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In the past three decades, almost 4,000 planet-like objects have been discovered orbiting isolated stars outside the Solar System (exoplanets). Beginning in 2011, it was possible to use NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope to observe the first exoplanets in orbit around young binary systems of two live stars with hydrogen still burning in their core.
Brazilian astronomers have now found the first evidence of the existence of an exoplanet orbiting an older or more evolved binary in which one of the two stars is dead.
The study resulted from a postdoctoral research project and a research internship abroad, both with scholarships from São Paulo Research Foundation – FAPESP. Its findings have just been published in the Astronomical Journal, owned by the American Astronomical Society (AAS).
Leonardo Andrade de Almeida (https:/
Almeida is currently a postdoctoral fellow of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), having conducted postdoctoral research at the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences (IAG-USP), where he was supervised by Professor Augusto Damineli, a co-author of the study.
Clues followed by the researchers to discover the exoplanet in the evolved binary called KIC 10544976, located in the Cygnus constellation in the northern celestial hemisphere, included variations in eclipse timing (the time taken for each of the two stars to eclipse the other) and orbital period.
“Variations in the orbital period of a binary are due to gravitational attraction among the three objects, which orbit around a common center of mass,” Almeida said.
Alex Jones breaks down how the globalists are attempting to collapse civilization within the next six months by intensifying their migrant-fueled destabilization of the west.
Orbital period variations are not enough to prove the existence of a planet in the case of binaries, however, because binary stars’ magnetic activity fluctuates periodically, just as the Sun’s magnetic field changes polarity every 11 years, with turbulence and the number and size of sunspots peaking and then declining.
“Variations in the Sun’s magnetic activity eventually cause a change in its magnetic field. The same is true of all isolated stars. In binaries, these variations also cause a change in orbital period due to what we call the Applegate mechanism,” Almeida explained.
To refute the hypothesis that variations in the orbital period of KIC 10544976 were due only to magnetic activity, the researchers analyzed the effect of eclipse timing variation and the magnetic activity cycle of the binary’s live star.
KIC 10544976 consists of a white dwarf, a dead low-mass star with a high surface temperature, and a red dwarf, a live (magnetically active) star with a small mass compared to that of our Sun and scant luminosity due to low energy output. The two stars were monitored by ground-based telescopes between 2005 and 2017 and by Kepler between 2009 and 2013, producing data minute by minute.
“The system is unique,” Almeida said. “No similar system has enough data to let us calculate orbital period variation and magnetic cycle activity for the live star.”
Using the Kepler data, they were able to estimate the magnetic cycle of the live star (red dwarf) based on the rate and energy of flares (large eruptions of electromagnetic radiation) and variability due to spots (regions of cooler surface temperature and hence darkness caused by different concentrations of magnetic field flux).
Analysis of the data showed that the red dwarf’s magnetic activity cycle lasted 600 days, which is consistent with the magnetic cycles estimated for low-mass isolated stars. The binary’s orbital period was estimated at 17 years.
“This completely refutes the hypothesis that orbital period variation is due to magnetic activity. The most plausible explanation is the presence of a giant planet orbiting the binary, with a mass approximately 13 times that of Jupiter,” Almeida said.
Formation Hypotheses
How the planet orbiting the binary was formed is unknown. One hypothesis is that it developed at the same time as the two stars billions of years ago. If so, it is a first-generation planet. Another hypothesis is that it formed out of the gas ejected during the death of the white dwarf, making it a second-generation planet.
Confirmation of its status as either a first- or second-generation planet and its direct detection as it orbits the binary could be obtained using the new generation of ground-based telescopes with primary mirrors exceeding 20 meters, including the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) installed in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The GMT is expected to see first light in 2024.
FAPESP will invest US$40 million in the GMT, or approximately 4% of the telescope’s estimated total cost. This investment will guarantee 4% of the telescope’s operating time for studies by researchers from São Paulo State (read more at: agencia.fapesp.br/28569).
“We’re probing 20 systems in which external bodies could show gravitational effects, such as KIC 10544976, and most are only observable from the southern hemisphere. The GMT will enable us to detect these objects directly and obtain important answers on the formation and evolution of these exotic environments, as well as the possibility of life there,” Almeida said.
Owen reveals Bernie’s possible win-win strategy.
Source: InfoWars
FILE PHOTO: PG&E crew work on power lines to repair damage caused by the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, U.S. November 21, 2018. REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage
April 9, 2019
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A U.S. bankruptcy judge on Tuesday deferred a ruling on whether to approve or reject a motion by PG&E Corp to pay up to $350 million in bonuses to 10,000 employees after the power producer said the plan excluded senior executives and would help it fight devastating wildfires.
The judge set April 23 for the next hearing. The judge said he wants more details about how the plan would work.
PG&E shares rose 0.4% to $18.90 in after-hours trading.
The plan covers 2019 and takes the place of a previously proposed 2018 bonus program for some 14,000 employees that PG&E scuttled after criticism from wildfire victims and their lawyers. The U.S. Trustee, the government’s bankruptcy watchdog, had also objected to the new plan, saying it did not make clear insiders are excluded and expressing concern about its cost.
San Francisco-based PG&E sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January facing the prospect of potentially billions of dollars in liabilities stemming from wildfires in California in recent years linked or suspected to be linked to its equipment.
The investor-owned power provider has said it expects its equipment will be found to have caused November’s Camp Fire, California’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire. The blaze killed 86 people and destroyed the town of Paradise.
Half of the plan’s formula for calculating bonuses is pegged to how well employees help PG&E meet safety goals like clearing trees and branches around power lines to avert contact that triggers wildfires.
(Reporting by Jim Christie; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)
Source: OANN
Metallic asteroids are thought to have started out as blobs of molten iron floating in space. As if that’s not strange enough, scientists now think that as the metal cooled and solidified, volcanoes spewing liquid iron could have erupted through a solid iron crust onto the surface of the asteroid.
This scenario emerged from an analysis by planetary scientists at UC Santa Cruz whose investigation was prompted in part by NASA’s plans to launch a probe to Psyche, the largest metallic asteroid in the solar system. Francis Nimmo, professor of Earth and planetary sciences, said he was interested in the composition of metallic asteroids indicated by analyses of iron meteorites, so he had graduate student Jacob Abrahams work on some simple models of how the asteroids cooled and solidified.
“One day he turned to me and said, ‘I think these things are going to erupt,’” Nimmo said. “I’d never thought about it before, but it makes sense because you have a buoyant liquid beneath a dense crust, so the liquid wants to come up to the top.”
The researchers described their findings in a paper that has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters.
Dr. “Willie” Soon explains what is going on with the government’s solar observatories and how the threat of a Carrington Event coronal mass ejection is being ignored.
Metallic asteroids originated early in the history of the solar system when planets were beginning to form. A protoplanet or “planetesimal” involved in a catastrophic collision could be stripped of its rocky outer layers, exposing a molten, iron-rich core. In the cold of space, this blob of liquid metal would quickly begin to cool and solidify.
“In some cases it would crystallize from the center out and wouldn’t have volcanism, but some would crystallize from the top down, so you’d get a solid sheet of metal on the surface with liquid metal underneath,” Nimmo said.
As for what the iron volcanoes would look like, Abrahams said it depends on the composition of the melt. “If it’s mostly pure iron, then you would have eruptions of low-viscosity surface flows spreading out in thin sheets, so nothing like the thick, viscous lava flows you see on Hawaii,” he said. “At the other extreme, if there are light elements mixed in and gases that expand rapidly, you could have explosive volcanism that might leave pits in the surface.”
NASA’s Psyche mission is scheduled to launch in 2022 and reach the asteroid in 2026. Signs of past volcanism that researchers could look for include variations in the color or composition of material on the surface, and possibly features that look like volcanic vents. Large volcanic cones are probably unlikely, Abrahams said.
Unfortunately, because metallic asteroids would have solidified fairly quickly after their formation, there has been plenty of time (billions of years) for any surface features of volcanism to be degraded. “It’s not clear what they might look like now,” Abrahams said.
The best opportunity to find evidence of ferrovolcanism on metallic asteroids might actually come from studying iron meteorites already in collections on Earth, the researchers said.
“There are lots of these metallic meteorites, and now that we know what we’re looking for, we might find evidence of volcanism in them,” Nimmo said. “If material got erupted onto the surface, it would cool very fast, which would be reflected in the composition of the meteorite. And it might have holes in it left by escaping gas.”
When they presented their findings at a recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Abrahams and Nimmo discovered that another research team had independently arrived at similar conclusions about the possibility of ferrovolcanism.
“It’s not a shocking idea, but we’d just never thought about iron volcanism before, so it’s something new and interesting to investigate,” Abrahams said.
This research was supported in part by NASA.
Establishment news attempting damage control after AOC’s speech.
Source: InfoWars
FILE PHOTO: The SEB logo is seen on their headquarters building in Stockholm April 28, 2010. REUTERS/Bob Strong/File Photo
April 9, 2019
By Esha Vaish
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Swedish bank SEB’s fund management arm has cut its stake in rival Swedbank by just over half, citing risks Sweden’s biggest mortgage lender faces due to its alleged involvement in a fast-growing Baltic money laundering scandal.
Swedbank has come under heavy criticism from politicians, investors and the general public over allegations that its Baltic operations processed billions of dollars of transactions linked to Russian money laundering.
The scandal, which broke on Feb. 20, has led to Swedbank’s CEO and chairman leaving and the launch of several regulatory investigations into the bank.
SEB Fonder has reduced its Swedbank stake to just under 1 percent from just over 2 percent over the past two months, having sold nearly 5 million shares in March and over 7 million shares in February, according to the company and based on data published on Tuesday.
Before the cut, SEB was Swedbank’s 10th largest shareholder according to Refinitiv Eikon data.
“The decision to reduce ownership in Swedbank is a management decision, based on the information that is gradually published about Swedbank,” SEB Investment Management’s head Hans Ek told Reuters by email.
He added that SEB had drawn parallels with respect to price developments with other companies suspected of lacking in money laundering controls.
Swedbank shares have fallen by one third as the scandal has grown, with the latest report suggesting its Estonian accounts dealt with roughly 135 billion euros of suspicious cash, predominantly from Russian clients.
(Reporting by Esha Vaish in Stockholm, additional reporting by Johan Ahlander; editing by David Evans)
Source: OANN
The Airbus logo is pictured at Airbus headquarters in Blagnac near Toulouse, France, March 20, 2019. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau
April 9, 2019
PARIS (Reuters) – European planemaker Airbus said on Tuesday it saw no legal basis for the United States’ move towards imposing trade sanctions on its aircraft and warned of deepening trade tensions.
Washington on Monday proposed a list of EU products, from large commercial jets to dairy products and wine, on which to impose tariffs as retaliation for European aircraft subsidies.
The EU and the United States have fought for over a decade over mutual claims of illegal aid to plane giants Boeing and Airbus. Both sides have been judged by the WTO to have paid billions of dollars of subsidies to gain advantage, and asked to stop or face potential sanctions.
Airbus spokesman Rainer Ohler said the planemaker had taken measures to comply with the “relatively minor” outstanding requirements. U.S. talk of $11 billion worth of damage from EU subsidies to Airbus was excessive, he added.
“The amount is largely exaggerated and in any case will be defined by the WTO and not the U.S.” Ohler said.
Ohler said a WTO ruling last week against tax breaks for its U.S. rival Boeing should allow the EU to seek “even greater countermeasures.”
He said the ruling showed “no willingness at all on the Boeing side to comply and confirms they are clearly in contravention with WTO rules.”
A source at the European Commission said the EU was preparing for possible retaliation.
“All this is leading to unnecessary trade tensions and shows the only reasonable solution in this long trade dispute is a settlement,” added Ohler.
(Reporting by Tim Hepher; Writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta/Keith Weir)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan testifies before a House Financial Services Committee hearing titled: “Holding Megabanks Accountable: An Examination of Wells Fargo’s Pattern of Consumer Abuses” in Washington, U.S. March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Erin Scott/File Photo
April 9, 2019
By Imani Moise and Pete Schroeder
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The day after former Wells Fargo & Co Chief Executive Tim Sloan told U.S. lawmakers he was transforming the bank’s high-pressure culture, Federal Reserve officials met privately with bank employees.
At the meeting on March 13, which has not been previously reported, Fed officials were told by four bank employees that little had changed within the bank’s culture since the scandal that engulfed Wells Fargo almost three years ago.
Among those present at the meeting was Fed Governor Lael Brainard, who is overseeing a decree requiring that Wells Fargo fix its risk management before it can resume growing, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said. The employees belonged to an advocacy group, Committee For Better Banks, which confirmed the meeting.
Brainard told the group she was there to listen and get insight into the mood among Wells Fargo staff but declined to say if or how the Fed would respond, the sources said.
While regulators occasionally meet with consumer advocacy or industry groups, it is unusual for a Fed board member to meet with an individual firm’s employees. It is not clear who asked for the meeting.
Sloan abruptly departed the bank last month, making him the second CEO to leave Wells Fargo in the wake of its sales practice scandal. Sloan, who declined to comment on this story through a representative, has previously said he stepped down because he felt the external attention on him had become a distraction.
His departure was at least partly the result of the board’s conclusion that Sloan had failed to convince regulators that he could transform the bank and rally a staff that had low confidence in its leadership, according to a source with knowledge of the board’s thinking.
Wells Fargo spokesman Mark Folk declined to comment on regulatory matters but disputed the employee group’s characterization of the bank’s culture.
Sloan’s struggles underscore the challenges faced by the bank’s next chief executive. They will not only have to transform the bank and its sales practices, but also persuade regulators and its 260,000 employees that they have done so.
Finding a new CEO who can win over the bank’s employees is as important as finding someone who can charm regulators and Wall Street, said Russell Raath, president of management consulting firm Kotter.
“The whole bank needs to know that this person cares about their contribution to the top and bottom line,” he said.
STRAINED RELATIONSHIP
Wells Fargo’s relationship with regulators has been strained since 2016, when employee whistleblowers revealed the bank had opened potentially millions of unauthorized accounts.
Internal and regulatory probes have since discovered other issues in the bank’s businesses, resulting in billions of dollars in fines and penalties.
In February 2018, Wells Fargo signed a Fed consent order that required the bank to fix its risk-management and governance problems before it could grow its balance sheet.
Two months later, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Wells Fargo’s other key regulator, ordered the bank to make similar fixes and repay customers to whom it had improperly sold mortgages and auto insurance.
In December, Reuters reported that the Fed had rejected the bank’s initial remediation plan, putting it behind schedule. Days later, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told Congress the Fed would not lift the asset cap until it was satisfied that Wells Fargo had fixed its risk problems.
LOW MORALE
An internal company-wide survey around that time also pointed to low morale, according to the Committee For Better Banks and other Wells Fargo employees.
The bank internally published a write-up about the survey, saying Wells Fargo found itself at a “challenging and interesting” crossroads. Some employees felt that the description sugar-coated the findings, sources said.
That sparked dozens of comments from workers criticizing management for being out of touch, according to the sources and screenshots of the internal site reviewed by Reuters.
A consumer loan underwriter complained on the internal site that the concerns about pay and employee benefits were falling on deaf ears.
“For years (team members) have been expressing their concerns and frustrations,” the employee wrote. “The only response (if any) are canned answers and talking points which we all know is baloney.”
An analysis of the survey Wells Fargo published publicly showed only 38 percent of employees felt senior management understood obstacles faced by frontline workers.
Wells Fargo’s Folk said the company seeks and values input from employees, and that the bank has already made a number of improvements based on the feedback.
He pointed to other categories in the survey that showed employees believed in the bank’s values and were satisfied. For example, 72 percent of employees said they believe Wells Fargo is a good place to work.
REGULATORY REBUKE
Sloan testified before Congress on March 12 in a hearing about the bank’s progress since 2016.
As a gesture of goodwill, Wells Fargo took the unusual step of offering the OCC the opportunity to review his testimony in advance, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. It is unclear how the OCC responded.
In his testimony, Sloan detailed Wells Fargo’s extensive transformation efforts, but regulators remained skeptical.
Sloan had barely finished speaking when the OCC said it was still “disappointed” by the bank’s remediation efforts.
The next day, after Wells Fargo disclosed Sloan had gotten a 5 percent pay raise, the Fed responded that it expects boards “to hold management accountable.”
A week later, Powell told reporters the bank had suffered a “remarkably widespread series of breakdowns” that needed to be addressed in a “fundamental” way.
These rebukes undermined Sloan’s position at the bank, the source with knowledge of the board’s thinking said.
On March 26, Sloan told the board he had decided to resign, according to a regulatory filing. Three days later, he publicly stepped down.
(Reporting by Imani Moise in New York and Pete Schroeder in Washington; additional reporting by Greg Roumeliotis in New York. Writing and additional reporting by Michelle Price; editing by Neal Templin and Paritosh Bansal)
Source: OANN
A small toy figure is seen on representations of the Bitcoin virtual currency in this illustration picture, December 26, 2017. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
April 9, 2019
SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China’s state planner wants to ban bitcoin mining, according to a draft list of industrial activities the agency is seeking to stop in a sign of growing government pressure on the cryptocurrency sector.
The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said on Monday it was seeking public opinions on a revised list of industries it wants to encourage, restrict or eliminate. The list was first published in 2011.
The draft for a revised list added cryptocurrency mining, including that of bitcoin, to over 450 activities the NDRC said should be phased out as they did not adhere to relevant laws and regulations, were unsafe, wasted resources or polluted the environment.
It did not stipulate a target date or plan for how to eliminate bitcoin mining, meaning that such activities should be phased out immediately, the document said. The public has have until May 7 to comment on the draft.
State-owned newspaper Securities Times said on Tuesday that the draft list “distinctly reflects the attitude of the country’s industrial policy” toward the cryptocurrency industry.
The cryptocurrency sector has been under heavy scrutiny in China since 2017, when regulators started to ban initial coin offerings and shut local cryptocurrency trading exchanges.
China also began to limit cryptocurrency mining, forcing many firms – among them some of the world’s largest – to find bases elsewhere.
Chinese companies are also among the biggest manufacturers of bitcoin mining gear. Reuters reported last year that at least three were looking to raise billions of dollars with initial public offerings in Hong Kong. But at least one, Canaan Inc, let its application lapse.
(Reporting by Brenda Goh; Editing by Richard Borsuk)
Source: OANN
A man stands in front of an electronic board displaying stock information at a brokerage firm in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China April 1, 2019. Picture taken April 1, 2019. REUTERS/Stringer ATTENTION EDITORS – THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. CHINA OUT.
April 8, 2019
By Andrew Galbraith and Daniel Leussink
SHANGHAI/TOKYO (Reuters) – Not for the first time, China’s markets are marching to their own beat.
Just as investors come to terms with a bleak outlook for global growth and earnings, with weak German industrial and trade data just the latest portents of gloom, China’s economy may be bottoming out, helped by Beijing’s early moves to prop up a stuttering economy.
At the same time, Chinese regulators’ drive to open up financial markets to foreign involvement is making the country more accessible, and a potentially rich target for foreign investors looking to diversify.
“The more you see stabilization of the Chinese growth story – and I think you’ll see that coming through in the middle of the year – the more comfortable you’ll be with looking at the debt and equity side of things in China,” said Kerry Craig, Global Market Strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management in Melbourne.
To be fair, global markets are having a good year. Index provider MSCI’s broadest gauge of global shares is up more than 13 percent since January, erasing last year’s losses even against the backdrop of the U.S.-China trade war and Brexit.
But dovish shifts by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have in recent weeks sparked market jitters, pushing down bond yields and jolting equity indexes.
China’s markets have been comparatively unfazed. The blue-chip CSI300 index has risen more than a third so far this year, making it the world’s best-performing major index.
Yields on benchmark 10-year Chinese government bonds have also jumped in recent days alongside rallying shares as investors’ appetite for the safest investments has ebbed.
Faced with a slowing economy due in part to a multi-year campaign to reduce risky leverage and to headwinds from the trade war, Beijing began easing policy selectively last year, channeling more money into the real economy to boost growth.
Tax cuts, infrastructure spending and pledges to boost lending and lower borrowing costs have helped revive stagnant credit growth, brightening the outlook for corporate earnings.
“With easing policies starting to have an impact on credit creation, credit growth should continue to pick up this year,” Chen Long, China economist at Gavekal Dragonomics in Beijing, said in a note.
“It’s clear that China’s economy slowed further in the first quarter of 2019, but there’s an increasingly strong consensus that growth will bottom out and improve later in the year.”
Chinese shares have also been bolstered by rising foreign interest.
Net flows into China’s stock market through the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Connect program topped 125 billion yuan ($18.6 billion) in the first quarter of 2019, nearly triple the same period a year earlier, data from Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd showed.
In February, the Institute for International Finance said foreign investors put more than $10 billion into Chinese onshore equities ahead of an announced rise in the weighting of A-shares in MSCI’s benchmark indexes.
Graphic: Different drummers, click https://tmsnrt.rs/2WUNt2W
BOND BOOST
Global index changes have extended beyond equities.
On April 1, index provider Bloomberg Barclays began a 20-month process of including some Chinese government and policy bank bonds in its Global Aggregate index, a move expected to draw billions of foreign dollars into China’s $13 trillion bond market.
While initial flows tracking the index will be gradual, “at some point in time there will be an inflection point,” said Dhiraj Bajaj, fixed income portfolio manager at Lombard Odier in Singapore.
For active investors, Chinese bonds provide advantages to a diversified portfolio, including lower average durations and significant yield premiums.
Frances Cheung, head of macro strategy for Asia at Westpac, said the yuan’s relative stability could burnish the appeal of yuan-denominated assets to some investors.
“The RMB is less sensitive to risk sentiment than some of its regional peers including the IDR, KRW and MYR. The correlation between USD/CNY and Chinese government bonds is also low. These features render CNY bonds a good avenue for portfolio diversification, especially when initial exposure is low for many investors,” she said.
Data from Bond Connect, which gives foreign investors access to China’s interbank market, shows trading volumes through the scheme jumped 70 percent, and the number of registered Bond Connect investors rose 41 percent, in the first quarter of 2019.
Bond Connect says index inclusion has shifted the focus of trading toward government and policy bank bonds, which accounted for 66 percent of turnover in March, up from 37 percent in December.
But following a year-long rally that pushed yields on 10-year Chinese government bonds down nearly a full percentage point from highs in late January 2018, some investors may be seeing less room for profit, said Bajaj.
A lack of familiarity with Chinese bonds may also deter some foreign investors, while technical issues such as limited hedging tools and patchy trading of newly issued government bonds remain nagging concerns.
“I imagine a lot of investors in similar positions like myself have just kind of a lack of experience of the market that probably limits its global safe-haven flow,” said Ross Hutchison, a global bond fund manager at Aberdeen Standard Investments in Edinburgh. “But that doesn’t mean that won’t change.”
Craig at J.P. Morgan said foreign investors should approach Chinese bonds with care. “We do know that the Chinese government has a large amount of debt. We have to think about the quality of what’s backing up those bonds,” he said.
But if investors are comfortable with China’s ability to contain debt, those concerns should ease, Craig added.
“We talk about the U.S. market being a safe haven, but U.S. debt is going to go up if they continue to spend at this rate,” he said.
Graphic: Benchmark moves, click https://tmsnrt.rs/2WPCXtv
(Reporting by Daniel Leussink and Andrew Galbraith; Additional reporting by Vidya Ranganathan in SINGAPORE; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
Source: OANN
A couple of days ago I stumbled upon a radio interview where the topic was safety and government oversight. I had tuned in at the exact moment when the interviewee said the following:
Well, my experience of 30 years in Washington, D.C. is the same Ronald Reagan had – you know, trust but verify. And when bad things happen, you need to verify if what he is saying is correct. I certainly question that there’s not a cozy relationship. All anyone has to do is look at the revolving door in Washington, D.C., and this agency and the industry to realize that there is a cozy relationship. Now the question is, is that cozy relationship having an adverse impact on the safety decisions being made?
Before I could ascertain what they were discussing in the interview, my mind began to race. Could it be clean water, Round Up pesticide lawsuits, climate change, vaccine safety, the opioid crisis? My question was quickly answered. The forum was an interview on National Public Radio(NPR) with former National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chairman, James Hall, on the investigation into the recent tragedy of two Boeing 737 MAX airline crashes. Upon a rewind of the interview, I kept hearing references to “revolving doors” and “cozy relationships.”
David Greene, host of the show, asked,
“But are you saying there are documents that Boeing has showing that they’re – that the company and, potentially the FAA, knew that there were some problems, some of the very problems that may have caused these accidents, and that they certified the aircraft anyway?”
Mr. Hall responded,
“…the process that we presently have is a self-certification process by the manufacturer of the safety of the aircraft… what has happened is that these decisions have been made in commissions and rulemakings dominated by the industry in Washington, D.C.”
As reported by NPR, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) left the safety testing of the plane to the manufacturing company (Boeing) and that this practice could be found “a lot” in the federal government. James Goodwin of the Center for Progressive Reform stated, “The American public would be surprised, and maybe even concerned, if they knew how widespread the practice of self-regulation was.” I wondered what implications this example might carry for aviation safety, agriculture, vaccine safety, and generally for the future of government oversight and scientific inquiry.
Toward the end of the interview, Mr. Greene from NPR stated that recently he had asked FAA head, Dan Elwell, some of the same questions. In one answer, Mr. Elwell responded, “the FAA is an agency that is based on data, and they very much make their decisions, including keeping those planes in the air, based on data.” Dan Elwell, is a former Vice President of the Aerospace Industries Association, representing the most powerful aerospace industry companies. There remain some very tough questions to be answered by the manufacturers of the airline industry, like Boeing, and the “cozy relationship” it and other industry members enjoy with the government agencies responsible for regulating its operations and overseeing its compliance with public safety. But, let’s move on from that thread of public air safety and pause for an overview of the opioid crisis facing the United States.
Alex exposes the globalist agenda that uses government agencies to cover up their crimes against the population.
Public Air Safety to the Opioid Crisis
Earlier in March, the 13th to be precise, I saved a copy of the transcript from an interview between David Greene and Brian Mann, an NPR associate, who has been following developments in some of the lawsuits around the nation’s opioid crisis. In its introduction to the interview NPR reported,
“The opioid epidemic claimed 70,000 lives in 2017. To put that in perspective, that is more than the number of people who died annually at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. And the pharmaceutical industry is going to spend much of this year answering some hard questions. Many blame pharma for our country’s opioid crisis. And this year, big drug makers, as well as pharmacy chains, are facing more than 1,500 lawsuits filed by state and local governments. Billions of dollars are at stake, and so are reputations. Johnson & Johnson, Purdue Pharma, CVS – those are just some of the companies targeted in these lawsuits.”
The following are excerpts from the interview:
Greene: I mean that there are internal company documents that are being made public, and some of them have been controversial, you’ve been finding.
Mann: Purdue executives, for example, can be seen secretly acknowledging that their prescription opioids were far more addictive and dangerous than they were telling doctors. At the same time, company directives kept pushing sales, pushing the salespeople incredibly hard to get more opioids into the hands of vulnerable people, including seniors and military veterans….We’ve also learned that Purdue Pharma executives developed a secret plan they called Project Tango, which they allegedly hoped might help them profit again from the growing wave of opioid addiction. The idea here was to sell addiction treatment services to some of the same people addicted to products like their own OxyContin… Which means for more than a decade, no one in the wider public knew how serious the allegations against Purdue and these other drug companies were. But this time, states and cities suing these companies seem eager to sort of pull back the curtain… the drug industry has fought these disclosures at every turn. They describe the information in these documents as proprietary, basically arguing its corporate property. But as more and more information comes out, it’s making people angry.
On a related topic, Mr. Mann expressed:
But according to the drug company’s own documents, firms including Johnson & Johnson pushed unscientific theories about drug addiction. They did so allegedly to convince doctors to prescribe even more opioids after patients showed signs of dependency. David Armstrong, the reporter with ProPublica, says this kind of disclosure is making it harder for the industry to protect its image.
Government Agency Collusion
Government agency collusion with different industries, to me, represented nothing short of corruption. I was reminded of the tobacco industry and how the Phillip Morris tobacco company organized its Boca Raton Action Plan in 1988, in an effort to “diffuse and re-orient” the voices and initiatives of those fighting tobacco in favor of public health. Also, how the World Health Organization (WHO) itself colluded with legal experts and doctors in the United States in favor of the tobacco industry and against public health. From this fiasco was coined the expression “tobacco science;” i.e. “Science” done on behalf of an interest defending its profits, like the science conducted by a cigarette company showing that cigarettes are safe.
And speaking of the WHO, I was also reminded of the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) “pandemic.” In the spring of 2010, the Council of Europe was investigating the role of the WHO in declaring the H1N1 pandemic. Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, an epidemiologist who at one time was head of the Health Committee of the Council of Europe, expressed concerns that the contracts for the vaccine were mostly confidential arrangements between the WHO, individual member states and the companies producing the vaccine. In fact, numerous countries, including Germany, France, Italy and Great Britain, entered into contracts with the vaccine manufacturing companies prior to the WHO’s declaration of an H1N1 pandemic. The contracts obligated these countries to purchase swine flu vaccinations under one condition: that the WHO issue a pandemic flu alert.
Transformed Relationships
In his farewell speech to the citizenry, U. S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower poignantly expressed his concern regarding the future of science and its partnership with government, and government with industry, when he said:
…the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research…The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
I kept wondering about the revolving doors, the collusion, industrial interests, and the science that was supposed to provide a foundation upon which to rest our confidence, our trust. How did we get here? The short answer, and quite possibly the simplest, might be the privatization of knowledge, or as some have called it, the “selling of science.” Or, maybe it’s the troubled matrimony of science and technology, where an applied and economic gain becomes the foundational rationale for present and future scientific endeavor. Such an environment raises serious questions as to the future of knowledge, the advancement of the sciences, and potential impacts on our economic, social, and public health.
Aristotle reminded us that “knowledge is virtue.” It has a value unto itself; a purpose that serves no particular master other than the rational development of inquiry and respective methods for the development of that knowledge. Here resided the principles of the classic universities, places where questions were explored, answered, and questioned again. This was the meaning of science – never settled – but forever moving toward a better, safer, healthier, and more advanced state of human affairs. But what happens to science when the scientist is tied to private industry, where the principle objective of private industry is defined by its stockholders interests, investments, and profits, where the same industry that manufactures the product for profit is also the industry responsible for generating the science determining the efficacy, effectiveness, and safety of its product?
In his book, Science in the Private Interest, Dr. Sheldon Krimsky writes,
“The responsibility of the scientist begins with discovery and ends with commercial applications. Universities exist mainly to provide labor for industry and to help industry turn knowledge into technology; technology into productivity; and productivity into profits.”
What Dr. Krimsky refers to as “public interest science as a model of knowledge for human welfare,” has been redefined, or more crudely speaking, undermined by the transformation of the relationship between scientists at universities, private industries with their scientists, and the “cozy relationships” that exist between the two. In the book To Profit or Not To Profit, authors Walter Powell and Jason Owens-Smith state,
“The changes underway at universities are the result of multiple forces: a transformation in of the nature policymakers and key constituents. These trends are so potent that there is little chance for reversing them-nor necessarily a rationale for doing so.”
These changes have been referred to as characteristic of the scientist as entrepreneur, or parts of what Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie explore in their book Academic Capitalism. In it, they write:
“We would expect that faculty as professionals participating in academic capitalism would begin to move away from values such as altruism and public service, toward market values.”
The Transformation of Science and Scientists
The transformation of science and scientists that are lured into and seek financial support from private industry for any number of research-to-market projects has become an all too familiar scenario with potentially devastating consequences.
Most recently, the parents of one of the victims of the Egyptian Boeing airline, filed suit against Boeing and the Rosemont airline parts manufacturing industry. Reuters report states that:
Thursday’s complaint accuses Boeing of putting “profits over safety” and said the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration must also be held accountable for certifying the 737 MAX.
However, reports Reuters: “Legal experts say these cases face high hurdles since government officials and agencies are generally immune from civil lawsuits.”
Under the current science-to-market model, government oversight of any number of products, from airplanes, to drugs, to tobacco, and more, continues to demonstrate a complacency that favors market-driven profits over public safety. This reality should alarm anyone and all. What if, as some of the legal experts above claim, a U.S. citizen has no right to hold industry responsible for assurances of safety because those industries are tied to government agencies, or because those agencies derive profits or “benefits” from the “cozy relationships?” If you believe that the FAA and the FDA need to come clean regarding the “revolving door” and “cozy relationships” that experts have indicated exist between both agencies and private industry, why would we not consider the same for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)?
Arguably, a profoundly vivid parallel is seen in the policies and practices of mandatory vaccination and informed consent. Over the many years studying vaccination theory and practice, I discovered a disturbing similar pattern – the “revolving door” between the CDC and private pharmaceutical manufacturing companies, the conflicts of interest where different committees and their members are given waivers protecting conflicts of interest, payoffs to doctors for administering vaccines, fast-tracking of vaccines and safety studies with no use of double-blind placebo studies, and the very “cozy relationship” between members of Congress, “big pharma,” the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA). For years families had been suing vaccine manufacturers for injuries their children suffered at the hands of vaccines. Threatening to discontinue vaccine production, the vaccine manufacturers asked for government assurances that their products would go forward unhindered. The 1986 law took all liability away from the manufacturers of vaccines, making it impossible to sue the industry. The same law stipulated that every two years the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would submit a report to Congress on the state of vaccine safety. It was during this time that the numbers and doses of vaccines began a dramatic increase.
In 2017 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Del Bigtree of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) filed a suit before the U.S. Federal Court for the Southern District of New York. On July 27, 2018, HHS admitted the following before the court:
The [Department]’s searches for records did not locate any records responsive to your request. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Immediate Office of the Secretary (IOS) conducted a thorough search of its document tracking systems. The department also conducted a comprehensive review of all relevant indexes of HHS secretarial correspondence records maintained at Federal record centers that remain in the custody of HHS. These searches did not locate records responsive to your request, or indications that records responsive to your request and in the custody of HHS are located at Federal record centers.
Today in the United States, political, medical, and mass media leadership, infused by the interests of vaccine manufacturers, are currently engaged in a massive campaign to silence dialogue, ban books and websites, avoid debates, and impose that vaccines become mandatory for all with no respect to informed consent, religious beliefs, medical conditions, or personal conscience. Writing on a recent measles outbreak in Rockland County, New York, Celeste McGovern remarks,
“People, like those in Rockland County, don’t avoid vaccines because they are misled by “fake” news and Facebook – but because of the real stories of corporate greed and political cover-up and vaccine-injured children that are shared on those platforms. The data bears them out. There are millions of them.”
The very thought that censorship would become an instrument of intimidation, humiliation, a threat, and a practice violating human rights, should make anyone shiver. But maybe more importantly, the unbridled and crass censorship we are witnessing today on the topic of mandatory vaccination, its effectiveness and safety, should leave us asking: How is it possible that censorship becomes a principal upon which public policy and social interaction are defined in a democracy? Will the violation of the right to informed consent become the new paradigm applied to air travel, medications, vaccination, food, and more?
Personally, and professionally, I see nothing edifying and positive coming from the censorship of those that question. Boeing has explaining to do, as does the FAA. Furthermore, Johnson & Johnson, Purdue, CVS and the FDA, owe the people an explanation. Likewise, the HHS, CDC, and pharma owe the people many explanations about the safety of vaccines.
This is no time for silence.
The viewpoints expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Infowars.
Brian Stelter is famous for complaining too much.
Source: InfoWars
FILE PHOTO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks at a news conference with Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Leo Varadkar during Merkel’s visit to Dublin, where the latest Brexit developments were on the agenda, in Farmleigh House, Dublin, Ireland April 4, 2019. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/File Photo
April 8, 2019
BERLIN (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel does not think expropriating apartments sold off to big private landlords is appropriate, her spokesman said on Monday, after thousands of Berlin residents demanded the expropriation of more than 200,000 such flats.Activists are collecting signatures for a ballot proposal that would require the city to take back properties from any landlord that owns more than 3,000 apartments. Polls suggest such a measure could pass, forcing the city to consider spending billions of euros buying privatized housing back.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry said it was necessary to build more flats rather than expropriate existing ones.
(Reporting by Michelle Martin)
Source: OANN
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