Gotta’ love CNN…’”apparent” tornadoes?

There are 11 states with tornado warnings right now as I write this. And “Apparently” they are in danger of being hit by this thing called a tornado. CNN’s article is below, I give up.

A powerful severe storm system moved across the United States on Friday, causing at least three apparent tornadoes from Alabama to Indiana and threatening even more destruction as the day wore on.

National Weather Service meteorologist John Gordon reported Friday afternoon the agency has about “half a dozen reports of tornadoes on the ground,” as well as reports of “significant damage” — stressing all the while that the worst may still be to come.

As of 4:50 p.m. ET, the weather service had 22 active tornado warnings out affecting 47 counties, plus five less urgent tornado watches that spanned 12 states.

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“This is an enormous outbreak that’s going on right now across Kentucky and the South,” Gordon said. “It’s crazy. It’s just nuts right here.”

Two of the reported twisters touched down in northeast Alabama, where residents were assessing damage to a high school, prison and other locales.

And shortly after issuing a tornado watch for large swaths of central and southern Indiana, central and eastern Kentucky and southwest Ohio, the National Weather Service reported that trained weather spotters detected a tornado at approximately 1:43 p.m. CT (2:43 p.m. ET) in southern Indiana in Posey County.

Jeffersonville, Indiana, Mayor Mike Moore reported that “some devastating tornadoes have come through.”

One of the hardest hit Indiana communities was Marysville, which Moore said he’d heard from a county police officer is “gone” — an assessment repeated by Clark County Sheriff’s Department Maj. Chuck Adams to CNN’s Louisville-based affiliate WDRB.

Aerial footage from CNN affiliate WLKY showed structures seemingly torn to shred and large swaths of trees knocked down in Henryville, about 20 miles north of Louisville, Kentucky.

In Tennessee, severe weather was responsible for critical injuries of as many as eight people in the cities of Harrison and Oolteweh, officials there said.

The storm brought golf-ball-size hail, strong winds and rain into the two northeast Alabama counties before continuing on a northeastward path into Tennessee.

Between 40 and 50 homes in Hamilton County, Tennessee, have “significant damage that we know about,” the county’s Chief of Emergency Management Bill Tittle told CNN.

He said that there are 24 reported injuries and, while none of those appear to be life-threatening, he acknowledged that “we have not reached all the homes.”

“We obviously have lots of debris, homes with roof damage, streets that are impassable that we have crews cutting down trees with chainsaws in order to get emergency vehicles through, and as of now our crews are just going door-to-door on foot,” said Amy Maxwell, Hamilton County, Tennessee, emergency management spokeswoman.

Reporting from that area near Chattanooga, CNN’s Rob Marciano observed a continuous stretch of damage about 200 yards wide that ripped what had been brick and mortar homes down to their foundations.

Emergency personnel set up a makeshift triage area at a nearby convenience store for people who were still being pulled out of the rubble on Friday afternoon.

Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger said a touchdown of a tornado had been confirmed, though he expressed optimism that sound preparation and safety measures appeared thus far to prevent any deaths.

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“We’re just working diligently at this hour to try to make sure that everyone is accounted for,” Coppinger told CNN. “And hopefully we’ll be able to escape (without fatalities).”

Meanwhile, there were no immediate reports of injuries at either Buckhorn High School in Madison County or the Limestone County Correctional Facility in an adjacent county, both in Alabama.

But there was widespread damage in Madison County, the National Weather Service said, and some injuries were reported, according to a local ambulance service.

The Madison County Emergency Management Agency confirmed that a rain-wrapped tornado was spotted near the Harvest area, just northwest of Huntsville, which itself was hit hard by a tornado last year.

“The key thing that let me know it was serious was the loud wind,” said Hovet Dixon of Harvey, Alabama. “It almost seemed like it was trying to lift my roof off.”

The scene after the storm passed in the areas where the apparent tornadoes touched down looked similar to what parts of the Midwest and South suffered earlier this week, with damaged homes and downed power lines. Thousands were without power.

The warden for the Limestone Correctional Facility, Dorothy Goode, said the prison was hit by the storm. All prisoners — the facility holds about 2,200 — were accounted for, she said.

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These were the first reported twisters from a storm system that threatened the already hard-hit Midwest and South.

Forecasters said the areas most at risk for twisters on Friday were southern Indiana, southern Ohio, most of Kentucky, central Tennessee, northeastern Mississippi and northwestern Alabama.

Tourist town of Branson, Missouri, hit

Storms were expected to proliferate during the afternoon, with the most likely window for tornadoes between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. ET, according to CNN meteorologist Sean Morris.

There is the potential for widespread damaging wind gusts, large hail and violent tornadoes in some areas.

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Storms will begin to weaken during the late evening as they move east toward the Appalachians. The severe weather threat will diminish overnight Friday into Saturday morning, Morris said.

These tornadoes follow an earlier outbreak, that began Tuesday night and left 13 dead across Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Tennessee and battered parts of Kentucky, as well.

An unusually ferocious Being Sea storm packing powerful winds and surging seas barreled into western Alaska early Wednesday, blowing roofs off homes, sending water seeping into buildings and forcing residents of Nome and isolated native villages to seek higher ground.

There were no immediate reports of injuries, though meteorologists warned the storm could be “life-threatening.”

“We do have some reports of buildings losing roofs in the Nome area,” said meteorologist Scott Berg at the National Weather Service in Fairbanks. “Also water at the base of buildings in Nome.”

The last time forecasters saw something similar was in November 1974, when Nome also took the brunt of the storm. That sea surge measured more than 13 feet, pushing beach driftwood above the level of the previous storm of its type in 1913.

Officials are concerned for Alaska Natives in the 18 villages in the region.

The village of Point Hope, which sits on the tip of a peninsula with the Arctic Ocean on one side and the Bering Sea on the other, is seven to eight feet above sea level, said Mayor Steve Oomittuk.

The Inupiat Eskimo village of about 700 people has no sea wall and no evacuation road. If evacuation becomes necessary, everyone will go to the school because it sits on higher ground and is big enough to accommodate everyone, he said.

Smaller communities that are vulnerable to storm erosion were of particular concern, especially the village of Kivalina, already one of the state’s most threatened communities because of erosion.

In Nome, some homes close to the ocean have been evacuated, but there are no reports of injuries, Berg said.

A storm surge could bring more severe flooding later Wednesday in the Nome area, he said.

Blizzard conditions prevailed overnight in quite a few places with sustained winds of 60 mph and gusts to 80 mph.

Berg said big low-pressure systems hit Alaska often, but this one is different because of the track it took and because ice hasn’t formed yet to protect the shore.

“Because we don’t have shore-fast ice this time of year, that’s what’s significant,” he said. “Just hasn’t got cold enough yet. We have open water generally until the first of December.”

The unusual storm had western Alaska bracing Tuesday. Tiny coastal communities were at particular risk for damage from wind and expected flooding.

“This will be an extremely dangerous and life-threatening storm of an epic magnitude rarely experienced,” the NWS said in a special warning message.

Winds had already reached 80 mph late Tuesday, said Neil Murakami, a National Weather Service forecaster in Anchorage.

The storm surge could produce seven-foot rise in sea levels, which would cause heavy flooding, said meteorologist Stephen Kearney in Fairbanks.

State emergency management officials said some residents in the storm’s path headed for emergency shelters Tuesday.

Seventy miles north of Nome in the village of Brevig Mission, teacher AnnMarie Rudstrom had made plans to move her family to higher ground from their home on a spit separating the village lagoon and the ocean.

The ocean by Tuesday afternoon had started to churn in shades of gray.

“It’s pretty ominous looking and the waves are getting bigger,” Rudstrom said.

State officials warned residents in harm’s way to secure home heating fuel tanks in case sea water flooded into communities.

The windows were boarded up Tuesday at the Polar Cafe, a popular restaurant that faces the ocean in Nome.

Items stored in the basement had been carried upstairs and were in one of the hotel rooms, said waitress Andrea Surina. Plans were being made to move the propane tanks to a safer spot, she said.

An asteroid the size of a city block zoomed inside the moon’s orbit today (Nov. in a rare flyby that marked the closest approach to Earth by such a big space rock in 35 years.

The asteroid 2005 YU55 came within 201,700 miles (324,600 kilometers) of Earth at 6:28 p.m. EST (2328 GMT) Tuesday evening before speeding off into deep space once again at about 29,000 mph (46,700 kph).

The space rock is about 1,300 feet (400 meters) wide. An asteroid this large hasn’t come so near to Earth since 1976 and won’t again until 2028, researchers said.

The asteroid encounter brought 2005 YU55 closer than the moon, which orbits Earth at an average distance of 238,864 miles (384,499 km). But there was never any danger that 2005 YU55 would slam into Earth today.

Gunmen crossed the Rio Grande into the United States near a shootout between where the Mexican military and a group of gunmen was taking place.

Several area SWAT teams responded about 1:30 p.m. Tuesday to a ranch near Escobares, just across the U.S.-Mexico border, where a shootout broke out south of the Rio Grande.

The shootout reportedly began shortly after noon but details were not immediately available. Residents on the U.S. side reported seeing members of the U.S. Border Patrol and Starr County Sheriff’s Office securing the area near the border.

Border Patrol spokeswoman Rosalinda Huey said agents had been tracking a suspected drug load near La Rosita and pushed it back to Mexico.

Border Patrol alerted Mexican authorities of the suspected load and then found an injured Mexican national on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, Huey said. Emergency crews rushed the man to an area hospital. His condition remains unknown.

The man, a suspected cartel gunman, had been shot by Mexican authorities, a separate U.S. law enforcement official said.

The official confirmed a group of as many as 15 gunmen had crossed the Rio Grande, though it remained unclear whether they were Mexican soldiers or cartel gunmen.

“We don’t know who they are,” the official said. “We haven’t gotten that information yet.”

Local authorities in Hidalgo County provided backup support along the Rio Grande as Border Patrol dispatched additional agents from the McAllen area to the incident in rural Starr County.

The experience was a bit unnerving for Ricardo Guerra, whose brother owns La Prieta Ranch in La Rosita. Guerra was overseeing the ranch hands shortly after noon when they noticed that the roads near the property became quickly swarmed with authorities.

“Yeah, you worry when that happens,” Guerra said. “We all went back inside the house. It looks like there was something going on over there (Mexico); we heard four or five shots from the helicopter. It looks like the (Mexican military) helicopter was shooting at the people on the ground over there.”

While he heard the shots, Guerra’s property soon swarmed with more than 100 law enforcement officials from various agencies.

“We saw them take one guy in an ambulance,” Guerra said. “He looked in bad shape.”

Datong-surveillance phone and data interception system

A screenshot of Datong’s official website (Credit: Datong UK)

Governments around the world are increasingly taking control of civilian communications – especially cellular telephone networks – usually for nefarious purposes.

We have seen just this occur in the Middle East on multiple occasions during the so-called Arab Spring and now these control systems are being implemented in full force in the West as well.

This is not just dangerous because having government creep into the private lives of citizens usually turns out poorly but because this type of technology enables horrific atrocities.

One type of system is produced by Datong in the United Kingdom which has already been purchased by the largest police force in all of Britain, the London Metropolitan Police.

The London Police paid $230,000 for so called “ICT hardware” in 2008 and 2009 which creates a fake cellular phone network in order to not only intercept the communications and unique identification numbers from phones, but also to remotely turn off telephones.

This incredibly dangerous technology that seems like something out of a spy thriller is highly portable and is about the size of a suitcase.

This means that at a protest in which a brutal government crackdown is about to occur, all that the police would need to do is turn on their suitcase device and suddenly no one is able to record the incident on their phone or call for help.

The device can intercept SMS (text) messages, telephone calls, and even the unique IMSI and IMEI identifiers which would then allow police to track the telephone user’s movements in real time, which totally bypasses the need to request location data from the carrier itself as is normally required, according to Wired’s Threat Level.

The device can also completely prevent outbound communications from reaching a cell tower “for crowd control during demonstrations and riots where participants use phones to organize.”

At least you have to give them some credit for being upfront about how this device can – and likely will – be used to stifle dissent and break up protests although it is usually promoted as a tool to prevent insurgents from detonating bombs via cell phone.

The technology can also be set up in a vehicle in order to track individuals who are on the move.

It is unclear whether this technology has already been used by the London Metropolitan Police and they refused to provide details to The Guardian about where and when it had been used.

However, it is not only the UK that has been buying up this dangerous Big Brother technology, unsurprisingly the United States government has been eager to get its hands on it as well.

Datong has been awarded over $1.6 million in contracts with the United States Secret Service, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other agencies between the years of 2004 and 2009 according to Threat Level.

Then, in February of 2010, Datong was awarded another $1.2 million contract to deliver tracking and location technology to the American “defense” industry.

I say the “defense” industry because as I have made clear in previous posts, the “defense” industry and the “national security” industries are nothing more than a sham to support the war profiteering racket that plagues America.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Secret Service, George Ogilvie, confirmed to CNET that they have indeed “done business with Datong in the past” but he refused to comment on if they were still doing business with Datong or what technology was acquired from Datong.

I find this to be somewhat insulting given the fact that they are spending my money and the money of other American taxpayers while refusing to tell us where and why it is being spent.

A staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a commendable non-profit organization that crusades to protect privacy rights and civil liberties in the digital world, Jennifer Lynch, made it clear why this technology is dangerous, “The problem with this kind of technology is that it means that the police and law enforcement do not have to go through a cell phone provider to gain access to information that can be obtained via someone’s cell phone”.

That means they don’t even have to go through the already ludicrously lax procedures to acquire the information from service providers in the post-PATRIOT Act America.

Lynch continued, “The law enforcement agency controls access to the interception of the communication data.”

In today’s America phone companies are usually quick to hand over private subscriber information, along with companies like Google, but at least the fact that law enforcement has to ask the companies provides some minimal impediment to warrantless wiretapping and surveillance in violation of our rights.

Somewhat disturbingly, Lynch told CNET that the EFF was not familiar with Datong’s technologies and they are not aware of what U.S. agencies employ it.

The fact that such radically dangerous technology can fly under the radar is somewhat unsettling.

However, in 2008 it surfaced that the FBI was using quite similar technology known as “Triggerfish” which was also capable of mimicking a legitimate cell phone tower so users unwittingly handed over identifying information and location data.

Yet Triggerfish’s capability was significantly less than Datong’s in that Datong’s technology can intercept a plethora of data including phone calls, e-mails, text messages, and all other data being sent by the phone.

The CNET article comes to a quite unsettling conclusion, “it doesn’t look like there is much an individual can do–other than turn off his or her phon[e]–to avoid being tracked.”

Tragically, even that will not keep you from being tracked in today’s invisible surveillance state.

More at EndtheLie.com – http://EndtheLie.com/2011/11/02/suitcase-sized-device-can-remotely-disable-phones-intercept-communications-record-unique-ids-and-track-you-in-real-time/#ixzz1cZYUi16H

Famous Muslim cleric Dr. Awad al-Qarni offers reward in response to similar cash prize offered by Israeli bereaved family. Hamas minister: Gaza pullout enables us to keep Shalit captive

A week after the release of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, top Saudi cleric Dr. Awad al-Qarni is offering a $100,000 reward to anyone who kidnaps Israeli soldiers.

He is responding to an ad published by the Libman family offering a similar reward for anyone who catches the person who murdered their relative Shlomo Libman. Libman was killed by terrorists near the settlement of Yitzhar in 1998.

• Israeli army officers ordered to foil kidnappings, even at expense of soldier’s life
• Hamas vows to abduct more soldiers

“The press reported that the Zionist settlers will pay huge amounts of money to whoever kills the freed Palestinian prisoners,” al-Qarni said. “In response to these criminals I declare to the world that any Palestinian who will jail an Israeli soldier and exchange him for prisoners will be rewarded with a $100,000 prize,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

Al-Qarni’s post has already received more than 1,000 likes and extensive coverage in Hamas-affiliated newspapers in Gaza.

Al-Qarni is a famous Muslim cleric who often guests on TV shows and operates his own website where he discusses various religious law issues. The Palestine-Islam issue is particularly close to his heart.

Meanwhile in Gaza, Hamas Minister Fathi Hamad admitted that Israel’s withdrawal from the Strip enabled Hamas to hide Gilad Shalit for so long.

In an interview with Lebanese daily as-Safir Hamad said that the “military campaign in Gaza abolished any security coordination with Israel and the Strip’s liberation allowed us to conceal Shalit for five years.”

Hamad stressed that Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Hamas’ military wing managed to keep Shalit captive despite Israeli attempts to extract him and admitted that they paid a heavy price for keeping Shalit captive.

“That is why the deal is a triumph for the Palestinian people and residents of Gaza who have sacrificed 600 lives during Israel’s first response to the bold abduction.”

But let’s be realistic for a moment shall we? Is anyone really anonymous on the web anymore? Do you really believe that a group with no central leadership or funding could take down giants like Mastercard and Paypal without creating a shit-storm of legal problems for themselves? Do you think Mastercard is just going to say “Oh, those silly kids have taken down our servers again” and let them skate? Doubt it. These guys have big money and government contacts and they aren’t afraid to use either of them. Don’t believe me? Try hacking your bank and see what happens. You will be getting a free stay at your local jail sooner than you think.

Sure, there are things you can do to temporarily mask your internet identity, but it won’t take someone with the proper authority long to catch up to you. And before all the techie types start spouting off about proxy servers and war-driving and the many other hacking techniques there are out there, let me ask you this. In order to truly avoid being caught using these techniques, what is the one thing you have to do? Keep moving. Its the only way to stay “Anonymous”. But even that doesn’t work forever. Just ask Kevin Mitnick. Staying in one place just a little too long will land you in the big house. Now ask yourself, who has the cash to keep moving around and hacking all day and night? Probably not a loosely-knit group of techno-nerds who have decided to save the planet one computer at a time. More than likely, Anonymous is a well funded group that doesn’t have to worry about getting caught, because they are working for the government. Doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that in order to clamp down on internet freedoms there will have to be a good reason. What better reason than Anonymous? They tell us all about the exploits of these superhuman hackers who can avoid capture and prosecution for a couple of years, then they will hit something big. Maybe a major banking network taking down all their ATMs for a couple of days. Or perhaps a power network causing rolling blackouts for a week or two. That would give them all the reason they need to clamp down on who is using the web and how they can access it. The sheeple who were inconvenienced by the ATM or power outage would be screaming bloody murder as well, helping the powers that be in their cause. Seems like nice neat false-flag op to me?

But maybe I am wrong. In my heart I want to be. I want to believe that a few smart men with balls can change the world, I really do. But my brain tells me different. In any event, the fact that Anonymous did something good is a positive thing and for that I say, huzzah! But alas, in the long run Anonymous might end up doing more damage to us little guys than good. Cynical? Maybe. But, let’s watch it play out a little more before we go singing their praises.

50 years ago, you would never hear a curse word on television. You could count on the television shows you watched to reflect good family values. Nudity and other graphic adult situations couldn’t be found in movie theaters, much less streaming into your living rooms. Yes, those days are gone for good. Instead now we have Jersey Shore, Lindsay Lohan, Kardashians and American Idol to teach us how to act and react in life. And we wonder why kids have literally gone crazy in the interim. You can no longer spank your children or give them any real discipline, because the government mandates how you should raise them. They spend the better part of their day in the indoctrination centers we will loosely term public schools, learning to expect government to provide for them instead of getting out there and doing for themselves. They watch as our immigration laws are scoffed at by illegal aliens and politicians alike. What does it say to a young and impressionable mind when laws are only selectively enforced? How did we get to this point where we allow our leaders to ignore the rules and do whatever they like, while at the same time passing ever more draconian laws that we the sheeple must follow? Should we blame greed? Apathy? Absentmindedness? All of these things probably played a part in getting us to this point, but what will get us back on track? That is the burning question. Even more important, can we get back on track without a major overhaul? The answer to that question in my opinion is no. Without a reset, the system can only do one thing and that is deteriorate. Like an apple growing on a tree will at one point be juicy and delicious, if left there, it will eventually dry out and rot, wither and fall away. So will go the morality,  ideals and eventually the systems of old.

In a way that is encouraging though. Because the world economic system is headed for disaster soon and once that happens, we will hopefully be a little smarter next time around. The same can be said of the political landscape. A lot of people are waking up to the fact that all politicians are corrupt and by voting for any of them they are condoning their actions.  Perhaps soon, we will have to endure a great tribulation as the world sheds its old ways and ascends to higher level of existence. The trip will be scary and many will perish, but alas, we could once again be in control of our own destiny. All we have left is hope and sometimes that is enough.

Gaddafi is killed

Muammar Gaddafi is dead, Libya’s new leaders said, killed by fighters who overran his home town and final bastion on Thursday. His bloodied body was stripped and displayed around the world from cellphone video.

Senior officials in the interim government, which ended his 42-year rule two months ago but had labored to subdue thousands of diehard loyalists, said his death would allow a declaration of “liberation” after eight months of bloodshed.

“We confirm that all the evils, plus Gaddafi, have vanished from this beloved country,” Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril said in Tripoli as the body was delivered, a prize of war, to Misrata, the city whose siege and suffering at the hands of Gaddafi’s forces made it a symbol of the rebel cause.

“It’s time to start a new Libya, a united Libya,” Jibril added. “One people, one future.” A formal declaration of liberation, that will set the clock ticking on a timeline to elections, would be made by Friday, he said later.

Western leaders, who had held off cautiously from comment until Jibril spoke, echoed his sentiments now that Gaddafi, a self-styled “king of kings” in Africa whom they had lately courted after decades of enmity, was dead at 69.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, who with French President Nicolas Sarkozy was an early sponsor of February’s revolt in Benghazi, said: “People in Libya today have an even greater chance after this news of building themselves a strong and democratic future.”

The new national flag, resurrected by rebels who forced Gaddafi from his capital Tripoli in August, filled streets and squares as jubilant crowds whooped for joy and fired in the air.

In Sirte, a one-time fishing village and Gaddafi’s home town that grandiose schemes had styled a new “capital of Africa,” fighters danced, brandishing a golden pistol they said they had taken from Gaddafi.

Accounts were hazy of his final hours, which also appeared to have cost the lives of senior aides. But top officials of the National Transitional Council, including Abdel Majid Mlegta, said he had died of wounds sustained in clashes.

FINAL HOURS

One possible description, pieced together from various sources, suggests that Gaddafi may have tried to break out of his final redoubt at dawn in a convoy of vehicles after weeks of dogged resistance. However, he was stopped by a NATO air strike and captured, possibly three or four hours later, after gun battles with NTC fighters who found him hiding in a drainage culvert.

NATO said its warplanes fired on a convoy near Sirte about 8:30 a.m. (2:30 a.m. EDT), striking two military vehicles in the group, but could not confirm that Gaddafi had been a passenger.

Accounts from his enemies suggested his capture, and death soon after from wounds, may have taken place around noon.

One of Gaddafi’s sons, heir-apparent Saif al-Islam, was at large, they believed. NTC official Mlegta told Reuters that he was surrounded after also trying to flee Sirte. Another son, Mo’tassim, whose arrest was announced earlier in the day, had been killed resisting his captors, Mlegta added.

He said that the elder Gaddafi had been wounded in both legs early in the morning as he tried to flee in the convoy which NATO warplanes attacked. “He was also hit in his head,” he said. “There was a lot of firing against his group and he died.”

There was no shortage of NTC fighters in Sirte claiming to have seen him die, though many accounts were conflicting. Libyan television carried video of two drainage pipes, about a meter across, where it said fighters had cornered a man who long inspired both fear and admiration around the world.

After February’s uprising in the long discontented east of the country around Benghazi — inspired by the Arab Spring movements that overthrew the leaders of neighboring Tunisia and Egypt — the revolt against Gaddafi ground slowly across the country before a dramatic turn saw Tripoli fall in August.

LIBERATION

An announcement of final liberation was expected as the chairman of the NTC prepared to address the nation of six million. They now face the challenge of turning oil wealth once monopolized by Gaddafi and his clan into a democracy that can heal an array of tribal, ethnic and regional divisions he exploited.

The two months since the fall of Tripoli have tested the nerves of the motley alliance of anti-Gaddafi forces and their Western and Arab backers, who had begun to question the ability of the NTC forces to root out diehard Gaddafi loyalists in Sirte and a couple of other towns.

Gaddafi, wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of ordering the killing of civilians, was toppled by rebel forces on August 23, a week short of the 42nd anniversary of the military coup which brought him to power in 1969.

NTC fighters hoisted the red, black and green national flag above a large utilities building in the center of a newly-captured Sirte neighborhood and celebratory gunfire broke out among their ecstatic and relieved comrades.

Hundreds of NTC troops had surrounded the Mediterranean coastal town for weeks in a chaotic struggle that killed and wounded scores of the besieging forces and an unknown number of defenders.

NTC fighters said there were a large number of corpses inside the last redoubts of the Gaddafi troops. It was not immediately possible to verify that information.

The death of Gaddafi is a setback to campaigners seeking the full truth about the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie in Scotland of Pan Am flight 103 which claimed 270 lives, mainly Americans, and for which one of Gaddafi’s agents was convicted.

“There is much still to be resolved and we may now have lost an opportunity for getting nearer the truth,” said Jim Swire, the father of one of the Lockerbie victims.

Swire has never believed in the guilt of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi who was convicted of the bombing in 2001 and sent to serve a life sentence in a Scottish prison. Al-Megrahi was released and sent back to Libya in 2009 because he was thought to only have a few months to live.

“Although we have not a scrap of evidence that Gaddafi himself was involved in causing the Lockerbie atrocity, my take on that was that at least he would have known who was,” Swire told Sky TV.

“I would have loved to see Gaddafi appear in front of the International Criminal Court both to answer charges against the gross treatment of his own people … and to hear what he knew about the Lockerbie atrocity.”

“Gaddafi’s body is with our unit in a car and we are taking the body to a secret place for security reasons,” Mohamed Abdel Kafi, an NTC official in the city of Misrata told Reuters.

It was not immediately known if the waters of the river had disappeared due to sinkhole activity that can occur after earthquakes or if the earth shaking caused damming that dried up the river near the Miravalles volcano. The quakes were centered near the Nicaragua and Costa Rica border in the same vicinity as the Miravalles volcano.

An entire body of water disappears? Strange but true, and this isn’t the first time this odd event has happened.

In 2010, the Iska River in Slovenia disappeared after local residents heard loud crashing and banging overnight. The next morning, the river was dry and the riverbed was full of fish and other creatures. It was believed that the waters of the river had drained through a large crack into an underground riverbed. This disappearance was not believed to have been related to an earthquake.

Most recently — aside from the disappearing river in Costa Rica — an entire reservoir in Huntsbury, New Zealand, that was filled with 36 million liters of water disappeared following a 6.3 magnitude earthquake. The reservoir water disappeared after the earthquake struck Christchurch Feb. 22.

A body of water disappearing is not unusual, nor is it unheard of for an earthquake to change the shape and form of bodies of water. There have also been numerous examples of seismic activity creating new bodies of water.

In 1959, the largest earthquake to strike Montana — a 7.3 magnitude temblor — caused a landslide to dam the Madison River just below Hebgen Dam, thus creating a new body of water that became Hebgen Dam, or “Quake Lake.”

The historic New Madrid earthquakes in the central United States created a lake in northwestern Tennessee in 1812. Reelfoot Lake was formed during the Feb. 7, 1812, earthquake that was one of several to strike the region during the winter of 1811 and 1812. That earthquake, which is estimated to have been at least 7.0 in magnitude or higher, caused subsidence along the Reelfoot River, dropping a 13,000 acre area of land between 4 and 19 feet. This area filled with water to become Reelfoot Lake.