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Sunday, September 3, 2017

Cabinet reshuffle: four senior ministers elevated and nine new faces added

North Korea Conducts Nuclear Test, Riling International Community

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW2tu2_ic18
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NOTHING UNEXPECTED AND NOTHING UNPREDICTED!. N.KOREA FOLLOW ON ITS ANNOUNCED SCHEDULE OF 10TH AUGUST, BEFORE THE ECLIPSE AND THE ECLIPSED HIGH LUNA TIDE HURRICANE HARVEY OF 24TH AUGUST. HOW DID N KOREA PREDICT THE LANDFALL OF HURRICANE HARVEY AS WELL AS IRMA FOLLOWED BY TWO MORE HURRICANES??
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2017.8.10.North Korea details Guam strike plan and calls Trump 'bereft of reason'
Pyongyang says it will launch four missiles into waters ‘30-40km’ off US territory in Pacific Ocean.
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CHINA MOVES TO BALLAST ITS YUAN TO GOLD FOR OIL AND COMMODITY TRADE.

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Tyler Durden's picture
by Tyler Durden
Sep 2, 2017 8:20 PM

Shortly after the news that North Korea announced it was in possession of an "advanced Hydrogen bomb", to which we said that if "the bomb appears to be authentic, it would confirm that the North is preparing for its most provocative action yet: its sixth nuclear test, which would force Trump to respond, having vowed never to allow North Korea to become a nuclear power with offensive capabilities", this is precisely what happened, when on Sunday morning, North Korea conducted what appears its sixth nuclear test, triggering a tremor 10 times as powerful as that from its test a year ago and just hours after it showed off what it called a hydrogen bomb capable of being mounted on a long-range missile.



The U.S. Geological Survey said it had recorded a M6.3 earthquake that it described as a “possible explosion” in northeastern North Korea—near the site of Pyongyang’s past nuclear tests—at a depth of zero kilometers at noon Pyongyang time. The agency initially assessed it to be a magnitude-5.1 temblor.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff assumed North Korea conducted its sixth nuclear test, after an artificial earthquake was detected near the site of the North’s previous nuclear tests earlier today. Additionally, the Korea Meteorological Administration said that it had detected a revised magnitude-5.7 earthquake in the same area of North Korea, in what it described as likely being a “man-made” earthquake.

Because earthquakes are measured using a logarithmic scale, a magnitude-6.3 quake would be 10 times as powerful as the one triggered by the North’s September 2016 nuclear test, which triggered a magnitude-5.3 earthquake, according to the USGS.
Leaving all suspense out of it, shortly after the earthquake reports, North Korea says Kim Jong-un ordered the test of a hydrogen bomb that can be fitted onto an ICBM, and the device was successfully detonated. Additionally, North Korea confirmed the nuclear test on local television.


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In response to the nuclear test, which will be the harhest test of Trump's diplomatic resolve vis-a-vis North Korea yet, a spokesman for South Korea’s military said that it had strengthened its military posture in response to the likely nuclear test, adding that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had preliminarily assessed the incident to be a nuclear test. Elsewhere, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said his country would work together with the U.S., South Korea, China and Russia on a response to the apparent nuclear test.

“We can never accept it. We will need to make a strong protest,” Mr. Abe said. It is unclear just how a "strong protest" will change anything at this point.

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According to the WSJ, North Korea’s September 2016 test had a likely yield of about 10 kilotons, larger than any of its previous four tests, but likely short of the hydrogen bomb that Pyongyang claimed that it detonated. In this case, the magnitude-6.3 explosion would likely mean explosive power of around a megaton, according to Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.



* * *

Earlier:

A day after Russian President Vladimir warned that the US and North Korea are “balancing on the verge of a large-scale conflict," North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is doing everything in his power to validate Putin’s words.

To wit, in a segment broadcasted Saturday by the Korean Central Broadcasting Network, the North’s state-run television-news network, the regime claimed that it has “succeeded in making a more developed” hydrogen bomb. In the broadcast, Kim can be seen looking on as a purported thermonuclear warhead is loaded onto an intercontinental ballistic missile, which KCNA described as having “great destructive powers." KCNA added that all hydrogen bomb components are homemade, so the North can "produce as many as it wants." The report also claimed that the North have developed a powerful electromagnetic pulse weapon.

According to the Wall Street Journal, experts fear an attack with this type of weapon could wipe out electrical networks in the U.S.

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North Korea details Guam strike plan and calls Trump 'bereft of reason'
Pyongyang says it will launch four missiles into waters ‘30-40km’ off US territory in Pacific Ocean
A news bulletin shows the distance between North Korea and Guam at a railway station in Seoul.
A news bulletin shows the distance between North Korea and Guam at a railway station in Seoul. Photograph: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images
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Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday 10 August 2017 09.42 BST First published on Thursday 10 August 2017 02.04 BST
North Korea has defied threats of “fire and fury” from Donald Trump, deriding his warning as a “load of nonsense” and announcing a detailed plan to launch missiles aimed at the waters off the coast of the US Pacific territory of Guam.

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A statement attributed to General Kim Rak Gyom, the head of the country’s strategic forces, declared: “Sound dialogue is not possible with such a guy bereft of reason and only absolute force can work on him”. The general outlined a plan to carry out a demonstration launch of four intermediate-range missiles that would fly over Japan and then land in the sea around Guam, “enveloping” the island.

“The Hwasong-12 rockets to be launched by the KPA [Korean People’s Army] will cross the sky above Shimani, Hiroshima and Koichi prefectures of Japan,” the statement said. “They will fly for 3,356.7 km for 1,065 seconds and hit the waters 30 to 40km away from Guam.”

The statement said the plan for this show of force would be ready by the middle of this month and then await orders from the commander-in-chief, Kim Jong-un.


The statement was clearly designed as a show of bravado, calling the Trump administration’s bluff after the president’s threat and a statement from the defence secretary, James Mattis, both stressing the overwhelming power of the US military. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met by fire and fury like the world has never seen,” Trump said on Wednesday.

The response from Pyongyang was its most public and detailed threat to date, and evidently meant to goad the US president. Trump had “let out a load of nonsense about ‘fire and fury’ failing to grasp the ongoing grave situation. This is extremely getting on the nerves of the infuriated Hwasong artillerymen of the KPA.”

The US has a naval base in Guam and the island is home to Andersen air base, which has six B-1B heavy bombers. According to NBC news the non-nuclear bombers have made 11 practice sorties since May in readiness for a potential strike on North Korea. The remote island is home to 162,000 people.

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South Korea’s military said on Thursday that North Korea’s statements were a challenge against Seoul and the US-South Korea alliance. Joint chiefs of staff spokesman Roh Jae-cheon told a media briefing that South Korea was prepared to act immediately against any North Korean provocation.

Japan’s chief government spokesman said the country could “never tolerate this”. “North Korea’s actions are obviously provocative to the region as well as to the security of the international community,” Yoshihide Suga said.

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The announcement on the North Korean state news service KCNA came at the end of two days of brinksmanship which began with the leak of a US intelligence report that Pyongyang had developed a nuclear warhead small enough to put on a missile. This was followed by Trump’s warning of “fire and fury”. On Wednesday the US defence secretary, James Mattis, said a North Korean attack would risk the “end of its regime and the destruction of its people”.

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US and South Korean security chiefs hold emergency talks as hydrogen bomb test puts Pyongyang closer to developing warhead
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On Thursday, Trump’s deputy assistant, Sebastian Gorka, declined to tone down the rhetoric, warning Pyongyang: “Do not challenge the United States because you will pay a cost if you do so”

Asked if the threat of a strike, rather than an actual attack, would be enough to provoke a response, Gorka told the BBC: “If you threaten a nation, then what should you expect; a stiffly worded letter to be sent by courier? Is that what the UK would do if a nation threatened a nuclear-tipped missile launched against any of the UK’s territories?”

Damian Green, the UK’s first secretary of state, urged the Trump administration to use UN processes to resolve the crisis. “It’s obviously in all our interests to make sure that nothing escalates,” Green said on a visit to Edinburgh. “We are very strongly in support of the UN process, which has and continues to put pressure on North Korea to stop acting in an irresponsible way.”


In the event of a missile launch by North Korea, the US military faces the dilemma of trying to intercept the incoming missiles and risking humiliation if it fails. Trump would have to decide whether to try to carry out a pre-emptive strike on the Hwasong launchpads or a retaliation strike if the launch went ahead. The North Korean military has frequently tested missiles that land in the sea off the Japanese coast, without a military response from Tokyo.

“For the [North Koreans] to telegraph a move like this is extraordinary. But it’s probably their way of trying not to trigger a war,” said Joshua Pollack, a senior research associate at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He said that if the launch went ahead as laid out in the statement, it gave US the opportunity to concentrate its ballistic defences in that area, to give them a better chance to shoot down the incoming missiles.

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Trump threatens North Korea with ‘fire and fury’
“The reason you can’t shoot down a test is that it doesn’t enter a defended area. But that wouldn’t be the case with ‘bracketing fire’,” Pollack said in a thread of tweets. He argued that the exchange of threats and the missile plans underlined the need to open a military hotline between the US and North Korea to mitigate the dangers of catastrophic miscalculation by either side.

“If they do carry out that plan, both sides might discover that they need a crisis management mechanism sooner than not,” Pollack said.

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Mattis’s reminder to Pyongyang that the allied militaries “possess the most precise, rehearsed and robust defensive and offensive capabilities on Earth” capped an unprecedented 24 hours of sabre-rattling sparked by Donald Trump’s surprise threat to rain “fire and fury” down on the Pyongyang regime.

Despite the harsh rhetoric, there was no change in US military deployments or alert status. Mattis couched his remarks in the language of traditional deterrence, making clear that such overwhelming force would be used in the event of a North Korean attack.

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Trump – without consulting his own security staff – had warned of a devastating onslaught “like the world has never seen” if Kim’s government persisted in threats against the US. But that line was crossed within hours when Pyongyang announced it was “carefully examining” a plan for a missile strike and “enveloping fire” around Guam.

The US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, also spent much of Wednesday struggling to contain the fallout from Trump’s threats, assuring Americans they could “sleep well at night”, and reassuring shocked allies that there was “no imminent threat of war”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW2tu2_ic18
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"Don't Mess With Yellowstone Supervolcano" Geologists Warn NASA

Tyler Durden's picture
by Tyler Durden
Sep 2, 2017 10:41 PM
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Two weeks ago, we reported that Brian Wilcox, a former member of the NASA Advisory Council on Planetary Defense, had shared a report on what the Space Agency considered one of the greatest natural threats to human civilization: the Yellowstone "supervolcano."

Following an article published by BBC about super volcanoes last month, a group of NASA researchers got in touch with the media to share a report previously unseen outside the space agency about the threat Yellowstone poses, and what they hypothesize could possibly be done about it.



“I was a member of the NASA Advisory Council on Planetary Defense which studied ways for NASA to defend the planet from asteroids and comets,” explains Brian Wilcox of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology.

“I came to the conclusion during that study that the supervolcano threat is substantially greater than the asteroid or comet threat.”

Yellowstone currently leaks about 60 to 70% of its heat into the atmosphere through stream water which seeps into the magma chamber through cracks, while the rest of the heat builds up as magma and dissolves into volatile gasses. The heat and pressure will reach the threshold, meaning an explosion is inevitable. When NASA scientists considered the fact that a super volcano’s eruption would plunge the earth into a volcanic winter, destroying most sources of food, starvation would then become a real possibility. Food reserves would only last about 74 days, according to the UN, after an eruption of a super volcano, like that under Yellowstone. And they have devised a risky plan that could end up blowing up in their faces. Literally.


Wilcox hypothesized that if enough heat was removed, and the temperature of the super volcano dropped, it would never erupt. But he wants to see a 35% decrease in temperature, and how to achieve that, is incredibly risky. One possibility is to simply increase the amount of water in the supervolcano. As it turns to steam. the water would release the heat into the atmosphere, making global warming alarmists tremble.

“Building a big aqueduct uphill into a mountainous region would be both costly and difficult, and people don’t want their water spent that way,” Wilcox says. “People are desperate for water all over the world and so a major infrastructure project, where the only way the water is used is to cool down a supervolcano, would be very controversial.”

So, NASA came up with an alternative plan: the smartest people on earth believe the most viable solution could be to drill up to 10km down into the super volcano and pump down water at high pressure. The circulating water would return at a temperature of around 350C (662F), thus slowly day by day extracting heat from the volcano. And while such a project would come at an estimated cost of around $3.46 billion, it comes with an enticing catch which could convince politicians (taxpayers) to make the investment.

“Yellowstone currently leaks around 6GW in heat,” Wilcox says. “Through drilling in this way, it could be used to create a geothermal plant, which generates electric power at extremely competitive prices of around $0.10/kWh. You would have to give the geothermal companies incentives to drill somewhat deeper and use hotter water than they usually would, but you would pay back your initial investment, and get electricity which can power the surrounding area for a period of potentially tens of thousands of years. And the long-term benefit is that you prevent a future supervolcano eruption which would devastate humanity.”
To be sure, NASA itself admitted that drilling into a super volcano comes with its own risks, like the eruption that scientists are desperate to prevent. Triggering an eruption by drilling would be disastrous.

“The most important thing with this is to do no harm,” Wilcox says. “If you drill into the top of the magma chamber and try and cool it from there, this would be very risky. This could make the cap over the magma chamber more brittle and prone to fracture. And you might trigger the release of harmful volatile gases in the magma at the top of the chamber which would otherwise not be released.”

Now, it is others' turn to slam the NASA plan: according to a geologist at Yellowstone national park, the proposal could have dire consequences, including killing countless animals.

According to the Star, Dr Jefferson Hungerford, who works at Yellowstone, has warned NASA scientists to stay away from the volcano. He said that: “messing with a mass that sits underneath our dynamic Yellowstone would potentially be harmful to life around us.

“It would potentially be a dangerous thing to play around with.” And he questioned whether the drilling could even work, saying “we’re not there scientifically”.

More importantly, Dr Hungerford said there is no need for anything to be done proactively at Yellowstone, adding: “We won’t see [an eruption]. Very likely we will never see it.”

Perhaps he is correct: the Earth has 20 known supervolcanoes, which if they erupt, would trigger planet-changing effects. Major eruptions are incredibly rare, with the last one approximately 26,500 years ago in New Zealand. But if a similar event occurred today, it would cause a nuclear winter with humans wiped out in just a few months from starvation.

For now, what some of the smartest people in the world disagreeing on what to do next, the increasingly more precarious status quo is the most likely outcome.

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