or faked. On June 8, 1950, Powell's story of the incident—accompanied by the two photos—was published as a front-page story in the local McMinnville newspaper, the Telephone-Register. The headline read: "At Long Last—Authentic Photographs Of Flying Saucer[?]" The story and photos were subsequently picked up by the International News Service (INS) and sent to other newspapers around the nation, thus giving them wide publicity. Life magazine published cropped versions of the photos on June 26, 1950, along with a photo of Trent and his camera.[3] The Trents had been promised that the negatives would be returned to them; however, they were not returned—Life magazine told the Trents that it had misplaced the negatives.[2]
In 1967 the negatives were found in the files of the United Press International (UPI), a news service which had merged with INS years earlier. The negatives were then loaned to Dr. William K. Hartmann, an astronomer who was working as an investigator for the Condon Committee, a government-funded UFO research project based at the University of Colorado Boulder.[4] The Trents were not immediately informed that their "lost" negatives had been found. Hartmann interviewed the Trents and was impressed by their sincerity; the Trents never received any money for their photos, and he could find no evidence that they had sought any fame or fortune from them.[5] In Hartmann's analysis, he wrote to the Condon Committee that "This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical, appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses."[6]
After Hartmann concluded his investigation he returned the negatives to UPI, which then informed the Trents about them. In 1970 the Trents asked Philip Bladine, the editor of the News-Register (the successor of the Telephone-Register), for the negatives; the Trents noted that they had never been paid for the negatives and thus wanted them back. Bladine asked UPI to return the negatives, which it did. However, for some reason Bladine never told the Trents that the negatives had been returned.[4] In 1975 the negatives were found in the files of the News-Register by Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an optical physicist for the U.S. Navy and a ufologist. Maccabee did his own extensive analysis of the negatives and concluded that they were not hoaxed and showed a "real, physical object" in the sky above the Trent's farm.[7] He then ensured that the negatives were finally returned to the Trents.
In the 1980s two UFO skeptics, Philip J. Klass and Robert Sheaffer, argued that the photos were faked, and that the entire event was a hoax.[8] Their primary argument was that shadows on a garage in the left-hand side of the photos proved that the photos were taken in the morning rather than in the early evening, as the Trents had claimed.[9] Klass and Sheaffer argued that since the Trents had apparently lied about the time the photos were taken, their entire story was thus suspect. Klass and Sheaffer also argued that the Trents had shown an interest in UFOs prior to their sighting, and their analysis of the photos indicated that the object photographed was small and likely a model hanging from power lines visible at the top of the photos. They also believed the object may have been the detached rear-view mirror of a vehicle.[9] When Sheaffer sent his studies on the case to William Hartmann, Hartmann withdrew the positive assessment of the case he had sent to the Condon Committee. However, Maccabee offered a rebuttal to the Klass-Sheaffer theory by arguing that cloud conditions in the McMinnville area on the evening of the sighting could have caused the shadows, and that a close analysis of the UFO indicated that it was not suspended from the power lines and was in fact located some distance above the Trent's farm; thus, in his opinion, the Klass-Sheaffer explanation was flawed.[10]
In April 2013, three researchers with IPACO posted two studies to their website entitled "Back to McMinnville pictures" and "Evidence of a suspension thread."[11] They used proprietary computer software designed to analyze UFO photos by François Louange, who previously has done image analysis for NASA, the European Space Agency, and GEIPAN. They concluded the geometry of the photographs is most consistent with a small model with a hollow bottom hanging from a wire, though no thread was detected. Further investigation, however, detected the presence of a thread, and the study concluded: "the clear result of this study was that the McMinnville UFO was a model hanging from a thread."
In August 2013, UFO researcher Brad Sparks posted a rebuttal regarding the IPACO McMinnville UFO studies in which he stated that the studies contained multiple foundation measurement inconsistencies. An example of this was IPACO applying and working with a 5 inch diameter for the UFO [in the McMinnville photos] in some instances, and also applying and working with a 6 inch diameter for it in others. Sparks argued that certain measurements within the studies were manipulated whenever they proved unable to support the "UFO-model-hanging-by-a-string" hoax hypothesis. [12]

Aftermath

Today, the McMinnville UFO photographs remain among the best-publicized in UFO history; and are among the most-discussed and debated. To many ufologists, the two photos rate as being among the most reliable and persuasive in arguing for the existence of UFOs as a "real," physical phenomenon. To many skeptics, however, the photos are likely hoaxes and/or fakes. Evelyn Trent died in 1997 and Paul Trent in 1998; they both insisted to their deaths that their sighting, and the photos, were genuine. The interest surrounding the Trent UFO photos led to an annual "UFO Festival" being established in McMinnville; it is now the largest such gathering in the Pacific Northwest, and is the second-largest UFO festival in the nation after the one held in Roswell, New Mexico.

Antônio Vilas Boas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Antonio Vilas Boas
Biography
Born 1934
Brazil
Died 1991 (aged 56–57)
Alleged abduction
Status Single Abductee
First abduction date October 16, 1957
Location São Francisco de Sales, Brazil
Taken from Open Fields
Antônio Vilas-Boas (in many English sources misspelled "Villas-Boas") (1934–1991) was a Brazilian farmer who claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials in 1957. Though similar stories had circulated for years beforehand, Vilas Boas' claims were among the first alien abduction stories to receive wide attention.[1][2]

Vilas-Boas' story

At the time of his alleged abduction, Antônio Vilas-Boas was a 23-year-old Brazilian farmer who was working at night to avoid the hot temperatures of the day.[3] On October 16, 1957, he was ploughing fields near São Francisco de Sales when he saw what he described as a "red star" in the night sky. According to his story, this "star" approached his position, growing in size until it became recognizable as a roughly circular or egg-shaped aerial craft, with a red light at its front and a rotating cupola on top. The craft began descending to land in the field, extending three "legs" as it did so. At that point, Boas decided to run from the scene.
According to Boas, he first attempted to leave the scene on his tractor, but when its lights and engine died after traveling only a short distance, he decided to continue on foot.[4] However, he was seized by a 1.5 m (five-foot) tall humanoid, who was wearing grey coveralls and a helmet. Its eyes were small and blue, and instead of speech it made noises like barks or yelps. Three similar beings then joined the first in subduing Boas, and they dragged him inside their craft.

Antônio Vilas Boas is located in Brazil
Location of São Francisco de Sales, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Once inside the craft, Boas said that he was stripped of his clothes and covered from head-to-toe with a strange gel. He was then led into a large semicircular room, through a doorway that had strange red symbols written over it. (Boas claimed that he was able to memorize these symbols and later reproduced them for investigators.) In this room the beings took samples of Boas' blood from his chin. After this he was then taken to a third room and left alone for around half an hour. During this time, some kind of gas was pumped into the room, which made Boas become violently ill.
Shortly after this, Boas claimed that he was joined in the room by another humanoid. This one, however, was female, very attractive, and naked. She was the same height as the other beings he had encountered, with a small, pointed chin and large, blue catlike eyes. The hair on her head was long and white (somewhat like platinum blonde) but her underarm and pubic hair were bright red.[5] Boas said he was strongly attracted to the woman, and the two had sexual intercourse. During this act, Boas noted that the female did not kiss him but instead nipped him on the chin.
When it was all over, the female smiled at Boas, rubbing her belly and gestured upwards.[6] Boas took this to mean that she was going to raise their child in space.[6] The female seemed relieved that their "task" was over, and Boas himself said that he felt angered by the situation, because he felt as though he had been little more than "a good stallion" for the humanoids.[7]
Boas said that he was then given back his clothing and taken on a tour of the ship by the humanoids. During this tour he said that he attempted to take a clock-like device as proof of his encounter, but was caught by the humanoids and prevented from doing so. He was then escorted off the ship and watched as it took off, glowing brightly. When Boas returned home, he discovered that four hours had passed.[8]
Antonio Vilas Boas later became a lawyer, married and had four children.[8] He stuck to the story of his alleged abduction for his entire life.[9] Though some sources say he died in 1992, he died on January 17, 1991.[10] [11]

Investigation

Following this alleged event, Boas claimed to have suffered from nausea and weakness, as well as headaches and lesions on the skin which appeared with any kind of light bruising. Eventually, he contacted journalist Jose Martins, who had placed an ad in a newspaper looking for people who had had experiences with UFOs. Upon hearing Boas' story, Martins contacted Dr. Olavo Fontes of National School of Medicine of Brazil; Fontes was also in contact with the American UFO research group APRO. Fontes examined the farmer and concluded that he had been exposed to a large dose of radiation from some source and was now suffering from mild radiation sickness. Writer Terry Melanson states:
Among [Boas's] symptoms were 'pains throughout the body, nausea, headaches, loss of appetite, ceaselessly burning sensations in the eyes, cutaneous lesions at the slightest of light bruising...which went on appearing for months, looking like small reddish nodules, harder than the skin around them and protuberant, painful when touched, each with a small central orifice yielding a yellowish thin waterish discharge.' The skin surrounding the wounds presented 'a hyperchromatic violet-tinged area.'[3]
According to Researcher Peter Rogerson, the story first came to light in February, 1958, and the earliest definite print reference to Boas's story was from the April–June 1962 issue of the Brazilian UFO periodical SBESDV Bulletin. Rogerson notes that the story had definitely circulated between 1958 and 1962, and was probably recorded in print, but that details are uncertain.
Boas was able to recall every detail of his purported experience without the need for hypnotic regression. Further, Boas' experience occurred in 1957, which was still several years before the famous Hill abduction which made the concept of alien abduction famous and opened the door to many other reports of similar experiences.
Researcher Peter Rogerson, however, doubts the veracity of Boas's story. He notes that several months before Boas first related his claims, a similar story was printed in the November 1957 issue of the periodical O Cruzeiro, and suggests that Boas borrowed details of this earlier account, along with elements of the contactee stories of George Adamski. Rogerson also argues:
One reason why the [Boas] story gained credibility was the prejudiced assumption that any farmer in the Brazilian interior had to be an illiterate peasant who 'couldn't make this up'. As Eddie Bullard pointed out to me, the fact that the Villas Boas family possessed a tractor put them well above the peasant class ... We now know that AVB was a determinedly upwardly mobile young man, studying a correspondence course and eventually becoming a lawyer (at which news the ufologists who had considered him too much the rural simpleton to have made the story up, now argued that he was too respectable and bourgeois to have done so).[12]

The Trindade Island's UFO

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A photograph of the supposed U.F.O. taken by Almiro Baraúna. The object is the small gray dot just to the right of the image center.
The Trindade Island's U.F.O. refers to a unidentified flying object which was seen and photographed over the Trindade Island on January 16, 1958. The photographs were rumored as being a hoax. In August 2010, a major T.V. show in Brazil aired information stating that the original photographer had made "hoax" photographs in the past. To date, the authenticity of the photograph remains a mystery.

The story

At 12:00 p.m. on January 16, 1958, Brazilian ship Almirante Saldanha, taking part in projects of the International Geophysical Year, was preparing to sail away from Ilha de Trindade, off the coast of the state of Espírito Santo.
Among the crew of the ship, there was a member of the Brazilian Air Force, Captain José Teobaldo Viegas, the submarine photographer Almiro Baraúna, several scientists and a group of highly trained explorers.
Reportedly Captain Viegas was on the deck with several scientists and members of the crew when he suddenly noticed a flying object, which had a "ring" around it, just like Saturn. Witnesses present reportedly saw the U.F.O. at the same time.
It reportedly came toward the island from the east, flew towards the "Pico Desejado" (Wished Peak), made a steep turn and went away very quickly to the north-west.
As soon as the object was noticed, Almiro Baraúna was sought for photography. After getting the camera and going up the quarter-deck, he managed to take several pictures of the object.
After being disclosed, the pictures were exhaustively analyzed by the Laboratório de Reconhecimento Aéreo da Marinha (Brazilian Navy's Aerial Reconnaissance Laboratory) and by the Serviço Aerofotogramétrico Cruzeiro do Sul. All the pictures were considered genuine, taken from a real occurrence, with the certification of military personnel. The pictures even received confirmation from Juscelino Kubitschek, president of Brazil at that time.
To this day because of the certification of the witnesses and the official recognition, the object in Almiro Baraúna's pictures remains unexplained.
In 2010, a document containing a testimonial by Baraúna was unveiled:[1]
On January 16, 1958, the Navy training ship "Almirante Saldanha" was moored at a bay in Trindade Island, some eight hundred miles off the coast of Espírito Santo. It was around 11:00 a.m., the sky was clear and the crew was getting ready to return to Rio de Janeiro when suddenly a group of people at the stern, among them the retired Força Aérea Brasileira captain-aviator José Viegas, alerted everyone. Instantly, all who were in the deck (some fifty people) started to see a strange, silver, saucer-shaped object moving above the sea towards the island. The object didn't make any sound, was shiny and sometimes it moved quickly, then slowly, up and slightly down and when it accelerated, it would leave a white phosphorescent trail that would disappear shortly. In its trajectory, the object disappeared behind the Desejado Peak and all expected it to reappear on the other side of the island, it reappeared from the same direction, stopped for some seconds and then disappeared again with great speed at the horizon. At first, when the object returned, I was able to take six pictures, two of which were lost due to the confusion at the deck, and the other four showed the object on the horizon, in a reasonable sequence, approaching the island from the mountain's side, and finally disappearing, going away. I took the film from my camera twenty minutes later following the commander's request, who wanted to know if the pictures had good quality. Almost the entire crew of the ship saw the film and they were unanimous in their reports to the Secret Service of the Brazilian Navy. These were the crew of the ship:
Chief Amilar Vieira Filho, banker, diver and athlete; Vice-chief: retired Força Aérea Brasileira captain-aviator José Viegas; Divers: Aluizio and Mauro; Photographer: Almiro Baraúna.
The group above was part of a group of spearfishing from Icaraí. Among the five members, only Mauro and Aluizio didn't see the object because they were at the ship's kitchen and when they ran to see it, it was already gone. According to the rumors I heard at the deck, the electronic equipment of the ship stopped working during the apparition of the object; what I can confirm is that after the ship left the island, the equipment malfunctioned three more times and the officials didn't have any plausible explanation for what was happening. Every time the ship stopped, the lights weakened slowly until the point they completely went out. When this happened, the officials would walk to the deck with their binoculars, however, the sky was clouded and they couldn't see anything. I need to say that if the reporter of the newspaper Correio da Manhã hadn't been smart enough to take copies of the pictures offered to then president Juscelino Kubitscheck, maybe no one would ever be aware of this pictures since the Navy had "marked" me, asking how much did I want not to publicize the pictures. I would like to make it clear that every official with whom I had contact during all the period of the interrogation were quite lovely with me, I felt completely comfortable and they didn't impose any objection to the possible unveiling of the case. they only mentioned that the sensationalist nature of the case could cause panic among the population and that was the reason the Brazilian Air Force wanted to avoid the publicizing of such cases

Controversy

Other investigators of the case have questioned the authenticity of the photos. Project Blue Book (the controversial U.S. Air Force investigation into the U.F.O. phenomenon) concluded that the photographs were hoaxed. The credibility of Barauna himself has been questioned. He had produced hoaxed photographs in the past (not only of U.F.O.s) and in the past had written an article showing how a well-known U.F.O. photograph taken some years earlier could have been hoaxed. Also, Barauna had the negatives for two days before the Brazilian Navy took them from him for their investigation, and he had cut them away from the remainder of the film negatives. Also, the Brazilian Navy did not get statements from the witnesses immediately after the event. Therefore, the actual number of witnesses is not known with certainty.[2]

See also