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The United States Secret Service is tasked with a few different missions. One is law enforcement against counterfeiting, the other is protecting the President of the U.S.  This week there was a major breach of security as some lunatic jumped the fence in front of the White House, started running and went through the front door, ran down a couple hallways landing up in the East Room. He was finally tackled by an off-duty Secret Service agent.  What if this guy had a suicide belt. America’s coveted Presidential mansion could have been blown to kingdom come!

But the Secret Service has been overcome before. As this early 1970’s documentary illustrates.

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Sao Paulo’s millionaires use helicopters to avoid traffic jams

scmp.com

More of Brazil’s uber-rich are using helicopters to avoid gridlock of its commercial capital

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Brazilian millionaire Cozete Gomes says helicopter is the best way to get around in Sao Paulo. Photo: AFP

Model turned business mogul Cozete Gomes owns eight companies and does not really have time to be stuck in Sao Paulo’s epic traffic jams. So she just flies over them.

In Brazil’s sprawling business capital, home to 20 million people, millionaires sick of nightmarish bottlenecks on the roads are taking to the skies, relying on a massive fleet of private helicopters to get around town.

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“For me, the helicopter is a necessary tool,” Gomes said as she flew high above the clogged streets into Campos de Jordao, northeast of Sao Paulo – a mountain resort for the rich dubbed the “Brazilian Switzerland”.

“I use it in my day-to-day activities, for my business, my meetings. It makes my life a whole lot easier,” she said during the 50-minute ride this month in a private six-seat helicopter.

There are 420 helicopters registered in Sao Paulo – second only to New York, said the Brazilian Association of Helicopter Pilots.

With a net worth estimated at US$125 million, Gomes, 41, is part of a select group of super-rich elite who either own helicopters or can afford to rent them for US$1,300 an hour.

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There are up to 500 helicopter flights daily in Sao Paulo and the city has a staggering 193 heliports. Helicicade, the city’s largest, boasts nearly 80 helicopters owned either by individuals or private companies.

“The helicopter business in Brazil has been growing about 20 per cent in recent years,” said Carolina Denardi, a spokeswoman for the Brazilian Association of Helicopter Pilots. The country had a nationwide fleet of more than 1,900 helicopters, including nearly 700 in Sao Paulo state alone, the association said. On average, more than 300 operator licences have been issued annually in the past three years.

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While most Sao Paulo residents struggle to get around the city, wealthy executives and socialites – oblivious to the maddening gridlock – cruise overhead, hopping to their luxury condos, beach resorts or business meetings.

In the Wealth Report 2013 published by Wealth-X, a Singapore-based wealth intelligence firm, Sao Paulo was last year home to 1,880 individuals with net assets of US$30 million or more.

Gomes – a former model and beauty queen whose eight companies focus on promotional marketing, event management and modelling – says she is one of the few Brazilian women to have built her fortune on her own.

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To modern readers the attack seems monstrous, even by the standards of medieval warfare. But the witness account contains more than a touch of hyperbole, writes Anders Winroth, a Yale history professor and author of the book The Age of the Vikings, a sweeping new survey. What’s more, he says, such exaggeration was often a feature of European writings about the Vikings.

National Geographic

A Yale historian wants us to rethink the terrible tales about the Norse.

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This illustration shows the stereotype of Viking marauders wreaking mayhem, even on clergy. The scene depicts the monastery at Clonmacnoise, Ireland.

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Published September 26, 2014

The Vikings gave no quarter when they stormed the city of Nantes, in what is now western France, in June 843—not even to the monks barricaded in the city’s cathedral. “The heathens mowed down the entire multitude of priest, clerics, and laity,” according to one witness account. Among the slain, allegedly killed while celebrating the Mass, was a bishop who later was granted sainthood.

When the account of the Nantes attack is scrutinized, “a more reasonable image emerges,” he writes. After stating that the Vikings had killed the “entire multitude,” for instance, the witness contradicts himself by noting that some of the clerics were taken into captivity. And there were enough people left—among the “many who survived the massacre”—to pay ransom to get prisoners back.

In short, aside from ignoring the taboo against treating monks and priests specially, the Vikings acted not much differently from other European warriors of the period, Winroth argues.

In 782, for instance, Charlemagne, now heralded as the original unifier of Europe, beheaded 4,500 Saxon captives on a single day. “The Vikings never got close to that level of efficiency,” Winroth says, drily.

Just how bad were the Vikings?

Winroth is among the scholars who believe the Vikings were no more bloodthirsty than other warriors of the period. But they suffered from bad public relations—in part because they attacked a society more literate than their own, and therefore most accounts of them come from their victims. Moreover, because the Vikings were pagan, they played into a Christian story line that cast them as a devilish, malign, outside force.

“There is this general idea of the Vikings as being exciting and other, as something that we can’t understand from our point of view—which is simply continuing the story line of the victims in their own time,” Winroth says. “One starts to think of them in storybook terms, which is deeply unfair.”

In reality, he proposes, “the Vikings were sort of free-market entrepreneurs.”

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IGF stadium in Winnipeg is great, now if the Blue Bombers could start winning.

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Since The Forks and Winnipeg City opened up the river walk along the rivers in downtown Winnipeg I have never seen a year like this year.  The river walks have been under water all year. The walkway is still under water in late September.  Crying shame. I love those walkways.

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The opening of the CMHR tried to be all inclusive. They invited the social activist Native group A Tribe Called Red to perform at the opening ceremonies. But the group has boycotted the event as they are in support of the people calling for a public inquiry into the missing and murdered Aboriginal women.  What is a public inquiry going to do is anybody’s guess.

If I was Aboriginal I wouldn’t want a public inquiry. It will open the facts to the general public as to how dysfunctional Native people are. Alcoholism, intense violence, unemployment, dropping out from school, always playing the blame game. They never face up to the fact they don’t do anything to improve their lot.

Migrations have occurred throughout history. The Europeans came over to North America, but the Natives also migrated from Asia.  Just because they were here longer doesn’t mean they own the land.  Do they really want to go back to the old days when they lived in buckskin huts in -35 temperatures.  When it was feast or famine depending on the migrations of wildlife. It is not mentioned very often, but before contact, many Natives died from famine.

Why are all these Aboriginal women getting murdered and gone missing? Because they come from dysfunctional families where they are left on their own to fend for themselves.  They want white society to be held responsible for these women? What about the Natives grabbing the bull by the horns and trying to improve their situation? Instead of this constant BLAME GAME!

Certain Canadian Natives are always bitching without doing anything to straighten out their reality. They are always ready to vent, but seldom ready to do anything about their ugly plight!

All other groups that come to Canada, the Somalis, Congolese, Ukrainians, Chinese, East Indians and Filipinos all try to improve their situation, in other words they work. We are beyond a hunter-gatherer society.   Only Native Canadians can’t seem to adjust. Why? Please help me on this one.

A Tribe Called Red, real interesting role models?

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Forget about the scientific “facts” drummed into your head by school teachers.  Saturn is not a planet – it’s a colossal UFO!

That’s the assertion of controversial astronomer Dr. Eduardo Marquez, who has come forward with puzzling photos that appear to bolster the seemingly outlandish claim.

“new high-definition photos taken by the powerful 2.6-meter telepscope at our observatory show windows, cargo bays and even shuttle-craft-size saucers going  to and from the mammoth vehicle,” says Dr. Marquez, who captured the images with the Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands.

“Clearly this is not a natural body, but the creation of intelligent beings – an almost inconceivably huge flying saucer 74,900 miles in diameter.”

Shockingly, Dr. Marquez claims that NASA has known the truth for decades and is deliberately concealing it from the world.

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When Pioneer 11 flew by Saturn on Sept. 1, 1979 and when Voyager 2 photographed it from just 21 million miles away in 1981, they couldn’t have missed these telltale features, He says.

“I believe NASA doctored those photos – and all since, including images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope – fearing that to inform the public that a spaceship larger than EArth is orbiting our sun would spark international panic.”

But terror is unwarranted, the scientist insists.

“Clearly, whoever built a craft that immense has the capacity to conquer Earth and could have done so any time in the past several thousand years,” Dr. Marquez says. “Since they haven’t done so, we can presume their intentions are not hostile.”

Saturn unique rings have long distinguished it from the other eight planets in the solar system.  To this day scientists aren’t certain about their composition and origin.  Prevailing theory is that they are made up largely of ice and were formed from moons shattered by impacts of comets and meteors.

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But Dr. Marquez says that’s baloney.

“It always troubled me that the “rings” looked solid – in fact, it occurred to me last year, they look like he wing of a flying saucer,” he reveals.

“Training the telescope on Saturn under ideal conditions. I recently found that to be precisely the case.”

The scientist believes that Saturn is a “mother ship” from a farflung  star system, used as a base of operations for aliens who’ve been studying mankind for centuries.  He notes that a 1988 study showed that in 94 percent of saucer sightings, the trajectory of the craft indicated they were heading to or from Saturn.

“I believe all flying saucers encountered in our atmosphere come from the mother ship.” Dr. Marquez says.

The humongous craft probably has at least 5,000 decks and could accommodate “literally billions” of extraterrestrials.

“They have no need to conquer Earth – they doubtless have all the comforts of home in their planet-size spacecraft,” the expert says.

NASA officials deny doctoring any images and reject the astronomer’s accusation of a coverup. They call the egghead’s theory about Saturn “preposterous.”

“We know that this is a respected scientist, but it sounds like his trolley has jumped its tracks,” says a space agency spokesman.

PLANET FACTS:

– -If the diameter of Earth were 10 percent smaller or larger, all the life on the planet would either be frozen or burned up.

– If the fresh water of EArth (only 1.6 percent of the water on the planet) were divided equally among all the people on the planet, each one would get 40 million gallons.

– Uranus is the only planet that rotates on its side.

– The Venus day is longer than the Venus year. The planet spins on its axis once every 243 EArth days and orbits the sun once every 224 Earth days.

– Venus is much brighter than any other planet or star.  At its brightest, it can cast shadow and can even be seen during the daytime.

Leaked NASA photo taken of the rings near the UFO planet shows some type of Alien habitat.

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Australia launches anti-terror raids over plot to kill

Australian police have carried out major anti-terror raids triggered by a call from a senior Islamic State militant for “demonstration killings”, Prime Minister Tony Abbott says.

The raids, involving at least 800 heavily-armed officers, took place in Brisbane and Sydney.

Fifteen people were arrested and one person charged with “serious terrorism-related offences”, police said.

Police say the anti-terror operation was the largest in Australian history.

Addressing a press conference, Mr Abbott said “direct exhortations were coming from an Australian who is apparently quite senior in ISIL (Islamic State) to networks of support back in Australia to conduct demonstration killings here in this country”.

The news of an alleged plot to publicly behead a random Australian will shock many people here, including the vast majority of this country’s long-established moderate Muslim community.

Many Muslims are unhappy with what’s going on in Iraq and Syria but would never resort to violence. These raids risk antagonising the broader Islamic community.

But Australia, like many countries including Britain, is worried about the threat from Islamic State, not just abroad but at home. More than a decade on from Australia’s support for the US-led war in Iraq, the country finds itself embroiled in a conflict that is far from over.

Tony Abbott this week announced he is sending 600 troops to the Middle East to assist in the fight against Islamic State. Security forces clearly face a battle at home too.

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“So this is not just suspicion, this is intent and that’s why the police and security agencies decided to act in the way they have.”

Reports in the Australian media said a plot involved beheading a random member of the public after draping them in an Islamic State flag.

‘Random attacks’

The raids began early on Thursday, with officers executing 25 search warrants across 12 Sydney suburbs.

They followed investigations into a Sydney-based group “alleged to have the intent to carry out random attacks on individuals” in Australia, the Australia Federal Police said in a statement.

“The police activity today was about preventing this group at the earliest possible opportunity and ensuring their plans did not come to fruition,” Acting AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin said.

Raids in Brisbane were not “directly linked” to the Sydney operation but related to a raid last week on an Islamic centre that led to two men being charged with terrorism offences, he said.

Last week, Australia raised its terror threat level to high amid concerns of the growing number of Australians “working with, connected to or inspired by” Islamist groups.

Officials say dozens of Australians have gone to fight in the Middle East for jihadist groups such as Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra (also known as the al-Nusra Front).

At least 60 Australians are believed to be fighting with jihadist groups in Syria and northern Iraq, and 15 Australians have been killed so far in these conflicts, including two suicide bombers.

About 100 more Australians are thought to be actively supporting these groups, police say.

Officials are worried about the impact of both returning fighters and supporters of these groups on domestic security.

It is the first time Australia’s threat level has moved from medium to high – the second-highest rank – since the system was introduced in 2003.

“Medium” means an attack could occur. “High” means an attack is likely and “extreme” means an attack is imminent or has occurred.

Australia has also recently committed troops to the fight against Islamic State.

Mr Abbott, who has been spending a week in an indigenous area in northern Australia, is heading back south to see off departing troops.

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These Islamist bloodlusters are on the warpath. They have really thrown a major wrench in the machinery of the world. They will have to be confronted and hit hard. Imagine what will happen to individual freedoms if these idiots behead a random Canadian or American on the street.

Why are certain segments of Islamic men so screwed up? How easily can these idiots get brainwashed? What do they think they will achieve? They just can’t do well in western societies, and then they get bitter and hateful to the very societies that got them out of the sand and camel dung. Any of these unholy warriors plan anything in western countries, lock em up for a long time, then when they get out prison, put their sorry bearded faces on the first plane back to the lands of goats, sandstorms, blistering heat and prayers 5 times a day. Good riddance!

Get a load of this ragheads shirt.

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