The US embassy to Sudan was reportedly closed on Wednesday, shortly after an explosion at a weapons facility south of the capital Khartoum.Al-Hayat reported on Thursday that the embassy, which stopped providing services in September after being attacked by rioters protesting the anti-Islamic film “Innocence of Muslims,” was completely closed following the alleged bombing, which was blamed by the Sudanese government on Israel.The article quoted Sudanese sources, who said that the US knew Israel was behind the attack and closed its embassy, fearing retaliation for the alleged bombing.On Wednesday night, hundreds of people gathered in the Sudanese capital holding anti-Israel signs after Khartoum said Jerusalem had been behind the attack, which killed two people.Some 300 demonstrators rallying against Israel chanted slogans, including “Death to Israel” and “Remove Israel from the map,” according to a report in the Iranian Press TV.
Minister of Information Ahmed Belal Osman told reporters on Wednesday that four aircraft hit the Yarmouk Complex, setting off a huge blast that rocked the capital before dawn.“Four planes coming from the east bombed the Yarmouk industrial complex,” Belal said. “They used sophisticated technology.” He didn’t elaborate further.Belal also referred to a 2009 attack on an arms convoy that killed dozens in the Red Sea province in the east of the country. The government then blamed the attack on Israel, which believes Sudan is a conduit for arms shipments through Egypt to Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers. Israel does not comment officially on the issue.Belal said the complex produces conventional weapons. He said his country has the right to respond.In a letter to the UN Security Council, Sudan’s representative called the attack a “blatant violation” of the UN charter and called for condemnation from the world body.Belal also said a technical team is inspecting remains of the missiles used in the attack which he said suggest Israel is behind the bombing. He didn’t provide any evidence.Israeli officials neither confirmed or denied Israel’s involvement.
At the same news conference, military spokesman Sawarmy Khaled said two people were killed and another was seriously injured in the blast. Earlier, officials said some people suffered from smoke inhalation.
In New York, Sudan’s UN Ambassador Daffa-Alla Elhag Ali Osman called on the UN Security Council to condemn the attack, accusing Israel of meddling in its internal affairs and providing support to rebel groups.
The Cairo-based Arab League said it is closely following the fallout from the attack. Deputy Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed bin Helli said Sudanese officials are in touch with the League and have provided initial reports about Israel’s alleged involvement. “We are working to verify them,” he said.Sudanese activists on social media websites criticized the government for placing a factory with such large quantities of ammunition in a residential area.Sudan has been engaged in various armed conflicts for many years.
Sudan’s government has been at war with rebels in the western region of Darfur and with its neighbors in South Sudan, which broke away to become Africa’s newest country in 2011. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.Sudan was a major hub for al-Qaeda militants and remains a transit for weapon smugglers and African migrant traffickers.The US imposed economic, trade and financial sanctions against Sudan in 1997, citing the Sudanese government’s support for terrorism, including its sheltering of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in Khartoum the mid-1990s.In 1998, American cruise missiles bombed a Khartoum pharmaceutical factory suspected of links to al-Qaeda. That followed the terror group’s bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people.The Yarmouk weapons complex was built in the 1996. Sudan prided itself in having a way to produce its own ammunition and weapons despite international sanctions.Yarmouk is one of two known state-owned weapons manufacturing facilities in the Sudanese capital.Jonah Leff of the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey told The Associated Press that the location of the two factories is “certainly a hazard” to Khartoum’s population if the weapons inside are not properly maintained or secured.A September report from the Small Arms Survey said there was evidence from weapons packaging found in Darfur and in South Kordofan that arms and ammunition from China are exported to Yarmouk and then transported to the two embattled regions.Leff said that although the Small Arms Survey has documented Sudanese military stocks of Iranian weapons and ammunition, there is no evidence that Iranian weapons are being assembled or manufactured in the two Khartoum factories.

Netanyahu: Nothing to Say about Sudan Explosion OCT 25,12 - INN

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said, Thursday, that Israel had nothing to say about the Wednesday-evening explosion at a weapons factory in Sudan.During a news conference with Prime Minister Mario Monti of Italy, a reporter asked him if Israel denied Sudan's accusations that Israel was behind the blast.

Israeli Official: Sudan is a 'Terrorist State'

A top Israeli defense official said that Sudan was a terrorist state, and that its accusations against Israel could not be taken seriously.By David Lev First Publish: 10/25/2012, 11:02 AM

Amos Gilad
Amos Gilad-Flash 90
Israel hit back at Sudan Thursday, after Khartoum on Wednesday accused Israel of attacking a military installation in the country. A top Israeli defense official told Army Radio that Sudan was a terrorist state, and that its accusations that Israel engaged in terrorism against that country could not be taken seriously.
“Sudan is a dangerous terrorist state. To know exactly what happened (there), it will take some time to understand," said Amos Gilad, director of policy and political-military affairs at the Defense Ministry. "There are different versions of the Sudanese side, so there is no reason to go into details," Gilad responded to questions of Israeli involvement in the attack.Sudan says it has evidence that Israeli warplanes carried out the attack, although it has so far failed to present that evidence. Sudan claimed that four Israeli aircraft fired missiles that hit a military factory and killed two people in Khartoum. The explosion at the military factory in Sudan's capital before dawn Wednesday sent detonating ammunition flying through the air, causing panic among residents, the official news agency and local media reports said. Sudan has demanded that the UN Security Council condemn Israel for the raid. A Sudanese official, Bilal Osman, said that a response by Sudan for the attack would be forthcoming, although “we reserve the right to react at a place and time we choose."Israeli officials have long been following the situation in Sudan, which security officials said was a major source of weapons for Gaza Arab terrorists. Gangs of terrorists trained and set up areas of influence in the remote parts of the country, with large weapons warehouses. According to security officials, Sudan is a major hub on the route of smugglers moving weapons from Iran and Syria to terror groups in Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Several months ago, a car carrying several weapons smugglers and a large amount of weapons exploded at Port Sudan. Sudan accused Israel of involvement in that attack as well.
Meanwhile, a report in Arab media Thursday said that the U.S. had closed its embassy in Khartoum, Sudan's capital, on Tuesday – just before the attack took place, as if the U.S. had advanced knowledge of the attack. Hundreds of Sudanese gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum calling for “death to Israel” and “death to America,” as they burned American and Israeli flags.

Fighting rages in Syria before Brahimi's truce

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis | Reuters – 1 hr 6 mins ago OCT 25,12
AMMAN (Reuters) - Syrian troops bombarded a town near Damascus on Thursday and fighting raged in and around the northern city of Aleppo, a day before a proposed truce for a four-day Muslim religious holiday.President Bashar al-Assad's government was expected to make a statement later in the day on whether it accepts the temporary ceasefire advocated by U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.
The Syrian authorities said on Wednesday they were still studying the plan, but Russia's envoy to the United Nations said Damascus had indicated to Moscow that it would agree to it.China urged all sides to respect a ceasefire, an idea also backed by Syria's main regional ally Iran, but there was no sign on the ground of any let-up in the violence on the eve of Eid al-Adha, the biggest feast on the Muslim religious calendar.
Syrian troops pounded Harasta, near Damascus, with tank and rocket fire, killing five people, after rebels overran two army roadblocks on the edge of the town, on the main highway from the capital to the north, opposition campaigners said.Rebels tried to maintain pressure on two army bases on main roads leading to the contested city of Aleppo, a key prize in the 19-month-old uprising against Assad's authoritarian rule.
"No one is taking the ceasefire seriously," said Moaz al-Shami, an opposition activist in Damascus."How can there be a ceasefire with tanks roaming the streets, roadblocks every few hundred meters and the army having no qualms about hitting civilian neighborhoods with heavy artillery? This is a regime that has lost all credibility."Even if Assad accepts a truce, there may be no unified response from Syria's fractured opposition. Some armed groups have said they will abide by a ceasefire. Others, including the Islamist militant Al Nusra Front, have rejected it.In Aleppo, where opposition activists reported more fighting and shelling, the rebel Shining Aleppo Division said it would observe the ceasefire despite "doubts over the credibility of the regime" if Assad stopped moving armored units, halted air raids and released thousands of prisoners held without trial.
WAR CRIMES
Brahimi's predecessor, former U.N. chief Kofi Annan, declared a ceasefire in Syria on April 12, but it soon became a dead letter, along with the rest of his six-point peace plan.Violence has intensified since then, with daily death tolls compiled by opposition monitoring groups often exceeding 200."Harasta is being pummeled by tanks and rocket launchers deployed on the highway. The rebels are putting up a fight and it does not seem the army will be able to enter the town this time," said a Damascus resident, who gave his name as Mohammed.Assad's force pushed into Harasta a month ago in an operation which opposition activists said killed 70 people.In Geneva, U.N. war crimes investigators said they had asked to meet Assad to seek access for their team, which has been excluded from Syria since it began work a year ago. There was no word on how the Syrian leader would respond.The inquiry led by Brazilian expert Paulo Pinheiro has been investigating atrocities by both sides in the conflictIn their latest report in August, the investigators said that Syrian government forces and allied militia had committed war crimes including murder and torture of civilians in what appeared to be a state-directed policy.In Harasta, an opposition group described the town as a "disaster zone" after the shelling. "An (army) roadblock had been set up next to the main bakery. There is no water, no food, no medicine and prolonged power cuts," it said in a statement.Activists also reported army artillery on the town of Anadan northwest of Aleppo. To the southwest of the city, rebels have been surrounding army barracks at the town of Orum al-Sughra, on the road between Aleppo and the Turkish border.Assad's forces appear to have curbed a two-week-old rebel offensive against an army base at Wadi al-Deif to the south, near Maarat al-Numaan on the Aleppo-Damascus highway.Rebel commanders said an armored column sent to defend the base 10 days ago had arrived near Maarat al-Numaan despite rebel attacks. The column, now deployed just south for the town, is bombarding rebel forces operating near Wadi al-Deif.(Editing by Alistair Lyon)

POISONED WATERS

REVELATION 8:8-11
8 And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood;
9 And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed.
10 And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;
11 And the name of the star is called Wormwood:(bitter,Poisoned) and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.(poisoned)

REVELATION 16:3-7
3 And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea.(enviromentalists won't like this result)
4 And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood.
5 And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus.
6 For they(False World Church and Dictator) have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy.

AP Interview: Japan nuke plant water worries rise

By MARI YAMAGUCHI | Associated Press – 1 hr 52 mins ago OCT 25,12
TOKYO (AP) — Japan's crippled nuclear power plant is struggling to find space to store tens of thousands of tons of highly contaminated water used to cool the broken reactors, the manager of the water treatment team said.About 200,000 tons of radioactive water — enough to fill more than 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools — are being stored in hundreds of gigantic tanks built around the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. Operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. has already chopped down trees to make room for more tanks and predicts the volume of water will more than triple within three years."It's a pressing issue because our land is limited and we would eventually run out of storage space," the water-treatment manager, Yuichi Okamura, told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview this week.TEPCO is close to running a new treatment system that could make the water safe enough to release into the ocean. But in the meantime its tanks are filling up — mostly because leaks in reactor facilities are allowing ground water pour in.Outside experts worry that if contaminated water is released, there will be lasting impact on the environment. And they fear that because of the reactor leaks and water flowing from one part of the plant to another, that may already be happening.
Nuclear engineer and college lecturer Masashi Goto said the contaminated water buildup poses a long-term health and environmental threat. He worries that the radioactive water in the basements may already be getting into the underground water system, where it could reach far beyond the plant, possibly the ocean or public water supplies."You never know where it's leaking out and once it's out you can never put it back in place," he said. "It's just outrageous and shows how big a disaster the accident is."The concerns are less severe than the nightmare scenario TEPCO faced in the weeks after the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami knocked out power and cooling systems at the plant, leading to explosions and meltdowns of three reactor cores in the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The plant released radiation into the surrounding air, soil and ocean and displaced more than 100,000 residents who are uncertain when — or if — they will be able to return to their homes.Dumping massive amounts of water into the melting reactors was the only way to avoid an even bigger catastrophe.Okamura remembers frantically trying to find a way to get water to spent fuel pools located on the highest floor of the 50-meter-high reactor buildings. Without water, the spent fuel likely would have overheated and melted, sending radioactive smoke for miles and affecting possibly millions of people."The water would keep evaporating, and the pools would have dried up if we had left them alone," he said. "That would have been the end of it."Attempts to dump water from helicopters were ineffective. Spraying water from fire trucks into the pools didn't work either. Okamura then helped bring in a huge, German-made concrete-making pump with a remote-controlled arm that was long enough to spray water into the fuel pools.The plan worked — just in time, Okamura said.Those measures and others helped bring the plant under tenuous control, but it will take decades to clean up the radioactive material. And those desperate steps created another huge headache for the utility: What to do with all that radioactive water that leaked out of the damaged reactors and collected in the basements of reactor buildings and nearby facilities.Some of the water ran into the ocean, raising concerns about contamination of marine life and seafood. Waters within a 20-kilometer (12-mile) zone are still off-limits, and high levels of contamination have been found in seabed sediment and fish tested in the area.Okamura was tasked with setting up a treatment system that would make the water clean enough for reuse as a coolant, and was also aimed at reducing health risks for workers and environmental damage.At first, the utility shunted the tainted water into existing storage tanks near the reactors. Meanwhile, Okamura's 55-member team scrambled to get a treatment unit up and running within three months of the accident — a project that would normally take about two years, he said."Accomplishing that was a miracle," he said, adding that a cheer went up from his men when the first unit started working.Using that equipment, TEPCO was able to circulate reprocessed water back into the reactor cores. But even though the reactors now are being cooled exclusively with recycled water, the volume of contaminated water is still increasing, mostly because ground water is seeping through cracks into the reactor and turbine basements.Next month, Okamura's group plans to flip the switch on new purifying equipment using Toshiba Corp. technology that is supposedly able to decontaminate the water by removing strontium and other nuclides, potentially below detectable levels, he said.TEPCO claims the treated water from this new system is clean enough to be potentially released into the ocean, although it hasn't said whether it would do that. Doing so would require the permission of authorities and local consent and would also likely trigger harsh criticism at home and abroad.To deal with the excess tainted water, the utility has channeled it to more than 300 huge storage tanks placed around the plant. The utility has plans to install storage tanks for up to 700,000 tons — or about three more years' worth — of contaminated water. If that maxes out, it could build additional space for roughly two more years' worth of storage, said Mayumi Yoshida, a company spokeswoman.But those forecasts hinge on plans to detect and plug holes in the damaged reactors to minimize leaks over the next two years. The utility also plans to take steps to keep ground water from seeping into the reactor basements.Both are tasks that TEPCO is still not sure how to accomplish: Those areas remain so highly radioactive that it is unclear how humans or even robots could work there.There's also a risk the storage tanks and the jury-rigged pipe system connecting them could be damaged if the area is struck by another earthquake or tsunami.Goto, the nuclear engineer, believes it will take far longer than TEPCO's goal of two years to repair all the holes in the reactors. The plant also would have to deal with contaminated water until all the melted fuel and other debris is removed from the reactor — a process that will easily take more than a decade.He said TEPCO's roadmap for dealing with the problem is "wishful thinking.""The longer it takes, the more contaminated water they get," he said.___Associated Press Writer Malcolm Foster contributed to this report.