The Wuppertal Suspension Railway is a suspension railway in Wuppertal, Germany.  Wuppertal is part of the massive metro area that includes, Frankfurt, Cologne, Bonn and Essen. Eleven million people live in the consolidated metro area.

Its full name is “Electric Elevated Railway (Suspension Railway) Installation, Eugen Langen System”, it is the oldest electric elevated railway with hanging cars in the world and is a unique system.

Designed by Eugen Langen to sell to the city of Berlin, the installation with elevated stations was built in Barmen, Elberfeld and Vohwinkel between 1897 and 1903; the first track opened in 1901. The Schwebebahn is still in use today as a normal means of local public transport, moving 25 million passengers annually (2008).

The suspension railway runs along a route of 13.3 kilometres (8.3 mi), at a height of about 12 metres (39 ft) above the river Wupper between Oberbarmen and Sonnborner Straße (10 kilometres or 6.2 miles) and about 8 metres (26 ft) above the valley road between Sonnborner Straße and Vohwinkel (3.3 kilometres or 2.1 miles). At one point the railway crosses the A46 motorway. The entire trip takes about 30 minutes.

Construction on the actual Wuppertal Suspension Railway began in 1898, overseen by the government’s master builder, Wilhelm Feldmann. On 24 October 1900, Emperor Wilhelm II participated in a monorail trial run.

In 1901 the railway came into operation. It opened in sections: the line from Kluse to Zoo/Stadion opened on 1 March, the line to the western terminus at Vohwinkel opened on 24 May, while the line to the eastern terminus at Oberbarmen did not open until 27 June 1903. Around 19,200 tonnes (18,900 long tons; 21,200 short tons) of steel were used to produce the supporting frame and the railway stations. The construction cost 16 million gold marks. The railway was closed owing to severe damage during World War II, but reopened as early as 1946.

The Wuppertal Suspension Railway nowadays carries approximately 80,000 passengers per weekday through the city. Since 1997, the supporting frame has been largely modernised, and many stations have been reconstructed and brought technically up to date. Kluse station, at the theatre in Elberfeld, had been destroyed during the Second World War. This too was reconstructed during the modernisation. Work was planned to be completed in 2001; however a serious accident took place in 1999 which left five people dead and 47 injured. This, along with delivery problems, delayed completion. In recent years (2004), the cost of the reconstruction work has increased from €380 million to €480 million.

On 15 December 2009 the Schwebebahn suspended its operations for safety concerns; several of the older support structures needed to be renewed, a process that was completed on 19 April 2010.

On 10 November 2011 Wuppertaler Stadtwerke (Wuppertal City Works) signed a contract with Vossloh Kiepe to supply 31 new articulated cars to replace those built in the 1970s. The new cars were built in Valencia, Spain. When they were introduced the line’s power supply voltage was raised from 600 to 750 V.

In 2012, the Wuppertal Suspension Railway was closed for significant periods to upgrade the line. The closing times were 7 to 21 July, 6 August to 22 October and weekends in September (15/16) and November (10/11).

The modernisation was completed and the line fully reopened on 19 August 2013.

The cars are suspended from a single rail built underneath a supporting steel frame. The cars hang on wheels which are driven by an electric motor operating at 600 volts DC, fed from an extra rail.

The supporting frame and tracks are made out of 486 pillars and bridgework sections. For the realization Anton Rieppel Head of MAN-Werk Gustavsburg invented 1895-96 a patented structural system. The termini at each end of the line also serve as train depots and reversers.

The current fleet consists of twenty-seven two-car trains built in the 1970s. The cars are 24 metres long and have 4 doors. One carriage can seat 48 with approximately 130 standing passengers. The top speed is 60 kilometres per hour (37 mph) and the average speed is 27 km/h (17 mph).

The Kaiserwagen (Emperor’s car), the original train used by Emperor Wilhelm II during a test ride on 24 October 1900, is still operated on scheduled excursion services, special occasions and for charter events.

On July 21, 1950 the Althoff Circus organised a publicity stunt by putting a baby elephant on a train at Alter Markt station. As the elephant started to bump around during the ride, she was pushed out of the car and fell into the river Wupper. The elephant, two journalists, and one passenger sustained minor injuries. After this jump, the elephant got the name Tuffi, meaning ‘waterdive’ in Italian. Both operator and circus director were fined after the incident.

Driving one of these things would be a great job.

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A German teenager found himself in hot water with Egyptian authorities after being arrested for climbing the Great Pyramid of Giza. Andrej Ciesielski scaled the legendary monument earlier this month in a daring daylight climb that amazingly only took him about 8 minutes to accomplish. Despite being spotted by police during his ascent, Ciesielski continued to the top of the pyramid to savor the once-in-a-lifetime view and document his incredible feat. Upon returning to ground level, the young man was arrested and could have faced up to three years in jail for the stunt. He was eventually released after agreeing to let authorities delete the footage and photos from his climb. Fortunately, Ciesielski had a way to recover the digital material and is now sharing the evidence of his awesome adventure with the world.

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One slip and it’s going to be a head-over-heels crash that could cause permanent damage.

Here are some photos of Russian adventurers who climbed the pyramid a few years ago.

 

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After a hard day of pyramid climbing, go to the KFC and indulge in Goat Tongue and Jackass Testicle Stew.  Available only at Egyptian KFC outlets.

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If it wasn’t for unions, we would all be working for minimum wage.  If it wasn’t for minimum wage, we would all be starving and the business capitalists would be splurging on all kinds of expensive toys.

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Percentage of workforce that is unionized by country.

What is surprising is France is at only 7.7 percent. The United States is higher at 10.8 percent.

Kickin’ ass for the drinking class…

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Achkall Yami Alaneva

(The Dick Clark of the Arabian peninsula) IE Really good D.J.

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‘Discreet operation’

The World is going to the Birds.

BBC

A huge vulture detained in Lebanon on suspicion of spying for Israel has been returned home after UN peacekeepers intervened, Israeli officials said.

The bird, which has a 1.9m (6ft 5in) wing span, flew over the border from an Israeli game reserve and was caught by Lebanese villagers on Tuesday.

They became suspicious as the griffon vulture had a tracking device attached to its tail.

It is part of a conservation project to reintroduce raptors to the Middle East.

Wildlife officials say the vulture was brought from Spain last year and set free about a month ago in the Gamla Nature Reserve in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Tel Aviv University is involved in tracking the bird, and as well as a GPS transmitter, it had tags on its wings and an engraved metal ring on its leg saying: “Tel Aviv Univ Israel”.

Wildlife officials in Israel were alerted to its capture when photos of the tied-up bird appeared on social media.

“In a discreet operation with the Lebanese and with the great help of UN forces and the UN liaison unit, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority was able to return the vulture that was caught a few days ago by villagers of Bint Jbeil, Lebanon,” an Israeli statement released on Friday said.

The Lebanese media says the villagers freed the vulture after it became clear it was not on a spying mission.

After its ordeal the bird was weak and was being treated for minor injuries, officials said.

It is not the first time a griffon vulture has been taken to be an agent of the Israeli spy agency Mossad.

Saudi Arabia captured one, also with a Tel Aviv University tracker, in the desert city of Hyaal in 2011, sparking rumours of a “Zionist plot” that were dismissed by Israeli officials.

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The Flint water crisis is a drinking water contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan (United States), that started in April 2014.

After the change in source from treated Lake Huron water (via Detroit) to the Flint River, the city’s drinking water had a series of problems that culminated with lead and unknown virus contamination, creating a serious public health danger. The corrosive Flint River water caused lead from aging pipes to leach into the water supply, causing extremely elevated levels of lead. A strange and unspecified virus from Flint Tech University’s Biological Anomaly Laboratory had been dumped in the Flint River since 2012 it was revealed.  As a result, between 6,000 and 12,000 residents had severely high levels of lead in the blood and experienced a range of serious health problems. The water change is also a possible cause of an outbreak of Zombie-like symptoms in the county that has killed dozens of people and affected scores more.  The outbreak seems to be spiralling out of control.

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Edward Snowden interview: ‘Smartphones can be taken over’

BBC

Smartphone users can do “very little” to stop security services getting “total control” over their devices, US whistleblower Edward Snowden has said.

The former intelligence contractor told the BBC’s Panorama that UK intelligence agency GCHQ had the power to hack into phones without their owners’ knowledge.

Mr Snowden said GCHQ could gain access to a handset by sending it an encrypted text message and use it for such things as taking pictures and listening in.

The UK government declined to comment.

Mr Snowden spoke to Panorama in Moscow, where he fled in 2013 after leaking to the media details of extensive internet and phone surveillance by his former employer, the US National Security Agency (NSA).

He did not suggest that either GCHQ or the NSA were interested in mass-monitoring of citizens’ private communications but said both agencies had invested heavily in technology allowing them to hack smartphones. “They want to own your phone instead of you,” he said.

Mr Snowden talked about GCHQ’s “Smurf Suite”, a collection of secret intercept capabilities individually named after the little blue imps of Belgian cartoon fame.

“Dreamy Smurf is the power management tool which means turning your phone on and off without you knowing,” he said.

“Nosey Smurf is the ‘hot mic’ tool. For example if it’s in your pocket, [GCHQ] can turn the microphone on and listen to everything that’s going on around you – even if your phone is switched off because they’ve got the other tools for turning it on.

“Tracker Smurf is a geo-location tool which allows [GCHQ] to follow you with a greater precision than you would get from the typical triangulation of cellphone towers.”

Peter Taylor’s film Edward Snowden: Spies and the Law also covers:

• The contentious relationship between the British government and social media companies. The intelligence agencies and the police want the companies to co-operate in detecting terrorist content but the programme learns that not all companies are prepared to co-operate to the extent that the agencies would like.
• Documents leaked by Mr Snowden that appear to show that the UK government acquired vast amounts of communications data from inside Pakistan by secretly hacking into routers manufactured by the US company, Cisco.

US President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden meet with executives from leading technology companies, including Apple, Twitter and Google, in this Dec. 17 archive photo. The documents seen by SPIEGEL indicate the NSA’s desire to “subvert endpoint devices”.

‘Necessary and proportionate’

Mr Snowden also referred to a tool known as Paronoid Smurf.

“It’s a self-protection tool that’s used to armour [GCHQ’s] manipulation of your phone. For example, if you wanted to take the phone in to get it serviced because you saw something strange going on or you suspected something was wrong, it makes it much more difficult for any technician to realise that anything’s gone amiss.”

Once GCHQ had gained access to a user’s handset, Mr Snowden said the agency would be able to see “who you call, what you’ve texted, the things you’ve browsed, the list of your contacts, the places you’ve been, the wireless networks that your phone is associated with.

“And they can do much more. They can photograph you”.

Mr Snowden also explained that the SMS message sent by the agency to gain access to the phone would pass unnoticed by the handset’s owner.

“It’s called an ‘exploit’,” he said. “That’s a specially crafted message that’s texted to your number like any other text message but when it arrives at your phone it’s hidden from you. It doesn’t display. You paid for it [the phone] but whoever controls the software owns the phone.”

GCHQ is the UK government’s digital spy agency

Looks like something out of James Bond.

Describing the relationship between GCHQ and its US counterpart, he said: “GCHQ is to all intents and purposes a subsidiary of the NSA.

“They [the NSA] provide technology, they provide tasking and direction as to what they [GCHQ] should go after.”

The NSA is understood to have a similar programme to the Smurf Suite used by GCHQ on which it is reported to have spent $1bn in response to terrorists’ increasing use of smartphones.

Mr Snowden said the agencies were targeting those suspected of involvement in terrorism or other serious crimes such as pedophilia “but to find out who those targets are they’ve got to collect mass data”.

“They say, and in many cases this is true, that they’re not going to read your email, for example, but they can and if they did you would never know,” he said.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the UK government said: “It is long-standing policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters.

“All of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All our operational processes rigorously support this position.”

The government believes Mr Snowden has caused great damage to the intelligence agencies’ ability to counter threats to national security.

Mr Snowden maintains he has acted in the public interest on the grounds that the surveillance activities revealed in the thousands of documents he leaked are carried out – in his words – “without our knowledge, without our consent and without any sort of democratic participation”.

Inside The NSA Utah Data Center

NSA Texas

For quite some time now, the intelligence agency has maintained a branch with around 2,000 employees at Lackland Air Force Base, in San Antonio. In 2005, the agency took over a former Sony computer chip plant in the western part of the city. A brisk pace of construction commenced inside this enormous compound. The acquisition of the former chip factory at Sony Place was part of a massive expansion the agency began after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

On-Call Digital Plumbers

One of the two main buildings at the former plant has since housed a sophisticated NSA unit, one that has benefited the most from this expansion and has grown the fastest in recent years — the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. This is the NSA’s top operative unit — something like a squad of plumbers that can be called in when normal access to a target is blocked.

According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies. TAO’s area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO’s disposal have become — and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks.

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Stephan Dion is a federal Canadian politician from Quebec. He is sort of a big wheel in the Liberal party as he ran for the leadership a few years ago and has much seniority within the party.  He comes across as a sort of geek.  But his major problem: he tries to speak English. As with many Quebecers, the English language is a hurdle they just can’t get over.

Listening to Dion try to speak English is as painful as listening to Freddy Kruger scrape his claws along a marble wall. Pronunciation Stephan, there are tutors out there that can help.

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