Month: July 2017

Anthony Scaramucci booted from the White House after just ten days on the job

mooch

Anthony ‘The Mooch’ Scaramucci is no longer the White House communications director. And having spent less than two weeks on the job, he’s not likely to be missed all that much.

The axe fell on the wealthy former hedge fund impresario earlier today, in a move that shocked many but surprised few. The axeman? The White House’s brand new Chief of Staff, no-nonsense retired Four-Star General John F. Kelly of the USMC.

It had been a relatively quiet two weeks inside the corridors of power at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., by the the current Administration standards at least. The chaos and the uncontrolled dive seemed to have righted themselves, for a while at least. Critical mass appeared to have been averted.

Then, a few short days after launching an expletive-laden tirade against Reince Priebus, The Mooch found himself on the firing line.

Fast-talking Scaramucci entered the White House riding a high horse, wearing aviator glasses with a Top Gun-esque blue tint, and boasting to report directly to his idolized boss, gunning for anyone suspected to have leaked information to the press. He took aim at Reince Priebus, who resigned last Friday ‘to give Scaramucci a clean slate.’

No such luck for Scaramucci, however. The once fawning Mooch was escorted out of the White House today, out of the job he had longed for since the Boss rose to power in the last election.

And Scaramucci is not just out of a job. He is out of a marriage too, as his wife filed for divorce ‘because he had turned into a Trump sycophant.’

Passchendale: One hundred years on, the horror and agony of the Passchendale campaign still resonates across Europe

passchendale3

The echoes of the carnage at Passchendale still resonate across the former battlefield where hundreds of thousands of soldiers became casualties of a bloody war of attrition.

Also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, the long and protracted offensive raged between July and November of 1917, claiming over half a million lives from all sides involved.

Passchendale, a small rural community in the West Flanders province of Belgium, became the site of historic carnage as German, British, and French troops fought for control of the strategically important Passchendale Ridge, a stretch of elevated ground about 70ft above sea level.

Seizing and controlling the high ground was crucially important for both sides, as the vantage point enabled unobstructed ground observation and a prime position for artillery pieces, with the added advantage of providing cover to conceal troop movements from the enemy.

Incessant bombardment during previous engagements had left the battlefield pocked by hundreds of shell holes, and had churned the ground to a quagmire. Constant rain during August 1917 compounded the problem, leaving the terrain with the “consistency of porridge”, as some combatants put it.

Horror and misery became the norm at Passchendale, with thousands of troops meeting their fate in a desolate ocean of mud that swallowed men, horses, and military hardware alike.

“It was a curious kind of sucking kind of mud. It ‘drew’ at you, not like a quicksand, but a real monster that sucked at you…”, soldiers said of the vast amounts of soft mud surrounding them.

There was no gas, nor there were tanks fielded at Passchendale. The campaign was purely an infantry engagement, with hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers sent to fight and die in agony inside a massive quagmire.

The exact number of casualties will probably never be known, but estimates put at around 245,000 dead, injured, or missing British troops, about 280,000 German (though some estimates quote up to 400,000 casualties), and a comparable number of French soldiers, either dead, sick, or missing.

The British side claimed victory, though it would be a pyrrhic win. The British army was depleted, and exhausted after suffering such enormous bloodshed during three long months of hellish struggle.

Ellen Ripley, or the epitome of female power

In the dying days of 1979, Ridley Scott’s Alien introduced a brand new mythos to the world of cinema. The alien creature soon became an icon of the relatively new (for 1979) sci-fi horror genre, spawning movie sequels, countless imitations, games, books, and a whole bunch of movie memorabilia.

Alien’s premise is simple enough. A Weyland-Yutani- (the ‘Company’) owned commercial freighter called Nostromo (a nod to Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness) is on its way back to Earth after a deep-space mining expedition (to the fictional, resources-rich planet of Thedus, for those who love their facts). Somewhere along the way, the ship’s central computer, Mother, intercepts a transmission, and in accordance with Yutani’s standard operating directives to investigate any transmission with a possible intelligent origin, wakes the crew up from hypersleep.

After setting down on the planetoid where the transmission came from, the crew discovers what appears to be a derelict spaceship with a cargo of thousands of egg-like objects. A crew member, Kane (John Hurt) touches one of these eggs and something leaps out from within, attaching itself to his face.

What follows is movie history. The alien life-cycle, the derelict spaceship, the Engineers, all entered the popular psyche and culture.

Alien is certainly notable for many things, and besides creating the whole mythology surrounding the alien creature, it also introduced the character of Lieutenant First Class Ellen Ripley, portrayed by Sigourney Weaver.

Weaver was barely 30 years of age when she accepted the part that would turn a largely unknown and struggling actress into a household name. Alien was, in fact, Weaver’s first major role, as she had only had a minor part in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall two years prior.

The character of Ripley as we know it today almost never existed, however, as Ripley was indeed a male character in early drafts of the screenplay. It only switched genders after a personal request by Scott.

Alien surprised pretty much everyone by having the seemingly lead male role, Dallas (Tom Skerritt), killed off early in the movie. This is a masterstroke, as it throws both the Nostromo’s crew and the audience into disarray. From that point on, anything is possible, and as the Alien picks off crew members one by one, Ripley emerges as the last survivor.

Ripley’s Journey: Alone in space, from surrogate motherhood to hardened warrior

Much has been written about Ripley’s endurance and resourcefulness while facing a superior foe. Our protagonist finds herself in a rather unenviable plight: Last one standing, alone inside a gigantic spaceship in the far reaches of the Outer Veil, with a monstrous alien creature stalking her. Where most women would have crumbled and broken down waiting for their inevitable fate, Ripley makes use of her cunning and will to survive, first by setting up the detonation of the spaceship and finally outwitting the heinous menace.

Ripley’s character stands out for many reasons, not least because a female lead was almost unheard of at the time of the movie’s release. Ripley contravenes all the rules of what a woman is supposed to be. She stands strong and determined in the face of adversity, facing off against a dark enemy. She refuses to give into despair by rising up to the challenge, on her own, and against all odds.

The character of Ellen Ripley would be further developed in the powerful sequel Aliens (1986). Under the expert direction of James Cameron, Ripley would evolve into a matriarchal role to the last survivor of Hadley Hope’s colony, 12 year old Rebecca “Newt” Jordan (Carrie Henn).

The relationship between Ripley and Newt is interesting. As both females grow closer throughout the events of the movie, Ripley becomes an accidental mother to the child, and there is a key element that explains this dynamic, though it is absent from the version of Aliens released in theatres.

It wouldn’t be until the release of Aliens: The Director’s Cut that we learned about Ripley’s own daughter, Amanda. After the events depicted in Alien, Ripley spent 57 years drifting through space on board the Nostromo’s lifeboat. She’s eventually picked up and taken to the Gateway Station, orbiting Earth. It is at Gateway that she learns of Amanda’s death in the intervening years.

This fact explains Ripley’s bonding with Newt, as Ripley perhaps attempts to redeem herself from the guilt of ‘abandoning’ her own biological daughter.

Get away from her, you bitch

Besides being a savior for Newt, Ripley’s character becomes a warrior of superior caliber, a fact that it’s perfectly epitomized in her final confrontation against the Alien Queen at the end of Aliens.

Using a Power Loader, Ripley takes on the Queen on her own terms, pummelling the monster into submission for attempting to take Newt from her. Once again, Ripley is the last one standing, empowered by her own resolution to save the child from the clutches of the cruellest of fates.

Once again, Ripley succeeds where a whole platoon of tough Marines failed. It is clear that a point is being made here. She represents the power of a female, the embodiment and pinnacle of Second Wave Feminism. Ripley may be armed and dangerous, using man-made technology to defeat a cunning adversary. Yet, it is a woman using a flamethrower to burn the Queen’s carefully laid eggs. And it’s also a woman emptying her weapons on all of the Queen’s unborn children, and later squaring off against Her in the Hangar Bay on board the Sulaco.

Conclusion: Ripley, icon of power and victory over male superiority

Early in Aliens, Company rep Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) asks Ripley to accompany himself and a platoon of Colonial Marines on their mission to find out why all communications have been lost with Hadley’s Hope. He refers to the Marines as ‘tough hombres’, adding that they’re ‘packing state-of-the-art firepower.’ But Ripley is not fooled by this. She has seen what just one alien creature can do, and initially refuses, perhaps believing that wars cannot be won by firepower alone, a fact painfully learned by the American army in a well known conflict in South East Asia.

But more significantly, Ripley stands up against a man’s world. Earlier on, while being grilled by a Company committee about her role in the detonation of the Nostromo, the almost all-male commission implicitly accuses her of blowing up the ship in a reckless act, dismissing her accounts of the alien creature. And when the only female member of the committee appears to back up the Company’s opinion that such creature is nothing but an invention (‘LV-426 is a rock. No indigenous life’), Ripley quips “I told you, it wasn’t indigenous. There was an alien spacecraft there. A derelict ship. We homed on its beacon…”

Later on, as the Colonial Marines platoon is decimated, largely because of its inexperienced commanding officer, Lt. Gorman, Ripley once again kicks into action and takes control. She turns the tables around and is chastised by it, but at least manages to save some of the Marines.

Ellen Ripley stands as an icon of female empowerment, both as a woman, a mother, a hero, and a kick-ass warrior.

 

 

 

 

 

Rings: Sadako’s vengeful spirit returns

Back in the late 90s, Asian horror was virtually unknown to Western audiences. The few titles that did reach Europe and beyond back then were probably bootleg copies with bad dubbing and even worse picture quality, perhaps contributing to an air of skepticism and meh attitude towards Asian cinema.

Indeed DVDs were somewhat of a novelty in those days. They had certainly not yet become as ubiquitous and commonplace as they are now, and thus VHS tapes were still in circulation. And for better or worse, a cursed VHS tape would become a novel way to kill by entities from the great beyond.

The long-running Ring franchise will soon be expanded with a new installment, due to premiere in a few days’ time, if not already in the cinemas.

Rings will broaden the series’ mythology, and Sadako’s implacable and shambling appearances will once again exact revenge on the living.

The film franchise began in Japan in 1998, with Hideo Nakata’s original Ring, though the mythos existed in printed form since Koji Suzuki’s 1991 book. The movie is undoubtedly a classic of the macabre, made even more unsettling by a method of killing which is terrifying and oh so personal, as the final blow is delivered via such an ubiquitous object as a TV screen.

The Ring draws inspiration from a number of sources and traditional myths from Japan’s own folklore, which was (and perhaps, still is )virtually unknown to all but the most hardcore of historians and fans of the supernatural.

Read on and learn how Sadako’s curse existence ties with the legends from the Land of the Rising Sun.

Okiku’s yurei

Okiku and the Nine Plates is one of the best known Japanese folk tales.

In the classic version of this tragedy of broken trust, abuse of power, and hauntings from beyond the veil of death, a humble and beautiful maid named Okiku works as a servant for a samurai lord called Aoyama.

The samurai is taken by his servant’s beauty, and attempts to seduce her multiple times. Okiku steadfastly refuses, however.
Enraged by the unrequited attentions, Aoyama crafts a plot to discredit Okiku’s worth as a servant.

The samurai owns a precious collection of ten Dutch plates, which Okiku is in charge of safekeeping. One day, after the maid cleans and puts the precious plates away, he sneaks into the kitchen, takes one of the plates, and hides it in his own bedchamber.

There is trouble in Aoyama’s mansion the next morning. When the other maids learn of the missing plate, Okiku is called to the samurai’s presence, as she was supposedly the last person to have handled the valuable crockery.

Okiku keeps counting the plates, one to nine, over and over again. The tenth plate is nowhere to be found. Okiku breaks down in front of her Master, as the plates were her responsibility.

Aoyama speaks in soothing tones, and says that he can forgive her, if she becomes her lover. But once again, Okiku refuses.

Aoyama plunges into a fit of rage, and in a moment of madness, kills Okiku with his sword. After slaying his servant, he throws the lifeless body into a well outside his home.

But when darkness comes, there is a stir at the bottom of the well. Aoyama goes to see, and up comes the sobbing sounds of a woman counting one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine… There is no ten. Instead, whatever dwells down in the well lets out a terrifying and otherworldly shriek.

Okiku’s vengeful spirit rises from the well, obsessively counting the plates that she was in charge of safekeeping in life. And in lieu of the missing plate, she utters a shriek to taunt her former Master, night after night, until the samurai plunges into madness, thus realizing her revenge.

There are different version of this tale, which has been told in Japan since the 12th century. As Western culture began influencing Japanese’s way of life -including its folklore-, certain elements changed, but the core of the story -the cursing- remains.

And if one jumps about 600 years forward, we find that many old wells and aquifers around Japan became contaminated with an odd-looking parasite that became known as ‘Okiku’s bug.’ The parasite’s anatomy looked as if its body was wrapped in black silk threads. Traditional folklore saw this as a reincarnation of Okiku. Ever since then, Okiku would be represented as a beautiful girl with long black hair, arms tied behind her back, and the lower body being that of a worm.

Dim souls: From Okiku to Sadako

We mentioned the word yurei. In broad terms, this concept is analogous to Western ghosts, though there are some local nuances.

Yurei is actually a compound name: Yu, meaning ‘hidden,’ or more commonly, ‘dim’, and rei, meaning ‘soul,’ or ‘spirit.’

In Japanese culture, every person has a rei, a soul. When the person dies of natural causes, or when his or her time is due, the soul simply awaits for the rites that will enable it right of passage and thus join its ancestors in peace. If the ritual is done in the right way, the rei passes on and cannot return to the land of the living.

However, if someone meets a violent or untimely end -through murder or suicide, for example,- the soul becomes a yurei that can find its way to the physical world. Murder or suicide victims are usually full of strong emotions at the point of death: Hate, fear, or sorrow, for instance. These emotions bind the spirit to the world it left behind, and the last thought at the moment of death will become an obsession that will lead to a haunting until such emotion is resolved. If it is not, the haunting will remain.

Traditionally, the lower the social rank of the person was, the more powerful and cruel the curse would be. Hence Okiku’s desire for revenge against the samurai who wronged her in life became so strong.

Japanese yurei are visually distinctive. Their manifestations wear long white garments resembling the traditional burial kimono. Yurei are usually represented without legs or feet, or at the very least, these are covered by the long kimono.

When they move, yurei’s arms hang outstretched close to their body.

And there’s one more trait that distinguishes a yurei. Their hair is long and jet black.Japanese women would normally wear their hair up, except during their own funeral, when the hair is allowed down.

Sadako’s curse: An onryo bent on vengeance

And so we’ve come full circle to this moment, just like in the iconic image that Ring takes its name from.

It is now plain to see how Sadako came to be. The ghostly pale hands, the white garment. That hair. And the well, of course.
The influence of Japanese folklore is strong.

The female name Sadako itself combines two words: Sada (chaste) and ko (child). This is an important clue. The original Ring book upon which the 1998 Japanese film version is based upon hints that Sadako was intersex, and thus could not reproduce. This allows the viewer (or reader) to infer that Sadako lived through the curse she bestowed upon the tape, and so her sentient essence could pass from one copy of the tape to another, enabling her to potentially live on indefinitely.

The entity known as Sadako is portrayed as an onryo, a vengeful spirit bound to the world of the living by a strong desire for revenge against those who did her harm.

Interestingly, onryos are almost exclusively female. Hailing from seemingly innocent, tame, and loyal humans while living, they become extremely violent and dangerous spirits from the world of the dead, and those who did them harm will pay the price.

Sadako’s motivations vary, depending on which timeline one looks at. In the ‘classic’ Ring, it is implied that she was murdered by her father and thrown down the well, where her onryo rose from, vowing revenge against the world. It is also hinted that Sadako’s true father was a sea demon.

But irrespective of the timeline, Sadako’s onryo always returns to harm those who wronged in life.

Rings: Sadako’s legacy lives on

The Ring franchise blends horror and rich mythology in an exhilarating cocktail of supernatural goings-on. The character of Sadako indeed features in plenty of ‘Scariest (moments, characters, etc.) lists around.

The legacy and the sheer visual power of the chaste child’s first appearance through a TV screen will linger in people’s minds long after we switch off our own televisions.

Rings hits theatres in early February.

Body Horror: Visceral Fantasies

Your body is your temple, right? Wrong.

The human body is a lab, a smouldering cauldron of fluids, muscle and sinew ripe for unholy modifications, a testing ground for the darkest and utterly twisted pseudo-scientific nightmares conjured up by that darkly pit of premeditated depravity that is the human mind.

Throughout the years, film makers and literary authors have regaled us with all sorts of body-related transformations, mutations, parasitic infestations, disfigurement, physical reconfiguration, perverse warping, and a whole lot more yucky and generally nasty physiological aberrations.

What exactly is body horror?

While a precise (clean?) definition is hard to come up with, the moniker relates to that sub-genre of horror cinema that shows, usually without sparing any gory details, the purposeful experimentation, alteration, contamination, plain deformation, and ultimate destruction of the human body.

The flesh is weak, and frail. It can be easily changed and corrupted, and the movie trope of the mad scientist with a bloody white apron and a grin on his face is no longer the sole source of our deepest fears. Experimental drugs, radiation, viruses, and weird parasitic creatures spawned from a godless place all conspire to taunt our will to be scared nowadays.

Unlike other, more popular horror sub-genres such as slasher movies, body horror is somewhat more intimate. The deeply invasive nature of the procedures being performed, and the sometimes openly sexual tampering with human flesh turn the whole body horror experience into a voyeuristic tour de force.

Also unlike most other sub-genres of horror cinema, the foe is usually not an external one. Rather, it comes from within, in the form of a disease, a microbe, or a parasite that infects the body and grows into a horrendous life form, or causes the body to transform into a monstrous thing. In body horror, we become witnesses to the horrific decay and breaking down of the flesh. The body turns into a canvas to bring someone’s dark obsessions into an organic and disturbing imitation of life.

The metamorphosis of the flesh heralds a catharsis, a change, as the body turns into something new. The old you has died, and you have become a brand new self, stepping through the veil of the flesh into a new dimension of existence. Such fantasy sometimes requires the total decomposition of your old form, as seen in the much loved 1986 remake of The Fly.

Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) in 1986’s The Fly. Photo credit: Fox

Here, we see loner scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldlum at his best) slowly evolve from human to a six-feet high insectoid through the second and third acts of the movie. Such transformation begins rather subtly, with Brundle showing a curious and intense craving for sugar. Superhuman strength and agility follow, making him believe that the experience of having your body structure systematically broken down and reformed again via the teleportation device of his own invention has bestowed god-like abilities unto him.

Brundle ultimately pays dearly for his hubris, after discovering that he unwittingly became fused with a furtive common house fly at a molecular and genetic level. Brundle’s body slowly decays into a pathetic and gruesome creature with cravings that go well beyond sugar. The Brundle character represents mankind’s misguided belief that technology and ego can rule over nature and bend the laws of physics to our own advantage. But nature always finds a way of expressing its inherent superiority over man, in this case via such a lowly creature as a common fly.

The Fly also serves as a reminder that body horror victims are rarely, if ever, willing participants in the nightmare unfolding under their very skin. Extraneous sources are usually at play, whether human, supernatural, or extraterrestrial, these dark forces use the victim’s body as a conduit for their own wicked desires.

Allegories in the Body Horror genre

Body horror is sometimes an allegory to sexual frustration or repression. In 1982’s The Entity, for example, single mother Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey), begins to experience increasingly violent episodes of sexual abuse by an unseen force in her own home. Some would postulate that the entity’s attacks were a manifestation of the woman’s repressed sexual fantasies.

The link between body horror and sexual activity is a pervasive one. The Fly was released in 1986, at the dawn of the AIDS era. Many saw the movie as an allegory of the sexually transmitted disease. In David Cronenberg’s first feature film, Shivers (1975), parasites introduced into the human body induce an uncontrollable sexual appetite on the host. Bizarre sexual activity in the context of body horror is epitomised in Society (1989). This (almost) forgotten classic by American director Brian Yuzna shocked audiences by featuring a final 30- minutes long so-called ‘shunting’ scene, that can only be described as a surreal orgy of kinky, melty, oozy flesh involving the rich and famous in a private American society literally feeding on the less well-off. Society was actually Yuzna’s directorial debut, and he delivered what he set out do in spades. The movie turned out to be as much as a horrific portrayal of depraved lust as a social commentary of the stark class divide so prevalent in modern day America.

Body horror movies, or books, or whichever media it is expressed through, tap into people’s primal fear of their own mortality, and also the fear of disease, of being unclean, eliciting that feeling of helplessness that an incurable and terminal sickness may bring to its sufferer. And it’s not a subtle fear, either. There is plenty gore and explicitness in body horror experiences. Slow, graphic transformations, gaping fleshy cavities oozing unspeakable fluids, limbs becoming impossibly elongated, and much more, are common sights. The unnatural birth of the alien creature in 1979’s seminal Alien is a prime representation of one of man’s primordial fears, that of giving birth. In the movie, Nostromo’s Executive Officer, Kane, is inseminated with an alien egg when the Facehugger inserts a phallus-like proboscis into his throat. The egg gestates inside Kane’s body and eventually bursts out through his chest.

Body horror usually attempts to provide an explanation for the horrifyingly grotesque decay of the body, though this is usually a thin justification to exponentially augment the gore level.  Whether the menace comes from within or from the further reaches of space, body horror shares a common goal: the utter destruction of the flesh. In 1982’s remake of The Thing, for instance, a group of scientist make the fatal mistake of allowing an extraterrestrial organism that had been frozen inside an Antarctic ice plateau for thousands of year to thaw out. Once freed from its icy prison, the creature runs amok, beginning to take over people’s bodies with its inherent ability to imitate life forms. Only sometimes, the extraterrestrial menace is interrupted mid-process, and the resulting stomach-churning monstrosity lumbers around with a mangled, perverse strut of stunted growth.

A fear of blood tends to create a fear of the flesh, some say. Body horror is the science of the insane, a kaleidoscopic circus of nightmarish visions full of gore and indelible and uncomfortable sights that will always remain off the mainstream due to its very nature. The body horror sub-genre has experienced somewhat of a revival in recent times, thanks to a new generation of film makers like the Soska Sisters, a pair of Canadian twins whose end-of-year project at film school, Dead Hooker in a Trunk, put them firmly on the horror map. They followed it with American Mary (2012), a film about a medical student-turned-body alterer for money. From the dawn of time, people have had a fascination about human flesh.

Whether it manifests in a sexual context, or pure voyeuristic enthrallment,flesh never goes out of fashion!

Researchers develop new surgical adhesive inspired by slug secretions

slug

Slugs are seldom talked about in a positive light, but this evening will be an exception.

Researchers at Harvard University studied slug secretions closely and somebody had an eureka moment. Based on the goo that the molluscs leave everywhere they wander to, some clever folk have developed a substance inspired by the sticky and elastic material secreted by the Arion subfuscus species of slug.

The new adhesive combines the positively-charged polymers found in slug goo with hydrogels, forming a bond, and the resulting substance is a strong adhesive that can stick to skin, cartilage, arteries, and other types of living tissues without the issues that current medical glues have.

Currently used products can be easily dislodged, can be toxic to certain tissues, and may become brittle. The new glue shows greater strength than the current generation of surgical adhesives, and crucially, is elastic (testing showed that it can stretch to 14 times its original size before failing), and sticks slowly over a period of time, which facilitates easy re-positioning if needed. Also, the new product demonstrated low toxicity to living tissue.

The adhesive is not commercially available yet, but shows the incredible potential in something as insignificant as a garden slug.

 

Wayward squirrel cuts power to over 45,000 residents in San Diego

squirrel

A humble squirrel went on a blaze of glory on Tuesday last, after interfering with high-voltage cables, roasting itself, and causing a power outage that affected over 45,000 in the north area of San Diego, California.

The squirrel’s actions shut down an electrical substation yesterday afternoon, local time. Power was restored shortly afterwards, and the squirrel was granted its own Viking funeral.

Charlie Gard case: Judge will rule on where tragic baby Charlie Gard should spend his last moments of life

charlie_gard

The case of baby Charlie Gard has gripped the public across Europe and elsewhere.

Charlie was born on August 4, 2016, to the parents of Connie Yates and Chris Gard.

Afflicted from birth by a rare genetic condition known as mitochondrial depletion syndrome, Charlie has not had much of a life outside hospital environments in London.

Charlie’s condition causes progressive muscle weakness, and in Charlie’s case, he’s also suffered brain damage, now known to be irreversible.

His parents fought a valiant, but ultimately futile legal battle to have their son treated with an experimental treatment that has reportedly had some success in other cases. Much to the parent’s pain and sorrow however, the window of opportunity to treat Charlie -if there ever was one-, has now passed. The damage to his brain is too great, and cannot be undone. Charlie cannot move or breathe unassisted. His body is being kept alive by machines.

Charlie’s parents are now fighting to be given the chance to take their son home for the last time, and let him pass away there.

A judge will rule tomorrow on the place and manner of Charlie’s passing, after the hospital where the baby is currently being cared for raised concerns about transporting the terminally ill Charlie Gard home, explaining that the ventilator that keeps him alive ‘might not fit through the door.’

Plastic nightmare: Spiralling consumption of plastic bottles threatens to become environmental disaster in the near future

 

plastic

The consumption of plastic bottles has skyrocketed over the last decade. About 480 billion were sold worldwide in 2016. This compares to about 300 billion just ten years before. To put it into perspective, if one were to stack 480 billion bottles, the plastic tower would reach almost half way to the Sun.

Right now, factories produce an average of 20,000 bottles every second of every day. Tonnes of discarded plastic enter the world’s oceans all the time, ultimately entering the food chain through birds and fish.

Plastic bottles have been found in every corner of the oceans, including the Arctic and remote, uninhibited islands. The world’s fatal love affair with plastic is now threatening to become a harmful environmental issue not far into the future, as consumption rates far outstrips recycling.

Experts are warning that plastic pollution will soon become as harmful as climate change, unless drastic measures are taken.

 

War to infinity and beyond: US Army committee votes for the creation of ‘space corps’ army branch

PFC. Vasquez and PFC. Drake, Smartgun Operators attached to 2nd Battalion, Bravo Team of the United States Colonial Marine Corps (USCMC), onboard  the USS Sulaco, from the movie Aliens. Photo credit: Fox.

 

Having almost run out of foes to fight on Earth, the US House Armed Services Committee has set its iron sights on the Solar System.

The committee has voted in favor of the creation of a brand new ‘space corps’ army branch, whose mission would be to conduct exoatmospheric operations.

The proposal, which has bipartisan backing, would require the personal signature of President Donald Trump to become a reality.

If it comes to pass, the so-called ‘Space Corps’ would become the sixth branch of the US Army, and the first US command to be created in seven decades.

The new corps would assume the responsibilities currently carried by the US Air Force in outer space. The Air Force does have a Space Division at present time, but if the new proposals become law, the space branch would become its own entity, featuring a new chain of command.

The ‘space soldiers’ would presumably be tasked with defending US interests around known space, and defend the country from potential alien threats.