HAPPY

 HALLOWEEN

Early Snowstorm Hits US East Coast Killing at Least Six

Fans of the New York  Giants in East Rutherford New Jersey were not deterred by the storm. They they set up camp in the parking lot to wait for the game with the Miami Dolphins.

An unseasonable snowstorm has hit the US East Coast, with some areas of Massachusetts seeing more than 27in  of snow. The authorities say at least six people have died in snow-related accidents.

More than three million homes have lost their electricity supply from Maryland to Massachusetts - some residents have been warned they may be without power for several days. The snowfall eased on Sunday, as the storm headed north from Maine.

It worsened as it moved north, with states of emergency declared in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and parts of New York. Communities in western Massachusetts were among the hardest hit. Nantucket in Massachusetts experienced wind speeds of 69mph, a National Weather Service (NWS) statement said.

Connecticut Governor Dannel P Malloy cautioned the 750,000 people who were without electricity in his state that the effects of the storm would still be felt after the snowfall stopped.  "If you are without power, you should expect to be without power for a prolonged period of time," CBS News quoted him as saying.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's house was one of the 600,000 suffering power cuts in the state.
West Milford, New Jersey, about 45 miles (70km) north-west of New York, saw 19in of snowfall, and Hillsboro, New Hampshire, saw 21.5in.
"I can't believe it's not even Halloween and it's snowing already," Carole Shepherd of Washington Township in New Jersey told Associated Press after shovelling her driveway.

Biggest snowfall in each state

Connecticut: 17in - Bristol

Delaware: 2in - Newark

Maine, 7.7in - Gray
Maryland: 11.5in - Sabillasville
Massachusetts: 27.8in - Plainfield
New Hampshire - 21.5in, Hillsboro
New Jersey: 19in - West Milford
New York: 17.9in - Millbrook
Pennsylvania: 16in - Huff Church
Rhode Island - 3.6in, North Foster
Vermont: 13in - Wilmington
Virginia: 9in - Skyland
West Virginia: 14in - Mount Storm

In New York City, a new record for October snowfall was set when 1.3in fell in Central Park. Only three other snowy October days have been recorded in the park in 135 years of record-keeping.
Most of the Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York's Zuccotti Park saw out the storm. Nick Lemmin, of Brooklyn, told AP he had "slept pretty well", although fellow protester Adash Daniel headed off after three weeks in the park, saying: "I'm not much good to this movement if I'm shivering."

On Sunday, passengers were stranded for more than seven hours on one JetBlue flight in Hartford, Connecticut. On Saturday, flights were delayed at Newark airport in New Jersey, which was being lashed by heavy rains and winds. Amtrak reported massive disruption to train services, including a 13-hour delay for passengers on one train in central Massachusetts.
John LaCorte, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Pennsylvania, told the agency that the last time the state saw a major storm so early was in 1972. "This is very, very unusual. It has all the look and feel of a classic mid-winter nor'easter," he said.

High pressure over south-eastern Canada had fed cold air south and into moisture from the North Carolina coast. In New England it is usual for measurable snow to fall in early December.
NWS meteorologist Bill Simpson said temperatures could return to normal by the middle of next week. "This doesn't mean our winter is going to be terrible. You can't get any correlation from a two-day event."
Well folks, in Canada, we'd say that was a pretty good sign of things to come.

Rio's Welcome Sign (2016 olympics)

2016 - Rio de Janeiro

" Solar City Tower ", built atop
the island of Cotonduba
 will be the welcome symbol to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro

It will be seen by the game visitors and participants as
they arrive by air or water.
The tower, captures solar energy. It will supply energy
for all of the Olympic city, as well as for part of Rio ..

It pumps up water from the ocean to create what
appears like a water fall and this fall stimulates turbines
that produce energy during the night.
  It will also hold the Olympic flame.  

The Tower possesses an amphitheater, an auditorium, a cafeteria and boutiques. Elevators lead to various observatories. It also has a retractable plat-form for the practice of bungee jumping.
At the summit is an observation point to appreciate the scenery of the land and ocean, as well as the water fall.

Solar City Tower will be the point of reference for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro .

More Rare Pictures

Robert Downey, Johnny Depp

 Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein

 John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone

 Danny Devito, Christopher Reeve

Vivien Leigh, Ringo Starr

 Ella Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe

People You Wouldn't Expect to be Together - Rare Photos

John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Pierre Elliot Trudeau

Mick Jagger, Madonna, Tony Curtis

Woody Allen, Michael Jackson

Eartha Kitt, James Dean

Andy Warhol, Alfred Hitchcock

Mohammed Ali, Martin Luther King

Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Barbara Streisand, Sidney Poitier

Marlon Brando,   Miriam Makeba

David Bowie, Art Garfunkel, Paul Simon, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Roberta Flack

Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson

Akira Kurosawa, Barbra Streisand, John Huston

Jack Nicholson, Lauren Bacall, Warren Beatty

   Mother Teresa, Princess Diana

Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire

Audrey Hepburn, Grace kelly

Elvis Presley, Joe Esposito, Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire

Michael Jackson, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas

Paul Newman, Robert Redford

Sophia Loren, Jayne Mansfield

Julie Andrews, Audrey Hepburn

The Beatles and Little Richard

Arnold Shwarzenegger, Shaquille O'Neal

Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen

Dean Martin, Shirley Maclean, Elvis Presley

Salvador Dali, Raquel Welch

Bridgette Bardot, Pablo Picasso

Sean Connery, Bridgette Bardot

Canadian Police Chase - Midas Commercial

        OH YEAH, I CAN FEEL IT IN THE AIR. WINTER IS ALMOST HERE.

Occupy Wall Street Protests Continue - Police Use Force...Atlanta, Oakland

Income inequality in the US has sharply increased in recent decades, a bipartisan analysis has revealed. The Congressional Budget Office said income had trebled for the richest 1% between 1979 and 2007. Meanwhile, a major poll shows anxiety for the future is high, with a majority saying the US is "on the wrong track".

The findings emerged as police used tear gas and mass arrests to force Occupy Wall Street protesters out of their camps in Atlanta and Oakland. Some 50 people were arrested in Atlanta and 85 were held overnight in Oakland, California.
After clashes in Oakland on Tuesday that left an Iraq war veteran in a critical condition, Mayor Jean Quan held a press conference on Wednesday to announce that the plaza would be open to protesting but not to camping. Ms Quan said Oakland supported the protesters' goals, but had to act when a small number of them threw rocks, paint and bottles at the police. Many Occupy Wall Street protesters say they are making a stand against corporate greed and income inequality in the US.

The analysis from the CBO and the latest opinion poll are the backbone of a deeply unhappy narrative in America.
For many people the link is broken between the idea of American capitalism - that hard work will be rewarded, that your children will have a better standard of living than you - and the reality of the system.
Hard times have come and gone before. Incomes have been squeezed, and unemployment has been high. But the conjunction of events and attitudes is startling; economic insecurity, a vast and growing gap not just between rich and poor but between rich and middle class, and a sense of foreboding about the future, including deep distrust of the one body that people once looked to for solutions - the government.
The CBO analysis is sobering, but the period under review ends before the 2008 financial crisis and the bitter recession that followed. Things have only got worse since 2007 for America's poor and its middle class. And right now it is hard to see when things will start to get better again.

As rallies continued, the report from the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office indicated the nation's highest earners saw their household income almost triple in the years between 1979 and 2007. After tax income increased by 275% for the wealthiest 1% of Americans but by just 18% for the poorest 20%, the report said.

In addition, the report revealed that in 2005-2007, the years immediately preceding the financial crisis, the top 20% of the population earned more after-tax income than the entire bottom 80%. Democratic House Representative Sander Levin said the findings confirm what Americans already knew.
"The rules have been changed by the unfair tax policies of the last decade and our tax code is doing less to level the playing field than it was in the past."

The poll, conducted by the New York Times and CBS News.  shows distrust of government is at its highest level ever. Almost half of those asked said they thought the sentiment behind the Occupy Wall Street protests reflected the views of most Americans. Two-thirds said wealth should be more evenly distributed in the US. Some 28% of respondents believe the policies of President Barack Obama favour the rich, although a strong majority - 69% - said that was the effect of Republican policies.
Baton rounds
 
The violence in Georgia and California comes as the Occupy Wall Street movement prepares to mark its sixth week of continuous protest. In the early hours of Wednesday morning police moved into Woodruff Park in Atlanta, Georgia, after issuing warnings that demonstrators should leave.
Around 50 protesters were arrested after midnight, as helicopters circled overhead and trained spotlights into the city square. In Oakland, California, riot police used tear gas and baton rounds and made around 85 arrests to clear protesters from Frank Ogawa Plaza.

The protestors certainly have my admiration and support. How about you?? They are protesting on your behalf too.

Last Cold War-era B53 Nuclear Bomb Dismantled in Texas

  The last of America's most powerful Cold War-era nuclear bombs - the B53 - has been dismantled in Texas.Experts have separated around 300lb (136kg) of high explosives from the bomb's uranium "pit".Weighing 10,000lb, the B53 was the size of a minivan and said to be 600 times more destructive than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.It was first put into service at the height of the Cold War in 1962, and remained in the US arsenal until 1997.

The bomb was designed to hit targets deep underground, such as bunkers in which military and civilian leaders might be sheltering. Carried by B-52 bombers, the "bunker busters" used five parachutes to land softly on their targets before detonating a nine megaton explosion, in effect simulating an earthquake. They have been superseded by bombs that burrow into the ground and then explode.
The first B53s were destroyed in the 1980s but several remained in service until 1997, when they were all retired. A dismantling programme had to be specially designed for the B53s, which were made with older technology and by scientists who have since retired or died. The B53 was a weapon developed in another time for a different world.

 

The US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has said the programme, which was completed once this final bomb had been dismantled, is a year ahead of schedule. The head of the NNSA, Thomas D'Agostino, called the decomissioning of the last B53 a "The world is a safer place with this dismantlement," he said. "The B53 was a weapon developed in another time for a different world. Today, we're moving beyond the Cold War nuclear weapons complex that built it toward a 21st Century nuclear security enterprise."

After disassembly, the uranium pits from the bomb will be temporarily stored at the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas, where Tuesday's dismantling was carried out.
The plant is the only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility in the US.
The plant is likely to be involved with future disassembly projects as older weapons are retired.
According to figures released by the US state department in May 2011, the US has 5,113 nuclear warheads in its current stockpile, down from 31,255 in 1967.

Obama Signs Nuclear ArmsTreaty With Russia

President Obama has signed an arms treaty with Russia that will reduce the nations' nuclear arsenals and bolster verification mechanisms.The Russian president signed similar documents last week, so the New Start treaty will come into effect when the papers are exchanged this weekend.

The treaty was approved by the US Senate in December and by the Russian parliament last month. It replaces the 1991 Start treaty which expired in December 2009. The New Start treaty, agreed to by Mr Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in April, limits each side to no more than 800 deployed nuclear warhead delivery systems (including bombers, missile launchers and nuclear submarines), a cut of about 50%. It limits each side to 1,550 deployed warheads.

It will also allow each side visually to inspect the other's nuclear capability, with the aim of verifying how many warheads each missile carries. The White House barred reporters from the Oval Office when Mr Obama signed the treaty, but allowed still photographers. The pact, opposed by many Republicans, could become an issue in the 2012 US political campaign.

Among other criticisms, US opponents of the treaty argued Russia would have reduced stockpiles anyway as its arsenal aged, so the US had no reason to agree to scrap its own nuclear arms.

US AND RUSSIA NUCLEAR WEAPONS