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A federal judge has ruled in favor of a public university that removed a Christian student from its graduate program in school counseling over her belief that homosexuality is morally wrong. Monday’s ruling, according to Julea Ward’s attorneys, could result in Christian students across the country being expelled from public university for similar views.
“It’s a very dangerous precedent,” Jeremy Tedesco, legal counsel for the conservative Alliance Defense Fund, told FOX News Radio. “The ruling doesn’t say that explicitly, but that’s what is going to happen.”
U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh dismissed Ward’s lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University. She was removed from the school’s counseling program last year because she refused to counsel homosexual clients.
The university contended she violated school policy and the American Counseling Association code of ethics.
“Christian students shouldn’t be expelled for holding to and abiding by their beliefs,” said ADF senior counsel David French. “To reach its decision, the court had to do something that’s never been done in federal court: uphold an extremely broad and vague university speech code.”
Eastern Michigan University hailed the decision.
“We are pleased that the court has upheld our position in this matter,” EMU spokesman Walter Kraft said in a written statement. “Julea Ward was not discriminated against because of her religion. To the contrary, Eastern Michigan is deeply committed to the education of our students and welcomes individuals from diverse backgrounds into our community.”
In his 48-page opinion, Judge Steeh said the university had a rational basis for adopting the ACA Code of Ethics.
“Furthermore, the university had a rational basis for requiring students to counsel clients without imposing their personal values,” he wrote in a portion of his ruling posted by The Detroit News. “In the case of Ms. Ward, the university determined that she would never change her behavior and would consistently refuse to counsel clients on matters with which she was personally opposed due to her religious beliefs – including homosexual relationships.”
Ward’s attorneys claim the university told her she would only be allowed to remain in the program if she went through a “remediation” program so that she could “see the error of her ways” and change her belief system about homosexuality.
The case is similar to a lawsuit the ADF filed against Augusta State University in Georgia. Counseling student Jennifer Keeton was allegedly told to stop sharing her Christian beliefs in order to graduate.
Keeton’s lawsuit alleged that she was told to undergo a reeducation program and attend “diversity sensitivity training.”
University officials declined to comment on specifics of the lawsuit but released a statement to FOX News that said Augusta State does not discriminate on the basis of students’ moral, religious, political or personal beliefs.
Tedesco said both cases should be a warning to Christians attending public colleges and universities.
“Public universities are imposing the ideological stances of private groups on their students,” he said. “If you don’t comply, you will be kicked out. It’s scary stuff and it’s not a difficult thing to see what’s coming down the pike.”
The Alliance Defense Fund told FOX News it will appeal the ruling.
- Prophecy News Watch
A day before Arizona’s tough new immigration law was scheduled to take effect, a nonpartisan research group reported that population growth in developed countries like the U.S. has “essentially peaked” and that what little growth remains will mostly come from immigration from developing countries.
The Population Research Bureau said in a report released today that the rate of increase over the next four decades “depends largely on future trends in international migration.” It said that the current population of 310 million could increase to 399 million, 423 million or 458 million by 2050, depending on immigration trends and, by extension, immigration laws, over the next 40 years.
The group’s 2010 World Population Data Sheet defined low net immigration at 1.1 million to 1.8 million per year and high immigration at a range of 1.5 million to 2.4 million per year.
Apart from immigration, the graying of the baby boom generation, which has started to reach retirement age, will contribute to the rapid aging of the population, the group said.
The annual report on world population comes as the U.S. completes its decennial census and confirms a continuing global trend toward an older world. It noted that many countries face a shrinking pool of working-age populations, those ages 15 to 64, to support those over 65, a worrisome trend that jeopardizes pension and health care entitlement programs for the elderly, including Social Security and Medicare in the U.S.
In 1950, the group said, there were 12 persons of working age for every person age 65 or older worldwide. By 2010, that number had shrunk to nine. By 2050, there is projected to be just one working-age person for every four old people. In the U.S., that means total spending on Social Security and Medicare will soar from today’s level of 8.4 percent of GDP to 12.5 percent in 2030.
The bureau attributed the world’s aging population to improved health, increased access to education and economic growth that has led to lower birth rates and longer life expectancy in every region and across socioeconomic groups.
Nearly all of the growth in global population, now at 6.9 billion, came from developing countries, where mortality rates are falling.
“There are two major trends in world population today,” said Bill Butz, the group’s president. “On the one hand, chronically low birth rates in developed countries are beginning to challenge the health and financial security of their elderly. On the other, the developing countries are adding over 80 million to the population every year. and the poorest of those countries are adding 20 million, exacerbating poverty and threatening the environment.”
Europe is likely to be the first region in history to suffer long-term population decline because of low birth rates, mostly due to smaller families in Eastern Europe and Russia, the report said. Japan and South Korea also are producing fewer babies. Japan has a fertility rate of 1.4 children per woman and a worker-to-elderly ratio of 3-to-1 — the lowest in the world. By 2050, Japan will have only one working-age adult for every elderly person; Germany and Italy will each have two.
By contrast, population in the developing world is booming. Africa’s population is projected to double to 2 billion by 2050. It has a total fertility rate of 4.7 children per woman. Nine of the 10 countries with the youngest populations are in Africa, with Niger leading the list, with more than half the population under the age of 15. Afghanistan, with 45.9 percent under age 15, comes in as the seventh youngest country.
The report projects that India will overtake China as the world’s most populous country by 2050. China currently leads with 1.3 billion people to India’s 1.2 billion. By 2050, India is expected to have 1.7 billion people to 1.4 billion in China, which has had a one-child-per-family policy for more than 30 years.
To illustrate the stark population differences between the developed and developing worlds, the bureau noted that even though Ethiopia and Germany have almost the same population today, the African nation is projected to more than double its size from 85 million to 174 million in 2050. Germany’s population will likely decline from 82 million to 72 million over that same period. The difference? Ethiopia’s women have a fertility rate of 5.4, four times greater than Germany’s rate of 1.3.
Watch our Islamic Demographics YouTube video here for more on the impact of shifting demographics and Islam:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpvq7GjqP18 [go to Prophecy News Watch.Com to view video]
- Prophecy News Watch
Now that another Middle East war seems imminent, concerns are growing about the new powerful weapons that are available to Palestinian terrorists. It appears to be virtually unknown that these weapons are being steadily supplied by Putin’s Russia. In the present atmosphere of the everlasting “reset” of relations between the U.S. and Russia, it is not difficult for the Kremlin to camouflage its arming of terrorists. Indeed, the world is willing to turn a blind eye.
This month, for instance, Russia announced it was making another gift to the “Palestinian security forces” on the West Bank: 50 armored vehicles. According to Russia’s Foreign Ministry earlier this month, the gift was already in Jordan and about to be passed on to the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). It was President Medvedev who made this decision which, the Kremlin says, will help the development of a Palestinian statehood.
The Russian spokesmen made much of the fact that the actual weapons had been removed from the vehicles. However, this does not make them as harmless as Moscow hoped to suggest. Not long before, Israel saw a wave of so-called “bulldozer terrorist attacks.” Palestinians hijacked bulldozers working on Jerusalem construction sites and went to the city streets ramming buses and cars. The terrorists were from the West Bank or East Jerusalem. Some observers at the time described those attacks as evidence of Israeli success in the war against terrorism. Suicide bombers, they pointed out, couldn’t penetrate Israel’s borders and the bulldozers were their last resort. And the “bulldozer terrorists” left far less dead and wounded than usual “martyrs” — even though the figures are of little comfort to the victims.
Owing to Russia’s generosity, the terrorists are getting a new chance for success as now they will be able to hijack armored vehicles. The kill potential of these vehicles is by no means less than of bulldozers; their maneuver capability and speed are better and they can bypass Israeli checkpoints on rolling terrain or simply ram into border crossings — which are not impenetrable fortresses.
Officially, like the U.S. and many other countries, Russia supports the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank led by Mahmoud Abbas, not Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It’s difficult to say why anybody would consider Abbas and his Fatah Party, founded by Yasser Arafat, a partner to make business with. Arafat was the Godfather of Terror and within almost six years after his death, Fatah has never distanced itself from the founding father’s ideas. However, in line with the custom to look for “hawks” and “doves” everywhere, while Fatah’s twin brother Hamas is internationally called a “radical movement,” Fatah is considered to be “moderate.”
Still, Russia’s relations with Hamas blossom just as well. The Hamas leaders are received at the highest levels in Moscow and at popular sea resorts like Sochi. In January, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin told the Security Council that the purpose of Moscow’s contacts with Hamas was to persuade its leaders to take steps towards Palestinian reunification. Without unity on the platform of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) it is very difficult to create the Palestinian state, he stressed. Churkin also explained that Moscow worked with all Palestinian sides in order to train officers for the Palestinian security forces, as well as to give Palestinians government scholarships in order to educate them in Russian universities. Admittedly, the education Russia is providing to the Palestinians is certainly working — as demonstrated, for example, by the recent success of “Palestinian engineers from Gaza” who managed to produce home-made rockets of longer range to shell Israeli cities. Russia’s education of Palestinians can truly work wonders.
The main beneficiary of Russian arms supplies, meanwhile, appears to be Hezbollah in Lebanon. The terrorist organization controlling the south of Lebanon is supported by Syria and Iran, who are willing to supply it with any kind of weapons. With both Hezbollah sponsors being customers of the Russian weapons industry, a large part of Hezbollah’s ample arsenal is Russian-made. In April, Israeli President Shimon Peres accused Syria of supplying Hezbollah with Russian-made Scud missiles. Those type of missiles were used by Saddam Hussein against the US-led coalition forces in 1991, and they are ever since considered not very effective because of their low accuracy. But while they may be ineffective against an advancing army, they would be very dangerous against densely populated areas in Israel — and that is how Hezbollah is certainly planning to use them. The missiles have a longer range than any other rocket Hezbollah has used before and they can reach any location in the Jewish state. Hezbollah officials have readily confirmed that they are in possession of new types of weapons and will continue their rearmament. They have stressed that Hezbollah’s arsenals “do not compare” with those of the U.S. and Israel, but they emphasize their right to buy whatever they find necessary to “protect” Lebanon and they stress they will be able to hit Tel Aviv in the case of war.
Although Defense Secretary Robert Gates has warned that Hezbollah has more rockets and missiles than most governments, American officials have avoided mentioning Syria during any war of words — and nobody ever mentions Russia.
While Syria denies arming Hezbollah with Scuds, the history of Syria supplying Hezbollah with Russian-made weapons is well-documented. Israeli tanks were shelled with Russian-made Kornet anti-tank missiles during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah militants also used Russian-made RPG-29 rocket launchers. Israeli troops seized terrorists’ armory, where they found cases with missiles and launchers with invoices identifying the sender as the Defense Ministry of Russia and the receiver as the Defense Ministry of Syria. At that time, Russian media openly boasted about the Russian military hardware used in Lebanon, and gloated over Israeli losses — 54 Merkava tanks.
Although the invoices provided real “smoking gun” evidence, Syria still made a usual attempt of a whitewash. Syrian Ambassador to Moscow Hassan Rishah claimed Hezbollah had never used Russian weapons supplied to Syria and that Damascus had never sponsored Hezbollah. The blame was placed on the free market and globalization, which allowed Hezbollah to purchase any arms.
The war in Southern Lebanon ended in August 2006 by UN Security Council resolution #1701, which included an arms embargo on Lebanon, except for transfers authorized by the Lebanese government or the U.N. In 2008, Russia, with no requests from Beirut, offered Lebanon 15 MiG-29 supersonic fighters as a gift. Lebanese authorities, although grateful, seemed confused as they couldn’t find an airfield where they could put the present. They never found a place to place the fighter and finally asked Moscow to choose a different gift. In March 2010, Russia decided that the gift would be a dozen of Mi-24 (Hind) battle helicopters, all heavily armed and armored. With Hezbollah representatives acting in the Lebanese government, and Lebanon’s President hailing Hezbollah as a “stronghold of Lebanon’s security,” there is little doubt that Hezbollah will have access to those helicopters in the next war. The helicopters have serious ground-attack capabilities and will pose a serious threat to Israel.
It is high time to hold Russia to account for its steady efforts to stir up trouble in the Middle East by arming terrorist organizations.
- Prophecy News Watch
The recent decoding of a cryptic cup, the excavation of ancient Jerusalem tunnels, and other archaeological detective work may help solve one of the great biblical mysteries: Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
The new clues hint that the scrolls, which include some of the oldest known biblical documents, may have been the textual treasures of several groups, hidden away during wartime—and may even be “the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple,” which held the Ark of the Covenant, according to the Bible.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more than 60 years ago in seaside caves near an ancient settlement called Qumran. The conventional wisdom is that a breakaway Jewish sect called the Essenes—thought to have occupied Qumran during the first centuries B.C. and A.D.—wrote all the parchment and papyrus scrolls.
But new research suggests many of the Dead Sea Scrolls originated elsewhere and were written by multiple Jewish groups, some fleeing the circa-A.D. 70 Roman siege that destroyed the legendary Temple in Jerusalem.
“Jews wrote the Scrolls, but it may not have been just one specific group. It could have been groups of different Jews,” said Robert Cargill, an archaeologist who appears in the documentary Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls, which airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel.
The new view is by no means the consensus, however, among Dead Sea Scrolls scholars.
“I have a feeling it’s going to be very disputed,” said Lawrence Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University (NYU).
Dead Sea Scrolls Written by Ritual Bathers?
In 1953, a French archaeologist and Catholic priest named Roland de Vaux led an international team to study the mostly Hebrew scrolls, which a Bedouin shepherd had discovered in 1947.
De Vaux concluded that the scrolls’ authors had lived in Qumran, because the 11 scroll caves are close to the site.
Ancient Jewish historians had noted the presence of Essenes in the Dead Sea region, and de Vaux argued Qumran was one of their communities after his team uncovered numerous remains of pools that he believed to be Jewish ritual baths.
His theory appeared to be supported by the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, some of which contained guidelines for communal living that matched ancient descriptions of Essene customs.
“The scrolls describe communal dining and ritual bathing instructions consistent with Qumran’s archaeology,” explained Cargill, of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Dead Sea Scrolls: “Great Treasure From the Temple”?
Recent findings by Yuval Peleg, an archaeologist who has excavated Qumran for 16 years, are challenging long-held notions of who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Artifacts discovered by Peleg’s team during their excavations suggest Qumran once served as an ancient pottery factory. The supposed baths may have actually been pools to capture and separate clay.
And on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion, archaeologists recently discovered and deciphered a two-thousand-year-old cup with the phrase “Lord, I have returned” inscribed on its sides in a cryptic code similar to one used in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
To some experts, the code suggests that religious leaders from Jerusalem authored at least some of the scrolls.
“Priests may have used cryptic texts to encode certain texts from nonpriestly readers,” Cargill told National Geographic News.
According to an emerging theory, the Essenes may have actually been Jerusalem Temple priests who went into self-imposed exile in the second century B.C., after kings unlawfully assumed the role of high priest.
This group of rebel priests may have escaped to Qumran to worship God in their own way. While there, they may have written some of the texts that would come to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Essenes may not have abandoned all of their old ways at Qumran, however, and writing in code may have been one of the practices they preserved.
It’s possible too that some of the scrolls weren’t written at Qumran but were instead spirited away from the Temple for safekeeping, Cargill said.
“I think it dramatically changes our understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls if we see them as documents produced by priests,” he says in the new documentary.
“Gone is the Ark of the Covenant. We’re never going to find Noah’s Ark, the Holy Grail. These things, we’re never going to see,” he added. “But we just may very well have documents from the Temple in Jerusalem. It would be the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple.”
Dead Sea Scrolls From Far and Wide?
Many modern archaeologists such as Cargill believe the Essenes authored some, but not all, of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Recent archeological evidence suggests disparate Jewish groups may have passed by Qumran around A.D. 70, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, which destroyed the Temple and much of the rest of the city.
A team led by Israeli archaeologist Ronnie Reich recently discovered ancient sewers beneath Jerusalem. In those sewers they found artifacts—including pottery and coins—that they dated to the time of the siege. (Related: “Underground Tunnels Found in Israel Used In Ancient Jewish Revolt.”)
The finds suggest that the sewers may have been used as escape routes by Jews, some of whom may have been smuggling out cherished religious scrolls, according to Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Importantly, the sewers lead to the Valley of Kidron. From there it’s only a short distance to the Dead Sea—and Qumran.
The jars in which the scrolls were found may provide additional evidence that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of disparate sects’ texts.
Jan Gunneweg of Hebrew University in Jerusalem performed chemical analysis on vessel fragments from the Qumran-area caves.
“We take a piece of ceramic, we grind it, we send it to a nuclear reactor, where it’s bombarded with neutrons, then we can measure the chemical fingerprint of the clay of which the pottery was made,” Gunneweg says in the documentary.
“Since there is no clay on Earth with the exact chemical composition—it is like DNA—you can point to a specific area and say this pottery was made here, that pottery was made over here.”
Gunneweg’s conclusion: Only half of the pottery that held the Dead Sea Scrolls is local to Qumran.
Scroll Theory “Rejected by Everyone”
Not everyone agrees with the idea that Dead Sea Scrolls may hail from beyond Qumran.
“I don’t buy it,” said NYU’s Schiffman, who added that the idea of the scrolls being written by multiple Jewish groups from Jerusalem has been around since the 1950s.
“The Jerusalem theory has been rejected by virtually everyone in the field,” he said.
“The notion that someone brought a bunch of scrolls together from some other location and deposited them in a cave is very, very unlikely,” Schiffman added.
“The reason is that most of the [the scrolls] fit a coherent theme and hang together.
“If the scrolls were brought from some other place, presumably by some other groups of Jews, you would expect to find items that fit the ideologies of groups that are in disagreement with [the Essenes]. And it’s not there,” said Schiffman, who dismisses interpretations that link some Dead Sea Scroll writings to groups such as the Zealots.
UCLA’s Cargill agrees with Schiffman that the Dead Sea Scrolls show “a tremendous amount of congruence of ideology, messianic expectation, interpretation of scripture, [Jewish law] interpretation, and calendrical dates.
“At the same time,” Cargill said, “it is difficult to explain some of the ideological diversity present within some of the scrolls if one argues that all of the scrolls were composed by a single sectarian group at Qumran.”
Caves Were for Temporary Scroll Storage?
If Cargill and others are correct, it would mean that what modern scholars call the Dead Sea Scrolls are not wholly the work of isolated scribes.
Instead they may be the unrecovered treasures of terrified Jews who did not—or could not—return to reclaim what they entrusted to the desert for safekeeping.
“Whoever wrote them, the scrolls were considered scripture by their owners, and much care was taken to ensure their survival,” Cargill said.
“Essenes or not, the Dead Sea Scrolls give us a rare glimpse into the vast diversity of Judaism—or Judaisms—in the first century.”
- Prophecy News Watch
The Russian security service has been given extended powers to act against people for so-called “thought crime” under a new law which opponents say marks a return to Soviet-era policing.
The bill, criticised by rights groups, would allow the Federal Security Service (FSB) to issue official warnings to individuals whose actions are deemed to be creating the conditions for crime.
Rights groups say the bill would essentially put the special service above the law and harks back to Soviet times when the much-feared FSB predecessor KGB used warnings to persecute dissidents.
The bill had already sailed through the lower and upper houses of parliament and was today signed into law by the Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev.
The opposition says the FSB security service is already extremely powerful and empowering it further would contravene Mr Medvedev’s pledge to liberalise Russia.
In response to protests from human rights activists, lawmakers earlier removed an amendment allowing the FSB to summon people to their offices to hand out the warnings and also publish their warnings in the media.
Earlier this month, Mr Medvedev launched a staunch defence of the law, saying its aim was to improve Russian legislation and had been drawn up on his personal orders.
“Every country has a right to fine-tune its legislation, including in respect to special services,” he said. “And what is happening today – I would like you to know that – has been done on my direct instructions.”
Under the 2000-2008 presidency of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, the FSB dramatically increased its influence over Russian society.
Human rights activists had hoped his successor Mr Medvedev, a lawyer by training without a KGB past, would put the special services in check.
But Medvedev’s critics say the Kremlin chief has promoted only cosmetic reforms and Russians have not become freer under his rule.
- Prophecy News Watch
In March 1989, six million Quebecers lost power for nine hours after a massive solar flare—an explosion of magnetic energy from the sun—created electric ground currents here on Earth, collapsing the power grid. Another geomagnetic storm, in 1921, brought ground currents 10 times as strong. But the fiercest one ever recorded, called the Carrington Event of 1859, electrified telegraph lines—even setting telegraph papers on fire—and created northern lights visible as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. If such a storm were to strike today, the consequences would be devastating. But NASA researchers say severe space weather could be on the way.
Every 11 years, for reasons that aren’t completely understood, our sun hits what’s called its solar maximum: an especially active period when sun spots, solar flares and “coronal mass ejections—these clouds of plasma that flow out of the sun at millions of kilometres an hour,” as astronomer Sten Odenwald puts it, are more likely to occur. The resulting streams of particles and pulses of electromagnetic energy create what’s called space weather, which can have all sorts of impacts here, throwing the Earth’s magnetic field into disarray and disrupting everything from GPS systems to the power grid. We’re now coming out of a quiet period for the sun, as it wakes up and moves toward the next solar maximum, expected in 2013, and experts say we should be preparing for the worst.
If the 1921 storm were to repeat itself today, massive blackouts would affect more than 130 million people, according to a 2009 NASA report on space weather, and over 350 transformers would risk permanent damage. Water distribution would be “affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, fuel re-supply and so on.” The social and economic impact might last for years. A repeat of the Carrington Event (thought to be at least 50 per cent stronger than the 1921 superstorm) could cripple banking systems, air travel and satellites; in the first year alone, the report warns, it could cost $2 trillion, 20 times more than hurricane Katrina.
Whether we’ll actually get such a superstorm is hard to predict, since the science doesn’t yet exist to accurately forecast it, says Richard Fisher, head of NASA’s heliophysics division. However, in the report, researchers noted that the electronic power grid, “modern society’s cornerstone technology,” is especially vulnerable to solar activity. Coronal mass ejections temporarily compress the Earth’s magnetic field, “stretching it out on the midnight side, opposite the sun,” Odenwald says, generating currents in the ground powerful enough to melt copper windings in transformers. At the solar maximum, he adds, there might be 10 coronal mass ejections in a week.
While we’d be more affected by a solar storm than ever before, we’re slowly becoming better prepared for it, too. “To a degree, we can see storms coming,” Fisher says, thanks to remote sensing in space. NASA recently launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which shows material streaming off the sun in previously impossible detail. Another device, called ACE, is “like a wind sock for solar wind,” Fisher says, and can give some advance warning of impending storms. That way, power grid operators can reserve capacity to counteract their effects, a lesson learned after the Quebec disaster; operators can switch satellites off-line, reroute flights, or warn people to put off “hunt[ing] an oil pipeline on the bottom of the ocean by GPS navigation,” Fisher says. Whether there’s a superstorm coming from space or not, it’s best to be prepared.
- Prophecy News Watch
Jason Hodge, father of four children from Barstow, Calif., says he’s “not paranoid” but he is concerned, and that’s why he bought space in what might be labeled a doomsday shelter.
Hodge bought into the first of a proposed nationwide group of 20 fortified, underground shelters — the Vivos shelter network — that are intended to protect those inside for up to a year from catastrophes such as a nuclear attack, killer asteroids or tsunamis, according to the project’s developers.
“It’s an investment in life,” says Hodge, a Teamsters union representative. “I want to make sure I have a place I can take me and my family if that worst-case scenario were to happen.”
There are signs that underground shelters, almost-forgotten relics of the Cold War era, are making a comeback.
The Vivos network, which offers partial ownerships similar to a timeshare in underground shelter communities, is one of several ventures touting escape from a surface-level calamity.
Radius Engineering in Terrell, Texas, has built underground shelters for more than three decades, and business has never been better, says Walton McCarthy, company president.
The company sells fiberglass shelters that can accommodate 10 to 2,000 adults to live underground for one to five years with power, food, water and filtered air, McCarthy says.
The shelters range from $400,000 to a $41 million facility Radius built and installed underground that is suitable for 750 people, McCarthy says. He declined to disclose the client or location of the shelter.
“We’ve doubled sales every year for five years,” he says. Other shelter manufacturers include Hardened Structures of Colorado and Utah Shelter Systems, which also report increased sales.
The shelters have their critics. Ken Rose, a history professor at California State University-Chico and author of One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture, says underground shelters were a bad idea a half-century ago and they’re a bad idea now.
“A terrorist with a nuke in a suitcase pales in comparison to what the Cold War had to offer in the 1950s and ’60s, which was the potential annihilation of the human race,” he says.
Steve Davis, president of Maryland-based All Hands Global Emergency Management Consulting, also is skeptical.
All Hands has helped more than 100 public and private sector clients with emergency management and homeland security services, according to its website.
The types of cataclysms envisioned by some shelter manufacturers “are highly unlikely compared to what we know is going to happen,” Davis says.
“We know there is going to be a major earthquake someday on the West Coast. We know a hurricane is going to hit Florida, the Gulf Coast, the East Coast,” he says. “We support reasonable preparedness. We don’t think it’s necessary to burrow into the desert.”
The Vivos network is the idea of Del Mar, Calif., developer Robert Vicino.
Vicino, who launched the Vivos project last December, says he seeks buyers willing to pay $50,000 for adults and $25,000 for children.
The company is starting with a 13,000-square-foot refurbished underground shelter formerly operated by the U.S. government at an undisclosed location near Barstow, Calif., that will have room for 134 people, he says.
Vicino puts the average cost for a shelter at $10 million.
Vivos plans for facilities as large as 100,000 square feet, says real estate broker Dan Hotes of Seattle, who over the past four years has collaborated with Vicino on a project involving partial ownership of high-priced luxury homes and is now involved with Vivos.
Catastrophe shelters today may appeal to those who seek to bring order to a world full of risk and uncertainty, says Alexander Riley, an associate professor of sociology at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa.
“They’re saying, ‘I can control everything,’ ” Riley says. ” ‘With the right amount of rational planning, I can even survive an asteroid hitting the Earth that causes a dust cloud like the kind we believe wiped the dinosaurs out.’ ”
The Vivos website features a clock counting down to Dec. 21, 2012, the date when the ancient Mayan “Long Count” calendar marks the end of a 5,126-year era, at which time some people expect a 2012 doomsday.
Vicino, whose terravivos.com website lists 11 global catastrophes ranging from nuclear war to solar flares to comets, bristles at the notion he’s profiting from people’s fears.
“You don’t think of the person who sells you a fire extinguisher as taking advantage of your fear,” he says. “The fact that you may never use that fire extinguisher doesn’t make it a waste or bad.
“We’re not creating the fear; the fear is already out there. We’re creating a solution.”
ou may have heard the rumor that swirled briefly last month about an Internet “kill switch” that could power down the Web in the case of a critical cyber attack. Those rumors turned out to be largely overblown, but it turns out there are now seven individuals out there holding keys to the Internet. In the aftermath of a cataclysmic cyber attack, these members of a “chain of trust” will be responsible for rebooting the Web.
The seven members of this holy order of cyber security hail from around the world and recently received their keys while locked deep in a U.S. bunker. But the team isn’t military in nature. The Internet safety program is overseen by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit watchdog group that has access to a security system designed to protect users from cyber fraud and cyber attacks.
Part of ICANN’s security scheme is the Domain Name System Security, a security protocol that ensures Web sites are registered and “signed” (this is the security measure built into the Web that ensures when you go to a URL you arrive at a real site and not an identical pirate site). Most major servers are a part of DNSSEC, as it’s known, and during a major international attack, the system might sever connections between important servers to contain the damage.
A minimum of five of the seven keyholders – one each from Britain, the U.S., Burkina Faso, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, China, and the Czech Republic – would have to converge at a U.S. base with their keys to restart the system and connect eveything once again. We’re imagining a large medieval chamber filled with techno-religious imagery where these knights cyber must simultaneously turn hybrid thumb drive/skeleton keys in a massive router, filling the room with the blinking light of connectivity.
In reality, it’s not so dramatic. The keys are actually smartcards that each contain parts of the DNSSEC root key, which could be thought of as the master key to the whole scheme. But it is interesting to know that there is a group of individuals out there that hold actual, physical keys that would reboot the Internet as we know it.
- Prophecy News Watch
Radio-frequency I.D. (RFID) tags are a convenient way to track items and cut costs for companies. But this technology is increasingly being used to track other things, like security badges — or even people — giving it the potential to cause a horrific erosion of privacy. Tracking people with smart tags, their shopping preferences, their activities, and their personal belongings sounds like something from a sci-fi thriller. But If your not happy over Walmart’s decision to track your undies via RFID smart tags, then you’ll be doublely concerned at how close we are to cradle-to-grave surveillance.
RFID tags reached a tipping point with Walmart’s announcement that, starting next month, the retailer will place removable “smart tags” on consumer goods. The RFID tags can be read by hand-held scanners to track inventory levels and keep a better eye on loss prevention. Recent drops in the cost per RFID tags have encouraged adoption of this technology. With Wal-Mart publicly embracing RFID, you’ll see other retailers quickly fall in line.
If your trash is filled with RFID tags, your trash could be exploited by cybercriminals (driving by with a RFID reader). Perhaps consumers should be advised to trash the offending tag before they leave Walmart parking lot? I’m honestly less concerned that cybercriminals will be cataloging an individual’s purchases via their trash than I am about RFID becoming “spychips” — using the RFID technology to track the whereabouts of citizens who have no idea they are being tracked. RFID chips are already embedded into passports and other everyday items. These potential-privacy-decimating spychips can be the size of a dust speck.
I’m not railing against all creative uses for RFID tracking. There are uses for it that aren’t intended to be violations of your privacy (though in the wrong hands, who knows?) A project called “RememberMe” was started earlier this year as a way of recording memories by tracking clothes and other objects by tagging them with an RFID tag and Quick Response (QR) codes. When the owners of the objects donate them to the shop, a research assistant would record brief stories about the donated objects into a microphone: where they acquired it, the memories attached and any associated stories. Everyone that participates volunteers to do so — so no one’s privacy is violated in this case.
Food is tracked with RFID for freshness and any possible contamination. A company came out with the world’s smartest coffee mug that was embedded with RFID to store the owner’s account information, purchase habits, and preferences. Perhaps your business has utilized RFID tracking with products such as Microsoft’s BizTalk RFID Mobile? Many companies now use RFID tracking, be it in employee badges or for product tracing.
When it comes to using RFID to track humans and our whereabouts, that’s when my hackles get raised. Not that this is new either. In 2007, after newspapers reported on a controversial program designed to compile massive dossiers of data on most every American, the website for Total Information Awareness was taken down. People naturally freaked out at the privacy invasion.
But the idea is far from dead. How about if governments started using RFID to issue automated ticket violations? As part of a project called ASSET-Road, VTT Technical Research Center in Finland, has developed RFID license plate tracking. The project began in 2008 and will wrap in June, 2011. VTT attempts to detect traffic congestion but it also achieved the goal of “traffic violations detected in a flash.” And then Arizona-based camera vendor American Traffic Solutions (ATS) expanded upon that RFID technology by developing automated tailgating tickets as a feature that can soon be added to existing speed camera programs. Now add in this bit of info: There are also drivers licenses that “come equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that can be read right through a wallet, pocket or purse from as far away as 30 feet.”
Along similar lines is a company using RFID to track employees. An Indian company, Unity Infraprojects, uses RFID employee tags to keep track of so-called “ghost workers.” The only way an employee gets paid is by a combination of RFID evidence and physical presence to collect daily payment.
And there are those taking this idea of tracking people a step further. RFID transponders can be embedded as a subdermal implant, similar to a microchip. Microchips for tracking our beloved pets are now common. Microsoft has HealthVault and Google has Google Health for e-health record management services and both are pushing for RFID medical bracelets. Between 2007 and 2009, RFID in the guise of VeriChip implants were given to hundreds of Alzheimer’s patients to help identify them and notify caregivers in case of an emergency. Since 2008, RFID infant protection systems have been placed on some infants at birth to prevent them from being abducted from the hospital or from being given to the wrong mother. A new RFID product, “guarantees that RFID will follow you straight to your grave.” The palm-size stone tablet has an RFID tag that talks with mobile phones to direct users to an Internet memorial archive. And such uses for RFID are only the tip of the iceberg. Thing Magic, a company that builds embedded RFID readers, recently launched 100 Uses of RFID.
In themselves, most of these are “valid uses” of RFID technology. Indeed RFID chips are often an embraced technology due to the good they could do for loss prevention. Then again, RFID technology can be the cause of security vulnerabilities. For instance, security badges with RFID chips can broadcast to the criminals where those badges are located. In an article about Fort Gordon stolen military IDs, embedded with RFID, Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity released a report stating, “The mere possession of a stolen card could, in fact, pose a security risk.”
Former NSA employee James Atkinson, still immersed in the world of intelligence and counterintelligence, said his business and government clients, “often fail to recognize security holes that to him seem big enough to steer a tank through.” In regards to the missing RFID enabled military badges, Atkinson stated, “If a spy can get within 300 feet of where classified material is handled, he owns it. I mean, he owns it big time.”
At this year’s HOPE hacker conference, the hackers showed both the good and the bad that comes when a person is attached to an RFID badge. “This badge knows what talks you go to. It knows who you talk to. It knows what places in the conference you go. It knows when you were there,” says Rob Zinkov, of the HOPE badge team. If you use that data to enhance your own conference experience, RFID is good. If someone else uses that data, unbeknownst to you, not good.
Extreme-range RFID tracking (hundreds of meters) will be explored and exploited during DEFCON. Also this year’s DEFCON Badge was described as “a full-fledged, active electronic system. Pushing fabrication techniques to the limit and using some components that are so new they barely exist, the design of this year’s badge took some serious risks.” At last year’s DEFCON, some hackers were able to temporarily steal other hackers’ and a fed’s identity. According to ThreatLevel, when a RFID “reader caught an RFID chip in its sights — embedded in a company or government agency access card, for example — it grabbed data from the card, and the camera snapped the card holder’s picture.”
Location-aware apps are scary enough, based on GPS with the broad range they offer. But for the most part you still have to sign up for those. RFID is being implemented all around you. It has slowly been moving to mainstream. It can track infants to senior citizens with Alzheimer’s. In between it can track your clothes, your purchases, your car — even you. RFID is on the verge of tracking us all, cradle to the grave.
- Prophecy News Watch
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.
It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.
This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.
America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.
“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.”
U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.
Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.
“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”
Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations.
That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products.
Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.
Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.
Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: “We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT’s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”
Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.
In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.
But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)
“Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.
But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn’t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.
“To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard — from contracts to deliverables — I don’t see a problem with it,” he told Danger Room by e-mail. “But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.”
- Prophecy News Watch
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