Confederate air force name change

Nuclear weapons at a top secret US air force base were “disabled” by aliens , according to a former officer.

Robert Salas claimed that around 10 nuclear weapons were disabled in 1967.

He was on duty as commander at a secret underground launch facility at the Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana.

Speaking after the secretive hearing held by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) task force this week, he told the Sun: “Nuclear missiles were shut down by UFO s over the span of eight days and this is well documented and there are testimonies by witnesses.

“The primary witnesses, myself included, are still alive and able to give testimony about this incident.

“Without a doubt, I would testify to the inquiry, under oath, and I would bring documentation in the form of audio recordings, letters etc.

“After the incidents took place, we were told not to speak about them, in other words, there was a cover-up.

“We were never debriefed about the causation or the attempt to find the causation by the investigative teams and this was kept secret.”

“There’s excessive secrecy surrounding the whole thing.

“There’s a cover-up ongoing and there must be an organised group within intelligence agencies that are holding these secrets.”

During the first day of the The Pentagon’s alien hearings this week, it was revealed that there were 400 reported cases of UFO sightings at a recent conference, which is the the first UFO conference the department has held in 50 years.

Senior defence officials were on hand to talk through the updated sightings list, as well as pledging their commitment in trying to understand “unidentified aerial phenomena”.

Two officials, Ronald Moultrie and Scott Bray, appeared before a House of Representatives subcommittee for the first hearing on the subject in half a century.

The hearing comes just under a year after a government document reported more than 140 cases of unidentified aerial phenomena since 2004, a number which has since rocketed up to 400.

While research from Scott Bray said no evidence of aliens had been found, the deputy director of Naval intelligence said that while the incidents cannot be explained, there is nothing of alien origin.

Bray added that none of the documented objects had tried to communicate with US aviators, who had been recording UFO sightings since 2004, nor had they been able to communicate with the unidentified flying objects.

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A Virginia board is considering restoring the names of two schools which were originally named for Confederate generals but changed in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd .

The Shenandoah County School Board in 2020 voted to change Stonewall Jackson High School to Mountain View High School and Ashby-Lee Elementary School to Honey Run Elementary School.

But in the two years since, community members — especially alumni — have expressed opposition to the name changes, school board member Cynthia Walsh told NBC News.

Robert E. Lee statue removed in Virginia

Sept. 8, 2021 01:29

More than 4,000 people have signed a petition to change the names back, Vice Chair Dennis Barlow said at a board meeting , where the issue was discussed at length last week.

Walsh is one of three members who were on the board when the name changes were approved. The current, all-white board is made up of six members.

Movement to remove Confederate monuments gains momentum

June 10, 2020 03:33

Some new board members feel the decision to change the names was rushed and did not consider the opinion of the community.

Barlow, who characterized those who were in favor of changing the names as outsiders who are “creepy,” “elitist” and from “the dark side,” said the school board’s decision was “undemocratic and unfair.”

He added that he regards Jackson as a “gallant commander.”

Walsh, who does not think the names should be changed back, argued: “Most people who vote for elected officials then count on them to do the right thing on their behalf.”

“We do have a representative democracy. We don’t have a direct democracy,” she added.

After Floyd’s death, statues , monuments, schools and buildings named for Confederate leaders became a focal point of the racial justice movement around the country. A number of the statues and monuments have come down.

“Times have changed, the makeup of our schools has changed,” Walsh said. “And I sincerely believe that revisiting the name change is not what’s best for kids.”

The board decided at the meeting that they would poll constituents on whether they believe the names should be changed back. But the board could not settle on whether to poll only the residents who live within the schools in question, or the whole area.

Kyle Gutshall, a recent high school graduate who was elected to the board this year, argued: “In my opinion if you’re doing it countywide, you might as well throw the students out because they don’t care.”

But other board members were adamant throughout the night that the decision has to first be what’s right for the students.

“No. 1 criteria: what is best for kids,” Andrew Keller said earlier in the meeting. “The kids we’e going to teach today and the next 25 years.”

They also didn’t settle on what options would be included in the survey, which they mostly agreed should have the questions:

Do you want to keep the names?

Do you want to restore the original names?

“I suggested a compromise: adding a third” option — I did not agree to the name change but I do not think we should change it back — “and that’s where we left it that night, but we didn’t vote on it,” Walsh said.

The next school board meeting is June 9.

The board likely won’t vote on the issue then, because they are still hammering out the details of the survey, Walsh said.

If the vote is split, the issue will likely be tabled for a year, or until there is a new board, she said.

Shenandoah County Public Schools declined to weigh in on the matter.

“It is the responsibility of the Shenandoah County School Board to determine the name of schools, school facilities, and areas of school facilities or grounds in the division. We do not have a comment or statement as a division at this time,” the district said in a statement.

The system serves about 6,000 students. More than 75 percent of them are white and about 3 percent are Black, according to U.S. News and World Report.

But Walsh said the statistics don’t show the full picture. “In one of our elementary schools, there are 10 languages spoken,” she said. “There is diversity.”

The results of the Australian election this Saturday will set the climate agenda for one of the planet’s worst per-capita CO2 emitters. It comes as the world faces a rapidly closing window to stop the most severe impacts of climate change.

The country, dubbed a “wrecker” at climate change negotiations, is a major exporter of fossil fuels, largely to East Asia and India. It has been criticized for grossly insufficient climate targets by the UK and US as well as its neighboring Pacific nations who could see their homes disappear as sea levels rise.

Voters facing record floods and droughts want more climate action

Australians want action on climate change, but major parties have hardly mentioned the issue in their election campaigns

At the same time, polls clearly show voters back stronger climate action in the “sunburned land,” having already experienced deadly and costly flooding and wildfires linked to climate change in recent years. Some big businesses, once against emissions cuts, have also done a U-turn on climate policy. The country is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis.

“Australians are feeling and seeing climate damage now and that’s why most Australians are very worried about climate change and want the government to do a lot more than they are,” said Kelly O’Shanassy, chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF).

Despite public support, the major parties vying for votes in the tight election have barely mentioned the issue in their campaigns, said Peter Christoff, senior research fellow with Melbourne Climate Futures, which is part of the University of Melbourne.

“And that’s really quite concerning and worrying,” said Christoff.

Australian political parties in long ‘climate war’

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Since 2007, Australia’s two major parties, the center-left Labor Party and the conservative Liberal Party, led by incumbent Prime Minister Scott Morrison, have been in an open war over climate change policies, leading to multiple leaders being toppled.

“The public vitriol in political exchanges — particularly over an emissions trading scheme and a price on carbon and carbon taxes — led to some of the ugliest politics we’ve seen in Australia over a 15-year period,” said Christoff.

Labor believes it lost the supposedly unlosable “climate election” in 2019 to the Liberals because of a backlash against its strong climate policies and job fears in key seats in coal-mining areas.

Coal lobby pushing against climate protection policies

Australia is the world’s second biggest coal exporter. And because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, rising coal prices mean Australia will likely earn 100 billion Australian dollars (€67 billion, $70 billion) in one year from coal.

Meanwhile, between 100,000 and 300,000 Australian jobs connected to coal, oil and gas are at risk if the country doesn’t prepare for the shift away from fossil fuels, according to a study by independent Australian think tank, the Centre for Policy Development.

Major parties weak on climate

To date, the conservatives have stymied significant action on climate change — blocking a major emissions trading scheme, slashing funding on climate research, subsidizing and allowing fossil fuel production to expand and abolishing the government-funded Climate Commission.

At the 2021 UN climate conference in Glasgow, the government refused to budge from its 2030 emission cuts of 26% to 28% on 2005 levels — one of the weakest targets in the developed world. The UN Climate Action Tracker rates Australia’s emissions and net-zero targets as “poor” and “highly insufficient,” putting it on a path to more than 3 degrees Celsius warming.

Going into the 2022 election, the Liberal Party pledged to go net-zero by 2050 , but has given itself scope to ignore this . At the same time, it has vowed to continue exports of Australia’s coal and gas past 2050 and has included these fossil fuels in its domestic energy blueprint.

Labor — currently forecast to win this election — has also vowed to go net-zero by 2050 and has stronger emission cuts of 43% by 2030 . It has pledged tens of billions of dollars to revitalize the nation’s energy grid and install solar banks and batteries. But it says it won’t stop exporting coal and gas.

A new climate force in the country?

The Australian Green Party, as well as climate-minded independents, are seeing a surge in support

Australia is dominated by two main parties, but by dragging their heels on climate change Labor and the Liberals have opened the door to new challengers.

A group of independents, dubbed “the teals,” are competing with Liberal lawmakers for urban seats. Mostly women, they receive funding from a group called Climate 200 — a relatively new political fund established by clean energy investor Simon Holmes a Court — and have campaigned on climate, integrity, and gender equality. They have all set ambitious 2030 emission reduction targets ranging from 50% to 70% by 2030.

And they appear to be attracting moderate Liberal voters who have become disillusioned with a lack of movement on climate change. Most recent polling shows several key seats are at risk.

Meanwhile, the Greens have enjoyed a surge and are now polling at about 15% nationally — compared to 10% in the 2019 election. They have pledged to cut emissions by 75% by 2030 , go net-zero by 2035, phase out the mining, burning and exporting of coal by 2030 and convert the grid to 100% renewables.

Depending on the result of the election, both the Greens and the teal candidates could wield significant power over the government.

Tech billionaire vies to end coal

Federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg may lose his seat to a climate-friendly independent

Businesses are also calling for more action. In one example, Australian tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes is attempting to use his wealth to force energy giant AGL to exit coal-fired power generation.

Even the Business Council of Australia — which represents big banks and corporations, such as industrial and retail giant Wesfarmers, mining companies BHP and Rio Tinto and airline Qantas — is now also calling for major emission cuts by 2030. It’s a dramatic shift for the organization that in 2018 called 45% emissions reduction cuts “an economy wrecking target.”

“It’s certainly not the community that is holding back the Australian political parties on climate action and also not the business community,” ACF’s O’Shanassy said. “Everyone wants climate action except for the people that go to Parliament House.”

But neither Labor nor the Liberals’ targets are enough to bring Australia in line with its Paris Commitments. Emissions cuts of at least 50% by 2030 are what’s required to keep it below the upper threshold of 2 degrees warming and about 75% for the 1.5-degree target, according to some estimates.

Australia: Huge potential for solar, wind

ACF believes the next government should take advantage of the country’s huge solar and wind potential and could quickly cut emissions while preserving jobs by replacing fossil fuel exports with products created with renewable energy such as hydrogen and ammonia.

“We need to use the vast amount of renewable energy we have in this country. We need to times it by about ten and then turn that into exports and stop exporting pollution to the world,” O’Shanassy said. “That would be our greatest contribution to climate change.”

Edited by: Jennifer Collins

Microsoft will revise its licensing deals and make it easier for cloud service providers to compete, its president Brad Smith said on Wednesday, as the U.S. software giant sought to dodge a lengthy EU antitrust probe into its cloud computing business .

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Microsoft was fined 1.6 billion euros ($1.7 billion) by EU antitrust regulators in the previous decade for various violations.

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The company found itself under the EU competition body’s scrutiny again after German software provider NextCloud, France’s OVHcloud, Italian cloud service provider Aruba and a Danish association of cloud service providers complained to the European Commission about Microsoft’s cloud practices.

Microsoft was taking the first step, but not the last, to address the concerns, Smith told a conference organised by think tank Bruegel in Brussels.

He recounted the “extraordinary defeat” that Microsoft had faced in a challenge to the EU antitrust body in 2007 that had forced it to embrace change “which is a lot more fun than like knocking heads”.

Microsoft wants to listen and act on the complaints, Smith said.

“It really starts by giving more options to European cloud providers. So if there’s a company that has a data centre but wants to run solutions in its cloud PBX data centre, we’re creating more options for them to do so with our software, because that’s what they’ve been asking for,” he said.

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Microsoft will help cloud providers to offer Windows and Office directly as part of a complete desktop solution that they can build on, sell and host on their infrastructure.

It will revise licensing deals and allow customers to use their licenses on any European cloud provider delivering services to their own datacentres. Customers will also be allowed to buy licenses just for the virtual environment without the need to buy the physical hardware.

While some cloud service providers lauded the news, others said it was not enough.

“Cloud adoption and the development of European digital capabilities are a priority for the European Union. Microsoft has a unique role to play in supporting this effort,” the European Cloud Alliance, whose members include Microsoft, said in a statement.

CISPE, which counts world No. 1 cloud service provider Amazon, OVHCloud and Aruba as its members, dismissed the move and urged the EU antitrust watchdog not to ease up.

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“The initiative announced today fails to tackle in any meaningful way the unfair licensing practices at the heart of complaints and concerns among cloud infrastructure service providers and customers across Europe,” CISPE Secretary General, Francisco Mingorance said in a statement.

“It does nothing to end the anti-competitive tying of productivity suites with cloud infrastructure services,” he said.

Asked about workplace messaging app Slack’s 2020 complaint on Microsoft’s tying of its Teams product into its Office productivity suite, Smith said bundling was in a different category, but did not provide details.