North Korea blast US calling Obama a monkey

This is really epic, North Korea calling President Barack Obama “a
monkey” and blamed the U.S. on Saturday for shutting down its Internet amid the hacking row
over the comedy “The Interview.”
North Korea has denied involvement in a crippling cyberattack on Sony Pictures but has expressed fury over the comedy depicting an assassination of its leader Kim Jong Un.

After Sony Pictures initially called off the release in a decision criticized by Obama, the movie has opened this week.

On Saturday, the North’s powerful National Defense Commission, the country’s top governing body led by Kim, said that Obama was behind the release of “The Interview.” It described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.

“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unidentified spokesman at the commission’s
Policy Department said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

“If the U.S. is to persistently insist that the hacking attack was made by the DPRK, the U.S. should produce evidence without fail, though belatedly,” the statement publish by KCNA said.

He also accused Washington for intermittent outages of North Korea websites this week, after
the U.S. had promised to respond to the Sony hack.

There was no immediate reaction from the White House on Saturday. According to the North Korea commission’s spokesman, “the U.S., a big country, started
disturbing the Internet operation of major media of the DPRK, not knowing shame like children playing a tag.”

The commission said the movie was the results of a hostile U.S. policy toward North Korea, and
threatened the U.S. with unspecified consequences.

North Korea and the U.S. remain technically in a state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War
ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

The rivals also are locked in an international standoff over the North’s nuclear and missile programs and its alleged human rights abuses. The U.S. stations about 28,500 troops in South Korea as deterrence against North Korean aggression.

Source: Associated Press

North Korea’s internet is down, all thanks to US

The saga between Sony, North Korea and the US government stiffens with more controversies, here is  a brief summary by LIB
Sony Pictures released a movie called The Interview, a comedy about a fictional assassination of North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un.. North Korean didn’t find it funny and hacked into Sony’s computers, rendering thousands of computers inoperable and forced Sony to take its entire computer network offline. That wasn’t enough, they then threatened terror attack on US citizens if Sony doesn’t cancel showing the movie, forcing Sony to pull the interview from theaters and losing almost $200m. Then the US govt got involved and told Sony to go ahead and release the movie, that they don’t take lightly to threats and promised to retaliate for the attack on Sony. It looks like they’ve kept their to promise. North Korea is currently offline. funny isn’t it ?

“Internet connectivity between North Korea and the outside world is currently suffering one of its worst outages in recent memory, suggesting that the country may be enduring a mass cyber attack a few days after President Obama warned the US would launch a “proportional response” to North Korea’s hack against Sony

North Korea, which has four official networks connecting the country to the Internet — all of which route through China — began experiencing intermittent problems yesterday and today went completely black, according to Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research in Hanover, New Hampshire.” Bloomberg reports.

No one messes with the US and goes free, haha

Former Miss America Mary Ann Mobley dies from breast cancer

   

One of Americas legendary beauty Mary Ann Mobley, she was one of the American women that made it big in the beauty and Hollywood entertainment world, Mary Ann Mobley, has died. Mary Ann, who won the Miss America pageant in 1959, died yesterday Tuesday Dec. 9th in Beverly Hills after a long battle with breast cancer, TMZ reports. She was 75 years old.

The former beauty queen appeared in several Hollywood movies and sitcoms including ‘Diff’rent Strokes. Her family says she will buried next week in her native Mississippi.

WoW ! Hillary Clinton To Decide On Presidential Bid Early Next Year

Hillary Rodham Clinton has said she won’t make a decision about a 2016 presidential bid before the end of the year, and on Friday, she stuck to that
timeline, saying she’ll decide whether to run around the beginning of next year.

The former U.S. secretary of state, senator and first lady said her background gives her a “unique vantage point” to bring to the White House should she run in 2016.

“I do have a unique vantage point and set of experiences about what makes the United States operate well and what doesn’t and what a president can do and should be doing,” she said. “So I am going to be making a decision around, probably after the first of the year, about whether I’m going to run again or not.”

Clinton first ran for president in 2008, but she was defeated in the Democratic primary by then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. She was asked about her intentions for the next presidential cycle Friday at an event in Mexico City honoring thousands of scholarship students supported by the Telmex Foundation, one of several charitable organizations under the umbrella of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.

Clinton would only speak
“hypothetically” about a possible presidential bid. She added she would have to have a clear vision of what she wants to achieve, and as well as how she would lead politically to realize that vision.

“I think the most important question anybody should ask who’s thinking about it is not whether you’re going to run or whether you’re going to win — it is what’s your vision for the country and can you lead us there?” she explained.

“And I will have to be convinced that I have a very clear vision with an agenda of what I think needs to be done, and that I have the experience and know-how to lead — not just those who agree with me, but those who disagree with me, to try to achieve those goals. It’s a
very serious undertaking, so obviously I’m thinking about it, but I have not made a decision yet.”

Polls have shown Clinton all but running away with the Democratic nomination and performing strongly against most of her GOP challengers, though her lead in general election polls has recently diminished, according to some surveys.

Source: CBSNEWS

WoW ! It’s HerexG

WoW ! Strong Solar Storm Will Hit Earth Starting Thursday Night, Scientists Say

“An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun on Sept. 10, 2014. This image was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and shows light in the 131 Angstrom wavelength, which is typically colorized in teal.”

Energy from two significant solar flares is hurtling toward the Earth, and is predicted to hit the planet’s magnetic field beginning on Thursday night and
lasting through Saturday, scientists said Thursday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), which monitors space weather, has issued a G3 or “strong” geomagnetic storm watch for Friday, due to the combined influence of two coronal mass ejections, or CMEs,
that were associated with the solar flares.

Coronal mass ejections, which are essentially magnetic clouds ejected at high velocity from the sun, can affect the electricity grid, radio transmissions and GPS signals, among other things,
when they interact with the planet’s magnetic field.

One benefit of this event, though, could be a significant display of the Northern Lights, also known as the Aurora Borealis. According to NOAA scientists, the Northern Lights may be visible on
Friday night as far south as New York City, Chicago, Illinois and Seattle, Washington.

The geomagnetic storm is expected to cause some fluctuations in the electrical grid, particularly across far northern areas of the globe, but overall its effects
should be “manageable,” said Thomas Berger, director of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. “We don’t expect any unmanageable impacts” to the U.S., Berger said.

There is a possibility, though, that because the solar flares and their associated CMEs occurred in such rapid succession — the first on Monday evening and the second, an X-Class solar flare, which is the strongest possible class, at 1:48 p.m. ET on Tuesday, he said, they may interact in a way that produces a larger solar storm than currently anticipated.

According to Berger, it is unusual to see two CMEs so close together, and it’s unclear how they may be interacting. Still, this event is nowhere near the strength that would be required to create a nightmare scenario that space weather specialists have been warning
about for years, in which a powerful geomagnetic storm, a G5 on the five-point scale, shuts down the electrical grid, wreaks havoc on radio communications, GPS devices, and aerial navigation systems, costing billions in damage.

Such a storm last occurred in 1859, and is known as The Carrington Event. In that event, a CME was so powerful that it raced from the Sun to the Earth — a
90 million mile journey — in just 18 hours. The incoming CMEs are expected to be slower, taking about 60 hours to make the same journey. Recent research showed that the Earth narrowly missed a similar event in 2012, but the burst of solar energy was directed far enough away from Earth’s magnetic field that disaster was averted.

“Neither one of these [CMEs] is anywhere near the Carrington level,” Berger said.

Source: Mashable

WoW ! It’s HerexG

WoW ! 13 years after 9/11, markets face new threat

It was just like yesterday when thousands of Americans lost their loved in the infamous attack of the 9/11 by the Al-Qaeda terrorist group headed by the late Osama, today we remember and reflect on this dark day, USA today covers it all.

“It’s been 13 years since the 9/11 terror attacks shut down the U.S. stock market for four days and sparked a mini-crash of 12% in the first week stocks resumed trading in September 2001. The resilient
stock market has doubled since then — despite two brutal bear markets — and the economy lived on and prospered once again despite the tragic loss of life.

But even though Osama bin Laden has been killed, the Iraq War is over and terror group Al Qaeda isn’t as feared as it once was, the U.S., its economy and
its financial system face a fresh threat from Middle East-based militants: the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

On the eve of the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, President Obama addressed the nation about the emerging threat from ISIL. He announced a four-step plan to combat the threat, including U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, support for forces in
the Middle East fighting against ISIL, counter- terrorism work, and humanitarian assistance.

The goal, the president said, was to “degrade and destroy” the “terror group” and make sure they don’t pose a threat to Americans on home soil. He stressed that U.S. combat troops will not engage in a ground war on foreign soil. The president’s address was a reminder to
investors that the mathematics of the market and the smooth functioning of the economy and the psyche of investors can be turned upside down with one unexpected event.

To get fresh insights on how Wall Street and the U.S. financial markets view terror more than a decade later — and to give investors a framework in how to weigh the risks — USA TODAY turned to
Lawrence Creatura, vice president and portfolio manager at Federated Investors.

“It’s a story of resiliency,” he says. “Economic resiliency and stock market resiliency.”

The first thing investors need to understand is why 9/11 had such a violent negative reaction on the stock market — at least in the short run. (The
market, of course, regained all of its nearly 12% drop exactly one month after 9/11.)

Why stocks went down so much?
“It was a big hit. Caused by an unknown unknown,” Creatura explains. “It was something that nobody saw coming. It was entirely unanticipated by the financial community. A complete shock.”
“Stock prices are derived from expectations of future earnings,” he adds. “Instantly, people didn’t know what the companies they owned were going
to be earning anymore. There was economic fear.

And that uncertainty caused stocks to be marked down immediately.” What triggered the market rebound?

“What slowly happened in the days after the attack is investors started to figure who the economic winners and losers would be and priced securities more accurately,” Creatura explains.

“Investors realized it was not going to be an existential issue, that the country was going to get back on its feet, live another day and fight back both economically and militarily. And that gave investors confidence.”

Will a future attack on U.S. soil create market panic again?

“It would be very unlikely to have the same impact,” says Creatura. “The market is much more prepared for terror than it was on Sept. 10, 2001. Investors
now know what it is, they know what it looks like, and they know what the economic impacts are. A portion of those fears are in share prices today.

Investors understand that it is a less-safe world. Is the Islamic State a threat to the U.S. and markets?
“Absolutely, yes,” he says. “It is a new form of threat. One where the (people posing the threat) have U.S. and British passports. That means borders are porous. They have documents to enter
the country and create mischief.” And sow economic fear?

“Yes, that’s part of what terror is,” Creatura says. “After the mathematical market impact, the damage also extends to the psychological impact. Investors discount future trouble. Stock prices are
driven by sentiment. So if people get scared, sentiment will weigh on share prices.”

WoW ! It’s HerexG

WoW ! Third American Ebola patient arrives U.S for treatment

The third American doctor to be diagnosed with the Ebola virus arrived Nebraska about some hours ago to begin
his treatment. Dr Richard Sacra (pictured above) contracted the deadly virus while working in Liberia.

Note Dr Sacra wasn’t treating Ebola patients when he was infected. He was today flown to the Nebraska Medical Center’s biocontainment patient care unit, one of the four facilities in America designed specifically to treat
patients exposed to extremely dangerous infectious organisms.

Two other Americans were recently treated of the deadly virus using the experimental drug, ZMapp.

HerexG

WoW ! Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney unexpectedly resigns

United States President Barack
Obama has finally announced Friday
afternoon that he’s accepted the resignation of White
House press secretary Jay Carney.

Josh Earnest, the White House special assistant to
the president and principal deputy press secretary,
will take Carney’s role, Obama said during a
surprise appearance from the commander-in-chief
during a scheduled briefing Friday afternoon.
“His name describes his demeanor,”

Obama said of the incoming press secretary. “Josh is an earnest guy
and you can call him Mr Nice guy.”
Carney, the 49-year-old former Moscow bureau chief
for Time Magazine, told reporters after the
president’s remarks that his last three-and-a-half
years as the White House press secretary has been
an “amazing experience” and “so fulfilling.”

Pres. Obama’s announcement came less than three
hours after he confirmed during a separate press
conference that morning that he had moments
earlier accepted the resignation of Veterans Affairs
Secretary Eric Shinseki in the midst of a high-profile
scandal that’s plagued the VA in recent weeks.

Carney is expected to stay press secretary through
mid-June, and did not immediately disclose the
reasoning behind his departure or his future plans.

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