Eideard

A two-and-a-half ton German satellite came within minutes of crashing into Beijing the European Space Agency has disclosed…

“Our calculations showed that, if Rosat had crashed to the ground just seven to 10 minutes later, it would have hit Beijing,” Heiner Klinkrad, head of the agency’s space debris team, told German magazine Der Spiegel, adding that an impact on the city “was very much within the realm of possibility.” The satellite eventually landed, as hoped, in the Indian Ocean.

Although most space debris burns up on entering the earth’s atmosphere Rosat, a defunct satellite launched 20 years ago, was made of durable material. Experts said that as much as 60 per cent of its bulk survived re-entry so if it had crashed into a highly populated like Beijing it could have caused the worst disaster in the history of space exploration.

The satellite’s remnants, travelling at speeds of 280mph, would have destroyed buildings, left craters and would have almost certainly caused casualties…

If it had crashed into Beijing it would also have landed the German government with an expensive bill. Under an international agreement the country responsible for placing the satellite in orbit is also responsible for any damage caused when it comes down.

Can you imagine the conspiracy theories that would have circled the Earth faster than any satellite?

Now, imagine the dead satellite being Russian and crashing, say, into Chicago. Phew!

Launch – November 9, 2011
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A Russian spacecraft that became stranded in orbit on the way to Mars last year is expected to fall back to Earth next week.

The 13.5 tonne Phobos-Grunt has been circling Earth since November when rocket boosters failed to ignite and send the spaceship on its journey to the Martian moon of Phobos. The spacecraft suffered a computer malfunction after launch and when repeated attempts to contact the rocket failed, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, had to abandon the mission.

Officials at Roscosmos admitted that 20 to 30 fragments of Phobos-Grunt, weighing a total of 200kg, might hit the Earth. Among the most likely parts to survive are the cone-shaped sample return capsule that is protected with a heat shield. The capsule was designed to survive a crash landing without a parachute.

Any components that are not vaporised during re-entry are likely to fall into the ocean or land in sparsely populated areas.

Which is what the PR folks for every space agency always say.

The spacecraft, the largest planetary rocket ever built by Russia, was designed to return rock samples from Phobos, the first time material would have been brought back from the moon of another planet. The rocket was to deliver a Chinese Mars orbiter and carried containers of bacteria to test their survival in space.

Space agencies tracking the rocket from radar stations around the world have stepped up their monitoring to once every day. As the spacecraft nears re-entry, officials will track its descent hour by hour to improve predictions of where any debris might land…

Tracking Phobos-Grunt will allow space agencies to work out when the rocket will begin re-entry, but does little to help predict where debris might land. The spacecraft is travelling so fast it completes an orbit of Earth every 90 minutes, so even a small uncertainty in its trajectory or how it breaks up can make a difference of hundreds of miles on the Earth’s surface.

Leave a note for your lawyer in case it gets you. At least your survivors may receive some compensation. Sometimes it ain’t fun being a beta-tester for approved technology.

A fleet of high-performance cars, including eight Ferraris, has been involved in one of the most expensive accidents in history after an astonishing multi-car pile-up in Japan. Police said three Mercedes Benz cars and a Lamborghini Diablo were also involved in the massive crash at the weekend on the Chugoku Expressway, in the country’s south-west.

While the majority of the 14 vehicles – which also included a Japanese supercar Nissan GT-R Skyline and a Toyota Prius – were travelling along the Osaka Prefecture-bound bended lane at least one Mercedes CL600 was driving in the opposite direction.

Television footage showed the cars – either wrecked or destroyed – spread across the highway, in a trail of crumpled metal and broken glass. Several of the vehicles were wedged up against the metal barriers. Miraculously, none of drivers – the majority of whom are reported to be foreign car enthusiasts – were seriously hurt in the wreckage but the bill is still bound to be painful nonetheless.

Such was the severity of the damage, several of the luxury cars have been written off, leaving their owners with the nightmare scenario of seeing their prized possessions turned into expensive scrap metal.

The total damage bill is expected to hit several million pounds. A new Ferrari 355 retails for several hundred thousand pounds. The other Ferrari models understood to have been involved in the pile-up include a F512, F355, F430 and a F360…

It is thought the crash occurred when the lead driver hit a central barrier after losing control of their Ferrari while trying to overtake in wet conditions. They are then reported to have hit the central reservation before rebounding into the path of the oncoming traffic.

They then caused a chain reaction of accidents over several hundred yards as other drivers went around the bend and unable to avoid the accident.

The highway was closed for more than six hours while authorities removed the wrecked cars.

Insurance companies are going to love this one. Especially whoever is covering the poor bugger whose Prius was thumped by all the expensive alloy and horsepower.

If you see a large glowing object plummeting from the sky late Saturday or early Sunday, duck.

A defunct European satellite called ROSAT is headed straight for Earth this weekend—and chances are even higher that a piece of space debris could hit someone than the odds placed on a NASA satellite that fell from orbit last month.

The German Aerospace Center, which led the development and construction of ROSAT, estimates that the chance of anyone being harmed by debris from the satellite is 1 in 2,000. For NASA’s UARS, the injury risk was roughly a third lower, at 1 in 3,200.

ROSAT is currently estimated to make an uncontrolled reentry during the early morning hours on Sunday, Greenwich Mean Time, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the European Space Agency’s space debris office. But Klinkrad cautions that the satellite could enter Earth’s atmosphere up to 24 hours earlier or later than the estimated time…

Unfortunately, neither Klinkrad nor anyone else can say exactly where on Earth ROSAT is headed.

Debris could come down anywhere between 53 degrees north latitude and 53 degrees south latitude, an area that includes most of Earth’s land mass…That could be a worry, because the satellite’s 1.5-ton mirror is likely to survive the superheated trip through the atmosphere all the way to the ground, where it could make a major dent in whatever it strikes…

If bits of the satellite do land in a populated area, “they will be extremely hot,” added the German Aerospace Center’s Roland Gräve. “This is why we recommend not touching any satellite parts” that do make it to the ground.

And any ROSAT debris, no matter where it’s found, belongs to the German government, he said.

There are people like Jonathan McDowell from the Center for Astrophysics who are planning reentry parties. It’s tough keeping it on a schedule. He has a blanket email ready to go when he has concrete location numbers – just fill in the blanks and send it off into the Web.

We all can go “whoopee” while it crashes and burns.

Greece would be in much better shape now if it had never joined the euro zone, or if it had been kicked out in 2004 when it admitted that it had lied about its finances to join the club. So would the rest of Europe.

So why not get out now?

One answer is the same one that was given when Greece’s cheating was revealed: Legally, there is no way out. The euro was designed to be the Roach Motel of currencies. Once you enter, you can never leave. There is no provision for departure.

The sophistry in this article is that the lies, the cheating, was “revealed”. Hogwash. Everyone knew what was going on. Including the Greek politicians who stood in line to gobble up the Euro dole.

But, of course, there is a way out. It would be messy, and perhaps disastrous. But no one is going to send an army to Athens to force it to keep the euro.

If Greece were to follow the example set by Argentina nearly a decade ago, it would simply convert its debts from euros into its old currency, the drachma, at the old exchange rate of 340.75 drachmas to one euro. It could also convert euro currency in the country at the same rate. So if you owned one million euros in Greek bonds, they would be converted to bonds with a face value of 340.75 million drachmas.

With a printing press available, Greece could meet those obligations. Of course the drachma would soon be worth a lot less — perhaps 1,000 to the euro. So bondholders would have lost two-thirds of face value…Greece would suddenly be forced to run a balanced budget, or to borrow from its own citizens, whose savings would have lost much, if not most, of their value.

For Greece to pull that off, it would probably have to do it over a weekend, without leaks of what it was planning. If people got wind of what might be coming, there would be an immediate run on Greek banks…

Think there are any Euro politicians who could keep that kind of secret?

…Greece remains woefully uncompetitive in export markets, and there is no credible plan to get its economy growing. The rest of Europe uses the threat of cutting off funds to force more and more austerity on the Greek government.

The message from Greece now may be summarized as, “I’m small. I’ve suffered. You can afford to rescue me. If you don’t, I can create chaos for all of you.”

Part of the earlier spring agreement Greece agreed to included – eventually – a replacement rate of 1 for 10 as civil servants retired. Some of the hacks on board before the government began the hiring tsunami that followed EU membership. Well, 18-20,000 retired who should have been replaced by 2,000 tops. The government hired 24,000.

Eileen Foster

In the summer of 2007, a team of corporate investigators sifted through mounds of paper pulled from shred bins at Countrywide Financial Corp. mortgage shops in and around Boston.

By intercepting the documents before they were sliced by the shredder, the investigators were able to uncover what they believed was evidence that branch employees had used scissors, tape and Wite-Out to create fake bank statements, inflated property appraisals and other phony paperwork. Inside the heaps of paper, for example, they found mock-ups that indicated to investigators that workers had, as a matter of routine, literally cut and pasted the address for one home onto an appraisal for a completely different piece of property.

Eileen Foster, the company’s new fraud investigations chief, had seen a lot of slippery behavior in her two-plus decades in the banking business. But she’d never seen anything like this. “You’re looking at it and you’re going, Oh my God, how did it get to this point?” Foster recalls. “How do you get people to go to work every day and do these things and think it’s okay..?”

One executive, Foster says, sent an email to dozens of workers in the Boston region, warning them the fraud unit was on the case and not to put anything in their emails or instant messages that might be used against them…Her team was not allowed to interview a senior manager who oversaw the branches. Instead, she says, Countrywide’s Employee Relations Department did the interview and then let the manager’s boss vet the transcript before it was provided to Foster and the fraud unit.

In the end, dozens of employees were let go and six branches were shut down. But Foster worried some of the worst actors had escaped unscathed. She suspected, she says, that something wasn’t right with Countrywide’s culture — and that it was going to be rough going for her as she and her team dug into the methods used by Countrywide’s sales machine.

By early 2008, she claims, she’d concluded that many in Countrywide’s chain of command were working to cover up massive fraud within the company — outing and then firing whistleblowers who tried to report forgery and other misconduct. People who spoke up, she says, were “taken out.”

By the fall of 2008, she was out of a job too. Countrywide’s new owner, Bank of America Corp., told her it was firing her for “unprofessional conduct.”

Foster began a three-year battle to clear her name and establish that she and other employees had been punished for doing the right thing. Last week, the U.S. Department of Labor ruled that Bank of America had illegally fired her as payback for exposing fraud and retaliation against whistleblowers. It ordered the bank to reinstate her and pay her some $930,000.

Bank of America denies Foster’s allegations and stands behind its decision to fire her. Foster sees the ruling as a vindication of her decision to keep fighting.

“I don’t let people bully me, intimidate me and coerce me,” Foster told iWatch News during a series of interviews. “And it’s just not right that people don’t know what happened here and how it happened.”

This is the intro to Part 1 of Eileen Foster’s tribulations as whistleblower on Countrywide Financial. The single company that can assume credit for the Great Recession over any other. Add to it the continued attempts by present owners Bank of America to paper over the crimes committed, fraud perpetrated.

Part 2 appears today. Just click the link above and follow the slime trail.

 
Police in Utah are searching for a group of construction workers, students and bystanders. But for a good reason.

This group is credited with saving a man’s life by working together to lift a burning car and pull a man to safety.

It was a “life-saving move that the Logan Police Department does not want to go unnoticed,” said Jeff Curtis, assistant chief of the police department in Logan, Utah.

The incident occurred Monday morning on a street near Utah State University and was captured on video.

Police said the BMW pulled out of a parking lot and in front of Wright. Curtis said the motorcyclist tried to avoid the car, which resulted in him laying the motorcycle down. After crashing, gas spilled out of the motorcycle and ignited, engulfing both the motorcycle and the front end of the car in flames…The motorcyclist became lodged underneath the burning vehicle…

Curtis said police are trying to find the people who helped so they can be recognized for their efforts at a city council meeting.

Bravo. Ordinary people torn an their ordinary day by extraordinary circumstances. Caring – as we all should – for the life of another human being.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Apple’s Find My iPhone feature led searchers to find a Chilean Air Force airplane that crashed and is believed to have killed 21 people.

Search and rescue teams were unable to find the airplane, which prompted one of the victims’ relatives to try locating them with the Find My iPhone functionality, which uses an iPhone’s GPS receiver to track the device’s location. According to infobae.com (via Gizmodo), the relative shared the location data with military officials in charge of the search operation.

“One of the passengers carried (an iPhone). When it fell into the sea, it was located and one of the relatives sent us that information,” the military official reportedly said.

Unfortunately the remains of the CASA 212 vehicle were found with no survivors. Parts from the destroyed plane were found floating in the sea near Tierra Banca and Playa Larga.

The plane was said to have been severely damaged by the crash, with no pieces larger than 20 inches recovered from the crash site thus far.

iPhones and iPads are built to be tough – but, not that tough. Outstanding software and hardware. Too bad the point was proven in such a sad context.

Click on photo for video story

For more than an hour Friday morning a driver was stuck inside his tractor-trailer as it balanced precariously on the edge of a raised section of Interstate 40, with only thin air between portions of the truck and the pavement 40 feet below.

Firefighters not only freed him, but kept the rig from falling off the I-40 Crosstown bridge after a multiple-vehicle accident triggered by an erratic driver during morning rush hour downtown, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper said.

Firefighters broke a window and spoke to the driver as wreckers got into position and crews used cables and chains to secure the rig after the 8 a.m. crash. The driver, whose name has not been released, was lodged in the sleeping compartment of the cab and waited to be freed.

“He was scared to death in the truck thinking he was going to fall over the edge,” patrol Capt. Chris West said…

Fire Deputy Chief Marc Woodard said about 30 firefighters were involved in rescuing the driver.

Scary situation. I’d be afraid to fart.

A global rout in equities drove the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to its worst slump since February 2009, while two-year Treasury yields plunged to a record low amid concern the economy is weakening…The S&P 500 tumbled 4.8 percent to 1,200.07 at 4 p.m. in New York, a 12 percent drop from its April 29 peak and weakest level since November 2010…

Concern the global economy may relapse into a recession has driven investors out of stocks and into the relative safety of Treasuries, the Swiss franc and yen and is spurring speculation the Federal Reserve will start another stimulus program. Japan’s moves to sell the yen, which this week neared a post-World War II record, and expand an asset-purchase fund follows efforts by the Swiss central bank to curb the franc’s gains. The European Central Bank resumed bond purchases and offered banks more cash to stem the spread of the debt crisis.

“The mood right now is gloomy,” Mike Ryan, the New York- based chief investment strategist at UBS Wealth Management Americas, said in a telephone interview. His firm oversees $774 billion. “The burden of proof is for better data that show the economy is not falling into recession. Tomorrow’s payroll report is crucial. If we see another disappointment, the stock market will have significant downside from here…”

Gap Inc., the largest U.S. apparel chain, sank 12 percent after sales missed analysts’ estimates. DirecTV, the largest U.S. satellite-television provider, tumbled 5.7 percent after adding fewer U.S. customers than analysts estimated.

“It’s not a flash crash,” Michael Shaoul, chairman of Marketfield Asset Management in New York, said in a telephone interview. His firm oversees $1 billion. “It’s much more orderly and I don’t see any weird prints like we saw that day in individual issues. I still couldn’t tell where this market will bottom. I also don’t think this is 2008 when you saw a genuine failure of global finance to be able to fund asset process. You don’t see money markets going crazy. It’s a plain and simple liquidation of equities and commodities.”

There is little reason for confidence in the US economy – and even less in the European economy taken as a whole. RTFA for details – if you dare.

Do I think we’re heading into another recession? Damned if I know. I’ll be happy when my social security check arrives this month.