Sunday, April 22, 2012
French Far Right Soars
China Lauds North Korea
Weird (Earth) Day in History: Sierra Nevada-N. California Region Rocked by Exploding Fireball 50 Years After Nevada Nuclear Test
Breaking News About a Big Boom
Dateline USA … Earth Day 2012…. Fifty years to the day after a Cold War-era Nevada nuclear test--see photo below--a mysterious, exploding fireball rocked the Sierra Nevada-Northern California region, as reported here and here. There is so far no definitive explanation for the event, which may have been caused by a disintegrating meteor, part of a meteor shower brought by a comet's annual fly-by.
France Holds First Round of Presidential Election
Voters in France are casting ballots for their favorite among 10 candidates vying to become the country's next leader. A second-round face-off is likely between incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Francois Hollande.
Jobs and France's sickly economy are top issues, especially in working class suburbs with high immigrant populations and high unemployment rates.
Sarkozy is banking on his experience steering France through hard economic times. As president, he promised people would earn more by working more. But unemployment grew during his presidency, and many voters are disillusioned.
Lieberman Dismisses Iran Drone Building Boast
The chairman of the U.S. Senate's Homeland Security Committee is dismissing Iran's claim that it has reverse-engineered a U.S. spy drone it captured last year. Lawmaker Joe Lieberman said Sunday on U.S. television that he considered the claims little more than "Iranian bluster."
Earlier Sunday, a senior Iranian commander declared Tehran had reverse-engineered the drone and begun building a copy.
Iranian news agencies quoted General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, chief of the aerospace division of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, as saying experts also are recovering data from the RQ-170 Sentinel drone captured in December in eastern Iran.
U.S. officials have acknowledged losing the surveillance drone. They have said Iran will find it hard to exploit any data and technology aboard it because of measures taken to limit the intelligence value of drones operating over hostile territory.
"Secret Codes"
Hajizadeh said the drone contained many "secret codes," but he implied that these had been cracked, saying the spy plane now had "no hidden points."
He said exact information about the drone's history had been recovered indicating that it had flown "above [al-Qaida leader Osama] bin Laden's Pakistani hideout two weeks before he was assassinated."
The Washington Post reported two weeks ago that a CIA stealth surveillance drone flew deep over Iranian territory more than three years ago, capturing images of a secret uranium enrichment facility near Qum before returning home.
The newspaper, quoting former senior U.S. intelligence officials, said there was no sign the aircraft was ever detected. It said such CIA spy planes scoured dozens of suspicious sites related to Iran's disputed nuclear program before the RQ-170 aircraft crashed in December.
-VOA
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