This is The Prophecy. The Prophecy is much more than seeing into the future. For The Prophecy sees without the limits of time. For The Prophecy sees what is, what was, and what always shall be.
said Randall Jibson, USGS scientist and lead author of this study. “Not every earthquake will trigger landslides, but we can use landslide distributions to estimate characteristics of earthquake energy and how far regional ground shaking could occur.”
“Scientists are confirming with empirical data what more than 50 million people in the eastern U.S. experienced firsthand: this was one powerful earthquake,” said USGS Director Marcia McNutt. “Calibrating the distance over which landslides occur may also help us reach back into the geologic record to look for evidence of past history of major earthquakes from the Virginia seismic zone.”
This study will help inform earthquake hazard and risk assessments as well as emergency preparedness, whether for landslides or other earthquake effects.
“What makes this new study so unique is that it provides direct observational evidence from the largest earthquake to occur in more than 100 years in the eastern U.S,” said Jibson. “Now that we know more about the power of East Coast earthquakes, equations that predict ground shaking might need to be revised.”
It is estimated that approximately one-third of the U.S. population could have felt last year’s earthquake in Virginia, more than any earthquake in U.S. history.
About 148,000 people reported their ground-shaking experiences caused by the earthquake on the USGS “Did You Feel It?” website. Shaking reports came from southeastern Canada to Florida and as far west as Texas.
In addition to the great landslide distances recorded, the landslides from the 2011 Virginia earthquake occurred in an area 20 times larger than expected from studies of worldwide earthquakes. Scientists plotted the landslide locations that were farthest out and then calculated the area enclosed by those landslides. The observed landslides from last year’s Virginia earthquake enclose an area of about 33,400 km2
, while previous studies indicated an expected area of about 1,500 km2
from an earthquake of similar magnitude.
“The landslide distances from last year’s Virginia earthquake are remarkable compared to historical landslides across the world and represent the largest distance limit ever recorded,” said Edwin Harp, USGS scientist and co-author of this study. “There are limitations to our research, but the bottom line is that we now have a better understanding of the power of East Coast earthquakes and potential damage scenarios.”
MOSCOW, Russia: The UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), called on Sunday for an immediate halt to attacks on Enerhodar, a town near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. This appeal follows recent drone strikes that hit two electricity substations in the area.
The plant’s Russian-installed officials accused Ukraine of carrying out the drone strikes, which reportedly destroyed one substation, damaged another, and temporarily cut power to local residents. Rafael Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, did not mention Ukraine in his statement but emphasized that such attacks must stop. “Whoever is behind this, it must stop. Drone usage against the plant and its vicinity is becoming increasingly more frequent,” Grossi stated on the IAEA website. He highlighted that these actions are “completely unacceptable” and violate established safety principles.
The strikes, which occurred on Wednesday and Friday, cut power to Enerhodar for 16 hours but did not affect the power lines essential for the nuclear plant’s operations. The Zaporizhzhia plant’s Russian-installed management reported that while some infrastructure, such as the transport department and print shop, faced disruptions, nuclear safety measures remained fully operational.
Ukrainian officials have not commented on the incidents, and Reuters could not independently verify the reports. Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, asserted that the strikes showed Ukraine’s contempt for nuclear safety.
Russia had previously launched mass attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure during the first winter of the conflict, resuming a series of attacks in March that Kyiv says have knocked out half of its energy-generating capacity.
Children waiting to receive food at a kitchen in Khan Younis in southern Gaza this month.Credit…Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
Here’s what we know:
A U.N.-backed panel of experts said Israel’s war in Gaza had created a catastrophic lack of food, but stopped short of declaring a famine in the territory.
Waiting to receive food rations in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, last month.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Gaza is at high risk of famine and almost half a million people there face starvation because of a catastrophic lack of food, a group of global experts said on Tuesday, though it stopped short of saying that a famine had begun in the enclave as a result of Israel’s war against Hamas.
The experts said that the amount of food reaching northern Gaza had increased in recent months. Israel, under intense pressure from global governments and aid organizations, recently opened border crossings for aid in the north.
The analysis by the group, called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or I.P.C., carries considerable weight. The group is a partnership of U.N. bodies and major relief agencies, and global leaders look to it to gauge the severity of hunger crises and allocate humanitarian aid.
After Hamas led a deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Israeli officials declared a siege of Gaza, and they have severely restricted the entry of humanitarian aid, saying they do not want it to help Hamas. From October to early May, the daily number of aid trucks entering the territory through the two main crossing points in southern Gaza dropped by around 75 percent, according to U.N. data, and reports of hunger and malnourishment have been widespread.
A malnourished Palestinian girl at the International Medical Corps field hospital in Deir al Balah in southern Gaza on Saturday.Credit…Mohammed Salem/Reuters
Israeli officials have said for months that there is no limit on the amount of food and other aid that can enter Gaza. In recent weeks, Israel has increased the number of commercial vehicles carrying food and other goods across the border.
“In this phase, households experience an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion of coping capacities,” the report said.
In March, the I.P.C. predicted that famine would likely occur in northern Gaza by the end of May. But on Tuesday, it said that the amount of food and other nutrition delivered there had increased in March and April.
Those increases “appear to have temporarily alleviated conditions” in the north, the report said, adding, “In this context, the available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring.”
In early May, Israel’s military sent ground troops into the southern Gazan city of Rafah, and more than a million people, many of whom had previously been displaced from their homes, fled to a coastal area that lacks basic infrastructure, making them acutely vulnerable.
The military operation closed the Rafah border crossing from Egypt and disrupted aid deliveries at the Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel. The situation in the south has since deteriorated, the report said.
The I.P.C. said that to be able to buy food, more than half of households in Gaza “had to exchange their clothes for money, and one-third resorted to picking up trash to sell.” It added that more than half of households often did not have any food to eat and that more than 20 percent went full days and nights without eating.
A month ago, the court, which is based in The Hague, ordered Israel to “immediately” halt its military offensive in Rafah, and it emphasized the need for open land crossings as part of its request for “the unhindered provision” of humanitarian aid. The Rafah offensive continues, but the order increased global pressure on Israel to scale back its attacks and limit civilian casualties.
Israeli officials acknowledge the hunger in Gaza but accuse Hamas of stealing or diverting aid. Ismael Thawabteh, deputy head of the Hamas government media office in Gaza, said last month that those allegations were “absolutely false and incorrect.” He added that, while there had been some looting of relief supplies, it had been done by a small number of people who had been forced into desperation by Israel.
Some Gazans have also accused Hamas of benefiting from looted aid.
Updated Sun, 23 June 2024 at 3:16 am GMT-6·3-min read
By Guy Faulconbridge and Lidia Kelly
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia, the world’s biggest nuclear power, could reduce the decision-making time stipulated in official policy for the use of nuclear weapons if Moscow believes that threats are increasing, parliament’s defence committee chairman said.
The war in Ukraine has triggered the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, with President Vladimir Putin last month saying that Russia might change its official nuclear doctrine setting out the conditions under which such weapons could be used.
“If we see that the challenges and threats increase, it means that we can correct something in (the doctrine) regarding the timing of the use of nuclear weapons and the decision to make this use,” RIA quoted Kartapolov as saying.
Kartapolov, who once commanded Russian forces in Syria and now serves as a lawmaker from the ruling United Russia party, added that it was too early to speak about specific changes to the nuclear doctrine.
Russia’s 2020 nuclear doctrine sets out when its president would consider using a nuclear weapon: broadly as a response to an attack using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction or conventional weapons “when the very existence of the state is put under threat”.
Russia and the United States are by far the world’s biggest nuclear powers, holding about 88% of the world’s nuclear weapons, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
Both are modernising their nuclear arsenals while China is rapidly boosting its nuclear arsenal.
But he also said he did not rule out changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine. The was viewed as a nod to pressure from hardliners in the Russian elite who believe that Putin should be able to act more swiftly on nuclear escalation and reduce the threshold for use.
Putin said again last week that the nuclear doctrine might have to be changed because Russia’s adversaries were developing ultra-low-yield nuclear devices.
Both Moscow and Washington made heavy cuts to the number of their weapons as the Soviet Union crumbled, but the Cold War arms control architecture has crumbled and many diplomats say they now fear a new arms race.
The United States may have to deploy more strategic nuclear weapons in coming years to deter growing threats from Russia, China and other adversaries, a senior White House aide said this month.
The U.S. 2022 Nuclear Posture Review says that Russia and China are both developing their nuclear arsenals so that by the 2030s “the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries”.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Guy Faulconbridge in MoscowEditing by Clarence Fernandez and David Goodman)
(WHTM/NEXSTAR) – A “notable” earthquake was recorded near Lebanon, New Jersey, on Friday morning, according to the United States Geological Survey, with rumblings felt throughout the Northeast.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported that the quake, which took place at 10:23 a.m., had a magnitude of 4.8. The reading was recorded north of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey — around 45 miles west of New York City and 50 miles north of Philadelphia.
People in upstate New York, Baltimore, Connecticut and other areas of the East Coast unaccustomed to earthquakes also reported feeling the ground shake. Tremors lasting for several seconds were felt over 200 miles away near the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, at a press conference Friday morning, said state officials were still assessing any impacts the quake may have had on bridges, roads, gas lines, vulnerable structures or telecommunications operations, but an official said only one gas leak was reported in Rockland County. No other “life-threatening situations” had been identified, Hochul said.
She was also in communication with the White House amid the ongoing assessments.
“It’s been an unsettling day to say the least,” Hochul added.
The Federal Aviation Administration also warned of possible disruptions at airports in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Baltimore, but said “air traffic operations are resuming as quickly as possible.” Hochul confirmed Friday morning that JFK airport in New York City and the Newark airport in New Jersey were under full ground stops in the event of possible aftershocks. LaGuardia, which has more “updated” infrastructure, was not, Hochul said.
Officials say anyone who observes structural damage or smells natural gas following an earthquake is advised to leave the area and call 911.
According to the State of New Jersey Office of Emergency Management, the largest earthquake felt in New Jersey happened in 1783 and was a 5.3 magnitude quake. It was reported west of w York City and was felt from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania.
The Friday quake also stirred memories of the Aug. 23, 2011, earthquake that jolted tens of millions of people from Georgia to Canada. Registering magnitude 5.8, it was the strongest quake to hit the East Coast since World War II. The epicenter was in Virginia.
That earthquake left cracks in the Washington Monument, spurred the evacuation of the White House and Capitol and rattled New Yorkers three weeks before the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.Copyright 2022 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said on Thursday he will not take part in elections in October and withdrew his support from the government, distancing himself from the state at a time when deadly hospital fires have angered Iraqis.
One of the most influential figures in Iraq, Sadr led a political bloc that emerged as the biggest in the 2018 parliamentary election, with 54 seats in the 329 seat legislature, and his movement has big sway.
The impact of his announcement was difficult to assess. Sadr, a long-time adversary of the United States who also opposes Iranian influence in Iraq, typically wields power without holding elected office. He has withdrawn from frontline politics before, without dismantling his powerful movement.
Even if he does not run, candidates loyal to him could stand, allowing him to retain his influence.
‘TERRIBLE MANAGEMENT’
Dozens of people were killed this week by a fire at a COVID-19 hospital in the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriya, the second such fire in Iraq in three months, and many Iraqis blame the government for both. The results of an investigation will be announced within a week, the prime minister’s office said on Tuesday.
Sadr’s move appeared aimed at deflecting popular discontent over the hospital fires, and over power and water cuts which have sparked protests, said Hamdi Malik, an associate fellow at the Washington Institute.
“Sadr is trying to distance himself from the terrible management of Iraqi officials,” said Malik, predicting Sadr’s party would take part and do well in the election, despite his promise not to stand personally.
“I inform you that I will not participate in these elections. The nation is more important than all of that,” Sadr said, adding that he was “withdrawing his hand from those who belong to this current government and the following one”.
In a televised speech, Sadr said Iraq was being subjected to a “satanic regional scheme to humiliate the country and to bring it to its knees”.
“Watch out before Iraq’s fate becomes like that of Syria, Afghanistan or other states that have fallen victim to internal, regional and international policies,” he said.
A source close to Sadr told Reuters the decision followed a campaign by Iran-backed Shi’ite groups to sully the reputation of Sadr’s movement, worried that it would sweep the vote.
In reference to his Iran-backed rivals, Sadr had told followers at a recent meeting there were “factions ready to burn Iraq to prevent the Sadrists from forming the next government”, the source said.
(Reporting by Ahmed Rasheed; Editing by Tom Perry, John Stonestreet, Peter Graff)
Imagine, for a moment, that the Iranian government announces it has developed a nuclear bomb and threatens to use it on Israel. The United States reacts with the threat of military intervention, as it did in 1991 and 2003 in Iraq. Iran signals that it will not tolerate a third Gulf war and looks for allies. American forces mass to enter Iran, which orders national mobilisation. Russia, China and North Korea express their support for Iran, and Washington expands its intervention force, bringing in a British contingent. Russia enters the game, raising the stakes in the expectation that the West will back down. A nuclear standoff follows, but with tense and itchy fingers on both sides, as leaders gamble on the risk of not striking first, it all ends in disaster. The Third World War begins with an exchange of nuclear fire, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Or picture this: Chinese frustration over the status of Taiwan prompts a build-up of invasion forces. The United States is preoccupied with its own domestic political crisis. Japan anxiously watches the exchange of harsh words between China and Taiwan, wondering whether to intervene. The United Nations condemns Chinese actions, and China repudiates the censure and orders invasion, confident that a quick victory will prevent others from intervening, as Hitler hoped when he invaded Poland in 1939. The United States now activates contingency plans to save Taiwan, and each side uses tactical nuclear weapons against the other’s armed forces. North Korea and Russia side with China. There is no general nuclear strike, but Russia warns Europe to keep out, dividing American strategy between the two theatres, as it was in the Second World War. The conflict continues to escalate.
Now let’s consider a totally different kind of global conflict. The growing division between the democratic West and the arc of authoritarian states across Eurasia has entered a dangerous new chapter. Neither side wants to risk outright war, but there is a possibility that destroying satellite communications will undermine the military and economic capability of the other side. Without warning, the West’s satellite communication system is attacked and massive damage is done to its commercial and military electronic networks.
The Siege of Rhodes in 1522: In every single culture of the past 5,000 years, war has been accepted practice – CPA Media Pte Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
No one claims to have launched the missiles, but, in the chaos that follows, blame is quickly directed at anti-Western states. Retaliation is difficult to mount with the collapse of communications. Uncertain what to do, military mobilisation is ordered across the Western world, but Russia and China demand that it ceases. As in 1914, the wheels, once set in motion, are hard to stop, and the crisis grows. Welcome to the First Space War.
These three scenarios are possible, though not one of them, I should make clear, is probable. Predicting – more accurately, imagining – the wars of the future can produce dangerous fantasies that promote anxiety over future security. It is likely that even the most plausible prognosis will be wrong. The development of nuclear weapons has substantially changed the terms of any future global conflict. There are no doubt contingency plans prepared by armed forces everywhere to meet a range of possibilities that might otherwise be regarded as fanciful in the real world. And while history may help us to think about the shape of a future war, the lessons of history are seldom learnt.
Yet the question of how a third world war might erupt haunts us today more than at any time since the end of the last world war. The very act of guessing is proof of our expectation that warfare of some kind remains a fact in a world of multiple insecurities. Conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Myanmar and Sudan are a reminder of that ever-present reality. And regular threats from Russia about using nuclear weapons suggest that our fantasies may not be so wide of the mark after all.
‘Some biologists believe belligerence is deeply embedded in human development’ – ASWphoto / Alamy Stock Photo
Perhaps, in attempting to forecast the outbreak of a future war, we should ask another question: Why do we make war at all? War has been a characteristic of almost the whole of recorded history, and warlike violence preceded the establishment of the first states. Why human beings have developed belligerency alongside their capacity for social cooperation remains a fundamental question.
It is a puzzle with which the human sciences have wrestled for much of the 20th and 21st centuries. For evolutionary biologists and psychologists, warfare was a means for early man to ensure survival, protect kin and cope with ecological crisis. No human biologist now argues that violence is in our genes, but early hominins, organised in small bands of hunter-gatherers or fishers, almost certainly used violence to protect against intruders, secure resources and food, and on occasion to act as predators on neighbouring communities. The resort to violence as one of the elements in the survival kit of early man became psychologically normative, as well as biologically useful. On this reading, belligerence is something deeply embedded in human development.
Yet this view is challenged by the other sciences, which see warfare as a phenomenon associated with the development of settled cultures and political systems, whether tribe, proto-state or state. By 10,000 years ago, there is no doubt that something resembling warfare emerged worldwide, evidenced in the archaeological record of weapons, iconography and fortifications.
Warfare was not like modern war, organised in mass armies and supplied by military industries, but took a variety of forms: a deadly raid, a ritual encounter, or a massacre, such as the Nataruk killings, dating to the 9th century BC: the remains of men, women (one of them pregnant) and children unearthed from this site near Kenya’s Lake Turkana show the victims were clubbed and stabbed to death.
It was evidently not necessary to have a state to engage in violence, as the tribal warfare observed in the past few hundred years has demonstrated, but war did mean the emergence of a warrior elite and a culture in which warfare was valorised and endorsed: the Spartans, the Vikings, the Aztecs. There have been very few cultures in which warfare has not played a part, usually a central part, in the life of the community. In the historic period of states, from about 5,000 years ago, there are no examples where warfare was not accepted practice.
‘The development of nuclear weapons has substantially changed the terms of any future global conflict’ – IanDagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photo
This says little about why wars are waged in the archaic past or the present. Wars are always waged for something, whether it is pleasing the gods by seizing captives to execute or sacrifice, or coveting resources, or wars for belief, or extending power over others, or in the search for heightened security, or simply a war of defence against a predator. This mix of motives has remained remarkably constant.
The seizure of resources is an obvious motivation for war, an explanation that extends from the ancient Romans as they destroyed enemy cities and grabbed slaves and treasure and exacted tribute, to the Japanese forces in 1942 when they captured the oil and raw materials of South-east Asia needed for waging further war. Wars for belief also span millennia, from the Muslim conquests of the Middle East and North Africa in the early Middle Ages, and the age of Christian crusades that followed, to the current jihad campaigns of militant Islam.
Security, as Thomas Hobbes famously recognised in his Leviathan of 1651, is always at risk in an anarchic world where there is no single common power to enforce it. Frontiers are a touchstone of security fears and lack of trust, as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza illustrate today. But the long Chinese frontier with the steppe nomads and the vast frontier of the late Roman empire were also sites of constant encroachments, defensive battles and punitive expeditions.
Missiles launched during a ground force drill by the Iranian army, October 2023 – Alamy
Pursuit of power is perhaps the most common explanation for war – particularly popular with political and social scientists. Power Transition Theory, pioneered at the height of the Cold War, sees a constant race between major hegemonic powers as one tries to exceed the power of the other. The race, so it is argued, might end in war as a declining power seeks to protect its position, or a rising power seeks to replace it. At one time, the theory was applied to the United States and the Soviet Union, but they never went to war against each other; now it is applied to possible war between the United States and China, which has become a favourite scenario for those predicting 21st-century conflict. Yet it is a theory that works poorly. The two world wars began with a major power picking on a lesser one – Serbia in 1914, Poland in 1939 – and then dragging other powers into the maelstrom. That might indeed happen with Taiwan, as it is already happening with Ukraine.
Power works best as an explanation when history turns to the individuals who drove themselves to become the great conquerors, men whose raw ambition mobilised support from their people for unlimited conquest – Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler. This is hubristic power based on arrogant self-belief and it usually evaporates with the death or defeat of the leader. But so long as they lead, and there are people willing to follow, war is unlimited and destructive on a vast scale. This is the most dangerous and unpredictable explanation for the persistence of warfare and it covers the whole historical record. It is one of the surest indications that war still has a future as well as a long past.
The wars of the future draw on a grim heritage. The fact that peace would seem to be the rational option for most humans has never been able to stifle the urge to fight when it seems necessary, or lucrative, or an obligation. And that heritage is the chief reason it is possible to imagine a future war. After the end of the Cold War, there was once a fashion for saying that war was obsolete – if only that were so, we might now live in a world without weapons and fear. While few would actively seek the Third World War, few envisaged or wanted the other two. The sad reality is that our understanding of why wars occur has so far contributed little to setting warfare aside as an enduring element in human affairs.
The Prophecy Blog 