Daily Archives: June 5, 2015

Spy ship … American spy ship USAV Worthy in Cairns for a refit. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied

The 2500-tonne United States Army vessel USAV Worthy looks more like a floating version of the CIA Pine Gap spy base near Alice Springs than a normal military ship with four large white radomes and other electronic instruments mounted on her superstructure.

The maintenance work was undertaken at the Tropical Reef Shipyard in Cairns Harbour where she has been for the past 10 weeks.

The USAV Worthy is known as a “missile range surveillance ship”, and is based at the top-secret US missile and space facility at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands midway between Cairns and Hawaii, about 3000km south west of Honolulu.

The US Government leases 11 of the 100 islands that make up the world’s biggest coral atoll around the largest lagoon on earth for its Ronald E Reagan test facility.

Secret … USA National Missile Defence launch of Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle sensor at Kwajalein Missile Range in the central Pacific. Picture: Supplied Source: News Limited

Eight of the islands are fitted with powerful radar, optics, telemetry, and communications equipment to provide instrumentation for ballistic missile and missile interceptor testing and space operations support.

It was established after World War Two to monitor the nuclear tests at nearby Bikini Atoll.

History … US nuclear testing on Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1946. Picture: Supplied Source: News Corp Australia

The facility is used by numerous agencies including the Department of Defence and NASA to support programs such as ballistic missile defence, Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) development and testing and space surveillance.

Satellites are also launched from the atoll.

Progress … The launch of a EKV (Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle) sensor at US Army’s Kwajalein Missile Range in central Pacific Ocean. Pic: USA / Armed Forces Source: News Corp Australia

The main island houses a large workforce and an airstrip capable of handling large military and civilian transport aircraft.

The main US base and airstrip on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied

From the air, the base looks remarkably similar to the controversial sand “islands” being built by the Chinese military in the South China Sea.

Satellite imagery showing progress of Chinese land building across Spratlys. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied

The Worthy began life in 1988 as a Stalwart Class ocean surveillance ship for the US Navy and she is due to leave Cairns in about two weeks.

source:news.com.au

A close up passport picture of Evgeni Agapov. Source: Supplied

“IT WAS in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

A “key witness” has shed light on the events surrounding the Ukrainian Air Force on the day Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a missile, Russia claims.

The Russian investigative committee says an aviation armaments mechanic “voluntarily crossed the state border of the Russian Federation and expressed a desire to cooperate with the Russian investigation.”

“As now there is new evidence of the reliability of the words of the witness, as well as various reports concerning the doubts of certain media outlets about the real existence of this witness, we decided to disclose [the name of the witness],” Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said.

Evgeni Agapov is now under Russian state protection after he volunteered information on the events surrounding the crash that killed all 298 on board the doomed flight.

“The witness told us that the [Ukrainian] pilot was shocked, confused [after the misfire]”, said the investigative committee.

“It was an accident and happened in combat conditions, the pilot just confused the planes.”

RT News reports the Russian investigative committee released footage of Agapov, who worked in the first squadron of the Ukrainian Air Force’s tactical aviation brigade, in the hope his testimony would give Russia’s account of events more credibility.

In his statement, Agapov reveals a Ukrainian Sukhoi Su-25 aircraft left the Ukrainian air base and “set out for a military task”.

The aircraft returned without its ammunition on the day of the crash, on July 17, 2014.

“When one returned, the pilot, Captain Voloshin, got out of the cockpit.”

The missiles originally assigned to the plane were now gone. Agapov overheard Voloshin, who was “visibly shaken”, say to fellow pilot: “That was the wrong plane.”

“Nearby was Flight Control Officer Dyakin, Captain Voloshin and two other pilots. Dyakin asked Voloshin: ‘What happened with the plane?’

“He said, ‘It was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’”

“In the evening we learned that a passenger Boeing was shot down that day,” Agapov said.

The Ukraine government claims none of its jets were in the air when the flight went down yet the Russian government released radar data proving otherwise. Russia has since been accused of faking the pictures.

But according to former Scotland Yard detective Charles Shoebridge, “the naming of this person bolsters his credibility enormously and not only for the investigation but in terms of the international PR war that is going on around this whole issue of who was responsible for MH17 and what capital can be gained from it from a political sense.

“The fact he’s been identified shows the obvious point that he exists, he hasn’t just been made up but more importantly it does give credibility to what he was saying because he was a person in a position to actually know what he was talking about.

“He’s a person whose been working in the Ukraine Air Force, he’s a person who had direct experience knowledge, if what he’s saying is true of the situation on the ground.

Controversy continues over who shot down the plane last summer over eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine and the West suspect it was destroyed by a Russian surface-to-air missile fired by Russian soldiers or Russia-backed separatist rebels fighting in the area. Russia denies its involvement.

Earlier this week, the Russian maker of the Buk air defence missile system concluded the flight was downed by an older version of the BUK-M1 system, which is no longer in service with the Russian military but is used within Ukrainian arsenals.

“If a surface-to-air missile system was used [to hit the plane], it could only have been a 9M38M1 missile of the BUK-M1 system,” Almaz-Antey said in a statement.

Officials stopped short of directly blaming Ukraine for shooting down the plane, but their statements certainly hinted at that.

source:news.com.au

Fisherman Erik Axner jumped straight into the freezing waters to pose with his catch. Picture: Erik Axner/BNPS Source: Picture Media

The 24-year-old Swede fought the gigantic fish for over an hour before finally getting the better of it — and when he weighed it, the fish tipped the scales at a whopping 101kg.

Because the halibut was so huge it couldn’t be pulled out of the water for photos — so Erik secured the halibut to the side of the boat using rope and jumped in in his drysuit instead.

“The fish was so powerful that it took me an hour to get the better of it.

“By the time I got the fish to the boat my arms were aching and my back was pretty tired as well.

“It was an unbelievable experience.”

Picture: Erik Axner/BNPS. Source: Picture Media

An average Atlantic halibut can measure 4.5 metres in length, so looks like this fish still had some growing to do, and was set free after Axner had hauled it in, adding, “After we took some photos we released the fish to fight another day.

source:.news.com.au

The building believed to house the “troll farm” at 55 Savushkina Street, St. Petersburg, Russia. Picture: Dmitry Lovetsky / AP Source: AP

AS Americans remembered the attacks on the World Trade Center last year, the internet began to flood with tweets, photographs and videos of what appeared to be another unfolding emergency.  

It was September 11 when hundreds of tweets from dozens of accounts included eyewitness details of an explosion at the Columbia Chemicals plant in the US state of Louisiana.

“Are we in danger because of this explosion? What about toxic fallout? What should we do?” one user wrote.

“How far do you think a gas can spread away from #ColumbianChemicals?” Arnold Evans asked.

“How many miles from New Orleans is that damn plant #ColumbianChemicals? Do we have time to evacuate?!” Elizabeth Newton wrote.

On YouTube, CCTV video showed the hint of a flash in the background of a Louisiana petrol station with a timestamp reading 11-09-2014.

A picture was posted of the CNN homepage which featured the chemical plant explosion as its main story.

But it was all fake. There was no explosion: it was an elaborate hoax doctored by a team of people employed to create havoc online.

As The New York Times revealed this week, the Columbia Chemicals hoax was eventually traced to Russia and a group called the Internet Research Agency, a known “troll farm”.

Adrian Chen, a reporter who visited the agency and spoke with former employee Lyudmila Savchuk, said the agency employs 400 people who work 12 hour shifts creating fake profiles and posting comments in support of management’s chosen agenda of the day.

The management team is “obsessed with statistics”, according to Ms Savchuk. Page views are counted. Comments are counted. Reach is calculated. The agency’s impact on social discussion is very much a refined science.

The agency is known to push Kremlin propaganda on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and local social network VKontakte. In March, after Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered, the agency left comments on Russian news outlets suggesting the opposition itself had set up his murder, the Times reported.

But what does it want with America? Why bother setting up a hoax explosion in another country?

It was all an information warfare campaign designed to trick the world — or at least those who weren’t paying a great deal of attention — into believing that America was losing control.

The Columbia Chemicals hoax was followed months later by a staged ebola outbreak in Atlanta and a fake report about a black woman being shot dead by police. Each hoax was tracked back to Russia. Each post was commented on and retweeted by another troll at the IRA.

Russia’s motivation could be found in a document stolen and leaked by hacktivist group Anonymous International that suggested the internet was biased — in favour of America and against Russia.

Ms Savchuk, who first revealed details of the troll farm to a local reporter in February, told The Times the agency had “industrialised the art of trolling”.

Several Russian media outlets say Russian president Vladimir Putin is connected to the agency and that it is funded by a man known as “the Kremlin’s chef”. But tracking down its roots is difficult.

When Chen visited St Petersburg earlier this year, he was told by security that the agency had moved. But it might just be operating under a different name.

Chen, himself, learned that the hard way, after meeting with a former IRA employee for an interview and later being trolled not by the Internet Research Agency but by the Federal News Agency that shared the same building.

After meeting with the employee — a woman who insisted she bring along her brother for protection — a story ran on the FAN website with the headline “What Does a New York Times Journalist Have in Common With a Nazi From St. Petersburg?”

The story detailed Chen’s meeting but failed to mention the former IRA employee. Instead, it focused on her “brother”, who it turned out was a notorious Neo-Nazi named Alexei Maximov.

Chen had been set up. Photographers had snapped him conversing with Maximov and painted him as an enemy of Russia. Maximov even told FAN that Chen requested the meeting because he was “very keenly interested in sentiment among Russian nationalists.”

In true IRA fashion, the trolling even included a YouTube video about the meeting. Different name, same tactics.

Chen said it worked.

“The trolls had done the only thing they knew how to do, but this time they had done it well. They had gotten into my head.”

source:news.com.au