Fears mobster Patrick Irwin will try to retake control of West of Ireland drug scene after arrest over brutal attack on lawyer Alan Toal  by Ken Foy  Inpendent.ie

Bank of Ireland was the hardest hit among the Irish banks by midday, with shares plummeting 10.4pc. AIB shares were down 7.6pc. The two were the worst performing stocks on the Irish stock exchange.

Shares in insurer FBD also took a pouinding, falling 7pc.

Markets swing wildly as bank rescues fail to bring calm

McGrath sets up task force to monitor banks and tech after SVB collapse

The moves followed a strong bounce in financial stocks on Tuesday as contagion fears related to the collapse of SVB subsided and investors anticipated continued interest rate increases from the European Central Bank (ECB) on Thursday.

The Irish banks were part of a broader trend in European banks, as Credit Suisse dropped to fresh record lows after the lender's biggest shareholder said it could not raise its 10pc stake citing regulatory issues.

Credit Suisse fell below 2 Swiss francs for the first time after Saudi National Bank said it could not go above 10pc ownership due to a regulatory issue.

Credit Suisse shares were last down by more than 22pc. Trading in the shares was halted a number of times by the stock exchange operator as volumes soared and the stock plummeted.

An index of European bank stocks fell in morning trading and was last down 5pc, hitting its lowest level since January 4. The index has lost 13pc in value since last Wednesday, marking its biggest week-on-week loss since Russia's invasion of Ukraine last February.

"Markets are wild. We move from the problems of American banks to those of European banks, first of all Credit Suisse," said Carlo Franchini, head of institutional clients at Banca Ifigest in Milan.

"This is dragging lower the whole banking sector in Europe. The shares accelerated losses after the Saudis (commented) ...I believe Credit Suisse's crisis can be solved and the bank will not be let to go belly up," Franchini said.

Shares in Swiss bank UBS were last down 21pc.

Markets swing wildly as bank rescues fail to bring calm

McGrath sets up task force to monitor banks and tech after SVB collapse

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From mind control to murder? How a deadly fall revealed the CIA’s darkest secrets

Frank Olson died in 1953, but, because of clandestine US government experiments, it took decades for his family to get closer to the truth Stephen Kinzer Fri 6 Sep 2019 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/06/from-mind-control-to-murder-how-a-deadly-fall-revealed-the-cias-darkest-secrets 

Glass shattered high above Seventh Avenue in Manhattan before dawn on a cold November morning in 1953. Seconds later, a body hit the sidewalk. Jimmy, the doorman at the Statler hotel, was momentarily stunned. Then he turned and ran into the hotel lobby. “We got a jumper!” he shouted. “We got a jumper!”

The night manager peered up through the darkness at his hulking hotel. After a few moments, he picked out a curtain flapping through an open window. It turned out to be room 1018A. Two names were on the registration card: Frank Olson and Robert Lashbrook.

Police officers entered room 1018A with guns drawn. They saw no one. The window was open. They pushed open the door to the bathroom and found Lashbrook sitting on the toilet, head in hands. He had been sleeping, he said, and “I heard a noise and then I woke up.”

“The man that went out the window, what is his name?” one officer asked.

“Olson,” came the reply. “Frank Olson.”

“In all my years in the hotel business,” the night manager later reflected, “I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtains drawn.”

The Statler Hotel in Manhattan. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

Leaving the police officers, the night manager returned to the lobby and, on a hunch, asked the telephone operator if any calls had recently been made from room 1018A. “Yes,” she replied – and she had eavesdropped, not an uncommon practice in an era when hotel phone calls were routed through a switchboard. Someone in the room had called a number on Long Island, which was listed as belonging to Dr Harold Abramson, a distinguished physician, less well known as an LSD expert and one of the CIA’s medical collaborators.

“Well, he’s gone,” the caller had said. Abramson replied: “Well, that’s too bad.”

To the first police officers on the scene, this seemed like another of the human tragedies they saw too often: a distressed or distraught man had taken his own life. They could not have known that the dead man and the survivor were scientists who helped direct one of the US government’s most highly classified intelligence programmes.

Early the next morning, one of Olson’s close colleagues drove to Maryland to break the terrible news to the dead man’s family. He told Alice Olson and her three children that Frank “fell or jumped” to his death from a hotel window. Naturally, they were shocked, but they had no choice other than to accept what they were told. Alice did not object when told that, given the condition of her husband’s body, family members should not view it. The funeral was held with a closed casket. There the case might have ended.

Decades later, however, spectacular revelations cast Olson’s death in a completely new light. First, the CIA admitted that, shortly before he died, Olson’s colleagues had lured him to a retreat and fed him LSD without his knowledge. Then it turned out that Olson had talked about leaving the CIA – and told his wife that he had made “a terrible mistake”. Slowly, a counter-narrative emerged: Olson was disturbed about his work and wanted to quit, leading his comrades to consider him a security risk. All of this led him to room 1018A.

* * *

Frank Olson had been one of the first scientists assigned to the secret US biological warfare laboratories at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland during the second world war. There Olson began working with the handful of colleagues who would accompany him throughout his clandestine career. One was Harold Abramson. Others included ex-Nazi scientists who had been brought to work on secret missions in the US. For a time they worked on aerosol technologies – ways to spray germs or toxins on enemies and to defend against such attacks. Later, Olson met with American intelligence officers who had experimented with “truth drugs” in Europe.

Olson was discharged from the army in 1944, but remained at Fort Detrick on a civilian contract and continued his research into aerobiology. Several times he visited the secluded Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, which was used for testing “living biological agents, munitions and aerosol cloud production”. He co-authored a 220-page study entitled Experimental Airborne Infections, which described experiments with “airborne clouds of highly infectious agents”.

In 1949, he travelled to the Caribbean for Operation Harness, which tested the vulnerability of animals to toxic clouds. The next year, he was part of Operation Sea Spray, in which dust engineered to float like anthrax was released near San Francisco. He regularly travelled to Fort Terry, a secret army base on Plum Island, off the eastern tip of Long Island, which was used to test toxins too deadly to be brought on to the US mainland.

This was the period when senior army and CIA officers were becoming deeply alarmed at what they feared was Soviet progress toward mastering forms of warfare based on microbes. Their alarm led to the creation of the special operations division. Rumours about its work spread through offices and laboratories. Olson learned of it over an evening game of cards with a colleague, John Schwab, who unbeknown to him, had been named the division’s first chief. Schwab invited him to join. Olson accepted immediately.

Less than a year later, Olson succeeded Schwab as chief of the special operations division. His job description was vague but tantalising: collect data “of interest to the division, with particular emphasis on the medico-biological aspects”, and coordinate his work with “other agencies conducting work of a similar or related nature”. That meant the CIA.

Olson’s speciality was “the airborne distribution of biological germs”, according to one study. “Dr Olson had developed a range of lethal aerosols in handy sized containers. They were disguised as shaving cream and insect repellants. They contained, among other agents, staph enteroxin, a crippling food poison; the even more deadly Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis; and most deadly of all, anthrax ... Further weapons he was working on included a cigarette lighter which gave out an almost instant lethal gas, a lipstick that would kill on contact with skin and a neat pocket spray for asthma sufferers that induced pneumonia.”

Frank Olson in 1952. Photograph: AP

By the time Olson stepped down as chief of the special operations division in early 1953, complaining that the pressures of the job aggravated his ulcers, he had joined the CIA. He stayed with the division, which was officially part of the army but functioned as a CIA research station hidden within a military base. There he came to know Sidney Gottlieb and his deputy, Robert Lashbrook, the two scientists who would soon be running a top-secret CIA project codenamed MK-Ultra.

Gottlieb was the CIA’s chief poison-maker. Over two decades, he oversaw medical experiments and “special interrogation” projects in which hundreds of people were tormented and many minds were permanently shattered. During this period, there was an obsession at the CIA: there is a way to control the human mind, and if it can be found, the prize will be nothing less than global mastery. MK-Ultra was a top secret programme of experiments in mind control that used, as its basic formula, doses of LSD given to “expendables”. Gottlieb wanted to discover how much LSD a human being could take. Could there be a breaking point, he wondered – a dose so massive that it would shatter the mind and blast away consciousness, leaving a void into which new impulses or even a new personality could be implanted?

In his laboratory at Fort Detrick, Olson directed experiments that involved gassing or poisoning laboratory animals. These experiences disturbed him. “He’d come to work in the morning and see piles of dead monkeys,” his son Eric later recalled. “That messes with you. He wasn’t the right guy for that.”

Olson also saw human beings suffer. Although not a torturer himself, he observed and monitored torture sessions in several countries.

“In CIA safe-houses in Germany,” according to one study, “Olson witnessed horrific brutal interrogations on a regular basis. Detainees who were deemed ‘expendable’ – suspected spies or moles, security leaks, etc – were literally interrogated to death in experimental methods combining drugs, hypnosis and torture, to attempt to master brainwashing techniques and memory erasing.” * * *

As Thanksgiving approached in 1953, Olson received an invitation to gather on Wednesday 18 November for a retreat at a cabin on Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland. This retreat was one in a series that Gottlieb convened every few months. Officially, it was a coming-together of two groups: four CIA scientists from the technical services staff, which ran MK-Ultra, and five army scientists from the special operations division of the chemical corps. In reality, these men worked so closely together that they comprised a single unit. They were comrades in search of cosmic secrets. It made sense for them to gather, discuss their projects and exchange ideas in a relaxed environment.

The first 24 hours at the retreat were uneventful. On Thursday evening, the group gathered for dinner and then settled back for a round of drinks. Lashbrook, Gottlieb’s deputy, produced a bottle of Cointreau and poured glasses for the company. Several, including Olson, drank heartily. After 20 minutes, Gottlieb asked if anyone was feeling odd. Several said they were. Gottlieb then told them their drinks had been spiked with LSD.

The news was not well received. Even in their altered state, the subjects could understand what had been done to them. Olson was especially upset. According to his son Eric, he became “quite agitated and was having a serious confusion with separating reality from fantasy”. Soon, though, he and the others were carried away into a hallucinatory world. Gottlieb later reported that they were “boisterous and laughing … unable to continue the meeting or engage in sensible conversations”. The next morning, they were in only slightly better shape. The meeting broke up. Olson headed back to Frederick. By the time he arrived, he was a changed man.

The next morning, 23 November, Olson showed up early at Fort Detrick. His boss, Vincent Ruwet, arrived soon after. Neither were in good shape. More than four days had passed since they had been given LSD without their knowledge. Ruwet later called it “the most frightening experience I have ever had or hope to have”.

Olson began pouring out his doubts and fears. “He appeared to be agitated, and asked me if I should fire him or he should quit,” Ruwet later recalled. Ruwet tried to calm him, assuring him that his work was excellent, and recognised as such. Slowly, Olson was persuaded that resignation was too extreme a reaction.

By this time MK-Ultra had been under way for seven months. It was one of the government’s deepest secrets, guarded by security that was, as Olson had been told when he joined the special operations division, “tighter than tight”. Barely two dozen men knew its true nature. Nine had been at Deep Creek Lake. Several of those had been surreptitiously dosed with LSD. Now one of them seemed out of control. This was no light matter for men who believed that the success or failure of MK-Ultra might determine the fate of the US, and all humanity.

Olson had spent 10 years at Fort Detrick and knew most, if not all, of the special operation division’s secrets. He had repeatedly visited Germany and brought home pictures from Heidelberg and Berlin, where the US military maintained clandestine interrogation centres. He was one of several special operations division scientists who were in France on 16 August 1951, when an entire French village, Pont-Saint-Esprit, was mysteriously seized by mass hysteria and violent delirium that afflicted more than 200 residents and caused several deaths; the cause was later determined to have been poisoning by ergot, the fungus from which LSD was derived. Perhaps most threatening of all, if US forces did indeed use biological weapons during the Korean war – for which there is circumstantial evidence but no proof – Olson would have known. The prospect that he might reveal any of what he had seen or done was terrifying.

“He was very, very open and not scared to say what he thought,” Olson’s friend and colleague Norman Cournoyer later recalled. “He did not give a damn. Frank Olson pulled no punches at any time … That’s what they were scared of, I am sure.”

Olson’s doubts deepened. In spring 1953, he visited the top-secret Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire, where government scientists were studying the effects of sarin and other nerve gases. On 6 May, a volunteer subject, a 20-year-old soldier, was dosed with sarin there, began foaming at the mouth, collapsed into convulsions, and died an hour later. Afterward, Olson spoke about his discomfort with a psychiatrist who helped direct the research, William Sargant.

A month later, Olson was back in Germany. On that trip, according to a later reconstruction of his travels, Olson “visited a CIA safe house near Stuttgart [where] he saw men dying, often in agony, from the weapons he had made.” After stops in Scandinavia and Paris, he returned to Britain and visited Sargant again. Immediately after their meeting, Sargant wrote a report saying that Olson was “deeply disturbed over what he had seen in CIA safe houses in Germany” and “displayed symptoms of not wanting to keep secret what he had witnessed”. He sent his report to his superiors with the understanding that they would forward it to the CIA. Sargant said later: “There were common interests to protect.” * * *

Five days after being dosed with LSD, Olson was still disoriented. Ruwet, his boss at the special operations division, called Gottlieb to report this. Gottlieb asked him to bring Olson in for a chat. At their meeting, Gottlieb later testified, Olson seemed “confused in certain areas of his thinking”. He made a quick decision: Olson must be taken to New York City and delivered to the physician most intimately tied to MK-Ultra – Harold Abramson.

Alice Olson was told that Abramson was chosen because her husband “had to see a physician who had equal security clearance so he could talk freely”.

That was partly true. Abramson was not a psychiatrist, but he was an MK-Ultra initiate. Gottlieb knew that Abramson’s first loyalty was to MK-Ultra – or, as he would have put it, to the security of the US. That made him the ideal person to probe Olson’s inner mind. Olson told Abramson that ever since the Deep Creek Lake retreat, he had been unable to work well. He could not concentrate and forgot how to spell. He could not sleep. Abramson sought to reassure Olson, who seemed to relax afterwards.

A week had passed since Olson was given LSD at Deep Creek Lake. He planned to return to his family for Thanksgiving dinner. The day after seeing Abramson, accompanied by Lashbrook and Ruwet, he boarded a flight to Washington. An MK-Ultra colleague was waiting when they landed. Ruwet and Olson got into his car for the drive to Frederick. Soon after they set off, Olson’s mood changed. He asked that the car be stopped. Olson turned to Ruwet and announced that he felt “ashamed to meet his wife and family” because he was “so mixed up”.

“What do you want me to do?” Ruwet asked.

“Just let me go. Let me go off by myself.” “I can’t do that.”

“Well then, just turn me over to the police. They’re looking for me anyway.”

Ruwet suggested Olson return to New York for another session with Abramson. Olson agreed, so they took a taxi to Abramson’s weekend home on Long Island. Abramson spent about an hour with Olson, followed by 20 minutes with Lashbrook.

The next morning, Abramson, Lashbrook and Olson drove back to Manhattan. During a session at his Fifty-Eighth Street office, Abramson persuaded Olson that he should agree to be hospitalised as a voluntary patient at a Maryland sanatorium. Olson and Lashbrook left, registered at the Statler Hotel, and were given room 1018A.

Over dinner at the Statler, Olson told Lashbrook that he was looking forward to his hospitalisation. He mused about books he would read. Lashbrook later said he was “almost the Dr Olson I knew before the experiment”. The two returned to their room. Olson washed his socks in the sink, watched TV for a while and lay down to sleep.

At 2.25am, he went out the window. * * *

Every secret service needs officers who specialise in cleaning up messes. In the CIA of the 1950s, those officers worked for Sheffield Edwards at the Office of Security. The cover-up he directed in the hours and days after Frank Olson died was a model of brisk efficiency.

With the calm self-assurance for which he was known at the CIA, Edwards announced how the cover-up would unfold. First, the New York police would be persuaded not to investigate, and to cooperate in misleading the press. Second, a fake career – a “legend” – would be constructed for Lashbrook, who, as the sole witness, would be questioned by investigators and could under no circumstances be recognised as working for the CIA, much less MK-Ultra. Third, the Olson family would have to be informed, placated and kept cooperative.

While Alice, at home in Maryland, was being informed of her husband’s death, Lashbrook was welcoming the CIA cavalry to room 1018A at the Statler in New York. It took the form of a single officer. In internal reports, he is called “Agent James McC”. Later, he was identified as James McCord, who would go on to become a footnote to US political history as one of the Watergate burglars. McCord had previously been an FBI agent specialising in counterintelligence. Making police investigations evaporate was one of his specialities.

As soon as Edwards called McCord before dawn on 28 November, he swung into action. He took the first morning plane to New York and arrived at the Statler about 8am. He spent an hour questioning Lashbrook and then, at about 9.30am, advised him to go to the morgue at Bellevue hospital, as the police had requested, to identify Olson’s body. While he was away, McCord minutely searched room 1018A and nearby rooms.

Shortly after noon, Lashbrook returned to the Statler, where McCord was waiting. Over the next few hours, Lashbrook made a series of telephone calls. One was to Gottlieb. When he hung up, he told McCord that Gottlieb had instructed him to go to Abramson’s office, pick up a report and take it back to Washington by hand. Lashbrook carried Abramson’s report to Washington on the midnight train. CIA security officers in New York took care of the remaining details. The investigating police detective concluded that Olson had died from multiple fractures “subsequent upon a jump or fall”. That became the official narrative.

Despite the successful cover-up, Olson’s death was a near-disaster for the CIA. It came close to threatening the very existence of MK-Ultra.

Gottlieb and his bosses at the CIA might have taken this as a moment for reflection. In light of this death, they could have reasoned, further experiments with psychoactive drugs should be stopped, at least on unwitting subjects. Instead, they proceeded as if Olson’s death had never happened. * * *

On 12 June 1975, the Washington Post ran a story about an army scientist who had been drugged with LSD by the CIA, reacted badly and jumped out of the window of a New York hotel. This story, with its lurid mix of drugs, death and the CIA, proved irresistible. For the next several days, reporters barraged the CIA with demands to know more. The Olson family called a press conference in the family’s back yard. Alice read a statement saying that the family had decided to “file a lawsuit against the CIA, perhaps within two weeks, asking several million dollars in damages”. She insisted that her husband had “not acted irrational or sick” during the last days of his life, but was “very melancholy” and “said he was going to leave his job”.

“Since 1953, we have struggled to understand Frank Olson’s death as an inexplicable ‘suicide,’” she said. “The true nature of his death was concealed for 22 years.”

Besides announcing plans to sue the CIA, the Olson family also asked the New York police department to open a new investigation. The Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, replied immediately, promising that his office would begin “looking into certain aspects” of the case.

Alarm bells went off at the White House after the Olson family announced its plan to sue the CIA. A lawsuit, if allowed to proceed, would give the family, as well as homicide detectives in New York, a tool they could use to force disclosure of deep secrets. President Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Dick Cheney, recognised the danger. Cheney warned Rumsfeld in a memo that a lawsuit might force the CIA “to disclose highly classified national security information”. To head off this disaster, he recommended that Ford make a public “expression of regret” and “express a willingness to meet personally with Mrs Olson and her children”.

President Ford (centre right) in the Oval Office with the Olson family. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

Ford took his aides’ advice. He invited Alice and her three adult children to the White House. On 21 July 1975, they met in the Oval Office. It was a unique historical moment: the only time an American president has ever summoned the family of a CIA officer who died violently and apologised on behalf of the US government. Later, they met with CIA director William Colby at the agency’s HQ in Langley, Virginia. He apologised for what he called a “terrible thing” that “should never have happened”.

“Some of our people were out of control in those days,” Colby said. “They went too far. There were problems of supervision and administration.”

White House lawyers offered the Olson family $750,000 in exchange for dropping its legal claims. After some hesitation, the family accepted. Congress passed a special bill approving the payment. And that would have closed the case if Frank Olson had remained quiet in his grave. * * *

At Olson’s funeral, Gottlieb had told grieving relatives that if they ever had questions about “what happened”, he would be happy to answer them. More than two decades later, at the end of 1984, they decided to accept his offer and called to arrange an appointment. When Alice, Eric and Nils Olson appeared at his door, his first reaction was relief.

“I’m so happy you don’t have a weapon,” Gottlieb said. “I had a dream last night that you all arrived at this door and shot me.”

Eric was taken aback. Later, he came to marvel at what he saw as Gottlieb’s manipulative power. “Before we even got through the door, we were apologising to him and reassuring him,” he said. “It was a brilliant and sophisticated way of turning the whole thing around.”

He began by telling the family what had happened at Deep Creek Lake on 19 November 1953. Olson and others were given LSD, he said, as part of an experiment to see “what would happen if a scientist were taken prisoner and drugged – would he divulge secret research and information?” Then he began musing about Olson. “Your father and I were very much alike,” he told Eric. “We both got into this because of patriotic feeling. But we both went a little too far, and we did things that we probably should not have done.”

That was as close to confession as Gottlieb ever came. He would not say what aspects of MK-Ultra went “a little too far”, or what he and Olson did that they “probably should not have done”. Nor would he entertain questions about inconsistencies in the story of Olson’s death. When Eric pressed him, he reacted sharply.

As the family were rising to leave, Gottlieb pulled Eric aside. “You are obviously very troubled by your father’s suicide,” he said. “Have you ever considered getting into a therapy group for people whose parents have committed suicide?” Eric did not follow that suggestion, but it left a deep impression on him. For years, he had been confused and depressed by the story of his father’s death. Only after meeting Gottlieb, however, did he resolve to bring his search for truth to the centre of his life.

“I didn’t have the confidence then in my scepticism to ignore his ploys, but when he made that therapy group suggestion – that was the moment when he overplayed his hand,” he said. “At that moment, I understood how much Gottlieb had a stake in defusing me. And it was also at that moment that the determination to show that he had played a role in murdering my father was born.”

Eric Olson waited another decade – until after his mother died – before taking his next step: arranging to exhume his father’s body. Several reporters stood near him as a backhoe clawed through the earth at Linden Hills cemetery in Frederick, Maryland, on 2 June 1994.

A forensic pathologist, James Starrs of George Washington University Law School, spent a month studying Olson’s body. When he was finished, he called a news conference. His tests for toxins in the body, he reported, had turned up nothing. The wound pattern, however, was curious. Starrs had found no glass shards on the victim’s head or neck, as might be expected if he had dived through a window. Most intriguingly, although Olson had reportedly landed on his back, the skull above his left eye was disfigured.

“I would venture to say that this hematoma is singular evidence of the possibility that Dr Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head by some person or instrument prior to his exiting through the window of room 1018A,” Starrs concluded. Later he was more emphatic: “I think Frank Olson was intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window.”

Besides conducting the autopsy, Starrs interviewed people connected to the case. One was Gottlieb. The two men met on a Sunday morning at Gottlieb’s home in Virginia. Starrs later wrote that it was “the most perplexing of all the interviews I conducted”.

Starr wrote: “I was emboldened to ask how he could so recklessly and cavalierly have jeopardised the lives of so many of his own men by the Deep Creek Lodge experiment with LSD. ‘Professor,’ he said without mincing a word, ‘you just do not understand. I had the security of this country in my hands.’ He did not say more, nor need he have done so. Nor did I, dumbfounded, offer a rejoinder. The means-end message was pellucidly clear. Risking the lives of the unwitting victims of the Deep Creek experiment was simply the necessary means to a greater good, the protection of the national security.”

Because Olson’s survivors had signed away their right to legal relief when they accepted their $750,000 compensation payment in 1975, they could not sue the CIA. Although Starr’s report and other discoveries sharpened Eric’s already powerful suspicion that foul play lay behind his father’s death, he could not prove it. Recognising that painful fact, he and his brother decided that it was finally time to reinter their father’s body. On 8 August 2002, the day before the reburial, he called reporters to his home and announced that he had reached a new conclusion about what had happened to his father.

“The death of Frank Olson on 28 November 1953 was a murder, not a suicide,” he declared. “This is not an LSD drug-experiment story, as it was represented in 1975. This is a biological warfare story. Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a ‘bad trip’. He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program in the early 1950s, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.”

Who killed the 20th century’s greatest spy? | Simon Parkin

In 2017, Stephen Saracco, a retired New York assistant district attorney who had investigated the Olson case and remained interested in it, made his first visit to the hotel room where Olson spent his final night. Looking around the room, Saracco said, raised the question of how Olson could have done it.

“If this would have been a suicide, it would have been very difficult to accomplish,” Saracco concluded. “There was motive to kill him. He knew the deepest, darkest secrets of the cold war. Would the American government kill an American citizen who was a scientist, who was working for the CIA and the army, if they thought he was a security risk? There are people who say: ‘Definitely.’”

This is an edited extract from Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, published by Henry Holt & Co on 10 September and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk

The Sarmat RS-28 is ready for action

In April 2022, Russia successfully launched its RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, proving it now had the capability to strike anywhere in the world with ease. 

 

Vladimir Putin's comments on the Sarmat RS-28

"This is a great, significant event in the development of promising weapons systems for the Russian army," Vladimir Putin said in a speech after the successful launch.

A truly unique weapon

"This truly unique weapon will strengthen the combat potential of our Armed Forces, reliably ensure the security of Russia from external threats and make those who, in the heat of frantic, aggressive rhetoric, try to threaten our country, think twice," Putin added. 

Nicknamed the Satan II

Nicknamed the Satan II by NATO intelligence according to Business Insider, the RS-28 Sarmat is a truly terrifying weapon of war designed for maximum destruction. 

A few details on Putin's new missile

"Measuring around 112 feet long and weighing just over 211 tons, the liquid-fuel ICBM is capable of carrying more than a dozen nuclear warheads, which can destroy entire cities,” wrote Business Insider’s Sophie Ankel, who pulled her information from Vice. 

Multiple Independently Targetable Re-Entry Vehicles

“The warheads are known as Multiple Independently Targetable Re-Entry Vehicles,” Ankel added, “which means they can be sent to hit different targets at once.”

Hitting multiple targets at once

One RS-28 missile could theoretically hit multiple targets and Military Today broke down some of the Sarmat’s new multiple re-try warhead options. 

What can it carry?

“It can carry 10 Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs) with a blast yield of 0.75 MT each” Military Today wrote on their website. 

Other alternatives

“Alternatively it can carry 16 smaller MIRVs, or up to 24 Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles,” Military Today added. “It is the first Russian missile capable of deploying these highly maneuverable vehicles.”

More difficult to intercept

The military website added that the RS-28’s penetration aids had been improved, which they believe would make the missile far more difficult to intercept. 

How far can the Sarmat fly?

The RS-28 Sarmat is what the Center for Strategic Studies’ Missile Threat called a silo-based intercontinental ballistic missile and it has a range of 6200-11,000 miles. 

 

Replacing Russia's aging nukes

Missile Threat noted that the RS-28 was designed to replace Russia’s aging R-36 silo-based missile, which was designed by the Soviet Union in the late 1960s.

A force of sheer destructive power

What sets the RS-28 apart from other long-range devices is its sheer destructive power. Not only can Putin’s newest intercontinental ballistic missile be used to launch multiple warheads at once but it can also be switched to drop a single 10,000-kilogram payload.

Comparing the RS-28 to the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima

To put that number into perspective, the bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima during World War II had a total payload of 64 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium according to data from the World Nuclear Associatio

The Satan II could destroy America

Alexei Zhuralev is a member of Russia’s Duma and explained how only a few RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles would be needed to totally destroy the United States. 

Only two Sarmat's needed to destroy the East Coast

“I will tell you absolutely competently that to destroy the entire East Coast of the United States, two Sarmat missiles are needed," Zhuravlev said during a May 2022 appearance on Russia-1 according to a translation from the New York Post.

The West Coast would need four

“And the same goes for the West Coast,” Zhuravlev added. “Four missiles, and there will be nothing left,” comments that might not be too off the mark if we look at Military Today’s estimates of the RS-28 Sarmat’s destructive capabilities

 

A single Sarmat could destroy three states...

“A single RS-28 missile with MIRVs can completely destroy 3 US states, such as Maryland, Vermont, and Rhode Island,” according to Military Today, a truly terrifying prospect for anyone opposing this deadly weapon. 

Meet Satan II: the nuclear missile that gives Russia the edge over the United States (msn.com)

https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/other/meet-satan-ii-the-nuclear-missile-that-gives-russia-the-edge-over-the-united-states/ss-AA18yfzQ?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=53fa2ae59a4e4dd89f14c76f5bbc86fb&ei=12#image=18 

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the nation’s 16th largest bank, failed after depositors – mostly technology workers and venture capital-backed companies – hurried to withdraw their money this week as anxiety over the bank’s situation spread.

Global institutions including the Bank of England are monitoring the situation closely amid concerns that the turmoil could put customers’ deposits at risk and lead to further panic across the financial system.

“Fear is contagious,” said Angela Lee, a Columbia Business School professor of venture capitalism. “Bank runs can start on a rumor and this is much bigger than a rumor. I worry about folks overreacting to this and overcorrecting.”

SVB had prompted a global sell-off in banking stocks after it launched a rescue share sale to plug a near-$2bn (£1.7bn) hole in its finances.

The bank lost the funds when it sold a portfolio of bonds in response to a decline in customer deposits. Those bonds had dropped in value as a result of rising interest rates, leaving SVB with a shortfall.

Its US-listed shares initially plunged 60% on Thursday, and were halted on Friday after tumbling 66% in pre-market trading, before regulators stepped in.

The troubles facing SVB were relatively unique – given it serves startups in the tech sector, for which funding has dried up in recent months. Silicon Valley was heavily exposed to the tech industry and there is little chance of contagion in the banking sector similar to the chaos in the months leading up to the recession more than a decade ago. The biggest banks – those most likely to cause a systemic economic issue – have healthy balance sheets and plenty of capital.

However, those troubles raised broader fears that the recent increases in interest rates have affected the value of other banks’ bond portfolios, which tend to fall in price when interest rates rise.

There were concerns about how that could affect lenders’ capital levels, which are meant to offset riskier parts of banks’ balance sheets. Those fears prompted a drop in UK banking stocks, which the Bank of England’s regulatory arm, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), is closely monitoring.

The Guardian understands the PRA is keeping an eye on market movements, and is speaking with firms it supervises – including high street banks such as Barclays, NatWest and Lloyds Banking Group – amid fears there could be further contagion from market jitters over the turmoil affecting SVB.

However, it is understood that the PRA believes that the UK banks it monitors are resilient, given that bond values are usually part of annual stress testing, and that most have seen their income rise as a result of higher interest rates in recent months.

It was not immediately clear what the implications for SVB’s UK operations would be, though its roughly 3,500 customers were understood to have been pulling deposits in light of the turmoil. That is despite the subsidiary having assured that its operations were “ringfenced” from the US parent firm, and that clients’ deposits were protected up to £85,000 by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

A Bank of England spokesperson said: “Silicon Valley Bank UK is supervised and authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority. The UK bank has no personal retail depositors. We are aware of the issues impacting the firm and are closely engaging with it and overseas regulators.”

However, the troubles have raised broader fears that the recent increases in US interest rates have affected the value of other banks’ bond portfolios, which tend to fall in price when interest rates rise. The collapse of Silicon Valley pushed shares of almost all financial institutions lower on Friday.

Silicon Valley Bank’s failure arrived with incredible speed, with some industry analysts on Friday suggesting it was a good company and still probably a wise investment. Silicon Valley Bank executives were trying to raise capital early Friday and find additional investors. However, trading in the bank’s shares was halted before the opening bell due to extreme volatility.

Shortly before noon ET, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation moved to shutter the bank. Notably, the FDIC did not wait until the close of business to seize the bank, as is typical in an orderly wind down of a financial institution. The FDIC could not immediately find a buyer for the bank’s assets, signaling how fast depositors had cashed out. The bank’s remaining uninsured deposits will now be locked up in receivership.

 

Crypto bank Silvergate announces liquidation amid sector turmoil

Silvergate reported a $1bn (£840m) loss for the fourth quarter of 2022

after investors raced to withdraw more than $8bn in deposits

The bank had $209bn in total assets at the time of failure, the FDIC said. It was unclear how much of its deposits were above the $250,000 insurance limit at the moment, but previous regulatory reports showed that much of Silicon Valley Bank’s deposits exceeded that limit.

As its name implied, Silicon Valley Bank was a major financial conduit between the technology sector, its founders and startups as well as its workers. Hundreds of companies held their operating capital with the bank, and it was seen as good business sense to develop a relationship with Silicon Valley Bank if a founder wanted to find new investors or go public.

“We saw building a relationship with Silicon Valley Bank as a logical step, given their reach,” said Ashley Tyrner, CEO of FarmboxRx, a company that delivers food and medicine to Medicaid and Medicare recipients. While Tyrner has money in other banks and can make payroll, she said a good portion of her business’s profits were now locked up with the bank.

But Silicon Valley’s connections to the tech sector became a liability rapidly. Technology stocks have been hit hard in the past 18 months after a growth surge during the pandemic and layoffs have spread throughout the industry.

Tyrner said she had spoken to several friends who are backed by venture capital. She described those friends as being “beside themselves” over the bank’s failure. Tyrner’s chief operating officer tried to withdraw her company’s funds on Thursday, but failed to do so in time.

“One friend said they couldn’t make payroll today and cried when they had to inform 200 employees because of this issue,” Tyrner said.

While the SVB meltdown is unlikely to have a major impact outside of tech, it is going to be “catastrophic” for startups, Columbia professor Lee said, and the broader Silicon Valley atmosphere.

“Startups are not able to access their funds and companies are going to go out of business to cover this,” she said. “The sentiment coming out of this is going to be devastating globally.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting

 

The cryptocurrency-focused US lender Silvergate is to wind down its operations after it was hit by customer withdrawals following the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.

The California-based bank had warned last week it was “less than well capitalised” after depositors demanding their money back, adding that it was evaluating its ability to operate as a going concern.

Silvergate said a voluntary liquidation of the bank was “the best path forward” in light of “recent industry and regulatory developments”. The failure of FTX sparked renewed volatility in the crypto markets. Silvergate also revealed it was being investigated by the US Department of Justice.

Its wind-down and liquidation plan includes full repayment of deposits, the bank added. Silvergate reported a $1bn (£840m) loss for the fourth quarter of 2022 after investors raced to withdraw more than $8bn in deposits, forcing it to incur losses as it sold assets to cover the cost of the withdrawals.

Multiple partners of the bank, including Coinbase, a crypto exchange, and Galaxy Digital, a crypto-focused financial services company, cut their links with Silvergate last week. FTX and its affiliated trading arm, Alameda Research, had Silvergate accounts.

After Silvergate’s statement, Coinbase said it had no client or corporate cash at the lender. Changpeng Zhao, the chief executive of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, said his company did not have any asset losses at Silvergate.

Founded in 1988, Silvergate ventured into crypto in 2013. The bank had also operated a mortgage warehouse business, but announced in December it would be winding down that division, citing the rising interest rate environment and reduction in mortgage volumes.

Last week, the bank discontinued the Silvergate Exchange Network (SEN), its crypto payments platform and one of its most popular offerings. That network enabled round-the-clock transfers between investors and crypto exchanges, unlike traditional bank wires, which can often take days to settle.

While risks of contagion are minimal, given that Silvergate has said it will repay depositors and has performing loans, the loss of SEN is disappointing, said Ram Ahluwalia, the chief executive of Lumida Wealth, an investment adviser that specialises in digital assets.

“It’s more of a strategic loss of critical infrastructure for crypto,” he told Reuters.

Federal prosecutors in Washington are investigating the company and its dealings with FTX and Alameda Research. In January, three US senators asked Silvergate for details about its risk management and FTX.

More than $1tn was wiped off the value of the crypto sector in 2022, as rising interest rates affected appetite for riskier assets.

After rapid growth in 2020 and 2021, bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency by far, fell more than 60% last year, pressuring the digital assets industry. Bitcoin fell below $16,000 after FTX’s collapse in November, but has since recovered to about $21,000.

“It’s more of a strategic loss of critical infrastructure for crypto,” he told Reuters.

Pat Phelan, co-founder and CEO of Sisu Clinic, said he realised early last week that the falling stock of SVB was something he needed to keep his eye on.

On Friday, US regulators pulled the plug on SVB – a key lender to US startups since the 1980s – after a run on deposits made it no longer tenable for the medium-sized bank to stay afloat on its own.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen today said the government wanted to avoid financial “contagion” from the implosion of the Silicon Valley Bank but ruled out a bailout of the institution.

The Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF) has said the around $100m it had invested in five funds managed by SVB Capital, a subsidiary of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Financial Group, would not be impacted by the panic that had started on Thursday with a massive drop in share price and a subsequent share sale.

“This means ISIF does not expect any impact on these investments arising from SVB Financial Group’s announcement that it will issue additional shares in the group,” a spokesperson for ISIF told RTÉ.

“The distributions received by ISIF from these investments since 2012 exceed the amount currently invested.”

Pat Phelan told RTÉ’s This Week: “I started looking at their [SVB] stock price, and it started dropping quickly and by Wednesday was in freefall, Thursday it was down 60%.”

Phelan said he had a lot of money on deposit in SVB because “we’re a venture-backed startup and the venture capitalists like you to use SVB”.

“Our experience, Ireland, tells you that it’s slow, and then it’s fast,” said Whelan.

“But I don’t think anyone could have predicted that a top 20 bank in the US, the banker of start-ups, could be gone in 24 hours.”

The Sisu Clinic co-founder told RTÉ he became “obsessive” about the stock price on Thursday afternoon and pulled “millions” from the bank on Thursday night.

“I thought ‘this is too risky’ and we pulled our companies millions out of there on Thursday night via WhatsApp.

“I had wake up the world, we’re going to need multiple signatures on this and empty the account.

“I knew that we were guaranteed to $250k but that was just a fraction of what it was.”

Crisis measures put in place by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) protects customers with up to $250,000 in deposits with the bank.

SVB is expected to reopen on Monday under a new name, with billions in customer deposits now under FDIC control.

“We pulled it all out,” said Phelan, “and I started dealing with calls from friends who are in the startup world, ‘what do you think?’

“I said, ‘I’m pulling, I’ve gone’, I couldn’t take this level of risk and we just shifted it back to our Bank of Ireland dollar account.”

‘Going to get stung’

However, Phelan told This Week that the “worst part” has been getting calls from people in Irish companies that left money in the now collapsed bank.

“I was talking to one person in particular, who runs a very successful Irish company, and has $8 million that they have no access to today.

“And then you look at Twitter this morning where the big venture capitalists are saying that this needs to be the government now, because their companies don’t have money to make payroll next week.”

He warned that “a huge amount of startups are going to get stung”.

“On Monday, you’ll see startup CEOs beginning to panic,” said Phelan.

“And I think what you’re going to see is probably contagion coming into Bitcoin as well – probably a considerable drop in Bitcoin values.”

Bitcoin is the leading form of cryptocurrency and other cryptocurrencies have been rattled by the collapse of SVP.

The supposedly “stable” cryptocurrency USDC fell sharply after the firm that created it, Circle, announced it holds $3.3 billion in SVB.

The USD Coin, or USDC, was launched in 2018 as a “stablecoin,” meaning it was indexed to a currency backed by a central bank, in this case the US dollar.

It is listed as the second largest “stable” currency worldwide, based on its volume in circulation (around $40 billion), behind Tether.

Stablecoins are supposed to be backed by equivalent reserves in immediately available assets, either cash or readily convertible financial securities.

Overnight Friday to Saturday, the USDC fell to its lowest level ever, dropping to 87 cents before recovering to around 94 cents.

-With additional reporting from AFP

A Dig Towards the Core of the Earth Uncovers a Lot of Scientific Secrets By Christine R. -16 January 2023

 

Have you read the classic Jules Verne novel entitled “Journey to the Center of the Earth?” The science fiction novel definitely made our imagination run wild. But have you ever wondered what really is in the center of the earth?

Source: Maternity Week

Source: Maternity Week

In a remote peninsula somewhere in Russia, a group of scientists has spent decades drilling down the ground to reach the center of the earth. But after decades of hard work, the team made a discovery that forced them to stop digging deeper.

In a remote peninsula somewhere in Russia, a group of scientists has spent decades drilling down the ground to reach the center of the earth. But after decades of hard work, the team made a discovery that forced them to stop digging deeper.

The ambitious goal to dig towards the center of the earth started with a competition between the USA and the USSR to conquer the subterranean world. We all know the space race between the two nations to conquer outer space but little was known about another race to dig as far into the Earth's crust as they possibly could.

You may think that dirt and rocks are not that compelling compared to the mystery of the cosmos but the Earth's crust leads the way to the mantle - the mysterious inner layer that makes up 40% of Earth's mass. What could that 40% be made of?

Source: Maternity Week

Project Mohole

You may think that dirt and rocks are not that compelling compared to the mystery of the cosmos but the Earth's crust leads the way to the mantle - the mysterious inner layer that makes up 40% of Earth's mass. What could that 40% be made of?

Source: Maternity Week

Project Mohole

Project Mohole was funded by the National Science Foundation. However, 8 years into the project, the funding was cut off by the US House of Representatives. Despite starting first, the Americans never got to the mantle.

Kola project

It took a while for the USSR team to start their project. In fact, it was not until May 24, 1970, that the Russians started drilling toward the center of the Earth.

They started drilling in the Pechengsky District, a low-populated area in the Kola Peninsula, Russia.

Source: Maternity Week

 

The Russian team had a simple goal – to dig as far as possible into the Earth's crust. Of course, they aimed to go further than the 600 feet that the American team achieved. In fact, the goal was a minimum of 49,000 feet.

Specialized equipment

The Russian team used specialist equipment in their project. Drilling was done using the Uralmash-4E, which was a serial drilling rig used to drill oil wells. This rig was modified a bit to be able to reach a depth of 7,000 meters.

Source: ResearchGate

Throughout the project, the Soviet team developed instruments that would help them take direct physical measurements at the bottom of the borehole. Because of this, they had greater measurement integrity. In 1974, the team upgraded to an Uralmash-15000.

The Bertha Rogers Hole

While all of this is going on, the Americans had been doing some progress of their own as well. In 1974, the Lone Star Producing Company started drilling for oil in Washita County, Oklahoma. They never found oil but they were able to dig the deepest hole existing on the planet at that moment.

In 1974, the Lone Star Producing Company started drilling for oil in Washita County, Oklahoma. They never found oil but they were able to dig the deepest hole existing on the planet at that moment.

Source: Maternity Week

 

Source: ResearchGate

Their drill became the "Bertha Rogers hole" which is a manmade hole that reached over 31,400 feet below the surface of the Earth. Although no longer the deepest manmade hole in the world, it still remains to be the deepest manmade hole in America.

Surpassing the American team

On June 6, 1979, one of the boreholes created by the Russian team surpassed the depth of the Bertha Rogers hole. The borehole was dubbed SG-3. By 1983, the SG-3 borehole has reached a depth of 39,000 feet below the surface.

ce.

Source: Maternity Week

The hole had a width of 9 inches. This meant the Russian team was only 10,000 feet shy of their minimum goal. They stopped drilling for 12 months so that different researchers could come to visit and see the site.

Focusing on another borehole

When the Russian team resumed drilling a year later, they unexpectedly had a technical problem that forced them to stop drilling at borehole SG-3. Unfazed, the Russian team decided to start again with another borehole. This borehole had a depth of 23,000 feet.

ce.

Source: Maternity Week

In 1989, the new borehole the Russian team focused on reached its goal. In fact, the drilling reached 40,230 feet deep. That was about 7.5 miles into the Earth's crust. This encouraged the team and made them believe that they could reach 44,000 feet sometime in 1990.

An unexpected heat

But things did not go as well as the Russian team had hoped for. As they dug deeper, they had no idea they were about to come in contact with something unexpected. As their drill slowly inched closer to the earth's center, a complete change occurred.

Source: Maternity Week

The first change was that the temperature inside the borehole started to change. As they dug further, the heat started to shoot up faster. By the time they were nearing their target of 49,000 feet, the heat in the hole was already 180 °C (356 °F) to a full 80 °C (176 °F). The team did not expect this much heat.

Plastic rocks

The heat is not the only strange thing the Russian team noticed as they dug further into the borehole. The researchers found that the rocks at those depths were less dense. And because of this, the rocks reacted differently to the higher temperatures.

Source: Dark Ecology

For instance, the rocks had an almost plastic-like texture. This strange texture eventually became a problem because it made it almost impossible to drill through the rocks. Not only that but the heat and the rocks were too much for their machine.

The end of the journey

It was at this point that the Russian team started to think that their drilling toward the center of the Earth would be over soon. Their equipment would not last long with the extreme heat and the plastic-like rocks.

Source: Atlas Obscura

They tried to press on with the project until 1992 but they never got to go any deeper. They had no choice but to discontinue drilling. The drill site was officially shut down and the Kola superdeep borehole was sealed in 2005. Although the project was abandoned, it does not mean that the whole thing was a bust.

Fascinating finds

The research team was able to gather some fascinating findings before they sealed up the borehole - which they dubbed the Kola Superdeep Borehole. The Kola Superdeep Borehole became a geological treasure trove of information.

Source: Maternity Week

Although the Russian team failed to reach the mantle, they were able to dig the deepest hole known to mankind. And in their dig, they were able to uncover a lot of information that made a huge difference to the science community.

2-Billion-Year-Old Fossil

At four miles deep, the research team found tiny fossils of single-celled marine organisms, proving that there was biological activity in the rocks. It was something unexpected to have something living so deep beneath the surface.

Source: HashtagChatter

The fossils were in very good condition given that they were encased several miles below the earth's surface for a very long time. In fact, the fossils were estimated to be over 2 billion years old. The science community definitely found this as a win.

Updated temperature map

The temperature map of the Earth's interior was updated thanks to the findings from the Kola Superdeep Borehole. Now geologists have more realistic data to rely on when it comes to the Earth's temperature.

Source: Maternity Week

The temperatures encountered during the drill turned out to be much higher than what was expected. It was a huge change in the field of Geology proving that we can still learn so much more over the years. And that's all thanks to the Russian team.

Debunking theories

The Russian project produced a lot of geological data that expanded what we know about the Earth. The Kola superdeep borehole gave a direct look at the structure of the crust and was able to confirm and debunk a lot of theories in geology.

One of these theories is the "Conrad discontinuity" which predicted that there was a transition from granite to basalt 3 to 6 kilometers beneath the surface. The Kola Superdeep Borehole findings would debunk this theory.

Granite all the way

The Conrad discontinuity theory was created by measuring seismic waves. For a while, this was how science pictured the Earth's crust – having layers from granite to basalt rocks. But the Kola Superdeep Borehole showed that this was not the case.

 

Researchers found that there was only granite at the farthest reaches of the borehole. This meant that the changes in the seismic waves were caused by the metamorphic differences in the rock - not a shift to basalt.

Flowing water beneath the surface

But the most fascinating find from the Kola Superdeep Borehole was when they ran into flowing water several miles deep beneath the surface. Before that, nobody would have thought that liquid water could exist so deep beneath the surface.

Source: Maternity Week

This showed that the crust of the Earth was not as dense as what was once predicted. Pathways existed that allowed fluids to flow. The research team believed that the flowing water is the result of a strong pressure that forced the hydrogen and oxygen atoms out of the rocks.

A tourist spot

Coincidentally. the closure of the Kola Superdeep Borehole also happened during the fall of the Soviet Union. Today, the site is abandoned and marked as an environmental hazard. This did not stop curious visitors from coming by and checking it out though.

Source: HashtagChatter

It seems hard to believe that an abandoned drill site that had rotting wood and scrap metal scattered all over the area sits in the deepest hole in the planet. Although the Kola Superdeep borehole is welded shot, it still remains a fascinating find.

So close yet so far

To this day, nobody has beaten the record of the Russian team. For perspective, the borehole's depth is the height of Mount Everest and Mount Fiji on top of one another. The Kola Superdeep Borehole remains to be the deepest manmade hole on the planet.

Source: DoubleHelix

Was the project at least able to reach the center of the Earth? Although the Kola Superdeep Borehole is quite an impressive feat, it still is shallow if you compare it to the Earth's depth. The truth is that the borehole was only able to penetrate about a third of the Earth's crust and 0.2% of the entire distance toward the core of the planet.

A long way to go

Other attempts were made to reach the Earth's core by other countries including Germany, Sweden, and Austria. But none of these projects were able to go deeper than the Kola Superdeep Borehole. Some were longer because they veered off from a vertical course but they do not go deeper.

Source: HashtagChatter

There is still definitely a long way to go when it comes to humanity's journey toward the center of the Earth. Who knows what we would find in the mantle someday? Looks like we will have to wait.

 

Anna Hazare's Message Letter in Hindi for Jan-Lokpal Bill & India Against Corruption

..:: Anna Hazare's Message Letter in Hindi for Jan-Lokpal Bill and India Against Corruption ::.. Anna Hazare's Message Letter in Hindi for Jan-Lokpal Bill & India Against Corruption.  Please read below and if you find government jokepal bill is wrong and Anna Hazare's Lokpal bill is right then please share and forward this letter to your friends and relatives and make it a great movement of India Against Corruption. Anna Hazare's Message Letter in Hindi - (You can Zoom In-Out, Print or Download this Message - Letter)tag: Anna Hazare talking about Lokpal Bill and Jokepal Bill, Anna Hazare requesting people of India to join...

Funny Photo of Anna Hazare & Manmohan Singh - Fighting with Indian Flag

 

7:48 PM  Milan Satra  

..:: Funny Photo of Anna Hazare and Manmohan Singh - Fighting with Indian Flag ::.. Anna Hazare and Manmohan Singh - Fighting with holding Indian Flag in hand.  Anna Hazare wave the flag of victory by smiling face and trying to be defeat corruption by non-violated path of Fasting (Anshan) whereas Manmohan Singh is very worried to see Anna Hazare's victory and see himself as a great defeated leader of UPA Congress. Tags : Funny cartoon Photo Images pictures pics, Anna Hazare Vs Manmohan Singh, UPA Congress, Fight, Fasting message by Anna Haz...

 

http://www.oceanofweb.com/

 

The deaths of three New Yorkers from fentanyl-laced cocaine shows the growing danger in the US drug supply - ABC News

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-10/growing-risk-of-fentanyl-laced-cocaine-in-new-york/102037348 

By Joanna Robin in New York

Posted 10th March 2023

Facebook Twitter is stacked With ex-FBI and CIA officials In Key Posts

On a single day in March 2021, three New Yorkers ordered cocaine from the same drug delivery service, then died after unknowingly ingesting fatal doses of fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid.

Warning: This article contains details readers might find distressing. 

All three had texted the same drug dispatcher, Billy Ortega, who then coordinated couriers to swiftly deliver the cocaine to three separate locations in Manhattan, according to authorities.

Ortega knew it was tainted, prosecutors later said, but he sold it anyway. 

Amanda Scher, a 38-year-old social worker, fatally overdosed in the Greenwich Village apartment she shared with her elderly rescue dog, close to New York University where she had completed her master's degree.

Wall Street trader Ross Mtangi, 40, had farewelled his pregnant girlfriend at their Manhattan penthouse before checking into a nearby hotel room.

He stayed there overnight, then texted her and other family members on the morning of March 17 to say he was OK but needed some space, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Mr Mtangi was found dead the next day by his sister and her partner, along with translucent black baggies containing what police identified as fentanyl-laced cocaine.

In the East Village, 26-year-old Julia Ghahramani, a talented first-year lawyer who had graduated from Columbia Law School in May 2020, died alone in her apartment after consuming the same bad batch of cocaine.

"Julia was amazing. She was brilliant," said her father Sassan Ghahramani, a hedge fund adviser from Greenwich, Connecticut.

He described his eldest daughter as a "warrior for social justice" who wanted to change the world for the better.

"We immediately knew she was poisoned," he said.

The drug fuelling America's deadly overdose crisis

Fentanyl is roughly 50 times more potent than heroin and up to 100 times stronger than morphine.

The pharmaceutical version of the drug is prescribed by doctors to treat severe pain, particularly after surgery or during end-of-life care.

But illicitly manufactured fentanyl, often made overseas, has increasingly spread through the United States' drug supply in recent years, showing up in counterfeit pills, MDMA, and stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine.

Amid the opioid epidemic, which began in the late 1990s with the over-prescription of painkillers such as OxyContin, overdose deaths in the US have risen fivefold over two decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

But fentanyl has been blamed for a recent deadly surge in unintentional overdoses across the country, which some have called the "third wave" of the evolving health crisis.

The most recent national data paints a grim picture, with more than 106,000 people dying from overdoses in the US in 2021.

Over half of those deaths involved synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl and its chemical analogues.

In New York City, over the same period, 2,668 overdose deaths were recorded by the city's health department.

Of those attributed to cocaine, 85 per cent also involved fentanyl, according to the department.

"Drug dealers don't label their drugs as poison, they just sell them with indifference to the tragedy left in their wake," said Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, when he announced the conviction of Ortega for supplying the cocaine that killed three people in one day.

"This case exemplifies that the national fentanyl epidemic continues to claim lives and inflict havoc on families from all walks of life."

While some people use fentanyl because of its potency, others are unknowingly exposed to the drug due to the adulteration or cross-contamination of other substances.

Sarah Wakeman, the medical director for substance use disorder at Mass General Brigham in Boston, said this is particularly risky for those who don't generally use opioids or use them infrequently.

"You can imagine if someone is selling both cocaine and opioids out of the same area, a small amount of fentanyl [cross-contamination], because of how highly potent it is, ... could be enough to cause an overdose in someone who has no tolerance to opioids," Dr Wakeman said.

Why fentanyl can be deadly 

Fentanyl is a depressant that binds to the body's opioid receptors, found in areas of the brain that control pain and emotions.

Too much can slow a person's heart rate and shut down their breathing, which can lead to hypoxia, a condition caused by decreased oxygen to the brain that may result in coma, permanent brain damage or death.

For someone with low opioid tolerance, "even a tiny bit of fentanyl could be enough to cause an overdose or even a fatal overdose," Dr Wakeman said.

In some cases, an amount the size of a small grain of rice can be deadly.

Ms Wakeman advocates a harm-reduction approach to substance use, including the use of test strips that reveal hidden fentanyl.

But while they are effective at detecting the drug, they don't measure its strength or quantity in a sample.

If an overdose occurs, naloxone, a medication that reverses the effects of opioids, sold under the brand name Narcan, can be lifesaving.

"For a person, particularly someone who uses cocaine or methamphetamine, who doesn't use opioids, to know that there's any amount of fentanyl in the substance you're about to use really is important," Ms Wakeman said.

"Because that could shape your decision about whether or not to use and certainly [your] thinking about precautions, like having naloxone on hand to reverse an overdose."

The small kit that could save a life 

Across the East River from the famous skyscrapers of Manhattan, on a recent Tuesday night in Greenpoint, a group of New Yorkers gathered in an upstairs room of their local library.

They were there for a free Narcan and overdose-response training session run by Vocal-NY, a state-wide community organisation, and the volunteer-run Brooklyn Harm Reduction Outreach Cooperative.

Trainer Laura Levine asked the group if anyone knew how to recognise an opioid overdose.

She then explained what to look for — signs of drowsiness, slowed or stopped breathing, pale skin and blue lips — and how to administer a single-dose Narcan nasal spray if a person is unresponsive.

Ms Levine, who is Vocal-NY's education coordinator, also laid out the protections of New York State's "Good Samaritan" law, which is designed to allow people to call emergency services for medical support without fear of arrest if they or someone else are experiencing a drug or alcohol overdose.

Each attendee left with informational flyers and a zipped blue pouch containing two doses of Narcan, provided by the city's health department.

"The more that we're able to educate drug users and not only drug users but family and friends of drug users … the more lives can be saved," Ms Levine later told the ABC.

"What we're doing is just giving them the education and the information to make a safer decision.

"It's not to scare people."

Ms Levine was also quick to bust what she called "the biggest myths around fentanyl", including that it's possible to overdose from brief skin contact with the drug, as a bizarre spate of US media reports has suggested.

 

"In order to experience a fentanyl overdose, it needs to be absorbed into your body," she said.

"So either absorbed into the mucous membranes by sniffing or [by] injecting right into the bloodstream."

How New York's night spots can help prevent overdoses

Training sessions like those run by Vocal-NY are becoming commonplace across New York City, where around every four hours someone dies from an overdose, with Black and Latino communities and poorer neighbourhoods worst affected.

Authorities, local organisations and grassroots groups alike are grappling with how to curb the problem and empower residents to protect themselves and others.

Health officials have announced a plan to install 10 "public health vending machines" in the city, stocked with free supplies including naloxone, sterile syringes, safe-sex kits and more.

Naloxone is already available over the counter at pharmacies across the state, and the FDA is expected to soon approve its sale without a prescription nationwide.

But for those without health insurance, the cost can be prohibitive.

New York City's Office of Nightlife has partnered with its Department of Health to equip venues and hospitality workers with overdose-prevention tools through a program called Narcan Behind Every Bar, which includes training for the nightlife community and the distribution of free naloxone kits.

In 2018, Ariel Palitz, a former club owner, was appointed to lead the agency, which acts as a liaison between the mayor's office and the hospitality industry.

She said harm reduction, which includes moving away from a "strictly [law] enforcement approach" to drug use, is at the centre of her work.

"We see [stocking naloxone] now as benign and yet as important as having a CPR kit behind a bar, or a first aid kit," Ms Palitz said.

"It doesn't necessarily mean people are having heart attacks all over New York City bars. But if you are having one, it's nice to know you have a CPR kit."

Ms Palitz said it is important to acknowledge that recreational drug use is often a reality in bars and clubs but nightlife itself is not the issue.

"It's not a nightlife problem, it's a drug use and contamination problem," she said.

"Nightlife just happens to be a location where people socialise, gather, and happen to use drugs. And therefore it is an opportunity, rather than a liability, to help people learn about how to prevent an overdose.

"And if [one] happens, how to bring somebody back."

The 'fourth wave' of the opioid epidemic

Daniel Ciccarone is a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California in San Francisco, who has spent more than two decades as a public health researcher, studying what he calls "drug use in the real world".

Mr Ciccarone explained the triple-wave opioid epidemic can be traced from the rise of opioid pills through the 2000s, which led to some people seeking out heroin in the early 2010s, to heroin increasingly being replaced and adulterated with synthetic opioids from around 2014.

This created a "huge spike in overdose deaths due to fentanyl," he said.

While the epidemic presents differently coast to coast, both prescription opioid and heroin deaths peaked nationally in 2017, whereas the fentanyl crisis continues, exacerbated by the pandemic and racial and economic inequalities.

Mr Ciccarone said stimulant-related deaths have become more common and increasingly entwined with opioids, particularly fentanyl, leading to what he has dubbed the "fourth wave" of the evolving epidemic.

 

"It's important to understand that co-use can have an accidental form where the end user is not aware of the substance they're using," he said.

But, he added, people who are opioid dependent may also seek out stimulants to boost the effects of other drugs, for example co-using heroin and cocaine.

"The interesting thing post-COVID is that methamphetamine plus fentanyl use is up," he said.

"That is very unusual. And just to see people combining that brings us into a whole new realm, a whole new phase of drug use, at least in the United States."

Mr Ciccarone said as different drugs move into and out of popular use there are often spill-over effects, such as shifts in user demographics or spates of overdoses.

"Once the supply recognises that, 'Oh, cocaine is going up in demand. Oh, methamphetamine is going up in demand. We're going to supply more of it. Why? Because we're capitalists.'

"The illicit drug markets are as capitalistic as any legitimate industry you can think of, maybe even more so."

But while supply-side interventions are often touted as the solution, Mr Ciccarone warned they can also have unintended consequences.

"Supply-side interventions, always run into what we call the balloon effect in drug policy, and that is you squeeze the balloon at one end and it pops out and the other end," Mr Ciccarone said.

"But the even more finesse part of the balloon metaphor is that it pops out in an unknown direction."

Mr Ciccarone said the Biden administration had made "bold leaps in the direction of demand reduction", including by increasing access to Buprenorphine, which is used to treat opioid use disorder.

The first National Drug Control Strategy under the leadership of a medical doctor, Raol Gupta, promised a "new era of drug policy" led by "compassion" — a stark departure from the harsh rhetoric and draconian laws that stemmed from former president Richard Nixon's "war on drugs".

The strategy includes plans to expand access to prevention and harm-reduction programs and treatment and recovery support services, while pledging to disrupt drug trafficking into the US by targeting criminal organisations.

But not everyone has welcomed the new approach, particularly members of the Republican Party who have sought to tie the fentanyl crisis to border security, given most of the illicitly manufactured fentanyl in the US is synthesised in China and Mexico.

In a recent poll, Republicans said fentanyl and other opioids represented the biggest threats to Americans' public health, which for Democrats was guns.

During President Joe Biden's recent State of the Union speech, he promised a "major surge to stop fentanyl production, sale, and trafficking", including stronger penalties for traffickers.

The moment was met with outrage from Republican members of Congress, including one who yelled, "It's your fault!" from the floor of the House.

 

Victim's father calls for action

For those affected personally by the overdose crisis, the seeming lack of action and political point-scoring can feel exhausting.

Mr Ghahramani, who lost his daughter nearly two years ago, said Mr Biden's words at the State of the Union felt like "lip service".

In the past couple of years, Mr Ghahramani said he has "learned more than I ever would have imagined about fentanyl", connecting with other grieving families and various advocates through social media.

"I stopped because I couldn't take it anymore," he said.

"It was just too hard for me. But I heard so many stories of so many people whose children had died and been poisoned with fentanyl."

Mr Ghahramani described the drug as the "most deadly poison ever to hit our streets".

He also said failures of the "war on drugs" shouldn't prevent law enforcement from acting against drug dealers, such as Ortega, who knowingly put people at risk.

While Mr Ghahramani agreed Narcan could be "a lifesaver", he said it was "not going to solve everything".

"You can't fight with one hand," he said.

"You have to root out the supply. You can't roll over and imagine that it will just go away."

Ortega was unanimously convicted by a jury on five charges in January following a trial.

He is scheduled to be sentenced in June and faces 25 years to life in prison.

Mr Ghahramani said he believes the onus should not be on victims to mitigate risks, while acknowledging the importance of education.

"When Julia died, there was no awareness," Mr Ghahramani said.

"They were just starting to put fentanyl in cocaine. She would have never in a million years have come close to it if she knew this was possible. People need to be warned."

Could Australia face its own fentanyl crisis?

Australia has so far avoided an opioid epidemic on the same scale as the US and Canada, in part due to laws restricting the direct marketing of pharmaceuticals to consumers.

But overdose deaths are rising, exceeding the road toll each year since 2014 when the country first breached 2000 annual drug-related fatalities, according to the Penington Institute.

Its most recent annual overdose report, based on data from 2020, warns Australia could slide into a US-style fentanyl crisis if common-sense steps aren't taken to prevent that from happening.

"It's still the case that in the US, it's a much worse situation. But the problem is, we often follow the US in terms of drug-use patterns," said John Ryan, Penington Institute's CEO.

"And if we get the same scale of problem that's been happening in the US now for a number of years, we're very unprepared for it."

Mr Ryan said Australia's overdose crisis is "incredibly diverse", but worse per capita in regional and rural parts of the country, and among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

He said stigma around drug use and dependence means the issue is often hidden from public view.

Overdose deaths involving fentanyl and other synthetic opioids have increased by 1,275 per cent since 2006, but most involved pharmaceutical fentanyl, which is commonly diverted from healthcare settings.

Illicitly manufactured fentanyl is not widespread in Australia, although in August 2022, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) announced a record bust of around 11 kilograms in Melbourne.

Mr Ryan said it could be a sign that more is on the way.

"Drugs in Australia are often described as readily available and easy to access," Mr Ryan said.

"And so even though [the AFP] did well … it's a real sign, I think, that there are people out there contemplating the opportunity. And the opportunity is obviously big profits."

While Australia may be downstream from the US in terms of drug-use trends, Mr Ryan said following "the American approach to drugs, which is to try and arrest our way out of these problems," had proven unsuccessful.

The Australian government has announced an investment of $19.6 million over four years to make naloxone available for free nationally without a prescription.

Mr Ryan is also pushing for a national overdose prevention strategy, which would bring together the federal and state governments, law enforcement and health services.

"I think we've got to really improve access to drug treatment, but also access to harm reduction services," he said.

"And that includes, most importantly, [ensuring] better understanding in the community about drug-use issues, and not relying on the police to get us out of what's basically a health problem."

 

5540 planes and 120 billion dollars: the largest aircraft order in history

Story by Zeleb.es

A historic request

Air India, an airline belonging to the Tata Group, has become the protagonist of the largest aircraft order in history.

 

540 planes and 120 billion dollars: the largest aircraft order in history (msn.com)

 

https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/other/540-planes-and-120-billion-dollars-the-largest-aircraft-order-in-history/ss-AA189KVP

 

Air India, Airbus and Boeing

February 2023 is already engraved in gold letters in the aeronautical sector, after the agreement that Air India reached with Airbus and Boeing, in which it will buy 250 and 290 aircraft, respectively.

Multimillion figures

Without official figures, specialized media such as Bloomberg estimate the agreement has a cost of more than 120 billion dollars.

What is known, through a statement released by Air India, is that all the aircraft purchased by the company will have the latest technological advances and offer cutting edge efficiency and sustainability.

Growing with India

Christian Scherer, Airbus Chief Commercial Officer and director of Airbus International, assures that the A320 and A350 models "will be an effective and versatile resource to continue democratizing and decarbonizing the country's air transport."

Photo: Air India

Economic, technological and sustainable growth

Organic and controlled growth

Air India's objective is clear, as confirmed in their statement: to boost their operations, both nationally and internationally, in the short, medium and long term, since the delivery of aircraft aims to last for at least a decade.

First almost immediate deliveries

Of course, the first Airbus units will begin to be delivered, according to Air India forecasts, at the end of 2023. That is, the expansion will be almost immediate.

"Top Notch Company"

From Air India they are clear about what they want: "to modernize and expand the fleet to make it a larger and first-class airline, to meet the growing demand for travel in the region," they point out in a statement.

Agreement with Airbus

The first agreement announced was that of Airbus. Among the 250 requested aircraft are 140 A320neo narrow-body single-aisle aircraft and 70 A321neo aircraft (pictured).

A new age

To these are added 34 A350-100 widebody aircraft and another six A350-900 aircraft (In the photo), a long-range aircraft that will debut in the Indian market to "mark a new era in the country", according to the Airbus statement.

Photo: Airbus

Agreement with Boeing

For its part, Boeing could also manufacture 290 low-consumption aircraft for the Indian airline.

The most advanced models

As Air India has specified, there will be 190 737 MAX aircraft (in the photo), another 20 787 Dreamliner aircraft and 10 more 777X aircraft. That is, a total of 220 units.

Photo: Boeing

Waiting to extend the order

In addition, 70 more vehicles could be added, which would be an additional 50 Boeing 737 MAX and another 20 787-9 aircraft (in the photo).

Photo: Boeing

A complete pack

The agreement with Boeing includes a comprehensive suite of aviation services, with an eye to making this massive growth sustainable, both domestically and internationally.

Photo: Boeing

Largest order in South Asia to date

After almost 90 years of collaboration between Air India and Boeing, this will be the largest order the company has received in South Asia

India hasn't stopped growing

India is the world's third largest air transport market and it is expected that, in the next 20 years, its growth rate will be 6.6% on average per year, double that of the rest of the world.

Excellent forecast for the country

According to expert forecasts, India is about to become the most populous country in the world (within a few years it will overtake China, whose demographics are declining) and the Indian economy aims to be the fastest growing of the G20.

A wise investment

It is expected that the country's thriving middle class will significantly increase their air travel. Obviously, the largest aircraft order in history, has a methodical analysis behind its multimillion-dollar investment.

540 planes and 120 billion dollars: the largest aircraft order in history (msn.com)

https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/other/540-planes-and-120-billion-dollars-the-largest-aircraft-order-in-history/ss-AA189KVP#image=18

 Putin's men are sick of fighting: Why 600 Russian soldiers in Luhansk region rebelled, 

 The Daily DigestStory by Zeleb.es • 12 Feb

 

Putin's men are sick of fighting: Why 600 Russian soldiers in Luhansk region rebelled (msn.com)

 

https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/putin-s-men-are-sick-of-fighting-why-600-russian-soldiers-in-luhansk-region-rebelled/ss-AA17hgUl

 

How bad are things getting for Russia's mobilized soldiers?

Roughly 600 mobilized Russian soldiers in the Luhansk region refused to figt on the frontlines of Ukraine and were returned to Russia according to a report from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

A statement from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

“There are cases of refusals to participate in hostilities by mobilized Russian soldiers,” the General Staff’s daily summary authors noted. 

600 rebelled and 600 returned home

“As of February 3, up to 600 people of this category were returned from the Luhansk region to the territory of the Russian Federation," the report read.

 

Indian man taking drugs from frog sweat and snake poison

 

Talking female dog Mishka who can speak like human beings

 

Clever Cow of India

 

Chinese Man Zhuang walking 2400 kilometers with donkey

 

Flying Saucer seen in sky on Christmas Day

 

Mysterious Well in Indian Village that cures human beings

 

Banana used as Hammer in Siberia for hammering nails

 

Talking female dog Mishka who can speak like human beings

 

 

OLX – The Newest Destination for Online shopping

July 17, 2013 | 0 Comment

Have you ever felt that you are surrounded by a lot of items that are of no use to you and you can’t spare any time to get rid of… Read more »

 

http://www.oceanofweb.com/india/olx-in-shop.html

OLX – The Newest Destination for Online shopping

Published by Atul on July 17, 2013 | 0 Comment

 

Have you ever felt that you are surrounded by a lot of items that are of no use to you and you can’t spare any time to get rid of it well here’s a perfect way to get rid of them, OLX.in is one of the biggest classifieds website allows you to meet buyers directly when you post an ad.

Why olx.in
What makes OLX.in unique is the fact that it does not charge the user any kind of fee for viewing or for posting the ads in the OLX.in website.

Uniqueness OF olx.in website
You can post an ad in OLX.in website without even registering in the website. But on signing up with the website there are more benefits such as updating your posts whenever there is any changes. You can also control the frequency of updating as and when required. What’s more you can even display your posted ads on your personal website if you have one, or you can just show it off on your social networking sites. OLX.in has a large number of category in which you can place your ads, all you have to do is give a detailed description about your item and if possible upload a good looking photo of your item and add your contact number through which the buyers will contact you.

OLX.in website is built upon the principles of customer satisfaction which the website has upheld since March 2006. Visit the website once and we are sure that it will become your newest shopping destination.

 

History of olx.in website
The OLX.in website was started way back in 2006 and it has a headquarters in New York City USA, OLX is used in over 105 countries in 40 different languages. OLX is available in 96 countries and 45 different languages. The website has a lot of satisfied customers who have a great deal of satisfaction when they buy/sell using the website.

olx.in Ad Campaign
You might have watched at least of one of these popular TV ads about the OLX.in website which is broadcasted as part of their TV campaign, It’s quite hard to miss out on one of these ads as they are very funny, as we can see in the video below a couple on becoming disheartened about their car being small decide to sell it on OLX.in website and get a good price for it too.

You can check more in the below videos:

 

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Filed in: India

 

http://www.oceanofweb.com/news/rinderpest-disease.html

 

An urge by OIE – Destroy Rinderpest Virus Stocks

Published by Atul on June 24, 2013

 

Animal Health World organization (OIE), in its continuous efforts, has launched video-campaign series in order to motivate the organizations and countries to destroy their deadly virus Rinderpest stocks completely.

The virus by the name rinderpest is one of the most dangerous viruses in the world. These viruses attack directly the cattle and other animals, resulting in the painful death of these animals.

See,
Slaughtering of Animals Video

The humans, infact, will not be the direct prey and will not be infected by any such epidemics; but the human-race will face a big disaster indirectly. The death of cattle will have one of the biggest negative effects on the health and living-standard of humans. The prices of all the commodities will rise to sky-level. Further, such increase in the prices will lead to jostling of human-beings lives and livelihood.

OIE is been urging all the countries of world to destroy their rinderpest virus gatherings immediately and that too completely. Moreover, OIE along with FAO, the United Nations Food and Agriculture organization, has appealed the countries that if they cannot kill the epidemic-spreaders; then atleast they should store them in the approved containers only and need to keep them at proper safe places.

In May 2011, there was an OIE General Sessions in which all the member countries of World Organization of Animal Health pledged to either vanish these disease-spreaders or store them in highly safe labs.

 

But in contrary to this, still this cattle-plaque is been in over 40 laboratories of the world. If by through any means, this Rinderpest comes out in open; it will for sure make the cattle its foremost prey. And if the disease is entered in any of the animals then slowly, it will start covering other animals too. And, then from city to state, from state to country and soon, whole world will be caught in the non-releasable jaws of cattle-plaque.

See,
Clever Cow

In order to avoid all these havocs, Food and Agriculture organization and World health of Animals organization are urging its all member countries to work with them and support them fully from heart. To achieve this noble cause, the both entities have made a committee of seven members whose aim is just to eradicate this evil from spreading. They all are requesting their member nations to respect their wordings which they committed in May 2011 session to kill this virus-stock completely. As per the committee members, the saddest thing is that inspite of passing of more than a year, the member-nations has still not even kept the rinderpest in safe and authorized containers and at proper places.

Rinderpest Virus risks and why to kill it

Virus Video
Below is the official video that is been released with United Nations support. The video elucidates the after-effects of deadly disease, if it is spread.

Why to not store Rinderpest Virus
Below are some of the reasons that any country should not keep the stock of this epidemic:
1. Suppose any nation is keeping this time-bomb and by any ways, knowingly or un-knowingly, the virus is able to free itself then that country cannot be treated as safe and a black question mark would be imposed on its safety.

2. The infectious cattle-stock will lead to drastic political problems.

3. Along with political issues, there would be severe financial crisis.

4. The animals would be treated skeptically as by naked eye, a common man cannot differentiate between healthy and unhealthy being.

5. People will stop eating animal-based products and as such, the animal-products manufacturing market will suffer huge money losses.

6. Various breeds of wild-life will start to extinct.

7. Population of wild-life will see a huge drop.

8. A need will arise to launch a campaign and that too a complete successful one as failure to be success in that movement will be a huge and unrecoverable loss to mankind.

9. The nation’s image at international and national level will finish.

10. The costs involved in launching a new campaign and making the country disease-free would be very high and as such, big sums of money will go waste.

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Funny Pictures Blog | Funny Hindi Jokes | Indian Shayari, Photos, SMS, Blog

My blog of funny pictures has some nice collection of funny hindi jokes, Indian pictures,shayari & quotes.

 

http://funnyindianphotos.blogspot.co.uk/

Innocent Girl Funny Cartoon 

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Jul 17, 2013

Funny Spiderman Cartoon

Spiderman Funny Cartoon

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Jul 12, 2013

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Jul 10, 2013

Funny Superman vs Batman Picture Joke 

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